Monthly Archives: February 2015

Carlos Santiago Nino: a bibliography

nino

Carlos Nino was a publicly engaged intellectual of rare integrity and brilliance. In his dedication to human rights, the rule of law, and constitutional legitimacy he combined passion with wisdom and analytic clarity. His inexhaustible courage in fighting to restore decency to his nation provides a model for others working in the wake of dictatorship. We are fortunate to have in his writings a record of his remarkable thought and experience.
Thomas Nagel

I started compiling this bibliography back when I was an undergraduate student at the university of Buenos Aires, and continued to work on it intermittently over the next few years. In 2007, my hard drive was damaged in an accident and most of the data stored in it was lost.  I had since then assumed that the document containing the bibliography was among the affected files. A week ago, however, I stumbled upon a copy of it.  Thinking that there might be sufficient interest in this information among legal scholars and other academics, I spent a few hours over the following days updating the references and formatting the bibliography for online publication.  I would like to thank the staff at various institutions whose libraries I consulted in the course of preparing this document, in particular Universidad de San Andrés, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico, Centro de Investigaciones Filosóficas, University of Oxford (Bodleian Law Library), Balliol College and University of Toronto (Robarts Library).

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My beliefs

My friend Brian Tomasik recently made available a table summarizing his beliefs on various issues. I thought recording my own credences on these propositions would be a fun and potentially instructive exercise, and decided to make my answers public. To prevent myself from being influenced by Brian’s responses, I copied the original table, pasted in on an Excel spreadsheet, deleted the column with his answers, and randomized the rows by sorting them in alphabetical order.  Only after recording all my responses did I allow myself to look at Brian’s, and I managed to resist the temptation to make any changes ex post facto. Overall, I was pleasantly surprised at the degree to which we agree, and not very surprised at the areas where we don’t agree.  I also suspect that a few of our disagreements (e.g. on compatibilism about free will) are merely verbal. Below, I comment on the propositions on which we disagree the most.

If you think you might want to participate in this exercise, you can make a duplicate of this spreadsheet and record your answers there before reading any further.

Update: See also Michael Dickens’ responses in the comments section.

Update 2: There is now a new version of the table below, which reflects my beliefs as of November 2020.

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