Philosophies

Some mid-eighteenth-century Political Economists, among them Adam Smith, employed the conceptual and methodological tools from General Grammar. Instead of offering, at the outset, a set of formal definitions of their concepts, they departed from ordinary language’s words (‘popular notions’, as Smith puts it) and endeavored to map all the different meanings of a particular notion. The goal of this paper is to follow Smith’s efforts as Grammarian by offering a mapping of the meanings of the word trade in the Wealth of Nations. According to Smith, trade has (1) a proper and original meaning as occupation or métier, that is, a specific productive activity or branch of labor; (2) a derived meaning as business, when it involves the employment of capital in pursuit of profit; and (3) an abstract meaning as commerce, especially when referring to a sector of economic activity, such as domestic or foreign trade. The article argues that key Mercantilist errors also stem from a grammatical confusion between these meanings, illustrating the critical aspect of Smith’s Political Economy.

In a recent stay in Senegal, I had a chance to contemplate a baobab tree (Adansonia digitata)1 located in the Bandia Reserve, whose hollow interior had been used as a burial site [...]

If evaluated solely by Raz’s criteria, Dworkin’s interpretive theory of law indeed faces a crisis of authority justification. This controversy stems from their divergent understandings of the nature of authority. By drawing on Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics to interrogate the rational foundation of prejudice, the rational essence of authority is re-exposed. Authority is a rational and free activity, tied to recognition, and manifests as the possibility of being justified through reasoning. Dworkin’s methodological approach provides a robust justification for legal authority, which manifests in three key dimensions. First, the very act of interpretation demonstrates recognition that authority constitutes a rational activity, thereby affirming that the establishment of legal authority represents a voluntary, autonomous, and reason-governed enterprise. Second, the interpretive theory of law correlates with the be-earned character of authority across three constitutive aspects: its susceptibility to justifiability, its normative demand for justification, and its substantive realization through justificatory practices. Third, the substantive content of interpretive theory corresponds to the epistemic features of authoritative justification—including its informational properties, scope of application, communal dimensions, and capacity for adaptive rationalization. Consequently, contra Raz’s critique, Dworkin’s theoretical framework successfully provides a coherent account of legal authority’s justificatory foundations.

This paper presents a methodological framework, Tonal Isomorphism (TI), derived from Tonal Meta-Ontology (TMO), focusing on operational protocols rather than ontological foundations. Tonal Isomorphism is framed as a meta-protocol rather than a metaphysical doctrine: its purpose is to provide a transferable logic that bridges disciplinary silos. We argue that knowledge breakthroughs can emerge not through trial-and-error experimentation alone, but through the isomorphic translation of tonal structures into domain-specific models. The methodology is demonstrated through three key contributions: (1) the Operationalization of Metaphysics, where tonal principles are expressed in executable forms such as the ToneWarp Equation and integrity-preserving responsibility chains; (2) the Unified Generative Field, a cross-domain modeling scaffold applicable to contexts ranging from arithmetic closure to digital trust protocols; and (3) the Generative Proof, which positions the methodology itself as a living demonstration of its claims, resistant to external mimicry. In an era defined by AI’s capacity for replication and simulation, Tonal Isomorphism offers a framework for knowledge generation where truth is not fixed discovery but a defensible, continuously enacted act of creation.