Hans Morgenthau was a founder of the modern discipline of International Relations, and his Politics among Nations was for decades the dominant textbook in the field. The character of his Realism has frequently been discussed in debates on methodology and the nature of theory in International Relations. Almost all of this discussion has mischaracterized his views. The clues given in his writings, as well as his biography, point directly to Max Weber’s methodological writings. Morgenthau, it is argued, was a sophisticated (...) user of Weber’s views who self-consciously applied them in the sphere of International Relations in such a way that Realism provided an ideal-typical model of the rational and responsible statesman. This interpretation both explains Morgenthau’s views and shows them to be a serious, complex, and compelling response to the issues which have animated the controversies over International Relations theory after Waltz’s presentation of the methodological basis for his neo-Realism. (shrink)

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

This book addressees a timely and fundamental problematic: the gap between the aims that people attempt to realize democratically and the law and administrative practices that actually result. The chapters explain the realities that administration poses for democratic theory. Topics include the political value of accountability, the antinomic character of political values, the relation between ultimate ends and the intermediate ends that are sought by constitutions, and a reconsideration of the meaning of the rule of law itself. The essays are (...) inspired by the demystifying realism of Max Weber and Hans Kelsen, including explications of their views on law, constitutions, and the rule of law. The book will be of interest to social and political theorists, philosophers of law, and legal theorists, and for discussions of democratic theory, the administrative state, constitutionalism, and justice, as well as to readers of Weber and Kelsen. (shrink)

The N ational Assembly held in the Frankfurt Paulskirche in 1848, which opened w ith high hopes for the unification o f Germ any on parliam entary constitutional principles, was left to die a year later, in the telling phrase o f D onoso Cortes, ‘like a street w om an in the gu tter’. In the period o f reaction that followed, during w hich the Paulskirche convention came to be described as the ‘parliam ent o f pro­ fessors’, (...) one o f its m em bers, Georg G ottfried Gervinus, was accused, in a trial for high treason, o f attem pting to prove the historical inevitability o f the supersession o f monarchical forms by republican forms. This was Gervinus’s second experience as a professorial m artyr. In 1837 he had been one o f the professors at the U niversity o f G ottingen, the ‘Gottingen Seven’, w ho protested the revocation o f the H anoverian constitution. For this he had been banished and given three days to leave the kingdom. The lesson he, and m any other liberal thinkers, learned from these experiences was that the Germ an middle classes were incapable o f perform ing the historical role assigned to them; they lacked the political will to establish a republican order. (shrink)

Since its publication almost 150 years ago, The Idea of a University has had an extraordinary influence on the shaping and goals of higher education. The issues that John Henry Newman raised--the place of religion and moral values in the university setting, the competing claims of liberal and professional education, the character of the academic community, the cultural role of literature, the relation of religion and science--have provoked discussion from Newman's time to our own. This edition of The Idea of (...) a University includes the full text of "University Teaching" and four selections from "University Subjects," together with five essays by leading scholars that explore the background and the present day relevance of Newman's themes. In the essays Martha Garland discusses the character and organization of the early nineteenth-century English universities upon which Newman based much of his vision; Frank M. Turner traces the impact of Newman's influence during the vast expansion of higher education since World War II; George Marsden investigates how the decreasing emphasis on religion has affected higher education; Sara Castro Klaren examines the implications of Newman's views on education and literature for current debates between proponents of a curriculum based on western civilization and one based on multiculturalism; and George Landow considers what the advent of electronic communication will mean to university teaching, research, and community. To aid accessibility, the edition also includes an analytical table of contents, a chronology and biographical sketch of Newman's life, questions for discussion, expanded notes, and a glossary of names, all of which will help make this the standard teaching text for Newman's work. (shrink)

The Pittsburgh Survey was part of the survey movement. The movement was characterized in three key documents of self-interpretation: the fi rst, an article by Paul U. Kellogg, Shelby Harrison, and George Palmer in the Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in 1912; the second, a paper by Kellogg and Neva Deardorff presented to an international social work convention in 1928; and the third, Shelby Harrison’s introductory essay to the catalogue of surveys constructed by Allen Eaton in 1930. (...) Ordinarily, such documents provide the beginning of historical analysis and are critically revised by later historians. However, there has been relatively little written about the surveys and the survey movement since it expired. So these texts give shape to a kind of dim memory of a movement to promote social reform through sociological research, which, for mysterious reasons, disappeared. (shrink)

Now that mankind has created the capability of destroying itself through nuclear technology, is it still possible to think in terms of a "just war"? Johnson argues that it is, and in the context of specific case studies he offers moral guidelines for addressing such major contemporary problems as terrorist activity in a foreign country, an individual’s conscientious objection to military service, and an American defense policy that requires development of weapons that may be morally employed in case of need. (...) "Remarkable.... A thoughtful and even profound book, which can be warmly recommended."—Adam Roberts, _New Society_ __ "[A] wise, prudential, and moral thesis.... A most important book, one that all Americans who can should read."—George Armstrong Kelly, _Political Science Quarterly_ __ "At its heart, _Can Modern War be Just? _Is a challenge to the common assumption that any modern war must be total—an unrestrained, spasmodic release of one’s entire destructive capacity against the whole of the enemy’s population."—Richard Allen, _Journal of Religious Ethics_ __ "Johnson... seriously attempt[s] to balance principles and respect facts. For this he is to be praised."—Gary Jason, _Chronicles of Culture_ __ "Johnson’s application of just war doctrine to the hardest problems of contemporary warfare is both morally sensitive and intellectually bold. Readers will sometimes disagree with his arguments, but they will be forced to think hard, and they will learn what it is to work within a moral tradition."—Michael Walzer. (shrink)

The term ‘Ohm's law’ traditionally denotes the formula of Georg Simon Ohm relating voltage, current, and resistance in metallic conductors. But to students of sensory physiology and its history, ‘Ohm's law’ also denotes another relationship: the fundamental principle of auditory perception that Ohm announced in 1843. This aspect of Ohm's science has attracted very little attention, partly because his galvanic researches so thoroughly eclipsed it in success and importance, and partly because Ohm's work in physiological acoustics had so little immediate (...) impact on the science of his time. On announcing his hypothesis in 1843, Ohm found himself drawn into a bitter dispute with the physicist August Seebeck, who successfully discredited the hypothesis and forced Ohm to withdraw from the field. (shrink)

The publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971 coincided with a complex set of changes in the political situation of the west, the role of intellectuals, the state of the social sciences and humanities, and in the development of the welfare state itself. These changes provided the conditions for the creation of a body of thought quite different from the one the sixties had produced, and a significant change from the discipline-dominated thinking of the period after the (...) Second World War. The immediately relevant events included the effective demise of Parsons’ systems theory, the waning of the passions of 1968, and an enrollment crisis in universities’ humanities and social science departments as economic fear drove students into professional programs, creating a sharp downturn in demand for faculty. The optimism that had characterized disciplines in these fields during the 1960s quickly faded. The idea that sociology was soon to become a “science,” the source of the positivism dispute of the sixties, faded along with it. Logical Positivism as a coherent movement collapsed under the weight of the problems of the theory-observation distinction. At the same time Political Theory, which had been taught largely as an historical study – a history of error, as Leo Strauss described the standard textbook of the time, George Sabine’s A History of Political Theory, or as a continuation of the mood of Kulturpessimismus, as in the writings of Sabine’s critic, Leo Strauss – revived, partly in response to the stimulus from the success of Rawls, partly in response to new ideas about participatory democracy rooted in the experience of the sixties. Social theory also changed: the role that Parsons had played as a focus of theoretical discussion was replaced; the work of Ju˝rgen Habermas, particularly his Theory of Communicative Action, reassessed and re-appropriated the classical theoretical tradition in social theory to replace Parsons’ synthetic account, and this work coincided with a systematic reconsideration of the classic social theorists, especially Weber. An additional source of new thinking came from the “dependent” periphery, as thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, which emancipated Socialist theory from received dogmas about class struggle and recognized the centrality of other antagonisms and the need for open democracy. (shrink)

The problem of objectivity has deep roots in the history of sociology, reaching back to the pre-sociological era of social and labor statistics. The admissibility of the section on statistics to the British Association for the Advancement of Science had already raised this issue in the 1840s, and it continued with the labor statistics movement of the later 19th century. The repeated conflicts involved what can be seen as two competing concepts: objectivity as fairness and objectivity as pure factuality. Each (...) was guaranteed by something: fairness by institutional arrangements and purity by methods. The greatest successes of sociology in the face of social conflict occurred when the two coincided, as they did in the study of the 1919 Race Riots in Chicago. More often they did not, leading to the dueling perspectives represented by Robert Lynd in Knowledge for What? and George Lundberg’s Can Science Save Us?, followed by Howard Becker’s “Whose Side Are We On?.” These conflicts continue to the present, and can be illuminated by the work of Miranda Fricker on epistemic injustice and Ted Porter on Trust in Numbers. The conflict, however, is unequal in one respect: what counts as fairness shifts as moral saliences shift, and although concepts of purity and method also shift, they have more continuity and stability. Today, the productive interaction between the two forms has broken down, in multiple settings, notably that of race, threatening the enterprise of sociology as a whole with collapse into ideology. (shrink)

Are culture driven ethical conflicts apparent in the discourse of the protagonists? A multi-year, multi-cultural study of managers by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner resulted in two conclusions relevant to business ethics. The first is that intercultural business conflicts can often be traced to a finite set of cultural differences. The second is that enough similarities exist between cultures to provide the grounds for conflict resolution. The research reported here gives credence to their study when applied to an ethical conflict viewed (...) from French and American perspectives. (shrink)

"This book is a sorely needed corrective. Animal Spirits is an important--maybe even a decisive--contribution at a difficult juncture in macroeconomic theory.

It will be recalled that Aristotle cites two examples of relations of this type: relations of knowledge and of vision, both of which are internal to the knower and seer, but external to the objects seen and known. However, neither of these relations can be the ones which exist between God and world for they are in a sense cul-de-sacs. Action is involved in their establishment, but they do not necessarily lead to further action, and so they cannot account for (...) the eternal movement of the universe. Only when their objects become desiderata do they result in additional activity. (shrink)

So far as his critical employment of the concept is concerned, the thing in itself is not a second object. The thing in itself is given in its appearances; it is the object which appears. In other words, the object is taken in a twofold sense. There is no contradiction, Kant maintained, in supposing that one and the same will is, as an appearance, determined by the laws of nature and yet, as a thing in itself, is free. He never (...) meant to hold that the self of the theoretical reason and the self of the practical reason are two separate and distinct entities. It is one and the same object considered from two perspectives. In this sense the thing in itself is purely a limiting concept. So far as the critical method is concerned, objects are always considered from a particular and limited perspective, e.g. science, morality, art, et cetera. This is the central meaning of his theory of appearances. In this employment of the concept it is completely meaningless to speak of the thing in itself as a cause of appearances. The critical distinction between appearances and things in themselves is not intended to be a distinction between subjective sense data and public objects, but between public objects as given according to two or more modes. This involves no extension of the category of causality beyond appearances. Moreover, it is not open to the charge that an unknown object is given the attribute of existence. The thing in itself is known as an appearance. By definition that is the only way that it could be known. To say that we know only appearances and not things in themselves is to state an obvious tautology, namely that objects are known only as they are known. (shrink)

Cognitive science is a child of the 1950s, the product of a time when psychology, anthropology and linguistics were redefining themselves and computer science and neuroscience as disciplines were coming into existence. Psychology could not participate in the cognitive revolution until it had freed itself from behaviorism, thus restoring cognition to scientific respectability. By then, it was becoming clear in several disciplines that the solution to some of their problems depended crucially on solving problems traditionally allocated to other disciplines. Collaboration (...) was called for: this is a personal account of how it came about. (shrink)

Blair's new translation of Plato's Republic is more readable and accessible than any translation on the market. Blair makes a persuasive case for using "honesty" rather than "morality" when translating a key Greek term.

What kind of education do students need to begin to think about who they are and how they can find significance in their lives? Both are essential to enable a life of happiness, freedom, and success. To deal with inevitable change, each individual must have a sense of self and purpose. That is what this book intends to tackle.

Akerlof's substantial introduction to this volume tells the story of these papers, connecting them and showing how his later work has built upon his early contributions, in many cases improving their arguments, their subtlety, and their usefulness today.

Having indicated my own enthusiasm for the project, I must hasten to add that it is precisely the explicit philosophical concern of existential psychoanalysis which constitutes its greatest vulnerability. No matter how strong one's interest in metaphysics may be and, hence, his initial sympathy with the metaphysical component in existential psychoanalysis, if one is critical and honest he cannot long avoid the question: what will be the results for psychoanalysis as a science? Two considerations are bound to give the philosopher (...) pause: Modern experimental science deliberately and willfully cut itself free from metaphysical speculation; up to the point where it failed to take this step, its progress was minimal. There are, I think, obvious dangers involved in empirical science either becoming too explicitly metaphysical or attempting to adapt itself to an antecedently available metaphysical system. I do not mean to suggest that metaphysics has not or cannot contribute to natural science, but only to underscore the fact that natural science has attained at least a relative autonomy. The physicist develops his own metaphysics to serve his own purposes and there is good reason to believe that he is well advised in doing so. (shrink)

When philosophers participate in the interdisciplinary ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and social analysis of nanotechnologies, what is their specific contribution? At first glance, the contribution of philosophy appears to be a clarification of the various moral and ethical arguments that are commonly presented in philosophical discussion. But if this is the only contribution of philosophy, then it can offer no more than a stalemate position, in which each moral and ethical argument nullifies all the others. To provide an alternative, we (...) must analyze the reasons behind the prevailing individual and cultural relativism in ethics. The epistemological investigation of this stalemate position will guide us to the core problem of the relation between theory and action . The stalemate can be overcome from a pragmatic philosophical standpoint, which combines epistemology, philosophy of language—that is, the philosophy of speech acts—and practical reasoning—that is, reasoning about decision-making . From this philosophical standpoint, it will be possible to show how philosophy can accompany and support the development of nanotechnologies. (shrink)

Change is one of experience's most evident data. The man who has finished reading is different from the same man before he started; the book he has read was once a tree. But if the fact is clear, it hides a very profound problem. Examining change, we see from experience that things do not come to be out of nothing; other things turn into them. The principle of sufficient reason confirms this, since a pure negation can never be a sufficient (...) reason for anything. But if this is true, then neither can the negation of an attribute provide a sufficient reason for its emergence in an already existing thing; this would be tantamount to saying that the attribute came from nothing. Nor, if the thing really changes, can we say simply that an external agent "pours in" some of its perfection, since then it would not change, but only receive a metaphysical coat of paint. And so, we seem to have forced ourselves into a dilemma: things must be what they are, and yet they must themselves be in some sense what they are not. If we deny the first part there is nothing to change; if the second, change is unintelligible, and hence impossible. (shrink)

The fundamental article of my political creed, declared John Adams, is that despotism, or unlimited sovereignty, or absolute power is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor. Equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in every respect diabolical. The consequences of this article for Adams' thought are nowhere better articulated than in this anthology, which presents his remarkable attempts at constructing a complete political system based on constitutional, balanced, representative government.