The Philosophy of a Persona

Summary

The essay collects Ian Hunter's central theoretical and methodological arguments from their various interpretative contexts and restates them in order to consider criticisms, real and imagined. Is Hunter's criticism of common forms of philosophical history itself open to such criticism, making its validity dependent upon prior adoption of a philosophical stance? Is his empirical intellectual history a form of ‘social’ reductionism?     

Philosophy,Theology, and the Humanities

Summary

This paper addresses the relation between the natural sciences and the humanities with reference to the work of Ian Hunter. It discusses the history of, role of philosophy in, and value of the humanities; the question of historicism; the issue of critique; and the role of theology in the humanities, all matters raised by Hunter's work. The paper suggests that a reinvented humanities might pay more attention to philosophy and the sciences, including theology. It asks how far such a perspective is compatible with Ian Hunter's pioneering work on the humanities and intellectual history. The paper concludes that a middle position, one between Hunter's historicising and an emphasis on naturalistic constraints, may be possible.     

The Role of Theatre in Society: A Comparative Analysis of the Socio-Cultural Theories of Brecht,Benjamin, and Adorno

Abstract

This article analyzes the socio-cultural theories of Adorno, Benjamin, and Brecht through the lens of the theatre, most especially as it pertains to the work of actors. It explores the forces of capitalism that determine how art is produced, distributed, and consumed. Following Adorno’s reading of Marx, actors are here posited as commodities whose labor is separated from the product they create for public consumption. This commodification raises various questions: How does a market economy shape the production and consumption of art? What is technology’s function in the commodification of art? What is art’s sociopolitical role and how does it apply to theatre? To address these questions I juxtapose the cultural theory of Adorno and Benjamin with Brecht’s epic theatre. This comparison exposes the ritualistic potential of the theatre to bring an audience together as a community through sharing a socially enriching event.     

Approaching selfhood

Often overlooked is the fact that postmodern theory brought to the fore a crisis in the humanities. The implied universalism of the current “iconic turn” in postmodern thinking is a blow to the traditional sciences grouped around national literatures and cultures. In the 1980's, postmodern practitioners in the United States began to assault the discursive practices of the mainstream under the banner of cultural studies. The current crisis in the humanities surfaced in the emancipation of the various studies from their traditional fields in the humanities. The German Studies practiced today in the United States for instance, has no counterpart in Germany's traditional departments of Deutsche Philologie. Whereas the icon in the United States has become an object of investigation for the various studies, it has not yet displaced the littera in Germany's literary sciences. However in the 1990's, the historical sciences in Germany responded to the challenge of the various studies by directing their attention not to cultural studies, but to cultural history, with its well-defined set of methodologies. But what kind of cultural history is it? Is it built on 19th century German foundations, or is it grafted to current North American notions of post-industrial culture? In this paper I show that the supposed opposition between cultural studies and cultural history is artificial. Through a close reading of Hayden White's extremist questioning of historical practice in Metahistory (1973), I demonstrate that there is no opposition between the icon and the littera in this recent radical critique of mainstream humanistic science. The vehement German reaction to his North American assault on European Kultur is based on a misunderstanding of White's premises. Rather than being constructed on a hodgepodge of postmodern approaches, I show that White's postmodern history is in fact conventionally grounded in 19th century Nietzschean thinking.     

Engineering professors as entrepreneurs: the case of Franz Reuleaux (1829–1905) and Alois Riedler (1850–1936)

Abstract

Franz Reuleaux and Alois Riedler were probably the best known professors of mechanical engineering in late nineteenth century Germany. The country was becoming one of the world’s leading industrial countries, and Reuleaux and Riedler tried to contribute to this process. They obtained patents, founded their own companies, invested in both already existing and newly erected firms, and worked as consultants. In doing so, Reuleaux lost nearly all his capital while Riedler became a millionaire. In this paper, I use the story of these two academics as cases for examining the following questions on academic entrepreneurship: What kind of commercial activities did these professors perform? What were the conflicts between the professors and the state bureaucracy on the one hand and industry on the other hand? What were the reasons for their success and failure? The case studies on Reuleaux and Riedler are based on printed and archival sources.     

Selected writings on Philosophy,Religion and Politics

Benedetto Croce was the author of the most important and original theory of history in the 20th century. His theory was that of ‘absolute historicism’, and this necessarily entailed an acute critique of inherited ideas about the Enlightenment. This article studies both Croce's theoretical analysis of Enlightenment and his historical analysis of the Neapolitan Enlightenment. Croce's interest in the Enlightenment had political as well as philosophical roots. All over Europe in the 1920s and 1930s historical and theoretical research was occurring into in the Age of Enlightenment. The broad goal of such research was to bring forth a new concept of reason, which would have purchase in the contemporary debate about rationalism and irrationalism. This debate, which flourished in the era of totalitarian regimes, raised a series of further questions: What was culture? What was the task of culture in the fight against political irrationalism? What was the relationship between culture and the growth of public opinion? With respect to the latter relationship an important role was played by intellectuals, as evinced by the works of Benda, Max Weber and Croce himself. The genealogy of the modern intelligentsia led again to Enlightenment. In the third part of the article Croce's position on this issue is discussed in the light of his historical researches on Enlightenment by reference to his correspondence with two young historians, Delio Cantimori and Franco Venturi.     

People,plants and performance: On actor network theory and the material pleasures of the private garden

Actor network theory has received considerable attention within geography. In this paper I suggest that geographers have looked at these ideas in a particular way and that this can be productively complemented by an excursion into the contemporary private garden. Through exploring the ways in which people and plants live together there, some geographical criticisms of a defined actor network theory no longer seem to necessarily apply to a more diffuse set of actor network ideas. Furthermore, these ideas can also provide a productive means of engaging practically with the material presence of things, insofar as this materiality is important in the constitution of human cultural experience.     

John Hewitt's allegorical imagination

John Hewitt (1907–1987), the Northern Irish poet from Belfast, is most famous for advocating the Regionalist project he helped start in the 1930's. Regionalism demanded something more than kinship: an allegiance to the smaller unit of land within a nation. In his poetry, Hewitt's pursuit of this ideal necessitated a concern with sectarian issues and the religious and cultural impasses that attended them. Consequently, he often examines his own complicity in the unhealthy relations between divided neighbors, and this opens the door to a couple of criticisms that have commonly been directed at Hewitt: that his negotiations with place are outdated and that his craft and imagination were superseded by a self-conscious attention to denominational questions. To a large degree this essay means to explore how Hewitt manages to overcome such difficulties in his best work, especially The Bloody Brae and ‘The Colony’. In these and other poems, he imagines an alternative time and place; such settings allow the poet to dramatize philosophical and meta-ethical questions without being explicitly hortative. The worlds of these poems exist independently, untainted by contemporary fact, yet they often allude to the predicaments of his homeland. This technique of using a double focus inspires reflection on questions current in Hewitt's lifetime, at the same time as it shifts responsibility for answers from poet to reader. It also insists on the recall of visual experience, thereby promoting a regionally characteristic language.     

The Burden of Intelligibility

Summary

Ian Hunter's career as an intellectual historian has been grounded in a commitment to regionalism and the refinement of a methodology devoted to conceiving thought in terms of various modes of comportment. This essay suggests that Hunter's recent work on ‘The History of Theory’ downplays the first principle in its development of the second, and consequently risks abandoning the commitment to historical pluralism that has been a distinguishing feature of his singular contribution to intellectual history.     

Introduction

This introduction will consider how these four papers mark new boundaries of an expanding anthropological project both in their theoretical aspirations and their empirical reach. While the papers address quite different questions, each is relevant to the contemporary relationship between anthropology, indigenous people and the Australian nation. To highlight that relevance I will draw on elements of anthropology's history using some of Stanner's observations in the 1950s. In the last section I discuss some contemporary conditions and criticisms of anthropology.     

3. NATURE,RELIGION, AND IMAGINATION: COMMENTS ON IMAGES OF HISTORY

After sharing some reflections, I raise three questions. The first asks about the role of nature and reason according to Kant's teleological history, and the extent to which Kant's essays written before the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) are “dogmatic,” as his phrase “aim of nature” might suggest. The second asks about Kant's “impure” ethics and the role of religion. What would Kantian religion look like today? The last question concerns the relation between images and ideas—a thornier issue than Kant's initial definitions of imagination and reason would seem to suggest.     

Judgment,Tradition and Reason: A Response

Abstract

The author of The Desire of the Nations (DN) and The Ways of Judgment (WJ) responds to the criticisms and questions of the eight other contributors, defending his concept of government-as-judgment and exploring questions about international law and contemporary pluralism.     

Creating the cultures of the future: cultural strategy,policy and institutions in Gramsci

Gramsci’s writings have rarely been discussed and used systematically by scholars in cultural policy studies, despite the fact that in cultural studies, from which the field emerged, Gramsci had been a major source of theoretical concepts. Cultural policy studies were, in fact, theorised as an anti-Gramscian project between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when a group of scholars based in Australia advocated a major political and theoretical reorientation of cultural studies away from hegemony theory and radical politicisation, and towards reformist–technocratic engagement with the policy concerns of contemporary government and business. Their criticism of the ‘Gramscian tradition’ as inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions has remained largely unexamined in any detail for almost 20 years and seems to have had a significant role in the subsequent neglect of Gramsci’s contribution in this area of study. This essay, consisting of three parts, is an attempt to challenge such criticism and provide an analysis of Gramsci’s writings, with the aim of proposing a more systematic contribution of Gramsci’s work to the theoretical development of cultural policy studies. In Part I, I question the use of the notion of ‘Gramscian tradition’ made by its critics, and challenge the claim that it was inadequate for the study of cultural policy and institutions. In Parts II and III, I consider Gramsci’s specific writings on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which have so far been overlooked by scholars, arguing that they provide further analytical insights to those offered by his more general concepts. More specifically, in Part II, I consider Gramsci’s pre-prison writings and political practice in relation to questions of cultural strategy and institutions. I argue that the analysis of these early texts, which were written in the years in which Gramsci was active in party organisation and leadership, is fundamental not only for understanding the nature of Gramsci’s early and continued involvement with questions of cultural strategy and institutions, but also as a key for deciphering and interpreting cultural policy themes that he later developed in the prison notebooks, and which originated in earlier debates. Finally, in Part III, I carry out a detailed analysis of Gramsci’s prison notes on questions of cultural strategy, policy and institutions, which enrich the theoretical underpinnings for critical frameworks of analysis as well as for radical practices of cultural strategy, cultural policy-making and cultural organisation. I then answer the question of whether Gramsci’s insights amount to a theory of cultural policy.     

Fields of gold: reflections on the research relations of the cultural policy researcher

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the methodological implications of the relations we have to our object of study as cultural policy researchers. We ask: What research relations we typically are part of and what social dimensions structure these relations? These questions are discussed by comparing field experiences from two cultural forms that can be characterized as polar opposites when it comes to the degree to which they are legitimized: contemporary opera and dance bands. We suggest that four dimensions are especially relevant to help ‘unpack’ the relations we typically find ourselves in as cultural policy researchers; cultural hierarchy, research conditions, geography and, gender and age. The coexistence of these dimensions means that the cultural policy researcher regularly finds him/herself in complex situations that we suggest should be analysed in terms of the ways in which, and the extent to which, we develop roles as insiders – or outsiders – in the field     

Ian Hunter's Civil Philosophy

Summary

Ian Hunter's normative commitment is to civil philosophy. His sustained critique of metaphysical philosophy is to be understood in the context of his proposition that civil and moral philosophy are at war. Since civil philosophy is the only guarantor of social peace, the stakes are high.     

‘Raw Individualists’: American Soldiers on the Bataan Death March Reconsidered

Abstract

The Bataan Death March has entered historical consciousness as one of the four great Japanese atrocities during WWII. Along with the Rape of Nanjing, the Burma-Siam Death Railway, and the Rape of Manila, it stands as one of the ultimate measures of twentieth-century wartime barbarity. Both primary and secondary sources share a central preoccupation with Japanese behaviour and therefore assume American prisoners were little more than a passive presence during this episode. In this essay I examine the Bataan Death March from a new vantage point, asking salient questions that lead to modi?ed understanding: who were these Americans, and what kind of soldiers, at war’s dawn for the US, did they make? What features of their cultural make-up help explain their behaviour? What were the fault lines in the allied, Filipino-American force that faced the Japanese Army? This article explores the numerous problems the American forces in the Philippines faced: the hybrid nature of the army, the tension between career soldiers and recent draftees and poor training and leadership. These problems, American soldiers’ cultural predisposition, and military inexperience all combined to render them signi?cantly more vulnerable to Japanese cruelty on the Death March than they otherwise would have been.     

The Eighth Argument. Identity,Ethnicity and Political Culture in Sixteenth-Century Scandinavia

What was a Swede in the 16th century? How did people identify themselves and others, and what political role did collective identities play before the coming of modern nationalism? One would perhaps expect that there exist many works proposing answers to such questions. Within the humanities, there has been a steadily increasing interest in culture and identities in the last few decades. Nevertheless, few have asked such questions. When dealing with medieval and early modern Europe, historians have put the questions rather in this way: Was the Swede of the 16th century Swedish in the modern sense? Did nations and/or nationalism exist before the end of the 18th century? The discussion of medieval and early modern identities has been severely limited by "the nationalicistic trap". Identities before the late 18th century have been studied in order to look for the roots of modern national identity, to find out where nations originate, or to argue that nationalism is a purely modern phenomenon. I intend to fall into that trap myself later in this article, discussing why nationalism and national identity are less fitting concepts when dealing with the 16th century. But basically, I seek to uncover and conceptualize the identities of the time in their own right.     

Josephus' Retelling of Nathan's Oracle (2 Samuel 7)

This paper deals with the way Josephus has retold and rewritten the narrative in 2 Sam 7 in his Jewish Antiquities 7.90-95. Recent studies made on this issue have focused either on the question of Messianism or on the characterization of king David in Josephus' writings. However, our study focuses on Josephus' qualities as a commentator and discusses how Josephus handled the hermeneutical problems he encountered in the story, for example: why did God forbid David to build a temple? What was the nature of God's promise to David that his dynasty will rule forever? These questions are examined through a close reading of the Josephus' retelling of the biblical story in 2 Sam 7. We have considered omissions, additions, and changes in the sequence of actions. Our aim was to find out whether the differences between the biblical text and that of Josephus should be ascribed to a different Vorlage (which may be identical to the LXX), to harmonization or to intentional changes made to clarify difficult verses within the text.     

Shakespeare's Fault or Yours? Melzer's Maxim: A Guide to Tentative Omniscience for the Congenitally Hyperfallible

Abstract

Arthur Melzer's tremendous accomplishment is even greater than he may realize. The tradition of esoteric writing in political philosophy exists, as he convincingly demonstrates, and the consequences of this discovery are as significant as he claims. But the method of esoteric reading that he recommends applies more broadly than he seems to suggest. Applied liberally, moreover, as a corrective to nearly everything that's gone wrong with education in the humanities and social sciences over the last forty years, his humble heuristic—Melzer's Maxim, I call it—has the potential to reorient and renew the whole concept of Liberal Education for an age whose pedagogy is foundering. A boon to the sub-discipline of Political Theory in particular, Philosophy Between the Lines has even more to offer to classroom instruction in general. Read between the lines, Melzer's specialized work of scholarship promises nothing less than the opening of the American mind. It is the antidote to the poison of politically correct multiculturalism.     

Social relations on stage: Witnesses in classical Athens

The study of witness testimony raises questions which are fundamental for the student of other cultures, whether past or contemporary. What are the standards expected of a reliable informant and how is reliability to be recognised? How is reliable knowledge about the past established?

The aim of this paper is to analyse the use of witnesses in classical Athenian lawcourts both for its epistemological implications — what does it tell us about Athenian ideas of ‘expert witnesses’, of reliability, of truthfulness and bias — and for the information it gives us about Athenian society and court practice. What kind of men did Athenian litigants select to act as witnesses for them, and what effect did they hope their witnesses’ testimonies would have on the jury?

If we start out from the assumption of modern courts that witnesses are called to ‘establish the facts of the case’ we shall misunderstand the Athenian data. What witnesses actually testified often was not very important: their testimonies might be insignificant, irrelevant or repetitive. To understand their role it is necessary to see them as minor characters in a drama, whose presence provides the backdrop against which the litigant wishes his own actions and character to be seen. Respectable witnesses — officials, members of the ‘professions’, reputable politicians — establish his own respectability. The support of neighbours, associates and kin shows that those who know the milieu in which the dispute arose are on the litigant's side. Denigration Of the opponent's witnesses, kin and associates presents him as a vicious and unreliable character. In the construction of a character‐portrait in court witnesses had an important role to play.