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1
Mishler, William. Political support for incomplete democracies: Realist vs. idealist theories and measures. Glasgow: University of Strathclyde, 2000.
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2
Stenglin, Jürgen von. Denken der Wirklichkeit: Eine sprachlich und kognitiv fundierte Theorie der Erkenntnis. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1990.
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Krollmann, Fritz-Peter. Grundlegung: Historische Betrachtung zur Philosophie im Horizont der Theorie des Holistischen Idealismus. Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2002.
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Krollmann, Fritz-Peter. Ethik und Ästhetik: Zwei thematische Erörterungen im Horizont der Theorie des Holistischen Idealismus. Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2002.
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5
Walter, Neumann. Negativer Materialismus, Logik und praktischer Idealismus: Zur Kritik der Marxschen Theorie. Hannover: Verlag für die Gesellschaft, 1996.
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1943-, Wiegand Roger, ed. Cohen-Macaulay representations. Providence, R.I: American Mathematical Society, 2012.
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7
Tolley, Clinton. Idealism and the Question of Truth. Edited by Michael Glanzberg. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199557929.013.4.
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This chapter traces developments in idealist theories of truth in and after Kant, focusing especially on key moments in the nineteenth-century history of analytic philosophy and phenomenology. Though Kant intended his transcendental idealism to effect a Copernican revolution in philosophy, he did not advocate for revisions in the traditional definition of truth in terms of a correspondence or agreement between our judgments and their objects. Many of his successors countered that it was only by carefully revisiting the nature of truth itself that philosophy could hope to avoid the “subjectivizing” pitfalls they saw latent in Kantian idealism. Intense post-Kantian reflection on the concept of truth led to a series of accounts which were deeply influential across a number of philosophical traditions and which provide the crucial proximate historical and conceptual context for many of the most influential discussions of truth, and semantics more generally, in the twentieth century.
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1964-, Schumacher Ralph, and Scholz Oliver R. 1960-, eds. Idealismus als Theorie der Repräsentation? Paderborn: Mentis, 2001.
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9
Bernstein, Sara. Causal Idealism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198746973.003.0013.
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This chapter argues that causal idealism, the view that causation is a product of mental activity, is at least as attractive as several contemporary views of causation that incorporate human thought and agency into the causal relation. The chapter discusses three such views: contextualism, which holds that truth conditions for causal judgments are contextual; contrastivism, which holds that the causal relation is a quaternary relation between a cause, an effect, and contextually specified contrast classes for the cause and the effect; and pragmatism, which holds that causal claims are sensitive to pragmatic factors. This chapter suggests that causal idealism has at least as much explanatory strength as these three theories, and is more parsimonious and internally stable.
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Pearce, Kenneth L. Mereological Idealism. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198746973.003.0012.
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According to common sense, some but not all collections of objects are unified into larger wholes. For instance, a certain collection of pieces composes a person’s desk, but there is no object composed of that person’s left ear and the Eiffel Tower. Mereological idealism is the view that our conceptualizing activity is responsible for this unification: a collection of objects composes a whole if and only if those objects are co-apprehended by some mind under some concept. This chapter develops this view in detail and defends it against objections. Additionally, the chapter argues that mereological idealism is able to solve certain well-known problems faced by other theories of composition: the vagueness problem, the causal exclusion problem, and the problem of alternative conceptual schemes.
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Schneider, Susan. Idealism, or Something Near Enough. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198746973.003.0017.
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This chapter develops a critique of physicalism based on the mathematical nature of physics. Drawing from an earlier paper of the author’s, it urges that physicalists need to locate a physicalistically kosher account of the nature of mathematical entities, because fundamental theories in physics are highly mathematical and abstract. At first it may seem that there are many theories in philosophy of mathematics that the physicalist could turn to. But it is argued that the physicalist cannot appeal to Platonism. Further, many of the leading nominalist approaches are mind-dependent; others raise direction of explanation worries for the physicalist for other reasons. After discarding physicalism, the chapter employs an account of mathematical entities that embraces the mind-dependence of fundamental physical entities, and leads to a form of non-physicalist monism. ‘protomentalism.’
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Schwadron, Hannah. Ballet Bawdies and Dancing Ducks. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935321.013.162.
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This article examines the dancing joke-work of Jewish film stars as ballet swans in Be Yourself and Funny Girl. It shows how the joke of the Jewish swan queers white heterosexual femininity while revealing the sustained power of its classical Western-centric swan tropes. In situating Jewish swan humor within theories of parody, queer discourse, and gendered joke-work, the article highlights the pleasurable embodiment of enduring Jewish female stereotypes and reveals a comic dance legacy of the funny girl body unfit for love. It also explains how the humor of ballet parody and the swan constructs the Jewish funny girl body; how Be Yourself and Funny Girl stake a claim in ethnic and sexual otherness as sites of comic expression and critical difference; and how each film embodies critiques of classical ballet and its idealist proscriptions for white women even as both sustain romantic fantasies of female leads.
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Zack, Naomi. Ideal, Nonideal, and Empirical Theories of Social Justice. Edited by Naomi Zack. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190236953.013.59.
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Ideals of justice may do little toward the correction of injustice in real life. The influence of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has led some philosophers of race to focus on “nonideal theory” as a way to bring conditions in unjust societies closer to conditions of justice described by ideal theory. However, a more direct approach to injustice may be needed to address unfair public policy and existing conditions for minorities in racist societies. Applicative justice describes the applications of principles of justice that are now “good enough” for whites to nonwhites (based on prior comparisons of how whites and nonwhites are treated).
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Moland, Lydia L. Hegel's Aesthetics. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190847326.001.0001.
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Hegel’s Aesthetics: The Art of Idealism is the first comprehensive interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of art in English in thirty years. In a new analysis of Hegel’s notorious “end of art” thesis, it argues for a variety of ways art ends, including historical, conceptual, and prosaic endings. It shows the indispensability of Hegel’s aesthetics for understanding his philosophical idealism and introduces a new claim about his account of aesthetic experience. In contrast to previous interpretations, it argues for considering Hegel’s discussion of individual arts—architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry—on their own terms, unlocking new insights about his theories of perception, feeling, selfhood, and freedom. This new approach allows Hegel’s philosophy to engage with modern aesthetic theories and opens new possibilities for applying Hegel’s aesthetics to contemporary art. Hegel’s Aesthetics also clarifies why Hegel is known as the “father of art history” by elucidating his controversial analysis of symbolic, classical, and romantic art and by clarifying his examples of each. By incorporating newly available sources from Hegel’s lectures on art, it expands our understanding of the particular artworks Hegel discusses as well as the theories he rejects. Hegel’s Aesthetics situates his arguments in the intense philosophizing about art among his contemporaries, including Kant, Lessing, Herder, Schelling, and the Schlegel brothers. It gives us a rich vision of the foundation of his ideas about art and the range of their application, confirming Hegel as one of the most important theorists of art in the history of philosophy.
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Saward, Michael. Democratic Design. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198867227.001.0001.
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The twenty-first century poses serious challenges to democratic ideals and institutions. Democratic Design argues that to respond effectively—to remake and renew democracy––democrats need to think and work in new ways, using a new and versatile toolkit of concepts and practices. Drawing together, and moving beyond, the best of existing theories and models, the author builds, defends, and illustrates the democratic design framework—a new set of tools for politicians, reformers, and observers to explore creative and hybrid forms of democracy. The book encourages idealism and practicality, demanding special attention to the history and politics of diverse countries and contexts. Bringing theory and practice into close conversation, the chapter fuses insights of design thinking and the future of politics and government, showing how a comprehensive and robust approach to rethinking democratic governance is both feasible and essential.
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Cruft, Rowan. In What Sense Should Respect for Human Rights Be Attainable? Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198713258.003.0020.
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This chapter initially disputes Brownlee’s claim that because human rights are ideals, they cannot be subject to feasibility requirements. The chapter goes on to consider an alternative, more complex interpretation of Brownlee’s claim: that because human rights’ ideality is compatible with human rights guiding action and bearing practical importance, there is no reason for the theorist to commit herself to feasibility conditions on human rights. Assessing the plausibility of this claim draws the chapter into methodological debates relevant to the evaluation of the rival ‘political’ and ‘orthodox’ views of human rights. It shows that the ‘orthodox’ approach best supports Brownlee’s complex argument against feasibility conditions.
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Gaus, Gerald. The Tyranny of the Ideal. Princeton University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691183428.001.0001.
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This book lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. It shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. The book argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice—essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years—needs to change. Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, the book points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society—with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives—have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. The book defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be. Presenting an original framework for how we should think about morality, this book rigorously analyzes a theory of ideal justice more suitable for contemporary times.
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Devetak, Richard. International Relations Meets Critical Theory. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823568.003.0004.
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This chapter provides an account of the reception of critical theory in international relations in the early 1980s. It is structured around detailed studies of four pioneering international relations theorists: R. B. J. Walker, Richard K. Ashley, Andrew Linklater, and R. W. Cox. In their different ways these international relations scholars helped fashion the critical persona on the basis of a modified philosophical reflexivity inherited from German idealism and historical materialism, and their Frankfurt School heirs. The end result of this reception was to refigure the theorist as a critical intellectual, capable of achieving higher levels of ethical comportment on the basis of Enlightenment self-reflection, and deeper insight into the latent forces of political transformation on the basis of dialectical-philosophical history.
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Kasperbauer, T. J. Psychological Plausibility for Animal Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190695811.003.0006.
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This chapter outlines the ethical implications of the psychological processes discussed in chapters 2–5. It illustrates the range of views one can take on how psychological processes impact moral ideals, within the context of debates over “ought implies can” and collective moral obligations. The main goal of the chapter is to show how psychological factors must inform ethical and political theorizing about animals. Criteria for assessing the psychological plausibility of moral ideals are proposed and applied to popular theories in animal ethics. These criteria are discussed in relation to “non-ideal” theories for improving treatment of animals and changing attitudes to animals over long periods of time.
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Wilberding, James, ed. World Soul. Oxford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190913441.001.0001.
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The concept of the world soul is difficult to understand in large part because over the course of history it has been invoked to very different ends and within the frameworks of very different philosophical systems, with very different concepts of the world soul emerging as a result. This volume brings together eleven chapters by leading philosophers in their respective fields that collectively explore the various ways in which this concept has been understood and employed, covering the following philosophical areas: Platonism, Stoicism, Medieval, Indian (Vedāntic), Kabbalah, Renaissance, Early Modern, German Romanticism, German Idealism, American Transcendentalism, and contemporary quantum mechanics and panpsychism theories. In addition, short reflections illuminate the impact the concept of the world soul has had on a small selection of areas outside of philosophy: harmony, biology (spontaneous generation), the music of Henry Purcell, psychoanalysis, and Gaia theories.
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Devetak, Richard. Critical International Theory in Historical Mode. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823568.003.0006.
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This chapter recovers a neglected, namely, historical mode of theorizing in an effort to reorient critical international theory. As critical international theories have become more meta-theoretical and abstract, they have lost touch with history. The chapter reconsiders R. W. Cox’s writings—in particular his abiding engagement with historicism and realism—as a means of retrieving critical intellectual resources outside of German idealism and historical materialism. The chapter then uses revisionist histories of the Enlightenment to help reorient critical international theory around historically grounded rather than philosophically grounded forms of criticism. Intellectual resources for this end are recovered from early modern European thought—particularly the historicizing and secularizing political theories of Renaissance humanism and Absolutist historiography. The final section explores the thought of Giambattista Vico, one of Cox’s professed influences, for its ‘Enlightened’ emphasis on humanist pedagogy and its historicist attention to changing forms of civil institutions.
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Candlish, Stewart, and Nic Damnjanovic. The Identity Theory of Truth. Edited by Michael Glanzberg. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199557929.013.10.
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When one thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case. In this truistic but influential thought lies the germ of the identity theory of truth. For, in the broadest terms, the identity theory holds that truth is a matter of identity between how things are and how one takes them to be. Giving such a theory substantive content, however, requires the specification of a pair of candidate entities for identification. The early sections of this chapter consider identity theories based on the most frequently proposed pair of entities, namely facts and propositions, focusing in particular on whether such theories can steer between the Scylla of mere truism and the Charybdis of absurdity (such as making falsehood impossible). The final sections briefly examine the connections between the identity theory of truth and quietism, on the one hand, and monistic idealism on the other.
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Devetak, Richard. Critical International Theory. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823568.001.0001.
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Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory. Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory’s prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory’s reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.
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Cureton, Adam. The Moral Concept of Right as Adjudication. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198808930.003.0004.
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Rawls proposes that the moral concept of ‘right’ is defined by the functional role it has of properly adjudicating conflicting claims that persons make on one another and on social practices. Substantive moral theories of right and wrong are supposed to provide more specific principles, criteria, values, and ideals for interpreting and resolving this fundamental moral problem. It is not immediately apparent, however, what moral problem Rawls thinks substantive theories of right are supposed to interpret and address. The aim of this chapter is to offer a fuller account of what Rawls could have meant by defining the concept of right as the proper adjudication of conflicting claims that persons make on one another or on social practices. Three implications of this expanded definition of right are explained, and two reasons are then offered in its defense.
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Devetak, Richard. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823568.003.0001.
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The Introduction sets out the approach to intellectual history adopted in the book. Influenced by the Cambridge School intellectual historians—Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock—the chapter defends a contextual and empirical approach designed to avoid the anachronism and presentism that often mar studies of international relations theory and to situate theoretical developments and receptions in argumentative context. The chapter also pursues two further objectives. First, to distance itself from the dialectical-philosophical approaches that dominate critical international theories informed by German idealism and historical materialism. Second, following Ian Hunter’s investigations into the ethico-spiritual exercises performed on the self to problematize prior ethical imperatives and social comportments, the Introduction directs attention to the cultivation of the critical intellectual persona through exercises in philosophical self-fashioning.
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Russell, Daniel C. Putting Ideals in Their Place. Edited by Nancy E. Snow. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199385195.013.48.
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Ideal virtue theories posit what counts as good character and then ask how one gets there from here. This chapter defends a non-ideal theory, on two fronts. One, getting better is path-dependent: to understand moral development, one must first understand what psychological paths are available, and then determine what developments that are possible along those paths would count as genuine improvements. Ideals like “the virtuous person” help one understand in which direction “better” lies, and one cannot do that work without them. Second, that is all the work ideals do, because doing better is also path-dependent. While the virtue of generosity (say) has the right goal of helping others, that goal is indeterminate, and it takes practical intelligence to appreciate what is feasible in the world as one finds it to determine what it would mean to realize one’s goal in a way that is genuinely excellent.
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Oklopcic, Zoran. Beyond the People. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198799092.001.0001.
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Who is ‘the people’? How does it exercise its power? When is the people entitled to exercise its rights? From where does that people derive its authority? What is the meaning of its self-government in a democratic constitutional order? For the most part, scholars approach these questions from their disciplinary perspectives, with the help of canonical texts, and in the context of ongoing theoretical debates. Beyond the People is a systematic and comprehensive, yet less disciplinarily disciplined study that confronts the same questions, texts, and debates in a new way. Its point of departure is simple and intuitive. A sovereign people is the work of a theoretical imagination, always shaped by the assumptions, aspirations, and anticipations of a particular theorist-imaginer. To look beyond the people is to confront them directly, by exploring the ways in which theorists script, stage, choreograph, record, and otherwise evoke the scenes, actors, actions, and events that permit us to speak intelligibly—and often enthusiastically—about the ideals of popular sovereignty, self-determination, constituent power, ultimate authority, sovereign equality, and collective self-government. What awaits beyond these ideals is a new set of images, and a different way to understand the perennial Who? What? Where? When? and How? questions—not as the suggestions about how best to understand these concepts, but rather as the oblique and increasingly costly ways of not asking the one we probably should: What, more specifically, do we need them for?
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Devetak, Richard. Revisiting the Sources of Critical International Theory. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198823568.003.0003.
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This chapter revisits the intellectual resources marshalled by critical international theory. It starts with the Frankfurt School and Max Horkheimer’s distinction between two conceptions of theory—critical and traditional. The chapter then turns to extended discussions of German idealism and historical materialism—in particular, Kant, Hegel, and Marx—to outline the normative and dialectical forms of social philosophy inherited by the Frankfurt School. Arising out of Kant’s transcendental philosophy was a form of critique concerned with the epistemic conditions under which the reasoning subject attains a pure intelligence detached from experience. This provided the context in which Hegel and Marx introduced their dialectical social theories. The chapter’s final section revisits the Kantian Enlightenment, which has exerted such an important influence over critical international theory. Running through the chapter is the transformative role critical philosophy plays in restoring freedom and reason to the world.
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Moriarty, Jeffrey. Desert-Based Justice. Edited by Serena Olsaretti. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199645121.013.7.
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Justice requires giving people what they deserve. Or so many philosophers—and according to many of those philosophers, everyone else—thought for centuries, until the 1970s and 1980s, however, perhaps under the influence of Rawls’s desert-less theory, desert was largely cast out of discussions of distributive justice. Now it is making a comeback. This chapter considers recent research on the concept of desert, debate about the conditions for desert, arguments for and against its requital, and connections between desert and other distributive ideals. It suggests that desert-sensitive theories of distributive justice, despite the challenges they face, have a promising future.
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Porterfield, Amanda. “The Real Nature and Spirit of Our Lives”. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199372652.003.0006.
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Proponents of social evolution blurred boundaries between commerce and Christianity after the Civil War, championing Christian work as a means to economic growth, republican liberty, and national prosperity. Meanwhile, workers invoked Christ to condemn patronizing attitudes toward labor, and by organizing labor unions to hold capitalists accountable to Pauline ideals of social membership. Influenced by organic theories of social organization that traced modern corporations to medieval institutions, U.S. courts began recognizing corporations as natural persons protected by rights guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which had originally be crafted to protect the rights of African Americans.
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Desmond, Will D. Hegel's Antiquity. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198839064.001.0001.
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Hegel’s Antiquity aims to summarize, contextualize, and criticize Hegel’s understanding and treatment of major aspects of the classical world, approaching each of the major areas of his historical thinking in turn: politics, art, religion, philosophy, and history itself. The discussion excerpts relevant details from a range of Hegel’s works, with an eye both to the ancient sources with which he worked, and the contemporary theories (German aesthetic theory, Romanticism, Kantianism, Idealism (including Hegel’s own), and emerging historicism) which coloured his readings. What emerges is that Hegel’s interest in both Greek and Roman antiquity was profound and is essential for his philosophy, arguably providing the most important components of his vision of world history: Hegel is generally understood as a thinker of modernity (in various senses), but his modernity can only be understood in essential relation to its predecessor and ‘others’, notably the Greek world and Roman world whose essential ‘spirit’ he assimilates to his own notion of Geist.
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Dwan, David. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198738527.003.0001.
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This chapter considers Orwell’s merits as a political thinker. It shows how his politics can only be understood by examining them in context—alongside contemporary debates about the importance of realism and the drawbacks of moralism in political life. The consistency and power of his views also need to be tested against a broader backdrop of political thought. Orwell was not a systematic thinker and he was famously hostile to intellectuals and theorists; yet the problems he encountered in politics had an irreducible conceptual element. Orwell’s contradictions express his own limitations, but they also expose the limits of justice itself. For justice, it would seem, is many-headed and services different—even incompatible—ends. Orwell’s writings express this conflict, producing a very agonized form of idealism.
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Schlapbach, Karin. The Mimesis of Dance between Eloquence and Visual Art. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807728.003.0003.
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This chapter shows that pantomime undermines the ostensible dichotomy of art and text by engaging in visual narration. It examines the perception of dance as a superior form of rhetoric, arguing that Lucian’s On Dancing cleverly deploys traditional ideals of rhetorical versatility (Proteus and the octopus) to show that the dancer embodies them more perfectly than the orator, because his skill is physical. The dancer’s body language is situated in the context of ancient theories of gesture and physiognomy as well as in the discourse on works of art (ekphrasis), from which the motif of silent speech and the use of notions such as ēthos and pathos are adopted. Finally, the chapter examines the possible role of Hellenistic sculptural groups emphasizing motion and narrative developments in preparing the path for pantomime’s empire-wide success.
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Cohen, Jean L. Sovereignty, the Corporate Religious, and Jurisdictional/Political Pluralism. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198794394.003.0007.
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We typically associate sovereignty with the modern state, and the coincidence of worldly powers of political rule, public authority, legitimacy, and jurisdiction with territorially delimited state authority. We are now also used to referencing liberal principles of justice, social-democratic ideals of fairness, republican conceptions of non-domination, and democratic ideas of popular sovereignty (democratic constitutionalism) for the standards that constitute, guide, limit, and legitimate the sovereign exercise of public power. This chapter addresses an important challenge to these principles: the re-emergence of theories and claims to jurisdictional/political pluralism on behalf of non-state ‘nomos groups’ within well-established liberal democratic polities. The purpose of this chapter is to preserve the key achievements of democratic constitutionalism and apply them to every level on which public power, rule, and/or domination is exercised.
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Lalli, Roberto. Hunting for the Luminiferous Ether. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198797258.003.0009.
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This chapter re-examines the view widely held by physicists that the luminiferous ether became an outdated concept in the early twentieth century and that Albert Einstein’s special relativity killed it. A second common narrative is that the null result of the 1887 Michelson–Morley ether-drift experiment led to Einstein’s theory and the demise of the ether. On the basis of these two simplified narratives, it has become part of the physicists’ ‘imagined past’ that the Michelson–Morley experiment provided the key evidence decreeing the end of the ether. Using scientometrics, this chapter argues that the first part of this idealised narrative is misleading and that the two parts of this narrative are deeply intertwined, as both had historical roots in the reception of Einstein’s relativity theories. In this perspective, the well-known episode of Dayton C. Miller’s repetition of the Michelson–Morley experiment in the 1920s appears in a new light.
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Gabrielson, Teena, Cheryl Hall, John M. Meyer, and David Schlosberg, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Environmental Political Theory. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199685271.001.0001.
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Set at the intersection of political theory and environmental politics, yet with broad engagement across the environmental social sciences and humanities, this Handbook illustrates, defines, and challenges the field of environmental political theory (EPT). Authors address canonical theorists and contemporary political and environmental problems with a diversity of theoretical approaches. The initial section focuses on EPT as a field of inquiry within political science and political theory, both theoretically and within the academy. Next, authors engage with the conceptualization of nature and the environment, as well as the nature of political subjects, communities, and boundaries in those environments. Another section addresses the values that motivate environmental theorists, including justice, responsibility, rights, limits, flourishing, and the potential conflicts that can emerge within, between, and against these ideals. The final section examines the primary structures that constrain or enable the achievement of environmental ends, as well as theorizations of environmental movements, citizenship, and the potential for ongoing environmental action and change.
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Sargent, Lyman Tower. Ideology and Utopia. Edited by Michael Freeden and Marc Stears. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585977.013.0016.
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In popular usage both ideology and utopia have negative, and somewhat similar, connotations. Utopia is thought to imply something naively idealistic and, as a result, impossible to achieve due to the constraints of the ‘real world’ or because ‘human nature’ will get in the way. Ideology is also thought to imply being out of touch with the ‘real world’ by being blinkered by a set of beliefs that distorts one’s understanding of that ‘real world’.This chapter examines the recent history of the relationship between the two concepts by examining the way they are treated by their best known theorists, Ernst Bloch, Michael Freeden, Fredric Jameson, Ruth Levitas, Karl Mannheim, and Paul Ricoeur. The chapter argues that while they are closely related and one can become the other, they can also be separated because they reflect different ways of understanding the world.
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Trask, Michael. Ideal Minds. Cornell University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9781501752438.001.0001.
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Following the 1960s, the decade's focus on consciousness-raising transformed into an array of intellectual projects far afield of movement politics. The mind's powers came to preoccupy a range of thinkers and writers: ethicists pursuing contractual theories of justice, radical ecologists interested in the paleolithic brain, cultists, and the devout of both evangelical and New Age persuasions. This book presents a boldly revisionist argument about the revival of subjectivity in postmodern American culture, connecting familiar figures within the intellectual landscape of the 1970s who share a commitment to what the book calls “neo-idealism” as a weapon in the struggle against discredited materialist and behaviorist worldviews. In a heterodox intellectual and literary history of the 1970s, the book mixes ideas from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, deep ecology, political theory, science fiction, neoclassical economics, and the sociology of religion. It also delves into the decade's more esoteric branches of learning, including Scientology, anarchist theory, rapture prophesies, psychic channeling, and neo-Malthusianism. Through this investigation, the book argues that a dramatic inflation in the value of consciousness and autonomy beginning in the 1970s accompanied a growing argument about the state's inability to safeguard such values. Ultimately, the thinkers who the book analyses found alternatives to statism in conditions that would lend intellectual support to the consolidation of these concepts in the radical free market ideologies of the 1980s.
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Peterson, Anna L. Works Righteousness. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197532232.001.0001.
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Works Righteousness is the first full-length study of the place of practice in ethical theory. It is a critique of the idealism of dominant approaches, an analysis of alternative models in which practice plays a more significant role, and an argument for taking practice seriously both in broad questions about ethical theory and in concrete case studies. The book’s main argument is that what people actually do should be central to ethical theory. Rather than assuming that pre-established moral ideas guide action, ethicists should acknowledge and explore the ways that practices generate values and the mutual shaping between ideas and actions. This argument challenges dominant philosophical and religious theories that assume that ideas are what really matter. Works Righteousness analyses the place of practice in these traditions, showing the links between their emphasis on internal states and simple, linear relationships between ideas, actions, and results. These themes are challenged by alternative models such as pragmatism, Marxism, and religious pacifism, which give practice a larger role and in the process highlight important themes such as the way social structures condition moral ideas and actions, the dangers of thinking about moral problems as polarized dilemmas, and the complex mutual shaping of ideas and actions. A practice-focused approach sheds new light on concrete case studies, underlining the value of attention to people’s concrete experiences and relationships in efforts to analyse and address contemporary problems such as hate speech, euthanasia, and climate change.
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O'Sullivan, Noël. Conservatism. Edited by Michael Freeden and Marc Stears. Oxford University Press, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585977.013.0005.
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Conservative ideology in its moderate form is inspired by opposition to belief in radical political and social change on the ground that it rests on several mistaken assumptions, of which the most important are that human nature is highly malleable; that human will can refashion history in whatever ways human ideals may require; that society is the artificial product of a contract between autonomous individuals; and that evil is an eliminable feature of human existence. The unifying theme of conservative ideology, by contrast, is a defence of limited politics, although different schools of conservatism have theorized the concept of limit in ways that are incompatible and even incoherent. Of these, the four principal schools are the reactionary, the radical, the moderate, and, more recently, the New Right. This chapter examines the degree of coherence achieved by each of these schools of thought.
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Boucher, David. Appropriating Hobbes. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198817215.001.0001.
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The aim of this book is not to trace the changing fortunes of the interpretation of one of the most sophisticated and famous political philosophers who ever lived, but to glimpse here and there his place in different contexts, and how his interpreters see their own images reflected in him, or how they define themselves in contrast to him. The main claim is that there is no Hobbes independent of the interpretations that arise from his appropriation in these various contexts and which serve to present him to the world. There is no one perfect context that enables us to get at what Hobbes ‘really meant’, despite the numerous claims to the contrary. He is almost indistinguishable from the context in which he is read. This contention is justified with reference to hermeneutics, and particularly the theories of Gadamer, Koselleck, and Ricoeur, contending that through a process of ‘distanciation’ Hobbes’s writings have been appropriated and commandeered to do service in divergent contexts such as philosophical idealism; debates over the philosophical versus historical understanding of texts; and in ideological disputations, and emblematic characterizations of him by various disciplines such as law, politics, and international relations. The book illustrates the capacity of a text to take on the colouration of its surroundings by exploring and explicating the importance of contexts in reading and understanding how and why particular interpretations of Hobbes have emerged, such as those of Carl Schmitt and Michael Oakeshott, or the international jurists of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
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Gray, Erik. Marriage. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198752974.003.0006.
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Marital love is rarely represented by poets, at least in their lyric poetry. Lyric, with its brevity, its intensity, its ellipses, seems ideally suited to a particular type of passionate love typified by novelty, absence, uncertainty. Conjugal love, powerful though it may be, lacks these particular qualities. Yet if the pleasure and even purpose of marriage lies in discovering freedom and self-realization within strictly prescribed limits, then lyric could well be seen as the genre most suited to marital love. This chapter examines the tradition of marriage lyric that has developed, for the most part, in recent centuries, as the ideal of loving, companionate marriage has spread. Taking as its starting point the work of the Victorian poet and theorist Coventry Patmore, whose treatise on poetic meter illustrates the same ideals that mark his poems about marriage, the chapter ranges from Anne Bradstreet to Seamus Heaney and other contemporary poets of marital love.
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Larmore, Charles. What Is Political Philosophy? Princeton University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691179148.001.0001.
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What is political philosophy? What are its fundamental problems? And how should it be distinguished from moral philosophy? This book redefines the distinctive aims of political philosophy, reformulating in this light the basis of a liberal understanding of politics. Because political life is characterized by deep and enduring conflict between rival interests and differing moral ideals, the core problems of political philosophy are the regulation of conflict and the conditions under which the members of society may thus be made subject to political authority. We cannot assume that reason will lead to unanimity about these matters because individuals hold different moral convictions. The book therefore analyzes the concept of reasonable disagreement and investigates the ways we can adjudicate conflicts among people who reasonably disagree about the nature of the human good and the proper basis of political society. Challenging both the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill, and more recent theories of political realism proposed by Bernard Williams and others, the book argues for a version of political liberalism that is centered on political legitimacy rather than on social justice, and that aims to be well suited to our times rather than universally valid. It proposes a new definition of political philosophy and demonstrates the profound implications of that definition. The result is a compelling and distinctive intervention from a major political philosopher.
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Scuriatti, Laura. Mina Loy's Critical Modernism. University Press of Florida, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.5744/florida/9780813056302.001.0001.
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In Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism, Laura Scuriatti argues that Loy’s corpus of works produces a kind of “critical” modernism, making the case that Loy’s corpus exhibits a skeptical, detached attitude toward its own simultaneous celebration and criticism of modernist aesthetic paradigms. Most modernist works are self-reflexive in this regard, but Loy’s corpus creates for itself a space of dis-affiliation, which combines critique with self-critique, rather than forging a space of rebellion and antagonism. Scuriatti investigates the notions of the masterpiece and the sacred art object, especially in their relation to the market; the figure of the author and the value of authorship; the embattled relationship between art and politics; the artwork's relationship to national language, identity and rootlessness. Scuriatti provides a new, in-depth investigation of specific aspects of the Florentine and Italian context in particular, which have so far been neglected by scholarship. Specifically, attention is devoted to the Florentine avant-garde journal Lacerba, and to the works of Giovanni Papini, Ada Negri and Enif Robert. The volume presents new insights into Loy’s feminism and argues that her texts respond to the rewriting of Otto Weininger’s then widely influential theories in the magazine Lacerba. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s, Luisa Muraro’s and Teresa de Lauretis’s claims, this study also rethinks the concept of eccentricity, conceived not as “aberrant”, but as consciously anti-normative, anti-idealistic and self-critical, in relation to modernist aesthetics. It shows that Loy’s texts present dialogic, “narratable,” “eccentric” selves and subjectivities, which create uncomfortable critical spaces within modernism as a broad movement.
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Dawson, Melanie V. Edith Wharton and the Modern Privileges of Age. University Press of Florida, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5744/florida/9780813066301.001.0001.
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This project explores age-based obsessions of the modern era, situating the charting and interrogation of age among modernity’s central preoccupations, with particular attention to the gendering of old age and the creation of intergenerational conflicts. While chronological considerations privileged the young and tended to exclude those past adulthood, much of modern literature interrogated the age-based forms of standardization rooted in the era’s understanding of personal development. By focusing on the ways that age was constructed so as to uphold the ideal of a coherent, stable self, this literature interrogates theories of development that were believed to govern life trajectories, and with them, ideals about progress, often to the point of envisioning aging as a form of unwelcome dissolution. The era’s literary texts, however, complicated such views by adding to familiar figures of the flapper and the young generation a host of others that broke age thresholds: the mature youth, the youthful adult, the young middle-aged, the rejuvenate, the child bride, the aged, and the ghost. All such figures invited an interrogation of youth’s supposed ascendancy by suggesting that modernity’s age-based privileges were more varied and more widely dispersed than they seemed. If youth appeared dominant in terms of bodily forms and youthful energies, the more mature are revealed as possessing resources, experiences, and strategies that counter the assets of the young, leading to scenarios where the outcomes of intergenerational conflicts were both volatile and unexpected.
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Myers, Alicia. Blessed Among Women? Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190677084.001.0001.
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Mothers appear throughout the New Testament. Called “blessed among women” by Elizabeth in the Gospel of Luke, Mary, the mother of Jesus, is the most obvious example. But Mary is joined by Elizabeth, a chorus of unnamed mothers seeking healing or promotions for their children, as well as male mothers, including Paul (Gal 4:19–20) and Jesus. Although interpreters of the New Testament have explored these maternal characters and metaphors, many have only recently begun to take seriously their theological aspects. This book builds on previous studies by arguing maternal language is not only theological but also indebted to ancient gender constructions and their reshaping by early Christians. Especially significant are the physiological, anatomical, and social constructions of female bodies that permeate the ancient world where early Christianity was birthed. This book examines ancient generative theories, physiological understandings of breastmilk and breastfeeding, and presentations of prominent mothers in literature and art to analyze the use of these themes in the New Testament and several, additional early Christian writings. In a context that aligned perfection with “masculinity,” motherhood was the ideal goal for women—a justification for deficient, female existence. Proclaiming a new age ushered in by God’s Christ, however, ancient Christians debated the place of women, mothers, and motherhood as a part of their reframing of gender expectations. Rather than a homogenous approval of literal motherhood, ancient Christian writings depict a spectrum of ideals for women disciples even as they retain the assumption of masculine superiority.
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Borris, Kenneth. Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807070.001.0001.
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This book defines Platonism’s roles in early modern theories of literature, then turns to reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent new understandings of Spenser’s poetics, his major texts, his poetic vocation, and his cultural influence. By combining Christian resources with doctrines of Platonic poetics such as the poet’s and lover’s inspirational furies, the revelatory significance of beauty, and the importance of imitating exalted ideals rather than the world, he sought to attain a visionary sublimity that would ensure his enduring national significance, and he thereby became a seminal figure in the English literary “line of vision” including Milton and Blake among others. Although readings of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender typically bypass Plato’s Phaedrus, this text deeply informs the Calender’s treatments of beauty, inspiration, poetry’s psychagogic power, and its national responsibilities. In The Faerie Queene, both heroism and visionary poetics arise from the stimuli of love and beauty conceived Platonically, and idealized mimesis produces its faeryland. Faery’s queen, projected from Elizabeth I as in Platonic idealization of the beloved, not only pertains to temporal governance but also points toward the transcendental Ideas and divinity. Whereas Plato’s Republic valorizes philosophy for bringing enlightenment to counter society’s illusions, Spenser champions the learned and enraptured poetic imagination, and proceeds as such a philosopher-poet.
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McKean, Benjamin L. Disorienting Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190087807.001.0001.
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In a dizzying global economy full of injustices that threaten our freedom, people who want to promote justice should be disposed to solidarity with each other. When global supply chains assemble products from every corner of the global and workers’ economic futures seem ever more uncertain, the very neoliberal theories that helped usher in this world also provide a powerful way to understand and navigate it. Those who want to resist the injustices of today’s global economy need to reorient their way of seeing so that it is possible to act more effectively. By drawing on a diverse range of thinkers from G. W. F. Hegel and John Rawls to W. E. B. Du Bois and Iris Marion Young, Disorienting Neoliberalism provides an account of freedom that can inform transnational movements for justice. By explaining how neoliberal institutions and ideas constrain the freedom of people throughout the supply chain from worker to consumer, the book provides a new orientation to the global economy in which it is possible for people to see one other as partners in resisting a shared obstacle to freedom and thus be called to collective action. Cultivating this disposition to solidarity better expresses freedom than the pity and resentment which global inequality so often gives rise to. In doing so, the book shows how political theory can be a source of orientation to the world, illuminating how ideals can help guide action even when they may be impossible to realize.
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Roberts, Neil, ed. A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass. University Press of Kentucky, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5810/kentucky/9780813175621.001.0001.
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Literary critics and historians have long studied Frederick Douglass’s impact on American literature and history, yet surprisingly few scholars have analyzed his influence on American political thought. Political theorists have focused on the legacies of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, but editor Neil Roberts argues that it is impossible to understand their work or Afro-modern and American political thought without understanding Frederick Douglass’s contributions. Douglass was a prolific writer and public speaker, and the contributors to this comprehensive volume examine not only his famous autobiographies but also his novels, essays, and speeches. Douglass had a genius for analyzing and articulating basic American ideals such as independence, liberation, individualism, and freedom in the particular context of American slavery. The contributors explore Douglass’s understanding of the self-made American individual and the way in which Douglass expanded the notion of individual potential, arguing that citizens have a responsibility to improve not only their own situations but also their communities’ well-being. The contributors also consider the idea of agency, investigating Douglass’s passionate insistence that every person in a democracy, even a slave, possesses an innate ability to act. Several of the volume’s essays seek to illuminate Douglass’s complex racial politics, deconstructing what seems at first to be his surprising aversion to racial pride, and others critique concepts of masculinity and gender in his oeuvre. The volume concludes with a discussion of Douglass’s contributions to pre- and post–Civil War jurisprudence.