A Battle for Public Mythology

The Mythology of Holdout as a Justification for Eminent Domain and Public Provision

One of the alleged justifications for government provision of roads is that the power of eminent domain is necessary in order to overcome holdout problems and obtain right-of-way properties (Goldstein 1987).1 After all, this argument continues, only the state has such power, so the private sector would be unable to supply the efficient amount of roads.2 In this article, I examine this market-fa...

Inventing a Mythology of Empowerment

Adopting a historical perspective, this paper examines the ideological and philosophical antecedents of current popular management approaches which advocate programs of workplace empowerment that are enacted through the implementation of teamwork. These approaches frequently assume that a propensity toward teamwork is an essential characteristic of ‘human nature’. It is argued that this is an i...

Context and Mythology

In this thesis, I will survey some philosophically representative approaches to the problem of the relationship between context and meaning. Starting from G.W.F. Hegel’s discussion of the meaninglessness of indexical terms in the Phenomenology of Spirit, I will investigate Gottlob Frege’s notion of context and the legacy of this notion in the formal sciences of language, showing that this appro...

Greek technology or mythology?

The study by Stefanadis et al. in this issue indicates that treatment with a variety of statins reduces the release of heat from atherosclerotic plaques in the human coronary artery. This observation suggests that statins exert a beneficial effect on the inflammatory process that exists in the vascular wall in a variety of acute coronary syndromes. The finding that this effect was most pronounc...

The Philosophy of Mythology