This book explores the interconnections between Milton's politics, poetics and prose writings.

Pierre Bourdieu is widely regarded as one of the most influential sociologists of his generation, and yet the reception of his work in different cultural contexts and academic disciplines has been varied and uneven. This volume maps out the legacy of Pierre Bourdieu in contemporary social and political thought from the standpoint of classical European sociology and from the broader perspective of transatlantic social science. It brings together contributions from prominent scholars in the field, providing a range of perspectives on (...) the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's oeuvre to substantive problems in social and political analysis. (shrink)

This paper develops a critical response to John Beatty’s recent (2006) engagement with Stephen Jay Gould’s claim that evolutionary history is contingent. Beatty identifies two senses of contingency in Gould’s work: an unpredictability sense and a causal dependence sense. He denies that Gould associates contingency with stochastic phenomena, such as drift. In reply to Beatty, this paper develops two main claims. The first is an interpretive claim: Gould really thinks of contingency has having to do with stochastic effects at the (...) level of macroevolution, and in particular with unbiased species sorting. This notion of contingency as macro-level stochasticity incorporates both the causal dependence and the unpredictability senses of contingency. The second claim is more substantive: Recent attempts by other scientists to put Gould’s claim to the test fail to engage with the hypothesis that species sorting sometimes resembles a lottery. Gould’s claim that random sorting is a significant macroevolutionary phenomenon remains an intriguing and largely untested live hypothesis about evolution. (shrink)

Debates about the theological implications of recent research in the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion have tended to focus on the question of theism. The question of whether there is any disagreement about the conceptualization of the individual human being has been largely overlooked. In this article, I argue that evolutionary and cognitive accounts of religion typically depend upon a view of cognition that conceptually isolates the mind from its particular social and physical environmental contexts. By embracing this view (...) of the mind, these accounts also unwittingly embrace an abstract individualist view of individual personhood that Christian theologians have explicitly battled against. Taken as a whole, the field leaves sufficient room for supplementary theories that are compatible with theological accounts of the relational individual, but in practice, no effort has been made to engage, or even to accommodate, any other view of individual personhood. (shrink)

Legendary director, actor, author, and provocateur Werner Herzog has incalculably influenced contemporary cinema for decades. This essay collection by professional philosophers and film theorists from around the globe offers a diversity of perspectives on how the thinking behind the camera is revealed in the action Herzog captures in front of it.

This book outlines a new account of the tacit, meaning tacit knowledge, presuppositions, practices, traditions, and so forth. It includes essays on topics such as underdetermination and mutual understanding, and critical discussions of the major alternative approaches to the tacit, including Bourdieu’s habitus and various practice theories, Oakeshott’s account of tradition, Quentin Skinner’s theory of historical meaning, Harry Collins’s idea of collective tacit knowledge, as well as discussions of relevant cognitive science concepts, such as non-conceptual content, connectionism, and mirror neurons. (...) The new account of tacit knowledge focuses on the fact that in making the tacit explicit, a person is not, as many past accounts have supposed, reading off the content of some sort of shared and fixed tacit scheme of presuppositions, but rather responding to the needs of the Other for understanding. (shrink)

Acommon theme in placebo studies is that the terms placebo and "placebo effects" are confusing, misleading, and sloppy, and that there are no agreed definitions. Indeed, many authors treat the conceptual difficulties raised by placebos as a call to action and propose new definitions and reconceptualizations, or even propose abandoning the term altogether. The promise of these approaches is that a new language and new metaphors for thinking about placebo phenomena may deliver clinical, ethical, and methodological advances. However, the nature (...) and impact of these promised advances is rarely... (shrink)

I examine several recent interpretations of Cynic philosophy. Next, I offer my own reading, which draws on Schopenhauer’s Incongruity Theory of Humor, Aristotle’s account of the emotions in the Rhetoric, and the work of Theodor Adorno. I argue that Cynic humor is the deliberate exposure of incongruities between what a thing or state of affairs is supposed to be and what it in fact is, as evidenced by its present manifestation to our sense-perception and thought. Finally, I interpret the significance (...) of this new reading: the exposure of incongruity aims to elicit a response of righteous indignation at the failure of phenomena to live up to our reasonable expectations. Cynic humor redeems the value of ‘wrong life’ by rendering its wrongness palpable and thus intolerable, by availing itself of reason’s inability to withstand flagrant contradictions. (shrink)

Contemporary theological anthropology is now almost united in its opposition toward concepts of the abstract individual. Instead there is a strong preference for concrete concepts, which locate individual human being in historically and socioculturally contingent contexts. In this paper I identify, and discuss in detail, three key themes that structure recent theological opposition to abstract concepts of the individual: (1) the idea that individual human beings are constituted in part by their relations with their environments, with other human beings, and (...) with God; (2) the idea that individual human beings are unique entities; (3) the idea that individual human beings cannot be conceptualized in atemporal terms. Subsequently, I seek to demonstrate that theories of embodied cognition offer broad, if not unconditional, support for the concept of the concrete individual. As such, I suggest, theories of embodied cognition provide a valuable resource for dialogue between contemporary science and theological anthropology. (shrink)

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)

L. J. Henderson was a central figure in Harvard discussions of the nature of science in the interwar period and served as a bridge between the sciences and the social sciences. Two key ideas were promoted by Henderson: systems and conceptual schemes, both of which spread quickly at Harvard and then beyond. In this article the focus will be on conceptual schemes, a term which had a distinctive origin in Henderson that accounts for some of the ambiguities in its adaptations. (...) Henderson spoke as a scientist speaking to philosophers rather than doing philosophy and sharply distinguished his aims from those that followed from Immanuel Kant. Henderson’s model was the scheme of ancient Greek medicine, which had persisted for millennia and was replaced by modern medicine. This was differentiated from earlier neo-Kantian and later Kuhnian variations. Henderson’s account was distinctive in placing the origins of conceptual schemes in intuitions about patterns formed in practice by people operating on concrete phenomena. The resulting schemes, he thought, had to be accepted on faith by students, but were, as he put it, walking sticks to enable communication and understanding rather than exclusive dogmas. Henderson was an enthusiast for Vilfredo Pareto, who was vilified at Harvard during the war by Carl J. Friedrich, which led not to the disuse of his ideas but to the erasure of their origins. (shrink)

This draft entry is a brief overview of John Stuart Mill's moral and political philosophy, with an emphasis on his views on religion, for the Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion (Wiley-Blackwell).

Although this article examines the problems facing modern universities such as their loss of independence and shortage of funding, similar problems faced universities throughout the 20th century. The focus is on the post-war generation, the creation of new universities and the political and economic changes that were brought about by Thatcherism. In the growth period between 1945 and the 1970s, many working-class children gained social mobility through the expansion of the university sector. This period also attracted large numbers of exiles (...) from Europe. The contemporary demographic challenge to universities in terms of the shrinkage of the population of eligible students is critical. Universities have responded by recruiting primarily Chinese and Indian students. This challenge joins other modern problems: bureaucracy, managerialism, rising costs, the loss of academic independence, stagnant wages, declining opportunities and the threat of AI. Can we imagine and build the post-university? Is the cafe as a meeting place a possible model of a global online intellectual hub? (shrink)

In this chapter, I examine the three main arguments of On Liberty: first, a largely epistemic argument that individual and social improvement, because they depend so much on intellectual development, require social conditions allowing for free discussion and “experiments of living;” second, an argument that individuality, or self‐directedness, is itself a key constitutive part of the individual human good; third, the introduction of a principle – the liberty principle – according to which only considerations of nonconsensual “harm to others” may (...) justify social or political interference. I then consider whether Mill, as a liberal utilitarian, has anything to offer the public reason tradition that dominates contemporary liberal thought. (shrink)

The dispute between simulation theorists and theory theorists follows a basic pattern in philosophical discussions of cognitive science. This chapter brings some of the topics of social theory into the discussion. The discussion of the problem of understanding in social theory has developed in two traditions: Verstehen, or empathy, the German tradition of Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber, and in taking the role of the other originating in the thought of G. H. Mead. Each regards understanding as both an activity (...) of theorists and of human beings themselves in the course of their dealings with one another. The topic of imitation became important in American psychology for reasons quite separate from its role in social theory. The psychological explanation holds that at least some emotions, and perhaps all real emotions, are universal and are explicable by features of human psychology, biology, and development that are themselves universal. (shrink)

There is a core conflict between conventional ideas about “meaning“ and the phenomenon of meaning and meaning change in history. Conventional accounts are either atemporal or appeal to something fixed that bestows meaning, such as a rule or a convention. This produces familiar problems over change. Notions of rule and convention are metaphors for something tacit. They are unhelpful in accounting for change: there are no rule-givers or convenings in history. Meanings are in flux, and are part of a web (...) of belief and practical activity that is in constant change. We can perhaps salvage some point to appeals to fixed frameworks if we treat them as “as if “ constructions designed as crutches to enable us to improve on literal readings of the texts by making more sense of the inferential connections and practical significance of their content at the time. (shrink)

In this reply to the commentary in the volume, some intellectual, historical, and biographical context is provided for the writings discussed. This includes a brief account of the trajectory from Sociological Explanation as Translation, and a discussion of the general problem of the substrate of social explanation and the status of social theories as ideal-typical constructions with a problematic relation to this substrate. On this basis, the themes of practices, normativity, and the problem of the meaning of reasons explanations are (...) reconsidered. An outline of a view of norms based on the notion of Jellinek of the normative power of the real is given and related to Russian developmental psychology. This extends and gives a psychological base to the pragmatic account of norms and practical normativity that runs through these texts. The chapter concludes with a discussion of social science, including the problems of the status of economic theory, the objectivity of field work and the problem of underdetermination, and the political significance of Parsons. (shrink)

Social science has for the most part lost its ambition to be ‘science’, as shown in the recent change in the American Anthropological Association statement of purpose. The new term is expertise. The change points to something fundamental: social science methods are now largely stable; they have well-developed uses for public and policy audiences; because they are user-friendly they are unlikely to radically change, and new problems arise for them to be applied to. New concepts are developed, but they do (...) not develop into ‘theories’ in a scientific sense. So what is expertise? It is something other than fact generation: it is the result of aggregating and assessing research in an area. Experts engage with one another, so there is a community of expertise. Yet there is also another sense of ‘scientific’: using the tools of natural science and extending them to the social. The current means of doing this for social science is through neuroscience. These methods could serve to filter and validate social science concepts. (shrink)

Much of Nietzsche’s work questions modes of thought, notably Platonism, that posit a dualism between a true world outside time and an apparent world of change, becoming, and semblance. It also raises doubts about a sharp separation between philosophy and literature.1Many have followed Nietzsche’s lead, seen philosophy’s modes of generalization and conceptualization as limited resources for the understanding of human conduct, and turned to literature. Thinkers as different from one another as D. Z. Phillips and Martha Nussbaum and post-Nietzschean philosophers (...) like Derrida, Bataille, and Blanchot have turned to literature for accounts of ethical experience in general and, in particular, for an understanding of what.. (shrink)

_Comparative Education: A Field in Discussion_ is a personal reflection on the field of comparative education from the perspective of one scholar who has been active in the field since the 1980s.

Jean Baudrillard is widely recognized as one of the most important and provocative writers of our age. Variously termed “France’s leading philosopher of postmodernism” and “a sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left,” he might also be called our leading philosopher of seduction or of mass culture. Following his acclaimed _America_ and _Cool Memories_, this book is the third in a series of personal records in hyperreality. Idiosyncratic, outrageous, and brilliantly original, Baudrillard here casts his net widely and combines autobiographical (...) memories with further reflections on America, the crisis of cultural production, new ideas in fiction/theory, and the “verbal fornication” of the postmodern. In this wide-ranging discussion of events and ideas, Baudrillard moves between poetry and waterfalls, strikes and stealth bombers, Freud and La Cicciolina, shadows and simulacra, deconstruction and the zodiac, Reagan’s smile and Kennedy’s death, the “curse” on South America and the future of the West, the last tango of French intellectual life and the exemplary disappearing act of Italian politics. Writing at the site where the philosophic and the poetic merge, he once again offers us commentary in the form of the riveting insight, the short distillation of reality that establishes its truth with the force of recognition. _Cool Memories II_, Baudrillard’s latest commentary on the technopresent and future, an installment of his reflections on the reality of contemporary western culture, will entice all readers concerned with postmodernism and the current state of theory. (shrink)