Congratulations to Rev. Daniel Martin, who defended his doctoral dissertation on December 2nd! His topic was "The Perennial Challenge of Incommensurability and the Response of Practical Wisdom in the Ethics of Exchange: The Categorial Approaches of Aristotle and Georg Simmel", and his director was V. Bradley Lewis, Ph.D, Dean of the School of Philosophy and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. Rev. Martin currently serves as the Chair of the Philosophy Department at St. John Vianney College Seminary in Miami, Florida.
Fr. Daniel Martin was born in Miami, FL and raised in Coral Springs, FL. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Fordham University in 2007, his M.Div. from St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in 2013, and his Ph.L. in Philosophy from The Catholic University of America in 2018. Since 2020, he has taught Philosophy at St. John Vianney College Seminary in Miami, FL.
Dissertation Abstract:
After the global financial recession and with the recent return of inflationary pressures, there have been growing concerns surrounding economic justice and fairness in pricing. Aristotle’s economic thought has thus begun to experience a much-needed revival. Aristotle’s approach to justice in pricing in Nicomachean Ethics V.5 involves metaphysical questions of measurement and equalization. The Aristotelian problem of incommensurability is a metaphysical-categorial challenge that concerns how the full range of qualitatively diverse goods and services that differ so greatly are made commensurable and equated in economic exchange. Aristotle claims that this truly impossible task is practically overcome by reference to human need through the use of money. Yet he and his Scholastic successors, turning to the market to supply the just price, never fully articulated how practical wisdom could lead to disagreement with and correction of the current market price. After Kant’s Copernican turn to a conceptual-categorial approach, Georg Simmel was the first to offer a modern philosophical approach to money and economic value in his Philosophie des Geldes. Lacking metaphysical categories, Simmel’s sacrificial theory of value holds that the value of a thing is not discovered simply in its enjoyment (pleasure) but rather in whatever must be sacrificed to attain it (pain). Yet, Simmel also struggles to find a common measure, in this case, between pleasure and pain. Arising in different philosophical systems, ancient and modern, metaphysical and conceptualist, the perennial challenge of incommensurability thus requires the continual response of practical wisdom. Building upon the work of Ruth Chang, I respond to incommensurability by developing Aristotle’s prudential approach: prudence allows us to exchange ethically, not by taking the current market price itself as a normative rule, but, instead, as a functioning market requires, by exchanging as the phronimos acting with right reason would, allowing for a full range of acceptable market prices that offer parity instead of strict equalization.