The Philosophy of Historiography?

Book reviewed in this article:
Encounters: Philosophy of History After Postmodernism , by Ewa Domanska.     

What Is Religion?

Abstract

This essay considers the question: “What is religion and is it essentially violent?” Rather than answer the question directly, Martin suggests that it is a loaded question and reflects on what might motivate it. Through a comparison of the concepts of “religion” and “child abuse”–as analyzed in Ian Hacking’s work on social constructionism–Martin points to the social or political stakes of defining terms tied to normative discourses and which could be designed to pathologize certain behaviors.     

Who Sank the Battleship Bouvet on 18 March 1915? The Problems of Imported Historiography in Turkey*

This article traces how differing perspectives on the sinking of the French battleship Bouvet ultimately denied the Ottoman artillery credit for the success. The official British account would attribute the defeat to ‘floating mines’ and to the ‘luck’ of the Turks in March 1915 first, and later to the Nusret’s minefield when they published their official history in 1921. Following the Great War and the occupation of Istanbul, the Ottoman officers who participated in the naval operations revised their own accounts and imported the British official narrative of the event. In understanding this overlooked case using newly disclosed Ottoman and German accounts, we can analyse how the losers’ historiography is vulnerable to overt influence from the victors’ hegemonic official historiography.     

Reading What Is Political Philosophy?

Abstract

Leo Strauss is responsible for the revival of political philosophy as a necessary response to the problem of human life. This essay articulates his own summary account of this necessity, the intellectual underpinning of his division of political philosophy into the classical and the modern approahces, and his preference for the former as the natural path leading to the understanding of man's political situation.     

Simone de Beauvoir: Problems of (self‐)definition

Beauvoir, S. de, Letters to Sartre, translated by Hoare, Q. (Radius, 1991), 531pp., £20, ISBN 0 09 174774 0

Moi, T., Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Blackwell, 1994), 324pp., £12.95, ISBN 9 631 19181 X     

Is Geography (Still) a Science?

Geographic science remains contested. The practice of geographic science has long been criticized on both methodological and institutional grounds, often justifiably. Even more serious is the continuing assault on the very idea of science as the objective discovery of and search for explanation in the university, including human behaviour in space and place. This essay argues that a scientific epistemology is incompatible with a relativistic one.     

Are universities ready for interculturality? The case of the Intercultural University ‘Amawtay Wasi’ (Ecuador)

This article focuses on the creation of the Intercultural University ‘Amawtay Wasi’ in 2003, and its evolution up until its final suspension from the university system in Ecuador. I reflect on the difficulty of implementing educational approaches based on locally situated cultural identities that involve epistemologies different from those which are hegemonic in academic spheres on the global level. From the point of view of the indigenous movement, the current situation is solely the result of the ignorance and arrogance of the state, which ‘has led to a backlash against the gains made by indigenous people that has even led to a decline in terms of indigenous rights’, calling the current government a government of ‘a new colonization’ (Salvador). However, interviews conducted in the years after the closure of Amawtay Wasi bring to light certain discourses and opposition that go beyond the obvious intellectual and political reluctance of the current government to maintain the Amawtay Wasi Intercultural University.     

What If Piketty Is Right? Real Economic Costs of Rising Income Inequality

Thomas Piketty's analysis of income and wealth distribution, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that wealth has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the most affluent, while lower and middle class real incomes have stagnated; he warns that this trend could have “potentially terrifying” results, possibly even violent revolution. This article presents evidence that growing inequality weakens the entire economy by eroding the purchasing power of the vast majority of the population and the education of the labor force, while increasing its vulnerability to future collapses of the financial markets. It agrees with Piketty's concern that the capitalist market system, driven by Adam Smith's classic reliance on the pursuit of individual self-interest, lacks mechanisms to correct these distortions, which must be addressed by new policy initiatives.     

What More Is There to Say? Revisiting Agamben's Depiction of Homo Sacer

This article argues that Agamben's “paradigmatic method” leads to particular choices in his depiction of the figure of the homo sacer. Reviewing this project also suggests that there's more to history—the example given is the story of homo sacer—than Agamben's method would ever leave us to say. In other words, there are still resources in the tradition for something new, and thus there is much more left to say about its legacies.     

What is Nationalism Really? Understanding the Limitations of Rigid Theories in Dealing with the Problems of Nationalism and Ethnonationalism

Abstract. This article examines major approaches to nationalism and ethnonationalism and posits a more flexible definition than that which is prevalent in these theories. It then goes on to look at how a more flexible approach to the study of nationalism can be used as a lens to both define and address the sources of nationalist and ethno-nationalist conflicts. The flexible approach leads to the conclusion that the character of a particular nationalism is highly context-sensitive and that the best way to understand the problems it creates is through an understanding of how the different levels of society interact with one another as well as with the outside world.     

The Dynamics of African Agricultural History: Is it Time for a New Development Paradigm?

Much of our present day perception of African agriculture is still indirectly based on the coloured accounts of the early explorers and administrators. It involves an often very static conception of ‘traditional’ African agriculture. Not only does this fail to dojustice to the rich and dynamic history of African agriculture, it has also led to an inappropriate research and development paradigm which treats African agriculture as a disrupted equilibrial system that needs readjustment to return to an equilibrial and productivestate. A diachronic study of African agricultural history reveals that many of our preconceptions of African society and agriculture are invalid: agriculturists are not inert, but respond in innovative and dynamic ways to the perturbations of their natural and socialenvironment. It appears that their survival is not so much dependent on the establishmentof a fine-tuned equilibrium, but rather on the dynamic responses to these external disturbances. It is very likely that the agro-ecosystems in large parts of Africa function mainly as non-equilibrial (unstable), but nevertheless persistent systems. This has importantimplications for development interventions and agricultural research. It requires a shiftfrom a synchronic approach to a diachronic approach that is firmly based on an understaning of the past.     

What Is the State? The Russian Concept of Gosudarstvo in the European Context

What allows us to talk about the state as an active agent when we understand that only individuals act? This article draws comparisons between Quentin Skinner's exposition of the history of the concept of the state in major European languages and the history of its equivalent Russian term gosudarstvo in order to provide some general hypotheses on the development of the phenomenon of the state, and on the origins of this baffling usage. First, summing up a vast number of historical and lexicographical works, it attempts a detailed reconstruction of the conceptual development of the term in the Russian language. Second, a peculiarity of the Russian case is discussed, in whichabsolutist thinkers (and not republicans, as in western Europe) stressed the difference between the person of the ruler and the state. Third, political interests in introducing such novel usage are discussed, together with the role of this usage in the formation of the state. This allows us to see better the origins of current faith in the existence of the state as a more or less clearly designated and independent actor, predicated on the mechanism of what Pierre Bourdieu described as “mysterious delegation.”     

What Is Our Real Concern with Real Inequality?

In this article, I offer an account of when and why inequality is problematic. I build this account upon the central elements of the sufficiency view—that justice is concerned with eliminating noncomparative deficiencies rather than comparative inequalities. The account that I develop here is concerned with an inequality if, and only if, it involves an instance of noncomparative deficiency; either material or social. I then conduct an analysis of suggested reasons to care about inequality identified in recent studies of the politics of inequality, and I argue that the sufficiency account can explain the reasons that empiricists give for their concern with inequality. Upon that analysis, I conclude that we have strong reasons to be concerned with inequalities, but that these reasons stem from our acceptance of the sufficiency view rather than from an intrinsic worry with inequality.     

What became of Appleton's ionosphere?

Appleton's papers on ionospheric physics spanned a period of forty years and dealt with all the main regions of the ionosphere. They include discussions of the ionosphere at low, middle and high latitudes, and consider many kinds of ionospheric anomalies and disturbances — the seasonal anomaly, the equatorial anomaly, atmospheric tides, eclipse effects, and the effects of solar flares and magnetic storms. A century after his birth, it seems appropriate to consider where some of Appleton's ideas on the ionosphere led to, and how some of the topics that interested him are seen today. The paper discusses some theoretical ideas that Appleton developed or used, reviews his work on the E layer, F layer and other ionospheric topics, and outlines some of the major developments since his day.     

What Is a Hunter-Gatherer? Variation in the Archaeological Record of Eastern and Southern Africa

This article reviews the recent history of the archaeology of African hunter-gatherers, focusing on debates around the origins of modern humans and the destiny of hunter-gatherers with the advent of food production. African archaeologists are developing an increasing appreciation for the diversity of African hunter-gatherer societies. Understandings of hunter-gatherers based primarily on ethnography are being successfully challenged and extended.