Promises and Agreements Philosophical Essays [Hardcover]

Promises and agreements are everywhere; we make, receive, keep, and break them on a daily basis. The quest to understand these social practices is integral to understanding ourselves as social creatures. The study of promises and agreements is enjoying a renaissance in many areas of social philosophy, including philosophy of language, action theory, normative ethics, value theory, and legal philosophy. This volume is the first collection of philosophical papers on promises and agreements, bringing together sixteen original self-standing contributions to the philosophical literature. The contributors highlight some of the more interesting aspects of the ubiquitous social phenomena of promises and agreements from different philosophical perspectives.

Preface
Contributors
Annotated Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Understanding Promises and Agreements,Hanoch Sheinman
2. The Problem with Promising,David Owens
3.Three Dogmas about Promising,Margaret Gilbert
4. Is Promising a Practice and Nothing More?,Stan Husi
5. The Importance of Self-Promises,Connie Rosati
6. On Coerced Promises,Eric Chwang
7. Promising Too Much,Julia Driver
8. The Value of Making and Keeping Promises,Michael Smith
9. Act-Utilitarianism and Promises,Alastair Norcross
10. Promises and Rule Consequentialism,Brad Hooker
11. Demystifying Promises,Stephen Darwall
12. Promises and Trust,Daniel Friedrich and Nicholas Southwood
13. Promise as an Arm's Length Relation,Daniel Markovits
14. Sidgwick on Promises,David Philips
15. Contractarianism and Emergency,Yitzhak Benbaji
16. Agreement as Joint Promise,Hanoch Sheinman
Subject Index
Name Index

As a snapshot of the state of the art in research on promising, the text comes off very well. It mixes contemporary contributions to many traditional delã'