A radically new philosophy of experience and speculation, based on a reading of Whitehead's Process and Reality. Can experience be thought systematically without transforming the richness of the world as it is lived into reductive philosophical generalities? Can the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with a method of systematic cosmological speculation? Didier Debaise's reading of Whitehead shows clearly what a philosophy that makes this possible looks like, how it works and what is at stake. He focuses in on Whitehead's (...) attempt to construct a metaphysical system of everything in the universe that exists whilst simultaneously claiming that it can account for every element of our experience: everything enjoyed and perceived, willed or thought. (shrink)

ABSTRACT We exist only because we inhabit a world in common, embedded within networks of associations between humans and nonhumans. This is endlessly disclosed by our experience of the world. And yet, despite its palpability, it is clear that we have failed to mobilize a notion of the common world into something capable of guiding our modes of thought and collective forms of activity—our attitudes, our affective lives, our politics. How have we arrived here? Bruno Latour's work suggests that an (...) answer can be found in the common world's status as information—its self-evidence works to exclude it from a world of values. What, then, should be done? In his recent work on the modes of existence Latour develops a pragmatic metaphysics inspired by the speculative method of Alfred North Whitehead. Metaphysical speculation becomes a tool for moving beyond the “bifurcation of nature” through the construction of abstractions with which to interpret the pluralism of experience. Rather than thinking of the common world as either a given fact or as a totalizing universal, Latour develops a notion of a common world out of the messiness of experience and, as such, hopes to transform us into beings who would be moved to actively pursue and care for such a notion. (shrink)

Philosophical Pragmatism and International Relations bridges the gap between philosophical pragmatism and international relations, two disciplinary perspectives that together shed light on how to advance the study and conduct of foreign affairs. Authors in this collection discuss a broad range of issues, from policy relevance to peacekeeping operations, with an eye to understanding how this distinctly American philosophy, pragmatism, can improve both international relations research and foreign policy practice.

Článek připomíná 110. výročí narození švýcarského katolického teologa a filosofa (metafyzika) Hanse Urse von Balthasara (1905 Luzern–1988 Basilej). Po studiích germanistiky ve Vídni, Berlíně a Curychu pokračoval ve studiu filosofie a teologie u jezuitů (E. Przywara, H. de Lubac). Před nadějnou akademickou dráhou dal přednost pastorační službě u studentů. V Basileji navázal úzké kontakty s K. Rahnerem a K. Barthem. S lékařkou a mystičkou Adriennou von Speyr založil sekulární institut Johannesgemeinschaft (1944) a nakladatelství, ve kterém vydával její díla. Roku 1950 (...) jezuitský řád opouští. Před druhým vatikánským koncilem vystupoval jako katolický progresivista, po něm jako kritik katolického modernismu, v němž viděl ohrožení biblických tradic. S Henri de Lubacem a Josephem Ratzingerem roku 1972 spoluzakládal mezinárodní katolickou revui Communio. Svou rozsáhlou a rozmanitou publikační činnost završil trilogií Herrlichkeit–Theodramatik–Theologik (1961–1987), v níž uvažuje o Bohu v estetických souvislostech, v kategoriích transcendentálií pravdy, dobra a jejich ztělesnění – krásy.The article recalls the 110th anniversary of the birth of the Swiss Catholic theologian and philosopher (metaphysician) Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905 Luzern–1988 Basel). He studied German in Vienna, Berlin and Zurich and after that he continued his studies in philosophy and theology at the Jesuits (E. Przywara, H. de Lubac). He preferred pastoral ministry among students to a promising academic career. In Basel he established close contacts with K. Rahner and K. Barth. Together with the doctor and mystic Adrienne von Speyr he founded the secular institute Johannesgemeinschaft (1944) and a publishing house, in which he published her work. In 1950 he left the Jesuit order. Before the Second Vatican Council he acted as a progressive Catholic, afterwards as a critic of Catholic modernism, in which he saw the threat of biblical traditions. With Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger in 1972 he co-founded the International Catholic review Communio. His extensive and diverse publications he completed with trilogy The Glory of the Lord–Theo-Drama–Theo-Logic (1961–1987), in which he contemplates God within aesthetic contexts, within categories of transcendentals truth, goodness and their embodiment – beauty. (shrink)

An internationally famous physicist and electrical engineer, the author of this text was a pioneer in the investigation of gravitational waves. Joseph Weber's General Relativity and Gravitational Waves offers a classic treatment of the subject. Appropriate for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, this text remains ever relevant. Brief but thorough in its introduction to the foundations of general relativity, it also examines the elements of Riemannian geometry and tensor calculus applicable to this field. Approximately a quarter of the (...) contents explores theoretical and experimental aspects of gravitational radiation. The final chapter focuses on selected topics related to general relativity, including the equations of motion, unified field theories, Friedman's solution of the cosmological problem, and the Hamiltonian formulation of general relativity. Exercises. Index. (shrink)

We examine the sequences A that are low for dimension, i.e. those for which the effective dimension relative to A is the same as the unrelativized effective dimension. Lowness for dimension is a weakening of lowness for randomness, a central notion in effective randomness. By considering analogues of characterizations of lowness for randomness, we show that lowness for dimension can be characterized in several ways. It is equivalent to lowishness for randomness, namely, that every Martin-Löf random sequence has effective dimension (...) 1 relative to A, and lowishness for K, namely, that the limit of KA/K is 1. We show that there is a perfect [Formula: see text]-class of low for dimension sequences. Since there are only countably many low for random sequences, many more sequences are low for dimension. Finally, we prove that every low for dimension is jump-traceable in order nε, for any ε > 0. (shrink)

This book presents a clear and compelling case for the intimate practical relationship between religion and capitalism. It signals a major change in how social scientists are beginning to interpret capitalism, religion and growing public hostility against secular society. It offers a new understanding of Weber and Weberian sociology and Marx's mature social theory and also contains significant commentary of figures such as Kant, Foucault and Lyotard.

Peter Lassman and Irving Velody, with Herminio Martins, eds., Max Weber's " Science as a Vocation ." Unwin Hyman, London, 1989. Pp. 213, US$49.95.

In a sense Maimonides identifies his views on the subject of divine providence with those of Epicurus. He does so by implying an analogy between this Greek philosopher’s atheistic opinions and those put forth by Elihu in the Book of Job. Despite the fact that commentators have discussed Maimonides’ views on providence for eight hundred years the only one to refer to the connection between Elihu and Epicurus was Joseph Ibn Kaspi in the fourteenth century. One of the consequences (...) of this analogy is a modification of our understanding of Maimonides’ concept of “providence according to the intellect.” Whereas Moshe Narboni and other commentators have understood Maimonides’ concept of providence to involve a unification of the human intellect with the Active Intellect, the association with Epicurus suggests an emphasis on the human individual’s material faculties such as the imagination. Indeed, it is possible that, following Al-Fārābī, Maimonides rejected the possibility of conjunction with the Active Intellect altogether, and that “providence according to the intellect” consists of nothing more than the activity of the human individual’s material faculties. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This chapter takes the form of a discussion between the editors of this volume and Joseph Agassi, regarding the relationship between methodological individualism and institutional individualism. The focus is on Agassi’s interpretation of traditional methodological individualism in terms of psychologism; the role of institutions and structural factors in social explanation; Popper’s theory of World 3; the application of Weber’s interpretative approach—Verstehen—to typical ways of thinking and acting; and the Austrian School of economics.

Entre otras muchas fuentes, Ratzinger recibió su formación de los tres grandes maestros: Agustín, Buenaventura y Tomás de Aquino. Aun rechazando una escolástica impersonal y esencialista, reconoce la autoridad del Aquinate –vista a través de un tomismo agustiniano– en la antropología, la doctrina de la gracia y de la creación, así como en la naturaleza del acto de fe y el método de la Teología. El teólogo alemán procura compatibilizar la perspectiva ontológica con la histórico-salvífica, la personalista con la metafísica. (...) En la síntesis entre fe y razón, filosofía y teología, Ratzinger encuentra en el Aquinate un buen modelo, que se fundamenta no solo en el orden de la gracia sino también en el de la creación. (shrink)

How does the physics community deal with the subsequent work of a scientist whose earlier work has been regarded as incorrect? An interesting case of this involves Joseph Weber whose claim to have observed gravitational waves was rejected by virtually all of the physics community, although Weber himself continued to defend his work until his death in 2000. In the course of this defense Weber made a startling suggestion regarding the scattering of neutrinos. I will summarize (...) the history of gravity waves including the rejection of Weber's claim around 1975, his later work on gravity waves, and examine the reaction of the physics community to his neutrino hypothesis.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------. (shrink)

ABSTRACTConfucianism tends to play only a marginal role in current theorizing about justice, which is a global pursuit dominated by Western theory and its strong tendency to assume that justice refers to some substantive conception of distributive, socioeconomic justice. This article examines and compares reconstructions of Confucian justice by Joseph Chan, May Sim, and Fan Ruiping. Each reconstruction makes reference to both classical and modern Western justice theory and thus each involves a comparative approach; indeed, each reconstruction seeks ultimately, (...) in its own distinctive fashion, to present a version of Confucian justice that is comparable with modern Western justice theory. In this article we assess, critically and comparatively, the tertium comparationis and the arguments in each reconstruction. While our analysis does not wholly endorse any of the reconstructions, it shows that there is a richness and vitality to Confucian justice theory that merits proper consideration in justice theory co... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:92 A NOTE ON SMITH'S TERM "NATURALISM" The reader of contemporary Hume literature may feel exasperated when reading recent authors. A conspicuous example is A.J. Ayer (Hume, 1982; see index, Art, Natural beliefs), who declares they endorse Kemp Smith's view of Hume's "naturalism" without sufficiently clarifying what they — or Smith — might exactly mean by this term. Charles W. Hendel, in the 1963 edition of his 1924 Studies (...) in the Philosophy of David Hume, adds eight pages of a new preface and thirty-one pages of a review of Hume scholarship between 1925 and 1962, and he speaks at great length there of his life-long friendship and cooperation with Norman Kemp Smith and appreciation of his work. He says (p. xlviii), "There is a disposition today to assimilate Hume's thought to naturalism as understood in the contemporary sense." He does not say what this "contemporary sense" is, and the statement just quoted seems to have served as the seal of approval and the legitimation of this questionable practice. Hendel's new, 1963, material mentions Smith's discussion of Hume's "naturalism" — but refers only to Smith's early work, "The Naturalism of Hume," Mind, 14, 1905, 149-173 and 335-347, not to Smith's famous The Philosophy of David Hume of 1941, even though he deems that work "of great consequence for Hume scholarship" (p. xxxviii) and a "masterwork" (p. xxxix). The early work (1905) of Smith is already mentioned by Hendel in the body of the 1924 work (p. 361), although there, clearly, the word "naturalism," whatever its meaning is, and however contemporary then, is not necessarily the "contemporary sense" of 1962. The work which clearly (if implicitly) distinguishes between the traditional sense and Smith's 1905 sense of "naturalism" is John Laird's Hume's 93 Philosophy of Human Nature, 1932, 1967. We find there a discussion of Hume's naturalism (beginning of Chapter II), as well as of Hume's "Naturalism" (Chapter VI, fifth and fourth paragraphs from the end), with reference to Smith's 1905 work. Now, the traditional sense of "naturalism" is straightforward and seems to have been instituted by Pierre Bayle to designate the view of the world as devoid of all supernatural intervention, the view of the world as "disenchanted," to use the equivalent term accredited to Max Weber. Clearly, all Epicureans and neoEpicureans, Hume included, were naturalists in this sense. This is not the sense in which Smith uses it in his 1905 essay, "The Naturalism of Hume." The first part of this essay opposes T. H. Green's traditional reading of Hume as a philosopher who streamlined the ideas of Locke and Berkeley and proposes to replace it with the view of Hume's view as "naturalism." "Hume's... naturalistic view of reason," we are told (p. 158), "is a new theory of belief": Humean belief, on Smith's new reading, "is not caused by knowledge but precedes it, and as it is not caused by knowledge it is not destroyed by doubt" (p. 165). Smith declared his reading quite revolutionary, yet it may be endorsed without rejecting Green's reading. Smith does not even attempt to re-interpret in detail the passages which prima facie conform to Green's reading. The second part of his essay is the application of his revolutionary reading to psychology and to ethics. Smith devotes the preface of his The Philosophy of David Hume (1941) to a revision of his 1905 study. It seems he did not alter his attitude towards the first part but only to the second: he thought the starting point of Hume's study was his concern not for "naturalism" but for "moral philosophy, or the science of human nature" (opening words of Hume's Inquiry, cf. Hendel, op. cit., p. xlvi). This statement has to do 94 with emphasis, not with the meanings of terms or with ascriptions of views (and it is erroneous, or at least limited; but this is another matter). This is not to deny that Hume was a naturalist in Bayle's sense, as everyone today agrees. Most philosophers today share this naturalism with Hume. "His attitude and way of... (shrink)

"We need a philosophy of both history and spirit to deal with the problems we touch upon here. Yet we would be unduly rigorous if we were to wait for perfectly elaborated principles before speaking philosophically of politics." Thus Merleau-Ponty introduces _Adventures of the Dialectic,_ his study of Marxist philosophy and thought. In this study, containing chapters on Weber, Lukacs, Lenin, Sartre, and Marx himself, Merleau-Ponty investigates and attempts to go beyond the dialectic.

Joseph Ben-David (1920-1986) fut un des sociologues des sciences les plus innovateurs et les plus en vue des années soixante et soixante-dix. Travaillant dans le cadre des théories sociologiques de Max Weber, Talcott Parsons et Robert Kmerton, il élabora dans ses ouvrages et nombreux articles une théorie sociologique originale du développement scientifique. Par sa démarche diachronique, il se démarque des sociologues des sciences de l'école fonctionnaliste ; par sa perspective sociologique, il définit des nouvelles problématiques qui viennent s'ajouter (...) à celles des historiens des sciences travaillant dans une optique " internaliste ". Dans le présent ouvrage ont été réunis et traduits les articles les plus importants de Ben-David, qui, ensemble, dessinent les contours d'une sociologie historique des sciences. Par son pouvoir explicatif, cette théorie est à même d'enrichir la pratique de l'historien des sciences, tandis que, par sa réaffirmation des vertus éthiques des rôles sociaux du savant et de l'Université, elle est d'une grande actualité pour les débats sur l'enseignement supérieur en France. (shrink)

This book is a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. It notes that modern writers on Aquinas, unlike those on other philosophers, seldom disagree with him, and that especially he has to be set free from the prejudices of the later textbook Thomism institutionalized by the encyclical Aeterni Patris. Accordingly the book proposes to meet this situation by following the lead of the fifteenth-century Peter of Bergamo and the work of E.-H. Wéber in emphasizing the overt (...) fact that the thought of Aquinas does not have the systematic unity traditionally attributed to it. Centering on its notion of principles, Kuhn aims to show that even in its fundamental tenets Aquinas' philosophy cannot be harmonised. (shrink)

Gottlieb Söhngen (1892-1971), fue profesor de teología fundamental en la Universidad de Munich desde 1947, habiéndose contado entre sus alumnos el joven Joseph Ratzinger, más tarde Papa Benedicto XVI, quien elaboró sus tesis de doctorado y habilitación bajo su dirección. En el presente artículo se considera el modo en que Söhngen interpreta la mediación entre ciencia y sabiduría, fe e intellectus fidei en la tradición platónicoagustiniana y en Tomás de Aquino, así como la relación entre la ciencia teológica y (...) sus conclusiones. Söhngen destaca los contrastes, así como la riqueza complementaria de una y otra aproximación. Aún si su interpretación de Tomás de Aquino es fragmentaria y en parte deudora de una lectura que había de ser enriquecida por la investigación de las décadas siguientes, cabe destacar el valor de su análisis y de algunas de sus intuiciones, por ejemplo, respecto de la relación entre fe y teología. La interpretación de G. Söhngen se enmarca en su programa de “unidad de la teología”, entendida como una síntesis fecunda de revelación y método científico, filosofía y teología, categorías de pensamiento metafísico e histórico-salvífico, humanidad y cristianismo, en miras la tarea siempre actual de dar razón de la fe y de su diálogo con la cultura. (shrink)

Max Weber· e Troeltsch perceberam a importância que o conceito de direito natural, tal como o entenderam os medievais, teve para a formação e desenvolvimento da civilização Ocidental. Não se pode negar esta importância, mas os estudos posteriores mostram claramente que a leitura feita por aqueles dois cientistas necessita de diversas correções, principalmente quando se toma como para digmática a obra de Tomás de Aquino.

En el presente artículo se estudia cuál es, según Joseph Ratzinger, la especificidad de la exégesis histórico-crítica respecto de la exégesis dogmática. Desde mediados del siglo XX en el campo católico se está dando un debate muy intenso sobre este tema. Dicha discusión gira, en buena medida, en torno a Dei Verbum 12 y, más concretamente, sobre la naturaleza de las reglas hermenéuticas propuestas en los cuatro primeros párrafos. Ratzinger toma postura en el debate y considera que la exégesis (...) histórico-crítica y la exégesis dogmática son antagónicas tanto en lo que respecta a su objeto como en lo concerniente a su método. Esto no excluye la posibilidad de colaboración entre ambas formas de leer la Biblia. (shrink)

Since the publication of the In Memoriam of Stefan George in “Understanding and Believing. Essays by Jochim Wach edited by Joseph Kitagawa”, the George-circle is seen as a major source for Wach's understanding of religion. According to the author nature is not a realm of abstract laws but the place where the divine reveals itself in the physical. Yet the In Memoriam was not composed by Wach, but by Gerardus van der Leeuw in 1934 and happend, by chance, to (...) find its way among the posthumous papers of Wach. From other statements we know that Wach rejected pagan conceptions of the epiphany of the divine. Nevertheless there exists an impact of the George-circle on Wach's sociology of religion. He was an early reader of Max Webers “Sociology of Religion ”, in which Weber chose as perspective a growing disenchantment of the world. Wach adopted the typology, but rejected Weber's systematics. The reason can be found in his essay on the relationship between Master and Disciple from 1925. Here he analyzed the George-circle as a case in point that the charisma of a master possesses a metaphysical quality that is resistant against the power of disenchantment. In contrast to Weber who correlated the varieties of religious communities with social conditions, Wach studied them as variations of genuine religious expressions. (shrink)

Schumpeter's writings on the transition from capitalism to socialism, on innovative entrepreneurship, on business cycles, and on the modern corporation have attracted much attention among social scientists. Although Schumpeter's theoretical and sociological writings resemble the works of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber in that they further our understanding of the rise and nature of modern society, his contribution to social theory has yet to be assessed systematically. Arguing that Schumpeter's perspective, if understood in social theoretical terms, provides a promising starting (...) point for the sociological analysis of the changing relationship between economy and society, I concentrate on two elements of his work that are of value to theoretical sociology today: the distinction between creative action and rational action that is fundamental to his theory of the entrepreneur, and his thesis that the success of the capitalist system leads to its demise. (shrink)

Na tentativa de resolver problemas concretos para a ciência, Max Weber toma por objeto de estudo o trabalho histórico, em especial o de um renomado historiador, Eduard Meyer. Para demonstrar e fundamentar o trabalho histórico, Eduard Meyer torna-se um exemplo para Weber da confusão lógica em que se encontram as ciências especializadas. Partindo deste fato, este artigo pretende mostrar como Max Weber fundamenta os conceitos lógico metodológicos que o auxiliam na construção da objetividade das ciências histórico-sociais. Nosso (...) objetivo é demonstrar como, através das operações lógicas, a metodologia weberiana distingue a conexão entre aqueles elementos “essenciais” da cadeia causal e outros elementos “acidentais” que se situam entre os infinitos momentos que compõem a determinação de um evento. (shrink)

For centuries it has been assumed that democracy must refer to the empowerment of the People's voice. In this pioneering book, Jeffrey Edward Green makes the case for considering the People as an ocular entity rather than a vocal one. Green argues that it is both possible and desirable to understand democracy in terms of what the People gets to see instead of the traditional focus on what it gets to say. The Eyes of the People examines democracy from the (...) perspective of everyday citizens in their everyday lives. While it is customary to understand the citizen as a decision-maker, in fact most citizens rarely engage in decision-making and do not even have clear views on most political issues. The ordinary citizen is not a decision-maker but a spectator who watches and listens to the select few empowered to decide. Grounded on this everyday phenomenon of spectatorship, The Eyes of the People constructs a democratic theory applicable to the way democracy is actually experienced by most people most of the time. In approaching democracy from the perspective of the People's eyes, Green rediscovers and rehabilitates a forgotten "plebiscitarian" alternative within the history of democratic thought. Building off the contributions of a wide range of thinkers--including Aristotle, Shakespeare, Benjamin Constant, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and many others--Green outlines a novel democratic paradigm centered on empowering the People's gaze through forcing politicians to appear in public under conditions they do not fully control. The Eyes of the People is at once a sweeping overview of the state of democratic theory and a call to rethink the meaning of democracy within the sociological and technological conditions of the twenty-first century. In addition to political scientists and students of democracy, the book likely will be of interest to political journalists, theorists of visual culture, and anyone in search of political principles that acknowledge, rather than repress, the pathologies of political life in contemporary mass society. (shrink)

How can we make informed decisions about whom to trust given expert disagreement? Can experts on both sides be reasonable in holding conflicting views? Epistemologists have engaged the issue of reasonable expert disagreement generally; here I consider a particular expert dispute in physics, given conflicting accounts from Harry Collins and Allan Franklin, over Joseph Weber’s alleged detection of gravitational waves. Finding common ground between Collins and Franklin, I offer a characterization of the gravity wave dispute as both social (...) and evidential. While experimental evidence alone may not have forced resolution of the dispute, there were also credibility‐based reasons warranting epistemic trust and distrust. Thus we see how social factors can have evidential significance and how expert disagreement can be reasonable. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Dept., Communication Arts Division, College of Lake County, 19351 W. Washington St., Grayslake, IL 60030; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Gravity’s Ghost is a book about the search for gravitational waves , which are predicted by the general theory of relativity to be ripples in space–time that propagate at the speed of light. The direct detection of GWs, if they exist at all, is exceptionally difficult, because they are theoretically expected to be very weakly coupled to matter. To this date, there is yet no conclusive evidence for the direct detection of GWs. The search for GWs was started by a (...) series of experiments performed by Joseph Weber in the 1960s. The history of the early GW detection experiments, as well as Weber’s claimed detection of GWs, which was eventually discredited, has been examined in great details by Harry Collins .Collins has long advocated a sociological approach to the study of scientific research groups that is premised on the view that in order to understand how scientific knowledge is produced collectively by a group of researchers, it is necessary to engage in the cultu .. (shrink)

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyse and criticize the argument of the experimenters' regress proposed by Harry Collins in 1985. In order to do that, I begin with an introduction to the experiments that aimed to detect gravity waves performed by Joseph Weber during 1970, then I analyse and discuss both forms of the argument: the epistemological and the ontological. Finally, after giving an outline of a theory of experimental reproduction and an explication of the (...) concept of replication, I propose two ways of avoiding the experimenters' regress. (shrink)

Today, DIY -- do-it-yourself -- describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways and to repurpose corporate content in order to offer political counternarratives. This book examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, exploring the diverse forms of political participation and "critical making" that have emerged in recent years. The authors and artists in this collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging and video production to knitting (...) and the creation of community gardens. Contributors examine DIY activism, describing new modes of civic engagement that include Harry Potter fan activism and the activities of the Yes Men. They consider DIY making in learning, culture, hacking, and the arts, including do-it-yourself media production and collaborative documentary making. They discuss DIY and design and how citizens can unlock the black box of technological infrastructures to engage and innovate open and participatory critical making. And they explore DIY and media, describing activists' efforts to remake and reimagine media and the public sphere. As these chapters make clear, DIY is characterized by its emphasis on "doing" and making rather than passive consumption. DIY citizens assume active roles as interventionists, makers, hackers, modders, and tinkerers, in pursuit of new forms of engaged and participatory democracy. _Contributors_Mike Ananny, Chris Atton, Alexandra Bal, Megan Boler, Catherine Burwell, Red Chidgey, Andrew Clement, Negin Dahya, Suzanne de Castell, Carl DiSalvo, Kevin Driscoll, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Joseph Ferenbok, Stephanie Fisher, Miki Foster, Stephen Gilbert, Henry Jenkins, Jennifer Jenson, Yasmin B. Kafai, Ann Light, Steve Mann, Joel McKim, Brenda McPhail, Owen McSwiney, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Graham Meikle, Emily Rose Michaud, Kate Milberry, Michael Murphy, Jason Nolan, Kate Orton-Johnson, Kylie A. Peppler, David J. Phillips, Karen Pollock, Matt Ratto, Ian Reilly, Rosa Reitsamer, Mandy Rose, Daniela K. Rosner, Yukari Seko, Karen Louise Smith, Lana Swartz, Alex Tichine, Jennette Weber, Elke Zobl. (shrink)

This article introduces the special section on the contribution of Jack Goody, which focuses on The Theft of History (2006). Goody attacks the notion of a radical division between Europe and Asia, which has become built into the commonsense academic wisdom and categorical apparatus of the social sciences and humanities. Eurocentrism is a constant target as he scrutinizes and finds wanting the claims of the West to have invented modern science, cultural renaissances, the free city, capitalism, democracy, love and secularism. (...) Goody’s approach favours a dynamic long-term basis for comparisons between societies and focuses on the exchange of information and goods across Eurasia to argue that the comparative advantage one society gains has been only temporary, swinging between different parts of Eurasia a number of times over the millennia. Goody suggests that China developed an active mercantile urban culture before Europe. Cities and towns with their mixture of luxury and learning, should not be seen as inevitably subordinate to centralized power structures in both eastern and western Eurasia. Goody criticizes the theoretical assumptions and the handling of evidence of Perry Anderson, Fernand Braudel, Norbert Elias, Moses Finlay, David Landes, Karl Marx, Joseph Needham, Immanuel Wallerstein and Max Weber. His concern is that the master categories of world history, such as antiquity, feudalism and capitalism, have been developed against a background of the particular European trajectory, then projected onto the world at large. Goody remains sceptical, not just about eurocentrism, but also the additional danger of being eurocentric about ethnocentricity, which he regards as a trap that postcolonialism and postmodernism frequently fall into. (shrink)

How social media and DIY communities have enabled new forms of political participation that emphasize doing and making rather than passive consumption. Today, DIY—do-it-yourself—describes more than self-taught carpentry. Social media enables DIY citizens to organize and protest in new ways and to repurpose corporate content in order to offer political counternarratives. This book examines the usefulness and limits of DIY citizenship, exploring the diverse forms of political participation and “critical making” that have emerged in recent years. The authors and artists (...) in this collection describe DIY citizens whose activities range from activist fan blogging and video production to knitting and the creation of community gardens. Contributors examine DIY activism, describing new modes of civic engagement that include Harry Potter fan activism and the activities of the Yes Men. They consider DIY making in learning, culture, hacking, and the arts, including do-it-yourself media production and collaborative documentary making. They discuss DIY and design and how citizens can unlock the black box of technological infrastructures to engage and innovate open and participatory critical making. And they explore DIY and media, describing activists' efforts to remake and reimagine media and the public sphere. As these chapters make clear, DIY is characterized by its emphasis on “doing” and making rather than passive consumption. DIY citizens assume active roles as interventionists, makers, hackers, modders, and tinkerers, in pursuit of new forms of engaged and participatory democracy. Contributors Mike Ananny, Chris Atton, Alexandra Bal, Megan Boler, Catherine Burwell, Red Chidgey, Andrew Clement, Negin Dahya, Suzanne de Castell, Carl DiSalvo, Kevin Driscoll, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Joseph Ferenbok, Stephanie Fisher, Miki Foster, Stephen Gilbert, Henry Jenkins, Jennifer Jenson, Yasmin B. Kafai, Ann Light, Steve Mann, Joel McKim, Brenda McPhail, Owen McSwiney, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Graham Meikle, Emily Rose Michaud, Kate Milberry, Michael Murphy, Jason Nolan, Kate Orton-Johnson, Kylie A. Peppler, David J. Phillips, Karen Pollock, Matt Ratto, Ian Reilly, Rosa Reitsamer, Mandy Rose, Daniela K. Rosner, Yukari Seko, Karen Louise Smith, Lana Swartz, Alex Tichine, Jennette Weber, Elke Zobl. (shrink)

With his clear and accessible prose, impeccable scholarship, and balanced Judgment, Roland Teske, SJ, has been an influential and important voice in Medieval philosophy for more than thirty years. This volume, in his honour, brings together more than a dozen essays on central metaphysical and theological themes in Augustine and other medieval thinkers. The authors, listed below, are noted scholars who draw upon Teskes work, reflect on it, go beyond it, and at times even disagree with it, but always in (...) a spirit of respectful co-operation, and always with the aim of getting at the truth. Essays on Augustine contributed by Gerald Bonner, Charles Brittain, Joseph Koterski, SJ, Joseph T. Lienhard, SJ, David Vincent Meconi, SJ, Ann A. Pang-White, Frederick Van Fleteren, Dorothea Weber, and James Wetzel. Essays on Bernard of Clairvaux, William of Auvergne, and other medieval themes contributed by John P. Doyle, William Harmless, SJ, John A. Laumakis, Edward P. Mahoney, and Philipp W. Rosemann. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Benjamin ReduxGerhard RichterProfane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, by Margaret Cohen; 271 pp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, $35.00 cloth, $14.00 paper.Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, by John McCole; xiii & 329 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, $45.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.Walter Benjamin’s Passages, by Pierre Missac, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson; xvii & 221 pp. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995, $25.00.Walter Benjamin’s (...) Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne; xiv & 298 pp. London: Routledge, 1994, $65.00 cloth, $18.95 paper.The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture corrects the theory of success,” writes Emerson in his 1860 essay “Culture.” 1 Perhaps at no point since the publication of Emerson’s essay has the diagnosis it advances been more relevant than today, some 136 years later, when “Culture,” at least in the methodological and political struggles within the academy, has again become the word of ambition. As in Emerson’s nineteenth-century America, those who today pursue that word most ardently also tend—in their struggle to explicate history and culture—to shy away from the persistent instability of meaning with which the texts that they take as their objects of study are vexed. In other words, they are afraid of earthquakes. For Emerson continues: [End Page 200] “There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your word, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of earthquakes.” 2It has become one of the methodological orthodoxies of the new contextualism, the increasingly prominent engine driving a continuing metamorphosis of what is perhaps no longer usefully called “Humanities,” to posit a relatively transparent, unproblematic relationship between a textual artifact and its larger cultural or historical context. It is precisely this complex relationship between text and culture—and the theoretical possibility of doing justice to it—that this review of four new publications on Walter Benjamin will revisit.The urgent promise to think through the complicated relationship between text and culture, between the idiomatic artifact and its historical formation, has yet to be fulfilled. How does one account for the singularity of a specific instance of signification, be it a literary text, a film, or a neon sign, articulating the relationship between it and the cultural paradigm that gave rise to it and to which it gave rise? How might one talk about a text’s historicity without forcing a hasty assimilation of it into a crudely mimetic model? One way out of the difficulty, of course, is to suppress the vicissitudes of language altogether, with an eye to hastening the assimilation of a text, seen primarily as illustrative or evidential material, into pre-established assumptions. An example of such a dissatisfactory answer can be found in the introduction to a recent programmatic publication, in which the editors triumphantly proclaim: “Thus, for example, although there is no prohibition against close textual readings in cultural studies, they are also not required.” 3 A marked dislike of earthquakes is at work here. What is more, the logic of such a statement goes as follows: because close reading is no longer necessary, it is dispensable, and therefore eventually no longer performed at all. One is tempted to invoke the famous language of Kafka’s chaplain in The Trial who reprimands Joseph K. for his failure to read closely: “You have not enough respect for writing and you are altering the story.” 4Such methodological difficulties only get worse when one considers the particular problem posed to scholarship by the case of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish critic, writer, and philosopher now widely regarded as one of the most significant theorists of our century. On the [End Page 201] one... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The King and the Crowd: Divine Right and Popular Sovereignty in the French Revolution Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly Stanford University We French cannot really think about politics or philosophy or literature without remembering that all this— politics, philosophy, literature—began, in the modem world, under the sign of a crime. A crime was committed in France in 1793. They killed a good and entirely likable king who was the incarnation of (...) legitimacy. We cannot not remember that this crime was horrible... When we speak about writing, the accent is on what is necessarily criminal in writing. (Jean-François Lyotard, "Discussion Lyotard-Rorty" 583; quoted in Dunn 165) The condemnation ofthe king is at the crux ofour contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God. (Albert Camus, The Rebel 120; quoted in Dunn 140) Susan Dunn makes a well-documented case that the death of Louis XVI was unconsciously understood, especially by the Jacobins, as a human sacrifice that was necessary for the founding of the republic. "Louis must die because the patrie must live," said Robespierre at the king's trial, and the representative Carra considered Louis "the source of corruption and servitude... the fatal talisman ofall our ills" whose death would cause the people to be "regenerated in morality and virtue" (Dunn 15-37). The king was a monster and the source ofall the ills, and his death 68Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly had the power to alleviate those ills and regenerate the nation. This image of the king as sacrificial victim persisted throughout the first half of the nineteenth century in French literature and politics, sometimes assimilating itself to the image of Jesus Christ who died for the sins of the world. Legitimist writers like Joseph de Maistre saw his death precisely in this light as a great Christian sacrifice that would do France and the world good (Dunn 28-37). The king as a sacred monster whose life causes all ill and whose death brings healing is the classic figure of the scapegoat or sacrificial victim identified by René Girard. Susan Dunn recognizes this but because she does not know Girard's mimetic theory she is not able to explain the significance of the scapegoat king. Her work is, indeed, as Conor Cruise O'Brien says in the foreword, a work ofdemonstration rather than argument, of evidence rather than interpretation. I offer a mimetic interpretation ofthe Jacobin claim that the death ofthe king was the human sacrifice that founded the republic, and an argument that a universally operative generative mechanism forged the historical events of the revolution.1 There is no essential difference between the sovereignty ofthe king and the sovereignty of the people. In both cases sovereignty arises from a metaphorical contract that threatens death to anyone who violates it. The royal metaphors are organic while the revolutionary metaphors are legal and rational, but they all express the sacrificial structure ofpolitical power. Revolutionary democracy imports the fiction ofrationality to obscure its sacrificial structure. The desire ofthe general will for contractual equality is a transformation of mimetic desire in search of a victim around which the bad violence ofmimetic rivalry can coalesce into the good violence of sacred order. Sovereignty, therefore, is structurally single and simple; it is violence transformed through the sacred into the powers oforder. Max Weber understood this in general ifnot in its particulars when he defined sovereignty as the monopoly of the means of violence within a single territory.2 1 Mimetic theory was discovered by René Girard. I have given an account of my understanding of it in 7Ae Gospel and the Sacred 129-52. The idea of a mechanism universally operative in human history isjustified in the emerging discipline ofevolutionary psychology. Such mechanisms are the result ofthe interaction ofgenetic and environmental factors in the process of evolution (see Robert Wright). 2 The precise quotation from Weber is as follows: "The state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a The King and the Crowd69 The transition from royal to popular sovereignty is a transformation of the basic pattern of victim and group. The... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern EuropeNoah J. EfronAlmost a quarter-century ago Benjamin Nelson published his famous plea for what he called a “differential” and “comparative historical sociology of ‘science’ in civilizational perspective.” 1 Like Max Weber, Robert Merton, and Joseph Needham, Nelson believed that the growth of western science could be better understood when compared to the ways “science” fared in other cultures with (...) other intellectual and institutional and economic sensibilities and structures. A particularly propitious case study for such a differential and comparative historical study of science, as Hillel Levine observed in his 1983 essay about Jewish reactions to heliocentrism, are the Jews of early modern Europe, who constituted “a society geographically and culturally contiguous with those who framed and advanced occidental ‘science.’” 2Since about the time of Nelson’s plea, David B. Ruderman has been writing the history of Jewish attitudes towards, and engagements with, science during the period in which modern western science was constituting itself. It is no exaggeration to say that he established this as a field of study, producing a steady stream of historical studies, initially of Italian Jews who read and wrote about nature and its study, but continually expanding his compass. 3 The field [End Page 719] Ruderman established and the studies he produced have been “repercussive” (to borrow his own adjective) in many directions—shedding light on Jewish-Christian relations, on early-modern Jewish intellectual history, on the deployments of Kabbalah and magic in early modern times, and so on. One of Ruderman’s achievements—perhaps not the most important in his view (for he considers himself a historian of Jewish thought and culture and not a historian of science) but of great importance nonetheless—has been to begin to lay the groundwork for a comparative history of Jewish and Christian attitudes towards and participation in the “new sciences.”Ruderman’s newest book is a big step towards Nelson’s desideratum, using Jewish attitudes as the comparative case. It is a collection of twelve linked essays (five of which have appeared elsewhere in one form or another) framed by a synthetic introduction and epilogue. The essays are individual or group portraits of Jews who evinced interest in natural philosophy or medicine, in a variety of settings and for a variety of reasons, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Ruderman describes his subject as “three distinct but interrelated groups among early modern Jews”: (1) “converso physicians and other university-trained intellectuals who fled Spain and Portugal in the seventeenth century and settled in Holland, Italy, Germany, England, and even eastern Europe, serving as doctors and purveyors of scientific learning throughout the Jewish communities of Europe, while yielding considerable political and economic power,” (2) “certain circles of Jewish scholars in central and eastern Europe [who] pursued scientific learning, especially astronomy, in more informal settings as a desirable supplement to rabbinic study,” and (3) “the hundreds of Jews who attended Italian medical schools, primarily the University of Padua, from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.” 4In fact Ruderman covers even more ground than this. As background, he includes a brief essay on the attitudes of tenth- to fifteenth-century Jews towards nature and its study, surely the best survey of the sort available. Of the thirty or so early modern Jews that he describes in the remainder of the book, about twenty fit in at least one of the three camps upon which he focuses. 5 Nine [End Page 720] emerged from different circumstances (though these too were often highly influenced by one or more of the focus populations). This fact does nothing to impugn Ruderman’s typology—the groups he described were, in fact, of particular importance, and his identification of them as the principle populations contemplating and promulgating natural philosophy among Jews is in itself an advance of some moment. But the fact that a third of the cases Ruderman described do not fit into his own typology is testimony both to the complexity of his subject, and to his agility in addressing it.By anthologizing a dozen depictions of different thinkers in different milieus, Ruderman affords what might be called a “hawk... (shrink)