In Plato's Republic, Socrates' account of a soul with more than one part or power provides ways of accounting for interesting self-directed or reflexive reactive attitudes, including `self-reproach', the analysis of which is otherwise not at all straightforward. Thinking about these attitudes reveals some fundamental characteristics of how Socrates imagines the relationships between the parts of the soul. This is illustrated by looking again at two very familiar passages: the discussions in Republic 4 of the cases of Leontius and Odysseus (439d5-441c3).
Immanent critique is often presented as a distinctive approach to political and social philosophy. But Rachel Fraser argues that immanent critique cannot satisfy three plausible criteria that characterise it as a distinctive approach: it cannot be normatively significant, social, and make no appeal to external standards. This paper develops a model of immanent critique that answers her challenge. I first argue that the normative significance of immanent critique should not be modelled on agent-based practical rationality. I then recast the problem of external standards as a problem of normative grounding, arguing that the force of critique derives from the practical interests of those situated within historically determinate social systems. On this basis, I then claim that immanent critique is best understood not as the application of principles to facts, but as the apt deployment of normatively charged terms to socially organised realities. Its distinctive telos is transformative: it aims to alter our perspective on social systems in ways that connect diagnosis to action.
We study identification in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) in which the endogenous variables enter nonlinearly on the left-hand side of the model, a feature we term endogenous nonlinearity, to distinguish it from the more familiar case in which nonlinearity arises only through exogenous or predetermined variables. This class of models accommodates asymmetric impact multipliers, endogenous regime switching, and occasionally binding constraints. We show that, under weak regularity conditions, the model parameters and structural shocks are (nonparametrically) identified up to an orthogonal transformation, exactly as in a linear SVAR. Our results have the powerful implication that most existing identification schemes for linear SVARs extend directly to our nonlinear setting, with the number of restrictions required to achieve exact identification remaining unchanged. We specialise our results to piecewise affine SVARs, which provide a convenient framework for the modelling of endogenous regime switching, and their smooth transition counterparts. We illustrate our methodology with an application to the nonlinear Phillips curve, providing a test for the presence of nonlinearity that is robust to the choice of identifying assumptions, and finding significant evidence for state-dependent inflation dynamics.
