PHILOSOPHY AND GEOGRAPHY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: A REPLY

So far as I can make out, Sitwell's comment on my essay says little that is relevant to its content. In fact he goes so far as to declare that my essay can in large part be ignored, presumably for purposes of gaining an understanding, or getting at the essence, of Margarita Bowen's book. I assume that Sitwell is writing a book review, more or less of the conventional sort, since he remarks that he is undertaking 'a review of the type May chose not to write.' I do not pretend for one moment that what I wrote is a book review. Perhaps it should not even have been called a 'review essay.' But Sitwell is not unaware of this, since he remarks that my 'essay is almost bound to be taken as a review,' which he regards as 'unfortunate.' Despite the fact that the tasks we have each undertaken are substantially different, and hence that our respective papers have little in common, I nevertheless think a few comments are in order.     

2. THE PUBLIC RELEVANCE OF HISTORICAL STUDIES: A REPLY TO DIRK MOSES

I am grateful to Dirk Moses for taking the time to study my work so assiduously and to comment on it so perspicuously. His essay is eminently well‐informed and even‐handed, and I have little to add to or correct of his characterization of my many, long on‐going, and admittedly flawed attempts to deconstruct modern historical discourse. He understands me well enough and I think that I understand his objections to my position(s). We do not disagree on matters of fact, I think, but we have different notions about the nature of historical discourse and the uses to which historical knowledge can properly be put.     

RETHINKING RACE HISTORY: THE ROLE OF THE ALBINO IN THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT LIFE SCIENCES1

The scholarly quest to recover the construction of racial difference in the Enlightenment‐era life sciences generally overlooks a singular fact: the vast majority of eighteenth‐century thinkers who were engaged in theorizing the human were often far more preoccupied with preserving a belief in an essential human sameness than they were in creating categories of essential difference. This article charts the problem of a potential human sameness as it related to questions of category, biological processes, and the human and non‐human through an examination of a neglected and key construct in the eighteenth‐century life sciences, the albino. The albino was absorbed into a scientific narrative in 1744 when Maupertuis used the concept to put forward a theory of shared origins or monogenesis. Positing that the nègre blanc—quite literally a “white Negro”—was a racial throwback, a reversion to a primitive whiteness, Maupertuis inspired a new generation of thinkers, most notably the great French naturalist Buffon, to assert categorically that blacks had degenerated from a prototype white variety. The significance of the concept nègre blanc, which has not been studied sufficiently, cannot be overestimated. In addition to the fact that the new role of the nègre blanc clearly said as much about whiteness as it did about blackness, the albino generated a new diagnostic chronology of the human species.     

The development of ∂/interconsonantal laryngeal in Iranian

Conclusion The examination of the material has shown that the only indisputable counter-example against Meillet's theory is Av. (p)tar- and its derivatives -fr and tirya-. All the other examples have been shown to be wrong, or at least to have other and in my opinion better explanations. Other theories beside Meillet's have been rejected, either because they are based upon such presuppositions as make them objectionable from a methodological point of view, or because they do not explain the actual facts as they stand. Even though no convincing explanation has been found to make ptar- fit in with Meillet's theory, I do not think that this word alone is justification enough for abandoning this otherwise well-founded theory and replace it with one which can perhaps account for this word, but is in other respects inferior to Meillet's.This article is an adaption of a part of my thesis for the degree of Magister Artium in Comparative Indo-European linguistics at the University of Oslo. I thank Professor F. O. Lindeman and Research fellow P. Skjærvø for their assistance in the preparation, and Professor F. B. J. Kuiper for valuable comments on some points in the article.     

Hobbes and the Rationality of Self-Preservation: Grounding Morality on the Desires We Should Have

In deriving his moral code, Hobbes does not appeal to any mind-independent good, natural human telos, or innate human sympathies. Instead he assumes a subjectivist theory of value and an egoistic theory of human motivation. Some critics, however, doubt that his laws of nature can be constructed from such scant material. Hobbes ultimately justifies the acceptance of moral laws by the fact that they promote self-preservation. But, as Hobbes himself acknowledges, not everyone prefers survival over natural liberty. In this essay I show that Hobbes can argue that the desire for self-preservation is rationally required by modifying his subjectivist theory of the good to equate what is good for an agent only with the satisfaction of desires (for her own life) that she has at the time that they are satisfied. It is thus irrational to prefer postmortem glory over survival since an agent must be alive for glory to have any value for her.     

But malice aforethought: cities and the natural history of hatred

I take as my starting point the fact that Western cities are often depicted as on the brink of catastrophe. Indeed some contemporary authors would argue that they have never been closer to that brink. The first part of this paper argues against this tendency by focusing on the preponderance of activities of repair and maintenance. Having looked at the state of this forgotten infrastructure, in the second part of the paper I turn to an examination of why this Cassandra interpretation is so prevalent. I argue that, in particular, it draws on wellsprings of misanthropy which are rarely voiced in writings on cities because sociality is too often confused with liking. Yet it seems vital to me to tackle misanthropy head on. Then, in the third part of the paper, I argue that currently there is a coming together in cities of all kinds of affective politics of concern which can act, through all manner of small achievements, as a counter to misanthropy but which do not mistake the practice of this politics for a search after perfection.     

Two Careers across Two Cultures

Beginning with my recollection of hearing C. P. Snow's ‘Two Cultures’ lecture, I sketch my experience of building two academic careers in succession, first in one of the natural sciences and later in the history of such sciences. I outline both the difficulties and the rewards that I encountered in crossing the alleged gulf between the sciences and the humanities, but also emphasise the diversity of cultures that I experienced within each. I describe my own encounter with the academic culture of continental Europe, within which the concept of a monolithic singular ‘Science’ could be dismissed as an ‘anglophone heresy’, and viewed from which the Two Cultures debate could seem both provincial and redundant.     

Some Personal Reminiscences and What They Meant for Me

There are those who have said I should write a book, and there are those—about the same in number—who have said I should not write a book. Those in the negative assert that my “book” already is written in the several hundred opinions (majorities, concurrences, dissents) I have filed over the years, and in my public utterances. There are valid arguments, I suppose, on both sides. I certainly do not wish to write anything that merely seeks to explain further my vote in decided cases, or to comment—supportively or adversely—on colleagues' votes, or to express little more than after‐the‐fact criticism. In that context, what might be said belonged in the decisional process itself. But there are other things in Supreme Court experience. Law students are inclined to ask questions. Example: “Tell me, how does one come to be a federal judge?” Justice Tom Clark had a direct response: “One has to be on the corner when the bus comes by.” One federal appellate judge plaintively said to me: “The only reason I am on the federal bench is because I was a close friend of a United States Senator.” (He had served for a time as the Senator's administrative assistant.) It may perhaps be said that every federal judge comes by his status in his own way. Of course, there are things one must not do, but I doubt that there is a specific path one must follow to be eligible and seriously regarded as a candidate for federal judicial service.     

An Apologia for Theoretical History

Karl Popper's critique of theoretical history remains formidable but contains serious flaws. Popper held erroneous views about the practice of the natural sciences and created overly severe strictures for theoretical statements in the social sciences. General theory and general theoretical statements play a legitimate role in the social sciences. Merton has promoted middle-range theories and models and Lakatos multiple ontologies. One can answer Popper's criticisms of either the impossibility or triviality of long-term historical laws by searching for stable constellations of local or middle-range laws rather than a universal law. Moreover, the successful use in the social sciences of various types of scales of measurement rather than an absolute scale shows that quantitative analysis is possible in history. Investigators need to find the boundaries, the frameworks of feasibility, in which historical trends and laws operate. Popper's maximalism plays into the irrationalist trends that he himself deplored. If historical investigators and theoreticians set appropriate goals for theoretical history, they can practice their discipline responsibly and find meanings, if not a single meaning, in history.     

2. IN DEFENSE OF PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE: A RESPONSE TO CAROLA DIETZE

This response to Carola Dietze's critique of Provincializing Europe takes up for examination three key expressions or ideas on which the original argument of the book was founded: hyperreal Europe, historicism, and political modernity. I appreciate the spirit of Dietze's engagement with the book, but I show that her critique is based on a degree of misapprehension of these three central ideas. While clarifying the details and the degree of my disagreement with Dietze, I provide my own critique of Dietze's proposal of “equal histories” by arguing that Dietze has not named or explained the unit with respect to which different histories could be considered equal. I also argue that Dietze's proposals about judging societies only by their “own” standards, and basing human dignity on the idea of a “human nature” that could be seen as a “constant,” do not solve the problems she sees with my book and are themselves open to some serious historical and logical criticism.     

INTENTIONALISM,INTENTIONALITY, AND REPORTING BELIEFS1

The dominant view of twentieth‐century analytic philosophy has been that all thinking is always in a language, that languages are vehicles of thought. The same view has been widespread in continental philosophy as well. In recent decades, however, the opposite view—that languages serve merely to express language‐independent thought‐contents or propositions—has been more widely accepted. The debate has a direct equivalent in the philosophy of history: when historians report the beliefs of historical figures, do they report the sentences or propositions that these historical figures believed to be true or false? In this paper I argue in favor of the latter, intentionalist, view. My arguments center mostly on the problems with translation that are likely to arise when a historian reports the beliefs of historical figures who expressed them in a language other than the one in which the historian is writing. In discussing these problems the paper presents an application of John Searle's theory of intentionality to the philosophy of history.     

Theorizing a child–dog encounter in the slums of La Paz using post-humanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in current ‘child in nature’ debates

This paper theorizes children's interspecies relation with dogs in La Paz Bolivia utilizing post-humanism and new materialism as its approach. This approach allows for the deconstructing of human–nature binaries found in discourses central to the children in nature movement. Questioning the universalizing of children's experience in nature the paper considers three propositions. Firstly, what if children were viewed as nature rather than outside of it. Secondly, can the objects or ‘things’ of nature be viewed as animated. And finally, how sensitive is the contemporary imperative to reconnect children to a romanticized more natured life, to children's diverse worldly experiences. I explore these propositions drawing on a study where I have adopted a materialist ontology and theorized using the work of [Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] and her concept of intra-action as adopted by Rautio [2013a. “Children Who Carry Stones in Their Pockets: On Autotelic Material Practices in Everyday Life.” Children's Geographies 11 (4): 394–408]. Based on my child–dog interspecies exploration, I will conclude by re-addressing the three propositions.     

Spinoza on Fictitious Ideas and Possible Entities

The aim of this article is twofold: to provide a valid account of Spinoza’s theory of fictitious ideas, and to demonstrate its coherency with the overall modal metaphysics underpinning his philosophical system. According to Leibniz, in fact, the existence of romances and novels would be sufficient to demonstrate, against Spinoza’s necessitarianism, that possible entities exist and are intelligible, and that many other worlds different from ours could have existed in its place. I argue that Spinoza does not actually need to resort to the notion of possible entities in order to explain the incontrovertible existence of fictions and fictitious ideas. In order to demonstrate this, I will first show how, according to Spinoza, true ideas of nonexistent things need not be regarded as fictitious ideas. Then I will show by which means Spinoza can justify the real existence of fictions and fictitious ideas in the human mind through our present knowledge of actually existing things, to conclude that fictitious ideas neither add anything to what we already know of things, nor do they increase the extent of the existing conceivable reality by demanding the existence of possible non-actualised entities.     

The search for historical experience

In the first part of my paper I will try to reconstruct a series of attempts at dialogue between history and the social sciences made by historians connected with the “Annales” (Marc Bloch, Ernest Labrousse, Giovanni Levi, Bernard Lepetit). What these attempts have in common is the idea that in history, as in the natural sciences, it is to some extent possible to carry out forms of experimentation on the sources, and that the inclusion of history among the human sciences, and even the scientific future of the discipline itself, ultimately depend on the adoption of this method. In the second part I will discuss the relationship that links historical experimentation with lived experience, and I will conclude by discussing the possible meaning of the idea of experimenting with the sources of history.     

陈独秀社会主义思想若干问题之再辨析——兼答马启民、任纪虎先生

马启民、任纪虎先生认为拙作《陈独秀对科学社会主义理论的探索及特点》①在陈独秀关于社会主义的经济制度、社会主义与民主的关系、社会主义需要不断深化改革等三个问题的论述方面,对陈独秀思想予以拔高,不符合陈独秀的本意,提出要与我商榷.其实,这些论述反映了陈独秀的真实思想,也是陈独秀社会主义思想中最具理论意义和现代价值之处.另外,拙作并不存在逻辑上的问题.     

Desiring structures: exhibiting the dendritic form

Abstract

From 30 April to 4 September 2005, the Museum of Design in Zurich staged the exhibition 'Simply complex' ('einfach Komplex'), an exploration of the dendritic form. The dendritic form is a recurrent and often instructive one in the sciences, which can be observed in many contexts and at different scales, from the delta of liquid methane revealed by the Huygens probe on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan in 2005, to micrographs of neurons in the human brain. It also recurs in the form of the persuasive diagrams which art historians, linguists and philosophers have long used to bring forth a sense of organic unity, order and development from their data. 'Simply complex' displayed case studies of these visual strategies in the sciences, while also showcasing some specially commissioned critical and aesthetic interventions by artists on the theme of the branching form. Here I reflect on the planning process for the exhibition, and present for the first time in English my essay from the accompanying book.     

BURYING THE DEAD,CREATING THE PAST1

Professional historians tend to be ambivalent about one of the prime historical phenomena of our time: the desire to commemorate. The amount of attention given to memory (collective or not) and trauma bears witness to the fact that historians really do want to give in to that desire; the fact that they treat these subjects in a rather “positivist” way suggests that they regard it as a bit improper to do so wholeheartedly. As a result commemoration is all over the place but is never taken as seriously as it should be. This essay argues that effective commemoration should start with a question Giambattista Vico might have asked: “who are we that this could have happened?” Posing this question means relinquishing the identity‐enhancing, self‐celebrating stance from which we tend to commemorate “unimaginable” events. Commemorative self‐exploration is a confrontation with what we don't like to be confronted with: the fact that occasionally we behave in utter contradiction to what we regard as our identity. Heterodox, “monstrous,” and therefore Gedächtnisfähig behavior comes in three varieties: things we are proud of, things we are ashamed of, and the sublime “mutations” in which we “commit” history and embark on the unimaginable. Because sublime mutations change consciousness, commemorating them confronts posterity with almost insuperable epistemological difficulties. Commemorating sublime mutations means burying them—not in the sense of “covering” them, but in the sense of “inventing” a way in which they keep on living.     

On the Sources of Instability in the Rank-Size Rule: Some Simple Tests of Gibrat's Law

While the implications of the Simon model of urban growth, e.g., the rank-size rule, have been explored in numerous papers, the assumptions of that model have not, to my knowledge, been subjected to empirical verification. This paper represents an initial attempt to do so, emphasizing those sources of variation in the growth of cities typically singled out in Simon's verbal statements of the model: births, deaths, rural-urban, urban-rural, and urban-urban migration. It is found that over the recent past the assumptions concerning these components are all violated and violated in the direction of upward curvature away from the log-linear relationship between city size and rank predicted by the model, an upward curvature which we in fact observe.     

GUEST ESSAY: THINKING LIKE A GEOGRAPHER

Compared to the geographic wasteland south of your border, geography appears to have fared well in Canada, both as a formal discipline extending our understanding by illuminating the human and physical worlds, and as a subject taught at all levels to create informed and aware citizens. I known you think much remains to be done, and perhaps things always look a bit greener on the other side of the hill, but I hope you will not mind my somewhat envious gaze. In fact, when I received the five volumes of the 'curriculum guideline' for geography, issued by the Ontario Ministry of Education for the intermediate and senior divisions of your high schools (ome 1988), my feelings were not so much envy as panic, a panic that rapidly induced something close to intellectual paralysis. Because in a moment I can only describe now as utterly weak and foolish, I started to read them, only to learn that your senior students 'analyze, interpret … explain … design and develop networks, systems and simulations that involve six or more variables' (ome 1988, A12).
In retrospect, I still think my panic was justified. After 30 years of hard post-doctoral work I have reached the point where I can think about the interactions of maybe three variables, but hardly the combinatorial possibilities of six. Such ineptness would mean that I might just squeeze into your tenth grade and from there slowly work my way over the next two years towards those Olympian heights of analytical thought where dwell Ontario's high school graduates.     

“Hungry for Knowledge”: Towards a Meso‐History of the Environmental Sciences

In recent years, cultural studies and cultural theory have experienced a new wave of ecological thought. Despite the engagement with the Anthropocene the history of ecology and the environmental sciences has remained somewhat of a puzzle. This goes especially for the 20^th century, a period when the sciences of the environment came to matter on a broader scale. Why do we actually know so little about the environmental sciences in the 20^th century? And what could a history of the environmental sciences in that period look like? This article answers these questions with two interrelated arguments. First, by reflecting on different approaches to write the history of ecology since the 1970s, it uncovers crucial entanglements between the history of science and ecological thought that created blind spots regarding the environmental sciences in the 20^th century. Second, it argues for a shift in scales of analysis—towards meso‐scales. With a more regional approach historians can engage with the often‐neglected aspects of the political and economic history of the environmental sciences in the 20th century and thereby also reveal their fundamental infrastructural dimension. Because at its core, the article claims, the environmental sciences were and are essentially infrastructural sciences.