Chapter 1 provides philosophical foundations for the arguments of this book in discussing the issue of scientific objectivity in economics. It criticizes a closed science, “view from nowhere” conception of economics, and defends an open science, “view from somewhere” conception of economics as an objective science. The first conception is ascribed to current mainstream economics, is associated with its principle practices – reductionist modeling, formalization, limited interdisciplinarity, and value neutrality – and has as its foundation the abstract Homo economicus conception. Two problematic consequences of these practices are value blindness regarding the range and complexity of human values; fatalism regarding human behavior in employing a tenseless rather than tensed representation of time. In contrast, the principle practices of an open science, “view from somewhere” conception of economics as a science – complexity modeling, mixed methods, strong relationships to other disciplines, and value diversity – provide the foundations of a socially and historically embedded individual conception. The chapter closes with discussion of the question: Might mainstream economics be a science bubble?

Jacobi played a determinative role in shaping the landscape from which German Romanticism would emerge. His critique of the philosophies of both Spinoza and Fichte, and his advocacy of transcendent realism, would deeply influence Early German Romantics such as Schlegel, Novalis and Hölderlin and would go on to shape the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

This chapter addresses Jacobi’s literary contributions, Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters and Woldemar, in the context of his critique of both Enlightenment reason and feeling. Both, Jacobi argues, undermined human individuality and freedom.

Manja Kisner stresses Schopenhauer’s continuity with Fichte and Schelling through Fichte’s concept of the intelligible subject as a nexus of ethical drives that tend toward an ethical world order. Schopenhauer rejected so much of this concept that we often miss the positive influences. Kisner points to the fact that Fichte was discussing agency in terms of drives, and responding to the problem of illicitly positing a causal relationship between the intelligible and empirical registers. Schopenhauer disagrees with Fichte’s idea that the intelligible world is a sort of moral destination, his moral fatalism. Kisner sees WWR as a reply to Fichte on this account. Schelling furthers the development toward Schopenhauer, however, by abandoning moral fatalism, and seeing the possibility of moral as well as immoral action, as contingent (not fatalistic) and rooted in an irrational, amoral ground. Schopenhauer can be seen as continuing and radicalizing it. He accepted Schelling’s notion of an amoral ground of being, but viewed it as an occasion for a negative rather than a positive morality. Freedom comes not from grounding oneself in the will and acting rationally, but from resisting the will altogether. Still, this theoretical move presupposes the philosophical tools developed by Schopenhauer’s contemporaries.

The influence of Wittgenstein on Wallace has become a truism in the scholarship. This chapter explores the contribution of the philosopher and logician to Wallace’s fiction writing, focusing on the logical questions that are most directly present in the fiction. More particularly, the chapter offers a provocative look at Wallace’s philosophical entanglement with Richard Taylor and ideas of fatalism. Imagining an alternate world in which Wallace was a philosopher by profession instead of an author, the chapter traces the development of his argument against Taylor’s proposition by way of logic, one of the key philosophical features of his writing, and traces a path from here to the interest in Wittgenstein and language games that dominated his fiction. In imagining this alternative world, the chapter invites the reader to think through exactly the ideas of choice, contingency, language and logic that animate argument it discusses.

Wallace’s reputation as an author naturally outstrips his renown as a philosopher, but Wallace himself wrote that he saw philosophy and fiction as different arms of a single gesture. Among the strains of philosophy with which he dealt directly was determinism. Indeed, his undergraduate philosophy thesis on this subject was published as a stand-alone text in 2010, under the title Fate, Time and Language. This chapter introduces the concepts with which Wallace grapples in this work, as well as tracing the structural persistence of the theme of determinism through his writing. The chapter also argues that Wallace was an accomplished technical philosopher in his own right, but that the strict form of philosophical writing did not lend itself to his tendency toward literal illustrations of complex concepts. In this respect, the chapter argues for Wallace as a literary philosopher in the vein of Wallace Stevens, seeing the creative work as a form of philosophy in itself.

The principle of sufficient reason (PSR) says that every contingent truth has an explanation. It is widely thought that if one strengthens "explanation" to "contrastive explanation," then the PSR entails modal fatalism – the view that no proposition is contingent. In a theistic context, this would force full theological determinism: of creaturely behavior by God and of divine behavior by the divine nature. I discuss about a dozen accounts of what could be meant by “contrastive explanation.” Some of them support these arguments and some do not. I argue, however, that we should not extend the PSR to contrastive explanation in any of the senses given.

Meyer discusses the intensely debated topic of Nietzsche’s philosophical naturalism and thinks that the key is Nietzsche’s study of Schopenhauer. For Meyer Nietzsche’s argument has to do with completing the project of naturalism that Schopenhauer thinks cannot be completed. Meyer thinks that Nietzsche’s naturalism in TSZ leads him to endorse the truth of cosmological eternal recurrence and that this truth entails for Nietzsche a kind of fatalism that leads us beyond a morality of good and evil and beyond the conception of agency that underlies this morality. Meyer thinks that Nietzsche constructed a narrative in which Zarathustra comes to abandon his non-naturalized conception of himself and his agency, thereby attaining a childlike state of innocence beyond good and evil.

Although The Spirit of Law (1748) was greeted very favorably in many quarters, a Jansenist writer in the Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques charged Montesquieu with lack of respect for Christianity and with being a follower of natural religion. Montesquieu’s response was that his critic had failed to understand that he was writing, not as a theologian, but as a “jurisconsult” (legal scholar) exploring what laws are most suitable for a given people considering their character and situation. Montesquieu acknowledges that although he had discussed many non-Christian customs, he was “not justifying the customs but giving the reasons for them.” He also stressed that he had rebutted the views of both Bayle and Spinoza. He notes that he had called out Bayle for his error in believing that “a society of true Christians could not survive” and had refuted Spinoza’s fatalism by asserting that “those who have said that a blind fate has produced all the effects that we see in the world have uttered a great absurdity.”

The texts in Part Three of the volume reveal Montesquieu’s moral idealism and life-long concern with ethics. He was clearly a moral theorist as well as a political philosopher. In his In Praise of Sincerity (1717) he stresses the importance of providing moral guidance to one’s friends by speaking to them honestly regarding their shortcomings. In his Treatise on Duties (1725) Montesquieu stresses the need, recognized by the Stoics and by Cicero, to observe human duties and attacks Thomas Hobbes by asserting contra Hobbes that there are absolutes of justice traceable to nature and attacks Baruch Spinoza by proclaiming that the world was created by design, not “blind fate.” In his Consideration and Reputation (1725) he observes that we crave the esteem of our friends even more than we desire birth, wealth, positions, and honors, and yet we neglect “probity, good faith, and modesty,” because these traits are undervalued by our friends. In his Discourse on the Equity that Must Determine Judgments and the Execution of Laws (1725) Montesquieu asserts that the “essential virtue” for a judicial magistrate is “justice, a quality without which he is but a monster in society.”

Recent research by climate scientists suggest that New Orleans, much of which is below sea level and protected from the sea only by a rapidly eroding marshland, may someday become uninhabitable. The city’s literature of the last few decades has been preoccupied with the theme of fatalism and apocalypse, and the deadly epidemics of the nineteenth century have provided rich symbolic terrain for figuring the troubles that “plague” the city and that will someday mean its end. Some recent work by women of color – notably Erna Brodber and Brenda Marie Osbey – delineates a different literary project, one appropriate to a post-apocalyptic diaspora, namely the work of remembering. Both the traditional fatalism and this emerging interest in memory will likely be central themes to watch for in the major literature associated with the New Orleans in coming decades.