Showing papers on "Realism published in 2014"

Realism in normative political theory

Abstract: This paper provides a critical overview of the realist current in contemporary political philosophy. We define political realism on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large part through its exploration of the sources of normativity appropriate for the political and so distinguish sharply between political realism and non-ideal theory. We then identify and discuss four key arguments advanced by political realists: from ideology, from the relationship of ethics to politics, from the priority of legitimacy over justice and from the nature of political judgement. Next, we ask to what extent realism is a methodological approach as opposed to a substantive political position and so discuss the relationship between realism and a few such positions. We close by pointing out the links between contemporary realism and the realist strand that runs through much of the history of Western political thought.

Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

Abstract: This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carre, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

Discourse of the real kind: : A post-foundational approach to organizational discourse analysis

Abstract: In response to the postmodern invasion of organization studies, some critics have issued increasingly loud cries that we should ‘get real’ about organizational discourse analysis. But what precisely do these proponents take to be the ‘real’? In this article we trace out some of the attempts of ‘getting real’, arguing that these approaches have some important limitations. We then explore the relevance of a post-foundational approach to discourse, which, we argue, have far reaching implications for the study of organizational discourse. We argue that such approach offers us a way of theoretically linking the ‘real’ with (1) the way discourses are structured around fundamental gaps, (2) how discourses are brought together through nodal points and (3) how discourses generate affective and emotional attachment. We then offer some suggestions of how these points can be used to study organizational processes. We conclude by reflecting on some of the limitations of this approach to studying discourse.

Beyond School-to-Prison Pipeline and toward an Educational and Penal Realism.

Abstract: Much scholarly attention has been paid to the school-to-prison pipeline and the sanitized discourse of “death by education,” called the achievement gap. Additionally, there exists a longstanding discourse surrounding the alleged crisis of educational failure. This article offers no solutions to the crisis and suggests instead that the system is functioning as it was intended—to disenfranchise many (predominately people of color) for the benefit of some (mostly white), based on economic principals of the free market. We begin by tracing the economic interests of prisons and the prison industrial complex, juxtaposing considerations of what we call the “educational reform industrial complex.” With a baseline in the economic interests of school failure and prison proliferation, we draw on the critical race theory concept of racial realism, to work toward a theory of educational and penal realism. Specifically, we outline seven working tenets of educational and penal realism that provide promise in redirecting...

Legitimacy in Realist Thought Between Moralism and Realpolitik

Abstract: What, if anything, can realism say about the normative conditions of political legitimacy? Must a realist political theory accept that the ability to successfully employ coercive power is equivalent to the right to rule, or can it incorporate normative criteria for legitimacy but without collapsing into a form of moralism? While several critics argue that realism fails to adequately differentiate itself from moralism or that it cannot coherently appeal to normative values so as to distinguish might from right, this article seeks to help develop a realist account of legitimacy by demonstrating how it can successfully and stably occupy this position between moralism and Realpolitik. Through this discussion, however, the article also argues that political rule necessitates the use of coercive power which is (at best) imperfectly legitimated, and that this blurs the distinction between politics and successful domination which lies at the heart of many recent accounts of political realism. In at least this sen...

Agential realism, social constructionism, and our living relations to our surroundings: Sensing similarities rather than seeing patterns

Abstract: If Barad’s account of agential realism is correct, then the psychological “things” that we name as “thoughts,” “ideas,” “theories,” “knowledge,” or “observations,” and study as the products of proc...

The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism

Abstract: In the 20th century, phenomenology promised a method that would get philosophy "back to the things themselves". But phenomenology has always been haunted by the spectre of an anthropocentric antirealism. Tom Sparrow shows how, in the 21st century, speculative realism aims to do what phenomenology could not: provide a philosophical method that disengages the human-centred approach to metaphysics in order to chronicle the complex realm of nonhuman reality. Through a focused reading of the methodological statements and metaphysical commitments of key phenomenologists and speculative realists, Sparrow shows how speculative realism is replacing phenomenology as the beacon of realism in contemporary Continental philosophy. Show More Show Less

Realism in the Study of Entrepreneurship

Abstract: The authors present a response to an article in a prior issue by S. Ramoglou entitled "On the Misuse of Realism in the Study of Entrepreneurship" that itself was a comment on their own earlier article entitled"Epistemology, Opportunities, and Entrepreneurship: Comments on Venkataraman et al (2012) and Shane (2012)." They address Ramoglou's contention that they conflated a positivist position with critical realism, then consider problems arising from portraying opportunities as objective objects.

After Civil Rights: Racial Realism in the New American Workplace

Abstract: List of Figures and Tables ix Preface xi Chapter 1 Managing Race in the American Workplace 1 Chapter 2 Leverage Racial Realism in the Professions and Business 38 Chapter 3 We the People Racial Realism in Politics and Government 89 Chapter 4 Displaying Race for Dollars Racial Realism in Media and Entertainment 153 Chapter 5 The Jungle Revisited? Racial Realism in the Low-Skilled Sector 216 Chapter 6 Bringing Practice, Law, and Values Together 265 Notes 291 Index 383

Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s

Abstract: Table of Contents: Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fictions of the Long 1980s Introduction Chapter 1. Personal Banking and Depersonalization in Don DeLillo's White Noise Chapter 2. Capitalist Realism: The 1987 Stock Market Crash and the New Proprietary of Tom Wolfe and Oliver Stone Chapter 3. "The Men Who Make The Killings": American Psycho and the Genre of the Financial Autobiography Chapter 4. Realism and Unreal Estate: The Savings and Loan Scandals and the Epistemologies of American Finance Coda

Two forms of realism in political theory

Abstract: This paper explores contemporary debates about the meaning and value of realism in political theory. I seek to move beyond the widespread observation that realism encompasses a diverse set of critiques and commitments, by urging that we recognize two key strands in recent realist thought. Detachment realists claim that political theory is excessively abstract and infeasible and thereby fails adequately to inform actual political decision-making. Displacement critics, on the other hand, suggest that political theory threatens or disrespects real politics. Not only are these visions of realism very different, there are also important tensions between them. I focus, in particular, on clarifying and evaluating the more complex charge that political theory displaces politics.

Political Norms and Moral Values

Abstract: Is genuinely normative political theory necessarily informed by distinctively moral values? Eva Erman and Niklas Moller (2013) answer that question affirmatively, and highlight its centrality in the debate on the prospects of political realism, which explicitly eschews pre-political moral foundations. In this comment we defend the emerging realist current. After briefly presenting Erman and Moller's position, we (i) observe that freedom and equality are not obviously moral values in the way they assume, and (ii) argue that a non-moral distinction between politics and sheer domination can give us a distinctively political normativity. The two points are related but freestanding.

Realism, Antirealism, and Conventionalism about Race

Abstract: This paper distinguishes three concepts of “race”: bio-genomic cluster/race, biological race, and social race. We map out realism, antirealism, and conventionalism about each of these, in three important historical episodes: Frank Livingstone and Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1962, A. W. F. Edwards’s 2003 response to Lewontin’s 1972 paper, and contemporary discourse. Semantics is especially crucial to the first episode, while normativity is central to the second. Upon inspection, each episode also reveals a variety of commitments to the metaphysics of race. We conclude by interrogating the relevance of these scientific discussions for political positions and a post-racial future.

The Metaphysics of Science: An Account of Modern Science in terms of Principles, Laws and Theories

Abstract: Preface. Introduction. 1. Empiricism vs. realism - the perennial debate in the philosophy of science. 2. Fundamental and refined principles: the core of modern science. 3. Empirical laws: the supervention of experience. 4. Scientific theories: closing the circle. 5. The principle-theory-law model of scientific explanation. 6. The social sciences: a consideration of economics. 7. Natural kinds. 8. Probability and confirmation. 9. Empiricism vs. realism revisited. 10. Modern science and the future. References. Index.

Epistemic relativism : a constructive critique

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Setting the stage: Epistemic Relativism in the Strong Programme and Beyond 2. Realism and the Argument from Underdetermination 3. Norm-circularity 4. Epistemic Absolutism that Explains the Relativist's Intuition Summary and Outlook Glossary Bibliography Index

A rival Enlightenment? Critical international theory in historical mode

Abstract: This article proposes an understanding of critical international theory (CIT) as an historical rather than philosophical mode of knowledge. To excavate this historical mode of theorizing it offers an alternative account of CIT’s intellectual sources. While most accounts of critical international theory tend to focus on inheritances from Kant, Marx and Gramsci, or allude in general terms to debts to the Frankfurt School and the Enlightenment, this is not always the case. Robert Cox, for example, has repeatedly professed intellectual debts to realism and historicism. The argument advanced here builds on Cox by situating CIT in a longer intellectual heritage that extends from Renaissance humanism and passes through Absolutist historiography before reaching Enlightenment civil histories, including Vico’s history of civil institutions. The critical element in this intellectual heritage was the formation of a secular political historicism critically disposed to metaphysical claims based on moral philosophies. By recovering this neglected inheritance of criticism, we can articulate not only a critical theory to rival problem-solving theories, but propose a conception of theory as a historical mode of knowledge that rivals philosophical modes yet remains critical by questioning prevailing intellectual assumptions in International Relations theory.

Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: Essays in Historical Realism

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: INTELLECTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE Chapter 1. Capital: structural, phenomenological, financial PART II: SCALES OF HISTORY AND POLITICS Chapter 2. The scales of ethnography: periodizing spatial coherence in early twentieth-century, Spain Chapter 3. Popular struggle, dissident intellectuals and perspectives in realist history: a case from late twentieth-century Peru Chapter 4. History's absent presence in the everyday politics of contemporary rural Spain Chapter 5. On the threshold between everyday practice and historical praxis PART III: POLITICS' EDGE Chapter 6. Conditions of possibility: dominant blocs and changing contours of the hegemonic field Conclusion: Between reflexivity and engagement: tensions in the praxis of intellectuals References Cited Index

Charles Peirce's limit concept of truth

Abstract: This entry explores Charles Peirce's account of truth in terms of the end or ‘limit’ of inquiry. This account is distinct from – and arguably more objectivist than – views of truth found in other pragmatists such as James and Rorty. The roots of the account in mathematical concepts is explored, and it is defended from objections that it is (i) incoherent, (ii) in its faith in convergence, too realist and (iii) in its ‘internal realism’, not realist enough.

Undoing Architecture: Temporalities of Painted Space in Early Modern Amsterdam

Abstract: Author(s): Sakai, Jennifer Mari | Advisor(s): Honig, Elizabeth A | Abstract: This dissertation explores the entanglement of temporality, realism, and representation in the making and viewing of Dutch art. I explore these issues through paintings, prints, and drawings by Dutch artists of Amsterdam made in the second half of the seventeenth century. Printed maps, paintings, drawings, and engravings of the destruction and ruination, both historical and imagined, of well-known Amsterdam structures, and images that have been understood to be straight-forward portraits of Amsterdam buildings and spaces are the main subjects of this study. This is not, however, a dissertation about architecture, or even, directly, about the representation of real architecture. Instead, I consider what happens in the intervals between representation and represented, the spaces where imagination transforms the experienced into the imaged. That is, this study begins with the assumption that what is represented in the works of art under consideration is not something that resides in the physical world, but rather the artist's imagining of what could, or should, or might exist in its place. This dissertation therefore questions the very structure of Dutch realism, arguing that the realism effect was actually the location of the severing of world from image. I argue that Amsterdam cityscapes subvert their own apparent status as realistic representations of contemporary Amsterdam. Though these images have always been treated as mimetic, they actively resist recording the present city, sometimes including structures that have yet to be built, in other instances destroying edifices that were already extant. These images, by Rembrandt, Ruisdael and Jan van der Heyden, among others, visually remake the city in a variety of ways: as it was meant to appear in the future; as a nostalgic and idealized version of its lost, past self; as a decayed ambivalent version that is neither clearly past nor clearly future. Denying the present, seventeenth-century images of Amsterdam convey unease about contemporary urban experience and probe the uncomfortable limits of representation itself. These creative reconstructions of Amsterdam were a form of resistance to the modernizing environment of the city, for they catered to both a false nostalgia for a fictive ancient past, and a deep ambivalence about the modernization and monumentalization of the urban fabric. I argue that Dutch art, which appears to insistently transcribe contemporary experience, is also paradoxically invested in the erasure of the present and the construction of alternate realities. The realist mode favored by many Dutch artists was far more concerned with the construction of new paradigms for society than with the representation of contemporary life.

Hegel’s Semantics of Singular Cognitive Reference, Newton’s Methodological Rule 4 and Scientific Realism Today (*)

Abstract: Empirical investigations use empirical methods, data, and evidence. This banal observation appears to favour empiricism, especially in philosophy of science, though no rationalist ever denied their importance. Natural sciences often provide what appear to be, and are taken by scientists as, realist, causal explanations of natural phenomena, often in terms of forces or entities we do not perceive with our normal, unaided human senses. Empiricism has never been congenial to realism about such scientific posits. Bas van Fraassen’s “Constructive Empiricism” purports that realist interpretations of any “unobservables” mentioned by a scientific theory in principle always transcend whatever can be justified by that theory’s empirical adequacy, and that “explanations” are merely pragmatic, insofar as they are context‑specific to the presuppositions of whomever poses the question an explanation is to answer. Here I argue that “Constructive Empiricism” rests upon a series of flawed presumptions about natural science and about epistemology. I draw upon two main resources. One resource is the constraints upon specifically c ognitive reference to particulars, first identified by Kant (and later by Evans). The second is William Harper’s (2011) brilliant re‑analysis and defense of Newton’s Prin c ipia , which shows that, and how, Newton justified his realism about gravitational force. One surprise is that Kant’s semantics of singular cognitive reference (examined in §3) directly and strongly supports Newton’s Rule 4 of scientific method (§4), which strongly supports his realism about gravi‑ tational force (summarized in §2). A further surprise is that Hegel first recognized that this semantics of singular cognitive reference directly and strongly supports Newton’s meth odological Rule 4 of experimental philosophy in ways which support Newton’s realism about gravitational force, and about distance forces generally. The textual and exegetical issues these attributions require I examine elsewhere. Here I make these important findings available to philosophers and historians of science. (*) Invited paper

Silent Modernism : Soundscapes and the Unsayable in Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf

Abstract: This thesis examines silence in modernist fiction, explaining how it forms a central aspect of realism in the modernist novel. It is based on close readings of the form and function of silence in the works of Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. The study proposes that silence as part of a text’s soundscape and silence as part of its mode of literary expression are related in modernist fiction. As part of the soundscape, silence represents aspects of ‘real’ human experience that cannot be conveyed in words: silence in modernist fiction is hence a response to linguistic problems connected to the representation of mind and feeling. The first chapter investigates what a reading of silence reveals about the modernist novel as a subgenre. Early twentieth-century linguistic difficulties are explored in terms of a crisis of realism: what is at stake here is the (im)possibility of achieving mimesis of certain aspects of reality through the use of language. Silence is seen to constitute a solution to the crisis of realism, forming part of an aesthetics of obscurity which seeks to circumscribe rather than describe. In modernist fiction, silence often represents a subjective experience of something that is not necessarily unintelligible, but ineffable by its very nature. Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf did not abandon realism as an aesthetic paradigm; they just redefined it. The subsequent seven chapters examine silence as a form of representation in the works of Richardson, Joyce, and Woolf. Chapters two to four discuss silence in Richardson’s Pilgrimage (1915-67), both in relation to Miriam’s explorations of her inner ‘Being’ and as an aspect of the form of the novel-sequence. Chapters five and six investigate silence in Joyce’s early fiction. A scrutiny of the early drafts of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) reveals radical changes in Joyce’s conceptualization of silence. Silences that are explicitly described in the text are associated with Stephen’s inner world, where he hides from the squalor of his external surroundings. Chapters seven and eight, finally, explore the oscillations between silence and sound in Woolf’s fiction, examining silence in relation to creativity and repose but primarily as an indication of rupture in the social and private spheres. In the work of all three writers, silence is a presence which communicates in its own way, representing nonverbal aspects of human experience. (Less)

Imperial Realism: Post-War IR Theory and Decolonisation

Abstract: The paper reviews the record of realism in IR theory in relation to the process of decolonisation. It argues that despite being traditionally set against imperial adventures and opposed to the kind of idealism in which they are usually coated, realism was remarkably silent about decolonisation, at a time when most commentators thought that the emergence of newly independent countries was a more portentous event than even the cold war. It explains this silence by the structure of the post-war debate on decolonisation, largely monopolised by modernisation theorists and often confined to the precincts of international organisations, but also by the fact that IR theory had built-in arguments against the unlimited extension of sovereignty that allowed its practitioners to advocate a pragmatic support for imperial powers and reproducing classical tropes of imperial thought.

Are Species Real?: An Essay on the Metaphysics of Species

Abstract: Series Editor's Foreword Preface and Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. Natural Kinds 3. Essentialism 4. Individualism 5. Metaphysics of Species for the Commitment-Wary 6. The Natural Kindness Approach 7. Pluralism & Realism Revisited References Index

Kafka's Cognitive Realism

Abstract: Introduction: Cognitive Realism, Kafka, and Literary Theory 1. Perception without Pictures 2. Re-Envisioning the Imagination 3. Kafka's Poetics of Perception in Der Process 4.Feeling From New Perspectives Conclusion: Cognitive Realism in Kafka and Beyond

Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity

Abstract: Introduction 1. Existing treatments of Heidegger on intentionality 2. Ontology and propositional intentionality 3. Intentionality and meaning 4. 'Being', realism and truth 5. Freedom and normativity 6. Authenticity and finitude Conclusion.

Queer Post-Gender Ethics: The Shape of Selves to Come

Abstract: Introduction 1 The Resilience of Bigenderism 2 Diagnosing and Transcending Sexual Difference 3 Gender Justice 4 Philosophical Arguments for Post-Gender Ontological Ethics 5 Queer Futures and Queer Ethics: Sketching Inexhaustibly Reciprocal Androgyny 6 The Politics of Implementing Post-Gender Ethics: Beyond Idealism / Realism 7 The Fully Armed Self: Cultivating Post-Gender Subjects 8 Ethical Post-Gender Sexual Relationships and Communities Conclusion: Utopian Realism

Best theory scientific realism

Abstract: The aim of this essay is to argue for a new version of ‘inference-to-the-best-explanation’ scientific realism, which I characterize as Best Theory Realism or ‘BTR’ On BTR, the realist needs only to embrace a commitment to the truth or approximate truth of the best theories in a field, those which are unique in satisfying the highest standards of empirical success in a mature field with many successful but falsified predecessors I argue that taking our best theories to be true is justified because it provides the best explanation of (1) the predictive success of their predecessors and (2) their own special success Against standard and especially structural realism, I argue against the claim that the best explanations of the success of theories is provided by identifying their true components, such as structural relations between unobservable, which are preserved across theory change In particular, I criticize Ladyman's and Carrier’s structural account of the success of phlogiston theory, and Worrall's well-known structural account of the success of Fresnel’s theory of light I argue that these accounts tacitly assume the truth of our best theories, which in any case provides a better explanation of these theories’ success than the structural account Structural realism is now defended as the only version of realism that is able to surmount the pessimistic meta-induction and the general problem that successful theories involve ontological claims concerning unobservable entities that are abandoned and falsified in theory-change I argue that Best Theory Realism can overcome the pessimistic meta-induction and this general problem posed by theory-change Our best theories possess a characteristic which sharply distinguishes them from their successful but false predecessors Furthermore ‘inference-to-the-best-explanation’ confirmation can establish the truth of our best theories and thus trumps the pessimistic inductive reasoning which is supposed to show that even our best theories are most likely false in their claims concerning unobservable entities and processes