The appeal of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) has moved with openness to non-foundationalism. This paper is devoted to providing evidence of that bivariate relationship. The paper stems from a 2018 article, “Dissing The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” I have pared down the quotations and...

Scholars distinguish between gratitude, which involves not only appreciation of benefit but a positive feeling directed to the benefactor, from gratefulness, which does not necessarily involve any benefactor, much less a feeling toward one (‘I am grateful for the warm sunshine.’). I suggest...

A group of scholars, including myself, have elaborated a tri-layered understanding of justice in Adam Smith (commutative, distributive, and estimative). Here I go beyond the matter of Smith’s understanding of justice, to ask: How did he discourse about justice? Does he instruct us in the...

This paper explores concepts under a rubric termed “jural,” the meaning of which is differentiated from “legal.” Within the conceptualization of the modern nation-state, there are two categories of jural relationships. In the first, both parties have equal jural standing (equal-equal),...

My university – George Mason University – has announced a Task Force on Anti-Racism and Inclusive Excellence. I gave a lecture about the discourse of those advocating such agendas. The lecture draws on Adam Smith and suggests that improprieties riddle such discourse. I treat improprieties of...

In Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith reasons about how a change in one thing, A, is attended by a change in another thing, B. In expounding on such bivariate relationships, Smith sometimes seems to go out of his way to posit a state of the world in which the relationship would break down....

David K. Lewis published his brilliant PhD dissertation in 1969, Convention; A Philosophical Study. With a lag, scholarship on David Hume has come to elaborate the similitude between Lewis and Hume on convention. Reading Hume along the lines of Lewis gives us a vocabulary with which we can...

This document includes the Introduction and table of contents of a project: Think Spiral: Essays on Adam Smith. The Introduction has the following sections: (1) A Social Grammar(2) The Three Justices: Commutative, Distributive, and Estimative(3) The Liberal Program(4) The Theory of Moral...

Using the records of the seven San Francisco Bay Area counties that surround University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, we conducted a systematic and thorough study of the party registration of the Berkeley and Stanford faculty in 23 academic departments. The departments span...