Tenure
October 26 – November 13
Graham Hubbs
Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Politics and Philosophy, University of Idaho
Graham Hubbs is an Associate Professor in the University of Idaho’s Department of Politics and Philosophy, where he also serves as Chair. His research lies at the intersection of studies of practical rationality and social ontology. His approach to practical rationality is neo-Aristotelian, and he has written extensively on issues related to the work of G.E.M. Anscombe. His primary interest in social ontology concerns the history and nature of money. During his time at ICE, Hubbs will be investigating the forms of explanation that have historically been used to account for the nature of money and the relevance of these explanations to the contemporary politics of money.
Hubbs is also a senior member of the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative (TDI), which is headquartered at Michigan State University’s Center for Interdisciplinarity. TDI, which received the American Philosophical Association’s 2018 Prize for Innovation and Excellence in Philosophy Programs, conducts workshops to aid interdisciplinary teams in communication and collaboration, harnessing the power of philosophy to reveal teams’ conceptual blindspots. Hubbs is eager to bring his experience with TDI to support ICE’s interdisciplinary projects.
Events
LIVE ONLINE
Thursday, November 12, 2020
4:00 p.m.
LIVE ONLINE
The Political Significance of the Ontology of Money
Progressive members of the U.S. House of Representatives—including, most prominently, Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar, and Pressley, who call themselves “The Squad”—have championed the ideas of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as a way to achieve policy initiatives such as a universal jobs guarantee and a Green New Deal. At its core, MMT rests on an account of the ontology of money called chartalism. I will explain chartalism by contrasting it with the what has historically been the orthodox theory of money, which I call the catallactic theory. The standard way of depicting the difference between these two accounts is in terms of the competing origin stories that each tells of the invention of money. Proponents of MMT commonly insist that understanding money’s origin is important, if not essential, for understanding the financial aspects of policy proposals based on the theory. Some opponents to MMT have asked how money’s history could be relevant to present-day policy. I will argue that the difference between chartalism and the catallactic theory that matters to policy is the order of explanation that each offers for money’s functions. Once we understand the difference between these accounts as a difference in explanatory order, we can then see chartalism’s argumentative power as a form of critique. The point of critique is to expose dogmatic assumptions for the historical contingencies that they are. The political significance of understanding the ontology of money, then, is the critical perspective enabled by this understanding to combat economic and political dogma. I close by focusing on one of these dogma: the function of taxes.
