While the United States is an important Asia-Pacific actor, its engagement with the region is complex and often difficult. Not only must US regionalism balance the diverse requirements of an ambitious policy agenda, but also US policy norms and priorities often clash with those of other regional actors. This has important implications for the capacity of the United States to provide regional leadership. Recent years have seen growing policy convergence between the United States and other Asia-Pacific actors, particularly in economic (...) terms, but US regionalism continues to feature competition alongside collaboration. (shrink)

That style which modern scholars have called “curial” or “clergial” is an elaborate fifteenth-century prose style practiced most notoriously by William Caxton in works published during the last decades of the century. It is often assumed that he learned the style from French courtly models. This view has recently suffered modification through the work of Diane Bornstein, whose study of the Tale of Melibee revealed that Chaucer had an independent grasp of many features of the style almost a hundred years (...) before Caxton used it. Although she was successful in demonstrating the use at an early date of these stylistic features, Bornstein did not question or discuss the sources of Chaucer's evident competence. It could be reasonably assumed, as had been assumed for Caxton, that they lay in French literary texts, since features of the style are present in the source of Melibee, the Livre de Mellibee et de Prudence, and they could be presumed to have occurred also in other literary texts of French origin with which Chaucer was doubtless familiar. (shrink)

This paper examines narrativism’s claim that the historical past cannot be known once and for all because it must be continuously re-described from the standpoint of the present. We argue that this claim is based on a non sequitur. We take narrativism’s claim that the past must be re-described continuously from the perspective of the present to be the result of the following train of thought: 1) “all knowledge is conceptually mediated”; 2) “the conceptual framework through which knowledge of reality (...) is mediated changes with every new generation of historians”; therefore (narrativism’s claim) “the historical past changes with every new generation of historians”. The idea of an unchanging past, for the narrativist, requires denying premise 1 (all knowledge is conceptually mediated”) and therefore rests on a problematic commitment to the chimerical notion of the past as it is in-itself, wie es eigentlich gewesen. We argue that the narrativist’s conclusion does not follow unless one adds a further premise, namely 3) “it is not possible to view reality through the categorial framework of historical agents”. If one asserts the possibility of grasping reality through the categorial framework of others, be they contemporary or past agents (as much philosophy of history written in an idealist key does), then one no longer has to accept the narrativist’s inference that since the past cannot be known in-itself or independently of conceptual mediation, then it cannot be known as it always was for the historical agents. Narrativism’s inference that the past cannot be known as it always was does not follow from premises 1 and 2 unless one smuggles in another problematic premise, premise 3. In this paper we defend the claim that the past can be known as it always was (not as it is in-itself) by invoking a different conception of the role of conceptual mediation in historical knowledge, one which assumes the possibility of viewing reality through the categorial framework of others. This notion of the role of conceptual mediation in historical knowledge is prevalent in the idealist tradition but, in the interest of brevity, we will defend this notion of mediacy by specific reference to the idealist philosophy of R.G. Collingwood. (shrink)

Il est une question fondamentale dont il semble pourtant qu’elle n’ait pas été posée: celle de savoir ce qui fait que le cogito soit effectivement un principe métaphysique, c’est-à-dire une vérité première. Il semble aussi que ce qui d’ordinaire tient lieu de réponse à cette question dans l’esprit des lecteurs de Descartes, c’est le sentiment vague qu’il s’agit là de la première vérité qui surgisse après la dévastation laissée par le doute universel de la Première Méditation, ou peut-être qui surgisse (...) au cœur de ce doute, puisque le doute ne s’autodétruit que pour faire place à ego sumOr s’en tenir à cela pour justifier le statut de principe métaphysique du cogito, c’est confondre priorité chronologique et primauté métaphysique ou épistémique: en effet, qu’y aurait-il dans le seul fait de se présenter ainsi qui assure que le cogito doive fonder d’autres connaissances, d’éventuelles sciences? Qu’est-ce qui empêcherait aussi qu’il ne soit lui-même assujetti à d’autres connaissances, plus fondamentales, et dont le méditant ne se serait peut-être pas encore aperçu? Il est vrai que cette confusion est compréhensible, puisque la primauté métaphysique du cogito coïncide effectivement avec sa priorité dans l’ordre des connaissancesMais dans le doute ambiant, celle-ci n’est en réalité qu’un effet de celle-là, et le simple fait de constater l’une ne revient pas à être assuré de l’autre. Il ne peut s’agir donc que d’une coïncidence, et la question se pose dès lors de savoir comment se traduit sa primauté, c’est-à-dire comment doivent se concevoir ses rapports avec le reste de nos éventuelles connaissances. (shrink)

The book is comprised of essays that utilize Shakespeare as a productive window into topics of contemporary social and political relevance. Its interdisciplinary qualities make the book relevant for students of political studies, literature, philosophy, cultural studies, and history.

In the tragic senarius the divisions of the sense normally coincide with the main divisions of the metrical structure. Punctuation is most frequently found at the end of the line, or at the penthemimeral or hephthemimeral caesura. There are few traces of any desire to produce a persistent clash between verse structure and sentence structure. Thus at Med. 446–50 and 709–13 five consecutive lines, at Med. 364–71 eight consecutive lines, are more or less self-contained in sense. But this principle, while (...) valid in some degree for all three tragedians, is not equally valid for all. Sophocles, as is well known, is far suppler in his iambic technique than Aeschylus and Euripides, and far more prone to write sentences which over-run the main metrical divisions. (shrink)

As a specialised complement to a history text-book Dr. Hawkins offers a collection of short essays, which coalesce around the main theme of the fortunes of British empiricism in its eighteenth century precursors, its twentieth century rebirth and in a possible reconstruction which in the author’s opinion may lead it to rejoin and deepen the traditional stream of realism. For good parallel measure he adds two essays on existentialism and marxism. Dr. Hawkins unites a trenchant independence of thought with the (...) national method of cautious analysis and lucid, simple style, which make him a competent accountant of the present balancesheet of British philosophy. His papers offer the personal results of some twenty years of probing analysis and critical evaluation of problems and trends of thought, which are mainly epistemological in character. One sole regret is that he omits from his account the urgent moral problems which are forcing a re-examination of empiricist method and objectivity and re-opening it to the possibility of a metaphysical basis for values. (shrink)

G. E. Moore, unlike most prophets, is honoured only in his own country—the small world of the Aristotelian Society and the Cambridge Moral Science Club. To outsiders he is known, if at all, mainly because of his connection with his more flamboyant colleagues, Russell and Wittgenstein. Yet Moore’s influence on the intellectual life of this century is hardly calculable. Philosophy as it is now taught in the universities of the English–speaking world derives its character, largely, from his personal habits of (...) thought. He bequeathed it its most obvious and, to the layman, most irritating characteristics—the emphasis on linguistic analysis and the tendency to avoid the really important problems, the problems which determine our way of life. Contemporary English philosophy is, like Moore’s, a philosophy of common–sense. It is concerned, not so much with truth but with meaning, the meaning of those statements whose truth is guaranteed by common–sense; hence arise the method of linguistic analysis and the failure to tackle those problems which common–sense cannot answer. (shrink)

In a sense every practising philosopher is a revolutionary—the pressing problems and personal insights of his human condition urge him to correct traditional thought, while he feels both retrospectively wiser than his predecessors and naively exposed to the criticism of his successors. Thus some members of the dominant current of British philosophy present their interpretation of its antecedents, methods and achievements during the past, sharply formative forty years. Somnolent for a century under the biting scepticism of Hume and the disinterest (...) of clerical dons, university philosophy serenely developed after 1850 a psychological form of empiricism and a local form of German idealism. With the first World War came a sudden change. Philosophy became a lay subject for lay dons after 1920, with its faculty separated from psychology and classics, and with professional journals concentrating on the sheer technique of philosophy. It developed into a philosopher’s philosophy with occasional forays into admiring journalism, where smart criticism was valued more than sober prudence. In the giddy years before and after World War II the brash iconoclasm of an adolescent Logical Positivism won it un succés de scandale, which eventually drew upon British philosophy generally the charge of irresponsibility or futility as a way of life, since this in the last, serious analysis is the traditional role of a philosophy. (shrink)

This valuable collection of lectures, articles and interviews is a rare introduction to an octogenarian scholar and a decisive leader in the new development of ecumenical theology, who is revealed at work immediately preceding the opening of the Second Vatican Council. Cardinal Bea has shown a notable talent for lucid explanation in public as well as quiet insistence upon basic principle in the sympathetic appreciation of the endemic divisions among Christian believers, which inevitably blur the image of Christ for thinking (...) non-Christians. In correction the creative example of Pope John was ‘intended to read the lesson of a new approach’ which the Introduction of the late Apostolic Delegate to Britain succinctly notes. (shrink)

Scientific realism has been advanced as an interpretation of the natural sciences but never the behavioral sciences. This book introduces a novel version of scientific realism, Measured Realism, that characterizes the kind of theoretical progress in the social and psychological sciences that is uneven but indisputable. It proposes a theory of measurement, Population-Guided Estimation, that connects natural, psychological, and social scientific inquiry. Presenting quantitative methods in the behavioral sciences as at once successful and regulated by the world, the book will (...) engage philosophers of science, historians of science, sociologists of science, and scientists interested in the foundations of their own disciplines. Part I introduces measured realism beginning with a novel realist theory of measurement (Population-Guided Estimation, or PGE). It examines two other versions of scientific realism — minimal (Hacking) and robust (Boyd, Putnam, and Newton-Smith) — and advances measured realism as best supported by the evidence in the behavioral sciences. It also critically evaluates the anti-realist arguments of van Fraassen, Laudan, and Fine. Part II formulates and develops a version of epistemological naturalism most appropriate to measured realism. Drawing upon the realist theory of measurement developed earlier, it favorably appraises a variety of statistical methods in the behavioral sciences against selected criticisms. It concludes that traditional, narrative methods in the behavioral and social sciences are unreliable by the measures of epistemological naturalism. (shrink)

(2002). Philosophy of Science 72 (January), 198-208.