Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

This book collects notes that were prepared for a university course taught in the Spring of 2018, and delivered to an audience of students enrolled in the Master course in Logic, philosophy and history of science of the University of Florence. The goal of the course was to introduce students to some basic concepts from the area of research generally known as decision theory. This is done by focussing on the concept of 'rational choice', which is analyzed, methodologically speaking, by the means of the theory of games. To minimize prerequisites it was decided to restrict the attention to the theory of finite games in particular. The topics treated are vary, and belongs to both the theory of games 'in normal form' as well as that of games 'in extensive form', as they are usually referred to. The classical issues in both fields, such as the theory of 'equilibria' and the study of properties such as determinacy, are carefully discussed to make them clear to beginners and are addressed from a novel perspective which makes use of formal methods that are typical of researches connected with the study of logic.

Rational choice theory.

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Manners and customs --- Economics --- Rational choice theory

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating "states of exception"-that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it-Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism. Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.

Religion and politics --- Philosophy. --- Carl Schmitt. --- Giorgio Agamben. --- Jubilee. --- Max Weber. --- charisma. --- disenchantment. --- rational choice theory. --- sacred. --- sacrifice. --- sovereignty.