Showing papers on "Realism published in 2007"

Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

Abstract: Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad’s analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr’s philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity. In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of “social” and “natural” agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their “interrelationship.” Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler’s influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable

Abstract: Scientific realism is the view that our best scientific theories give approximately true descriptions of both observable and unobservable aspects of a mind-independent world. Debates between realists and their critics are at the very heart of the philosophy of science. Anjan Chakravartty traces the contemporary evolution of realism by examining the most promising strategies adopted by its proponents in response to the forceful challenges of antirealist sceptics, resulting in a positive proposal for scientific realism today. He examines the core principles of the realist position, and sheds light on topics including the varieties of metaphysical commitment required, and the nature of the conflict between realism and its empiricist rivals. By illuminating the connections between realist interpretations of scientific knowledge and the metaphysical foundations supporting them, his book offers a compelling vision of how realism can provide an internally consistent and coherent account of scientific knowledge.

Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory

Abstract: Justice Beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. By Simon Caney. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 319p. 24.95 paper.The author's aim in this book is the defense of a “cosmopolitan political morality” that pits cosmopolitan ethics against its communitarian competitors (e.g., realism, the “society of states” tradition, and nationalism) and finds them wanting in relation to a number of key issues: human rights, distributive justice, political institutions, war, and intervention. These issues are addressed in specific chapters, which outline the cosmopolitan positions and then negatively evaluate the alternatives. At the outset, we are informed that this is not intended to be a “neutral account” (p. 3), and the author consistently and methodically picks his way through the book at every turn seeking to reinforce his defense.

Making a mess with method

Abstract: If the world is non-coherent, then methods that seek and describe it as coherent are making a mess of doing so. This argument is developed empirically and philosophically. After showing that the comment sense realism of standard methods works to other non-coherence, the chapter recommends non-coherent or 'messy' methods.

The New Legal Realism

Abstract: The last decade has witnessed the birth of the New Legal Realism - an effort to go beyond the old realism by testing competing hypotheses about the role of law and politics in judicial decisions, with reference to large sets and statistical analysis. The New Legal Realists have uncovered a Standard Model of Judicial Behavior, demonstrating significant differences between Republican appointees and Democratic appointees, and showing that such differences can be diminished or heightened by panel composition. The New Legal Realists have also started to find that race, sex, and other demographic characteristics sometimes have effects on judicial judgments. At the same time, many gaps remain. Numerous areas of law remain unstudied; certain characteristics of judges have yet to be investigated; and in some ways, the existing work is theoretically thin. The New Legal Realism has clear jurisprudential implications, bearing as it does on competing accounts of legal reasoning, including Ronald Dworkin's suggestion that such reasoning is a search for integrity. Discussion is devoted to the relationship between the New Legal Realism and some of the perennial normative questions in administrative law.

Does capitalism need the state system

Abstract: Contemporary Marxist students of international relations, like their mainstream counterparts, disagree over whether geopolitics has a future. Many believe that it has none, either because globalized capitalism has overcome the nation-state or because the 'informal empire' of the United States has overridden inter-state conflict. This article supports those who argue that significant economic and political conflicts persist among the main capitalist states. It does so by exploring the question of whether, in Marxist theory, the capitalist economic system and the international system of states are necessarily or contingently related. Marx's method in Capital offers, it is argued, a way of non-reductively incorporating the state system within the capitalist mode of production. This argument provides the basis for a partial reconciliation of Marxism and realism. More importantly, it offers a theoretical framework in which to explore the scope for inter-state conflict in the 21 st century.

A pragmatist philosophy of democracy

Abstract: 1. Pragmatism's Ambiguous Legacy 2. Can Democracy be a Way of Life? 3. Peirce, Inquiry, and Politics 4. Pluralism and the Peircean View 5. Posner's Pragmatic Realism 6. The Case of Sidney Hook 7. Epilogue: The Eclipse Narrative Revisited

War and the State: The Theory of International Politics

Abstract: This book exposes the deep logical contradictions of Realist political thought and counters it with a new, more robust theory of war. "War and the State" dismantles the fundamental workings of Realism and exposes its intrinsic flaws. Where Realists insist that any theory of international politics should focus on the interactions within a system of states, Wagner demonstrates that any understanding of international politics must instead be part of the more general study of the relationship between political order and organized violence - as it was in the intellectual tradition from which modern-day Realism was derived. In this, his first book, Harrison Wagner draws on the insights from his distinguished career of international relations scholarship to create an elegantly crafted essay accessible to both students and scholars.

A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism

Abstract: Introduction: The Kantian Root 1. Defining Realism I. THE KANTIAN PARADIGM 2. Kant's Revolution 3. Hegel - The Truth of the Whole 4. Nietzsche - Will-to-Truth Transition 5. Early Heidegger - Fundamental Ontology II. THE HEIDEGGERIAN PARADIGM 6. Later Heidegger - "The Great Turning Around" 7. Foucault's History of Truth Post 8. Derrida Conclusion: Anthropology from Two Kantian Points of View or, A Tale of Two Kants.

Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy

Abstract: Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction PART I: RELIGION AND THE EXTERNAL WORLD 1. Projection, Religion and the External World 2. The Senses, Reason and the Imagination 3. Realism, Meaning and Justification: The External World and Religious Belief PART II: MODALITY, PROJECTION AND REALISM 4. 'Our Profound Ignorance': Causal Realism and the Failure to Detect Necessity 5. Spreading the Mind: Projection and Necessity 6. Into the Labyrinth: Persons, Modality and Hume's Undoing PART III: VALUE, PROJECTION AND REALISM 7. Gilding: Projection, Value and Secondary Qualities 8. The Gold: Good, Evil, Belief and Desire 9. The Golden: Relational Values, Realism and a Moral Sense

Systems theory: a worldview and/or a methodology aimed at requisite holism/realism of humans' thinking, decisions and action

Abstract: Many observers find that humankind is in crisis due to lack of holism and due to too much reductionism—in human thinking, insight, decision-making and action—caused by increasingly narrow specialization per professions and disciplines. Systems theory surfaced good five decades ago to fight this problem. But it keeps losing its battle, including in its own arena. Specialization is unavoidable, but it is frequently not enough. Good three decades of experience of this contribution's author have demonstrated that his concept of the ‘dialectical system’ and ‘law of requisite holism/realism’ can offer a response. It shows a way towards holism/realism as an overarching worldview, which is capable of providing room for many systems theories and specialized/traditional theories to work together, because they are interdependent, that is, needing each other. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Realism reconsidered: the legacy of Hans Morgenthau in international relations

Abstract: Introduction 1. Morgenthau, Agency and Aristotle 2. 'The Twilight of International Morality'? Hans J. Morgenthau and Carl Schmitt on the end of the Jus Publicum Europaeum 3. Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond 4. The Image of Law in Politics Among Nations 5. Realism, Tragedy and the Anti-Pelagian Imagination in International Political Thought. 6. The balance of power in Politics Among Nations 7. Hans Morgenthau and the Cold War 8. Hans Morgenthau and the World State Revisited 9. Morgenthau Now: Neoconservatism, National Greatness and Realism 10. Texts, Paradigms, and Political Change

Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems

Abstract: "Menke's Telegraphic Realism" is the first comprehensive reading of Victorian fiction as part of an emerging world of new media technologies and information exchange. The book analyzes the connections between fictional writing, communication technologies, and developing ideas about information, from the postage stamp and electric telegraph to wireless. By placing fiction in dialogue with media history, it argues that Victorian realism was print culture's sophisticated response to the possibilities and dilemmas of a world of media innovations and information flows.

Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism

Abstract: Introduction: The "Affective Fallacy" Fallacy The Entanglements of Two Cultures Literature and Neurology, 1860-1910 Rethinking Emotion 1. "The Zest, the Tingle, the Excitement of Reality" Toward a New Conceptual Genealogy for American Literary Realism "Being Moved": Modernity, Evolution, and the Reflex Arc Laughter, Reflection, and Realization in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 2. Statistical Pity: Elsie Venner and the Controversy over Childbed Fever The Case against Contagion Representing "Ontological Shadows" Holmes's "Algebra of Human Nature" Pathological Particularity in the Novel Coda: Anecdote and Abstraction 3. Fear and Epistemology: Tracking the Train of Feeling in A Mortal Antipathy From Physiognomy to Physiology Excess and Dissolution of the Nervous System Embodied Memory and the Pathogenic Secret The Forensic Self 4. Nervous Effort: Gilman, Crane, and the Psychophysical Pathologies of Everyday Life Freud, Feminist Reading, and Interrogative Criticism A Physiological Approach to Nervousness Effort, Agitation, Aesthetics Fracture and Fabrication: Crane's The Red Badge of Courage Coda: Reconstruction and "The Yellow Wallpaper" 5. "Mindless" Pleasure: Embodied Music in The Awakening and Theron Ware New Varieties of Religious Experience Theron Ware and the Ironic Rhythm of the Sick Soul Kate Chopin's Lyrical "Gospel of Relaxation" Music and the Sounding Board of the Body The Rhythm of Desire in The Awakening The Pleasures of "The Storm" 6. Corporeal Wonder: The Occult Entrancements of The Wings of the Dove Charming Milly From Trance to Transference--and Back Again William James and Mrs. Piper: The Medium Is the Message "Tremendous Rites of Nullification" Conclusion: Burning Issues Notes Acknowledgments Index

Nature and sociology

Abstract: 1. Recovering Nature 2. Knowing Nature 3. Beyond Anti-Dualism? 4. Time 5. Language and Technology 6. Temporality and Realism 7. Genomics 8. Transgression 9. Neurological Adventures

Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation – Scott R. Sehon

Abstract: Using the language of common-sense psychology (CSP), we explain human behavior by citing its reason or purpose, and this is central to our understanding of human beings as agents. On the other hand, since human beings are physical objects, human behavior should also be explicable in the language of physical science, in which causal accounts cast human beings as collections of physical particles. CSP talk of mind and agency, however, does not seem to mesh well with the language of physical science.In Teleological Realism, Scott Sehon argues that CSP explanations are not causal but teleological -- that they cite the purpose or goal of the behavior in question rather than an antecedent state that caused the behavior. CSP explanations of behavior, Sehon claims, are answering a question different from that answered by physical science explanations, and, accordingly, CSP explanations and physical science explanations are independent of one another. Common-sense facts about mind and agency can thus be independent of the physical facts about human beings, and, contrary to the views of most philosophers of mind in recent decades, common-sense psychology will not be subsumed by physical science.Sehon defends his non-reductionist account of mind and agency in clear and nontechnical language. He carefully distinguishes his view from forms of "strong naturalism" that would seem to preclude it. And he evaluates key objections to teleological realism, including those posed by Donald Davidson's influential article "Actions, Reasons and Causes" and some put forth by more recent proponents of causal theories of action. CSP, Sehon argues, has a different realm than does physical science; the normative notions that are central to CSP are not reducible to physical facts and laws.

Realism Discourse and Deconstruction

Abstract: 1. Introduction: Realism, Discourse and Deconstruction Jonathan Joseph and John Michael Roberts Part One: Realism and Critical Discourse Analysis 2. Critical Realism and Semiosis Norman Fairclough, Bob Jessop and Andrew Sayer 3. Critical Realism, Critical Discourse Analysis, Concrete Research Martin Jones 4. How Might the Inclusion of Discursive Approaches Enrich Critical Realist Analysis? The Case of Environmentalism Jenneth Parker Part Two: Voloshinov and Bakhtin 5. Will the Materialists in the Bakhtin Circle Please Stand Up? John Michael Roberts 6. Value and Contract Formation Howard Engelskirchen Part Three: Realism and Post-Marxism 7. Lost in Transit: Reconceptualising the Real Neil Curry 8. Laclau and Mouffe and the Discursive Turn: Gains and the Losses Kathryn Dean Part Four: Realism and Eurocentric Discourse 9. Eurocentrism, Realism and the Anthropic Carthography of Emancipation Rajani Kanth 10. The Dialectics of Realist Theory and the Eurocentric Problem of Modern Discourse Nick Hostettler 11. Limited Incorporation or Sleeping with the Enemy: Reading Derrida as a Critical Realist Colin Wight 12. Dialectics, Deconstruction and the Legal Subject Alan Norrie 13. Learning to Live (with Derrida) Jonathan Joseph 14. Deconstructing Anti-Realism: Derrida's 'White Mythology Christopher Norris

Quasi-realism and fundamental moral error

Abstract: A common first reaction to expressivist and quasi-realist theories is the thought that, if these theories are right, there's some objectionable sense in which we can't be wrong about morality. This worry turns out to be surprisingly difficult to make stick—an account of moral error as instability under improving changes provides the quasi-realist with the resources to explain many of our concerns about moral error. The story breaks down, though, in the case of fundamental moral error. This is where the initial worry finally sticks—quasi-realism tells me that I can't be fundamentally wrong about morality, though others can.

Revitalizing Causality : Realism about Causality in Philosophy and Social Science

Abstract: Part I - Key Formulations 1. Critical Realism and Substance 2. Causality and Substance 3. Essence and Accident 4. Conceptual and Natural Necessity 5. Powers and Dispositions Part II - Realism About Causality in Philosophy 6. Meaning, Truth and Causal Explanation: The 'Humean Condition' Revisited 7. Aristotelian Powers 8. Powers, Dispositions, Properties 9. Inessential Aristotle: Powers Without Essences 10. Causal Exclusion and Evolved Emergent Properties 11. Are There Natural Kinds in Psychology? Part III - Realism About Causality in Social Science 12. Sociology's Causal Confusion 13. The Mother of All Isms: Causal Mechanisms in Political Science 14. Marxisn Crisis Theory and Causality 15. On the Clear Comprehension of Political Economy: Social Kinds and the Significance of Section 2 of Marx's Capital

Adventures in Realism

Abstract: Adventures in Realism offers an accessible introduction to realism as it has evolved since the 19th century. Though focused on literature and literary theory, the significance of technology and the visual arts is also addressed. Comprises 16 newly-commissioned essays written by a distinguished group of contributors, including Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson. Provides the historical, cultural, intellectual, and literary contexts necessary to understand developments in realism. Addresses the artistic mediums and technologies such as painting and film that have helped shape the way we perceive reality. Explores literary and pictorial sub-genres, such as naturalism and socialist realism. Includes a brief bibliography and suggestions for further reading at the end of each section © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

A Pluralist Approach to International Law

Abstract: This Essay is a contribution to a recent symposium at Yale Law School asking whether there is a new New Haven School of International Law. The original New Haven School of International Law offered a significant, process-based, rejoinder to the realism and positivism that had dominated international relations theory in the United States since the close of World War II. Whereas international relations realists viewed international law as merely a product of state power relations, and positivists dismissed international law entirely because it lacked both sovereign commands and a rule of recognition, scholars of the New Haven School studied law as a social process of authoritative decision-making. Such a study necessarily expanded the state-focused perspective of both the realists and positivists by drawing attention to ongoing interactions among variously situated bureaucratic and institutional actors. Now, in the first decade of the 21st century, the gaze has widened still further, as international law scholars (and those studying law and globalization more generally) increasingly recognize that we inhabit a world of multiple normative communities, some of which impose their norms through officially sanctioned coercive force and formal legal processes, but many of which do not. These norms have varying degrees of impact, of course, but it has become clear that ignoring such normative assertions altogether as somehow not law is not a useful strategy. Accordingly, what we see emerging is an approach to international law drawn from legal pluralism. As such, this new international law scholarship owes a debt not only to Myers McDougal, Harold Lasswell, Michael Reisman and the other practitioners of the New Haven School, but to another Yale Law School professor whose name is rarely associated with international law: Robert Cover. This Essay discusses Cover's work and its relationship to the New Haven School of International Law, while arguing that Cover's emphasis on norm-generating communities - rather than nation-states - along with his celebration of jurisdictional redundancy provide a useful analytical framework for understanding the plural normative centers that are the focus of much current international law scholarship. Moreover, a pluralist perspective on international law provides a powerful critique to the latest incarnation of realism, now newly dressed up in the trappings of rational choice theory.

Critical realism and the social sciences : heterodox elaborations

Abstract: Critical realism is a distinct school of thought in philosophy and the social sciences that has been expanding and growing in significance over the past three decades. It offers important insights into the nature of both our social and natural world, and the nature of the social sciences by challenging conventional notions of the relationship between empirical experiences, actual events, and causal mechanisms. Critical Realism and the Social Sciences brings together contributors from both sides of the Atlantic, all of whom engage with tenets of critical realism, juxtaposing them with traditional representations of social scientific enquiry. United in the belief that the conceptual systems hitherto relied upon affect our styles of thought, ethical choices, political orientations, and so on, the contributors explore realism in relation to other currents of theoretical thought, thus suggesting a basis for evaluation and further elaboration of critical realism. As a whole, the volume seeks to show how this particular approach provides a way to better understand many aspects of social existence, from human attributes to the interrelatedness of human activities and the natural world. In this much-needed study, critical realism is carefully examined, sympathetically assessed, and creatively developed by authors from diverse disciplinary backgrounds.

Freudian roots of political realism: the importance of Sigmund Freud to Hans J. Morgenthau's theory of international power politics

Abstract: The article unveils the intellectual indebtedness of Hans J. Morgenthau's realist theory of international power politics to Freudian meta- and group psychology. It examines an unpublished Morgentha...

‘Eavesdropping on honored ghosts’: from classical to reflexive realism

Abstract: While the practice of reinventing realism is by no means novel, recent reinventions have taken a decidedly reflexive turn. This article examines how three particular scholars — Anthony Lang, Michael Williams, and Richard Ned Lebow — have revived some important and relatively obscured principles from classical realists, thereby recovering some practical ethics important for contemporary world politics. The article outlines the principles held in common by this scholarship. Reflexive realism has also resurrected and re-emphasized a once obscured critical voice of realists like Hans Morgenthau. In the process, it has served as a launching pad for a serious critique of eschatological-based philosophy, including neoconservatism. Several avenues for the future development of reflexive realism are also identified.

Reconstructing Scientific Realism to Rebut the Pessimistic Meta‐induction*

Abstract: This paper develops a stronger version of ‘inference‐to‐the‐best explanation’ scientific realism. I argue against three standard assumptions of current realists: (1) realism is confirmed if it provides the best explanation of theories’ predictive success; (2) the realist claim that successful theories are always approximately true provides the best explanation of their success; and (3) realists are committed to giving the same sort of truth‐based explanation of superseded theories’ success that they give to explain our best current theories’ success. On the positive side, I argue that (1) the confirmation of realism requires explaining theories’ explanatory success, not just their predictive success; (2) in turn this task requires a richer realist model of explanation that brings into the explanans both (a) successful theories’ epistemic virtues (e.g., unification and simplicity) and (b) the standards governing these virtues, as well as truth; (3) this richer realist model is further confirmed because it ...

Linguistic ethnography in realist perspective

Abstract: This article engages with linguistic ethnography from the perspective of sociological realism. It begins by reviewing some of the positions expressed in the linguistic ethnography (LE) literature about the extent to which LE is defined by theoretical orientation as well as by method. The article is then framed around a kind of ‘generic’ sociolinguistic research question – ‘Which people use which kinds of language in what circumstances and with what outcome(s)?’. Taking each element in turn, it explores the ways in which an ethnographic approach contributes to the processes of: classifying speakers as members of various kinds of social groups; identifying language varieties; accounting for the inf luence of ‘context’; and identifying ‘outcomes’. I suggest that each of these aspects of social linguistic research stands to benefit from the methods developed in ethnography, and from the theories and principles underlying the approaches it uses. However, drawing on the work of contemporary realist social theorists, the article concludes that ethnography is a method suited to illuminating certain aspects of such questions better than others.

Political economy of socialist realism

Abstract: For decades Stalinist literature, film, and art was almost exclusively deemed political propaganda imposed from on high, devoid of any aesthetic significance. In this book, Evgeny Dobrenko suggests an entirely new view: socialism did not produce Socialist Realism to "prettify reality"; rather, Socialist Realism itself produced socialism by elevating socialism to reality status, giving it material form. Without art, socialism could not have materialized. Bringing together the Soviet historical experience and Stalin-era art-novels, films, poems, songs, painting, photography, architecture, and advertising-Dobrenko examines Stalinism's representational strategies and demonstrates how real socialism was begotten of Socialist Realism. Socialist Realism, he concludes, was Stalinism's most effective sociopolitical institution.

The Project in the Model: Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Politics of Ethnographic Realism

Abstract: Concepts such as “reciprocity,” “embeddedness,” and “social capital” have been the main tools for description and analysis of social relations sustaining economic activities in areas defined as regional economies or industrial districts, becoming models for successful development in Europe. Historicizing these concepts, stressing the concrete political agendas of the scholars who produced them, reveals them as paradoxical in that, though they are abstract, their main force lies in their social, cultural, historical, and spatial situatedness. This situation points to the awkwardness of “ethnographic realism” and the need for a kind of “reflexive historical realism” to enhance viable anthropological communication.