Speculative Realism and Public Theology: Explorations

Abstract

The paper argues that ideas emanating from the speculative realists can inform a new approach to public theology, one that is broadly consistent with Christian realism and opposed to that of radical orthodoxy. Linking the two disciplines through an exploration of the ethical consequences of speculative realism, it takes in particular the work of Latour, his concept of the "gathering," his distinction between matters of fact and matters of concern, and his questioning of the fact-value distinction, and through a lived example shows how the language of human and non-human offers a critique of reductionist approaches to the political.     

Lapita before Lapita: The Early Story of the Meyer/O’Reilly Watom Island Archaeological Collection

ABSTRACT

Seventeen years before the first excavation at the archaeological site of Lapita (New Caledonia) in 1952, two men of the cloth met and exchanged artefacts, notes and ideas to produce some of the earliest analyses of what later became known as Lapita pottery. Otto Meyer (1877–1937), a Sacred Heart Missionary stationed on Watom Island, described chance finds of ‘prehistoric pottery’ in 1909, following these with more systematic excavations. Patrick O’Reilly (1900–88), a Marist Father associated with the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, drew on Meyer’s work, his own extensive bibliographical knowledge and his observations during a one-year mission in the region in 1934–5 to present part of the collection in France, laying the ground for further theories. The publication, interpretation and curation of the Meyer/O’Reilly collection represents an exemplary journey through the history of Pacific archaeology and the emergence of the Lapita paradigm. We consider the context of Meyer’s encounter with O’Reilly, the ideas both men advanced in analysing the collection and the site, and how these resonated during the development of Pacific and Lapita archaeology throughout the first half of the 20th century.     

Monkfish Mysteries. A Narrative Analysis of Place-making and Knowledge Production among North Norwegian Fishermen

Abstract

In this article, major focus is on creative production of knowledge needed to outsmart the monkfish at deep seafloor locations. This production is examined through narrative analysis. Narratives link individual human actions, events and experiences into interrelated aspects of an understandable composite. This is a cumulative process that shows some of the complexity and contextuality of everyday meaning-making. One recurrent question is, how do fish think? How fishermen construct narratives about the behavior of marine animals and their preferred underwater habitats is presented and analyzed. Some narratives are contested but all the same influence human–animal interaction. Narrative work further establishes and confirms common ideas, informed by marine biological science, fishermen's experiences, creative imagination and hopes. These narratives address topics also related to overfishing and resilience.     

Sexual Selection,Automata and Ethics in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Olive Schreiner's Undine and From Man to Man

Abstract

This paper brings together two related areas of debate in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first concerns how the courtship plot of the nineteenth-century novel responded to, and helped to shape, scientific ideas of sexual competition and selection. In The Mill on the Floss (1860), George Eliot strikingly prefigures Darwin's later work on sexual selection, drawing from her own extensive knowledge of the wider debates within which evolutionary theory developed. Maggie Tulliver's characterisation allows Eliot to explore the ethical complexities raised by an increasingly powerful scientific naturalism, where biology is seen to be embedded within morality in newly specific ways. The second strand of the paper examines the extension of scientific method to human mind and motivation which constituted the new psychology. It argues that there are crucial continuities of long-established ethical and religious ideas within this increasingly naturalistic view of human mind and motivation. The contention that such ideas persist and are transformed, rather than simply jettisoned, is illustrated through the example of Thomas Henry Huxley's 1874 essay on automata. Turning finally to focus on Olive Schreiner's Undine (1929) and From Man to Man (1926), the paper explores the importance of these persistent ethical and religious ideas in two novels which remained unpublished during her lifetime. It argues that they produce both difficulty and opportunity for imagining love plots within the context of increasingly assertive biological and naturalistic accounts of human beings.     

Creative geographies of ceramic artists: knowledges and experiences of landscape,practices of art and skill

This paper argues for a conception of art as an embodied and creative material practice. It draws on research conducted with seven professional ceramic artists who deal with landscape in their work to explore their processes of art-making through interview and (filmed) observation. It demonstrates the distributed range of embodied and relational more-than-artistic practices which inform how landscape is encountered, known and ultimately represented. It argues that artists’ self-expression in art is based upon material, social and political knowledges which interweave in artists’ lives. By studying ceramicists’ making this paper demonstrates both the non-conscious skill and the conscious technical knowledge needed to make art. It shows chance to have a triple role in practices of making, as something to work alongside, to work against and to draw on as a creative resource. This paper both argues for and demonstrates the value of an approach to art-making that frames it as a complex of both conscious, socio-cultural, technical knowledges and non-conscious skills which together (in)form works of (ceramic) art.     

The Event in John Latham and Bob Cobbing

ABSTRACT

This article documents some examples of the event-responsive poetry of the British poet Bob Cobbing (1920–2002) and compares it to the unique theory of the event structure developed by British sculptural and conceptual artist John Latham (1921–2006). It establishes points of intersection between their practices, and particularly at the level of aesthetics where very little comparative work exists. While both men are best known for their experimental 1960s work (Cobbing in relation to sound and concrete poetry, and Latham in relation to conceptual art) this article focusses on their earlier work as being preparatory to their later, more developed practice. Artistic affinities are contextualized in relation to World War II, the dialectic of romantic and classical art, and the institution of welfare-capitalism. How poet and artist both visually represented time (drawing on scientific discourses to do so) is further identified as a link between their practices.     

Writers and politics in West Germany

This article argues that Archibald Campbell's Necessity of Revelation (1739) can be viewed as the first application of the ‘science of human nature’, a characteristic branch of the Scottish Enlightenment, to the study of religious belief. Adopting Baconian and Newtonian methodological principles, Campbell set hypotheses, collected historical data, and inferred conclusions about the capabilities of human nature to come to fundamental religious ideas without the aid of revelation. He did so not only to reject the ‘deist’ position on the powers of unassisted human reason, associated with Matthew Tindal's Christianity as Old as the Creation (1730), but also to refute Campbell's conservative critics within the Church of Scotland who had earlier tried him for heresy. Campbell's example is that of a university professor using the experimental study of religion to defeat both radical freethinking and Calvinist orthodoxy. His work is another instance of the complicated relationship between science and religion within eighteenth-century Scotland.     

Mapping the audit traces of interdisciplinary collaboration: bridging and blending between choreography and cognitive science

ABSTRACT

Two long-term sci–art research projects are described and positioned in the broader conceptual landscape of interdisciplinary collaboration. Both projects were aimed at understanding and augmenting choreographic decision-making and both were grounded in research conducted within a leading contemporary dance company. In each case, the work drew upon methods and theory from the cognitive sciences, and both had a direct impact on the way in which the company made new work. In the synthesis presented here the concept of an audit trace is introduced. Audit traces identify how specific classes of knowledge are used and transformed not only within the arts or sciences but also when arts practice is informed by science or when arts practice informs science.     

Julian of Vézelay,a Twelfth-Century Critic of his Monastery's Worldly Success

Abstract

This article analyses the sermons of the Benedictine monk Julian (c. 1080 – 1165) from the small Burgundian monastery of Vézelay in the context of the other contemporary sources issuing from this monastery. It argues that Julian was a reformer who criticized his monastery for an unhealthy attachment to its newfound wealth and neglect of proper monastic practice. The themes in his preaching may further be reflected in some of the capitals of the cathedral Sainte-Madeleine at Vézelay. More broadly, his sermons provide a striking illustration of one monastery's struggle to come to terms with an influx of money in the twelfth century.     

Beilstein in English

Abstract

If we consider the context in which certain works of art were produced, as well as the world view of the artists themselves, we should be able to make some connections between the history of science and the history of art. We can do this partly because we have access to reproductions of pictures in all media made before photography and can make comparisons between them. Yet these same techniques for the multiplication of images flood our own daily horizons with pictures taken from their original context and often trivialised. Photography has so conditioned our way of looking at pictures that a considerable corrective effort is needed to bridge the psychological distance between our own mentality and that of the past.     

History of European ideas

This essay explores one of the potential implications of the cross-displinary work implied in the idea of a literary instrument of enlightenment through a consideration of the relationship between James Macpherson's The Poems of Ossian (1761–1763) and their most immediate social-political context, Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1769). It notes that revisionism of Macpherson that has tended to minimise the disruptive elements in Ossian in favour of a reading in terms of cultural wishfulfilment. The essay argues however that while Macpherson's prose theorising seeks to transcend the anxieties about progress and corruption articulated in the Essay, the peoms themselves offer eloquent testimony to the force of those anxieties, and rather than solving them restates them in pressing terms. This, the essay concludes by suggesting, is a measure of their literariness, and it not to be elided in the otherwise entirely appropriate reading of Ossian as a literary instrument of enlightenment.     

Technology Management: Triumphs and Failures

Abstract

This paper argues that the threefold division of human cultures, common in anthropology, into primitive, oriental, and western, is at its core the same as the distinction made in computer science between imperative, declarative, and dynamic programming methods. Underlying both triplets is an abstract scheme, traceable through history, by which humans perceive the consistency of information. To describe this scheme three terms are introduced. In ‘instructionism’ all entities of information are independent and no formal structure limits their meaning. In ‘inventionism’ all entities of information are forced into a single, permanent structure. ‘Adaptivism’, too, demands structure, but this structure is dynamic and may be revised if deemed necessary. The threefold scheme gives a comprehensive view of how humans deal with information and also contributes to an understanding of several philosophical issues in (computer) science.     

Textual context in the history of political thought and intellectual history

ABSTRACT

We can easily misread historical texts if we take ideas and passages out of their textual contexts. The resulting errors are widespread, possibly even more so than errors through reading ideas and passages out of their historical contexts. Yet the methodological literature stresses the latter and says little about the former. This paper thus theorises the idea of textual context, distinguishes three types of textual context, and asks how we uncover the right textual contexts. I distinguish four kinds of textual-context error, and offer practical tips for avoiding these errors. However, the beating heart of this paper is the history–philosophy debate: in contrast to the prevailing assumption that historical and philosophical analysis are fundamentally different, I show that a commitment to textual context, which should be entirely uncontroversial, also commits one to think philosophically.     

Who should pay for pollution? The OECD,the European Communities and the emergence of environmental policy in the early 1970s

Abstract

Environmental policy emerged as a new European and global policy field within a very brief period of time during the early 1970s. Notably in Europe, international organizations played a central role in defining core principles for this new policy domain. This article argues that inter-organizational connections were crucial in this context: the exchange and transfer of policy ideas facilitated the rise of environmental policy across different international organizations. Focusing on the co-evolution of the polluter-pays principle enshrined almost simultaneously both at the OECD and the European Communities, the article assesses the multiple routes along which policy ideas travelled, the role inter-organizational competition played and the selective nature of transfers. While expertise played a key role in determining which policy concepts were selected, institutional conditions and the politics of the recipient institution determined how they were adapted to the respective new context.     

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on ideas actualized in history

ABSTRACT

Situating Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thought on historically actualized ideas with reference to a range of classical thinkers, this article examines his intriguing philosophical theory about how ideas become progressively actualized in history. This cultural growth can be understood as contemplation-in-action, although it occurs through mainly fumbling – or else overenthusiastic – human agents. I distinguish Coleridgean first-order, transcendent ideas (such as God, infinity, the good, the soul) from second-order, historical ones (such as church, state, the constitution). It has been argued that Coleridge’s theory of ideas develops from Bacon’s inductive method for discovering laws of nature through experiment and natural law through common law. I further claim that Coleridge upholds the reality of “Forms” in science, and of rights in ethics and politics; that his later political thought is inherently more progressive than is generally admitted; and that his account differs from Schelling’s and Hegel’s respective theories by maintaining the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their evolving historical actualizations. Coleridge’s philosophy is therefore, whether political or metaphysical, ultimately an ontological defence of the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their progressive but imperfect actualization.     

Elite migrations in modern Italy: patterns of settlement,integration and identity negotiation

Abstract

Francesco Crispi has often appeared a paradoxical figure. In the earlier part of his life he was a revolutionary republican and a friend of Mazzini. After 1860 he accepted the monarchy, but remained very much a man of the Left and in many ways a quintessential democrat. Yet he ended his career as an authoritarian Prime Minister, a vigorous opponent of the Far Left, and an imperialist, who prorogued parliament and contemplated dispensing with representative government altogether. This article contends that Crispi's career has more coherence than is commonly suggested; it focuses on an important but hitherto neglected aspect of his thinking, namely the problem of how to achieve a sense of national consciousness in Italy through ‘political education’. The article traces the development of the idea of national political education throughout Crispi's career and argues that his two terms as Prime Minister in 1887–91 and 1893–6 can only be fully understood in the context of his long‐standing concern with this problem.     

Superstitionis Malleus: John Toland,Cicero, and the War on Priestcraft in Early Enlightenment England

Summary

This paper explores the role of the Ciceronian tradition in the radical religious discourse of John Toland (1670–1722). Toland produced numerous works seeking to challenge the authority of the clergy, condemning their ‘priestcraft’ as a significant threat to the integrity of the Commonwealth. Throughout these anticlerical writings, Toland repeatedly invoked Cicero as an enemy to superstition and as a religious sceptic, particularly citing the theological dialogues De Natura Deorum and De Divinatione. This paper argues that Toland adapted the Ciceronian tradition so that it could function as an active influence on the construction of his radical discourse. First, it shows that Toland championed a particular interpretation of Cicero's works which legitimised his use of Cicero in this rational context. Then, it shows the practical manifestations of this interpretation, examining the ramifications for how Toland formed three important facets of his campaign against priestcraft: his identification of priestcraft as a superstition; his argument for a rational religion in which priestcraft could play no role; and his portrayal of anticlericalism as a service to the Commonwealth.     

‘‘The Acceptable Face of the Unintelligible’: Intermediality and the Science Play’

Abstract

The limitations of the ‘science-in-theatre’ genre is explored and the concept of the intermedial science play is introduced as an alternative to conventional science plays. How the science-in-theatre play dampens the mediality of the stage in order to establish a specific contract with its audience in order to realize what Carl Djerassi calls ‘didactic realism’ is considered. By virtue of the dramatic form and the didacticism it establishes, the science-in-theatre play limits the means by which audiences may encounter and enjoy responding to science. In particular, when staging concepts from the postclassical sciences, the intermedial science play offers artists and spectators new approaches to the sciences of infinities, complexity and emergence whilst also establishing a new, interactive contract with the audience based on forms of pedagogy associated with the thinking of Jacques Rancière. Using the media theory of Peter Boenisch and others, intermediality is identified as more than the mere presence of multimedia, but in terms of the effects it produce on the sensorium of the spectator.     

Greening cultural policy

Abstract

This article focuses on greening cultural policy within a sustainable development context. We examine shortcomings of major public-policy responses to the ecological crisis, linking this to the ambivalent philosophical heritage of anthropocentric worldviews that underpin ideas about the relation of culture to non-human nature. This ambivalence is reflected by weak environmentalism in the cultural policy arena, exemplified by surprisingly non-green cultural platforms espoused by green political parties. Green thinking is further hampered by the widespread adoption of digitisation within cultural organizations, which we contextualise in the broader political economy of digital capitalism and the attendant myth that high-tech culture is a low emissions business. Green cultural policy necessitates intensive self-examination of cultural institutions’ environmental impact, at the same time these institutions deploy art, education, entertainment, sports, and news to raise awareness of ecological crisis and alternative models of economic activity. We cite the efforts of activist artists’ resistance against fossil fuel corporations’ sponsorship of arts and cultural organizations as a welcome provocation for greening cultural policy within cultural organizations and green political parties alike.     

Aberdulais Falls

Abstract

Aberdulais Falls is a multi-period site, important because it participated in the early development of three of the major metals industries of Wales – copper smelting, ironworking and tinplate manufacture. For three centuries the River Dulais provided a natural head for water powered plant, the earliest of these being a copper works thought to have been established here in 1584. It was the site of a corn and grist mill c1765-1819, during which time it was a popular subject for travelling artists, Turner among them. This article is an interim report based on the archaeological work undertaken from 1982-5, and represents the author's term as Site Archaeologist at Aberdulais Falls. It argues that the extant remains belong, almost exclusively, to the two final periods of industrial activity – ironworking (c1819-40) and tinplate manufacture (c1840-90).