exemplar of eighteenth-century British empiricism and epistemology. This article sheds new light on the different ways in which Dalgarno, the Wise Club, and Stewart addressed Molyneux's Problem in unique programs to cultivate dormant or restored external
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Molyneux's Problem in the Scottish Enlightenment
Charles Bradford Bow
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2019
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 22–41 (20 total)
Theory and method in the study of poverty in east Africa
John R. Campbell
This article explores the relation between theory and method in three methodologically innovative studies of rural poverty. The issue is pertinent because the nature of research on poverty has shifted from small-scale qualitative studies to large surveys, and to national-scale studies that combine qualitative and quantitative methods in an effort to inform policy makers on appropriate poverty reduction strategies. The interest in combined methods holds considerable promise for poverty research because it links a search for 'objective' economic concerns to the analysis of 'subjective' and context-specific issues. It is instructive to examine recent studies of poverty that have pursued different theoretical and methodological choices with a view to understand how 'theory' influenced methodological choices, and whether and how such choices influenced their understanding of poverty.
On Sunstein's Infotopia
David Estlund
Sunstein argues that democratic theory has recently rested its normative claims on a vast but empirically uninformed optimism about the ability of collective deliberation to lead to morally and rationally better decisions. Once that question is considered empirically, he argues, deliberation turns out to be mixed at best, and a disaster at worst. I want to suggest that Sunstein exaggerates the claims of the deliberative democrats, and interprets the empirical literature against deliberation in a way that appears, even based on his own descriptions of the studies, to be unfairly biased against the value of deliberation.
The “Democracy-Politics Paradox”
The Dynamics of Political Alienation
Gerry Stoker and Mark Evans
Contemporary political scientists have observed a democratic paradox that has crystallized around the disconnection between how citizens imagine their democracy and how politics is practiced. Citizens continue to believe in the values of liberal democracy but are increasingly disillusioned with how their political systems work and the politics that are practiced in the name of democracy. This article revisits the root causes of political alienation to better understand this democratic paradox. It provides both a conceptual understanding of political alienation and its domain of action and insights into how the concept can be operationalized and measured in empirical research. It argues that while democracy itself may not be in crisis, the politics on which its operation rests is in peril.
In Democratic Theory
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 26–36 (11 total)
Measuring the Sacred
Research Notes on the Use of Science by Adherents of New Spiritualities in Poland
Dorota Hall
The essay presents exemplary cases for the use of scientific accessories, such as a specialist vocabulary and sophisticated technical tools, in Polish holistic milieus. It analyses editorials published in the esoteric monthly Nieznany Świat, and refers to materials gathered during ethnographic fieldwork among vendors and customers of alternative medicine fairs and esoteric shops in Warsaw, as well as visitors to the Węsiory village, considered to be one of Earth's 'power places'. The work goes on the claim that references to science, and especially to various measurements, besides their legitimating function, appeal to sensitivity related to traditional folk religiosity. Therefore, the Nieznany Świat magazine might be considered a continuer of the folk tradition.
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2010
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 102–115 (13 total)
Knowledge, Travel, and Embodied Thought
Restlessness in Herder’s Journal of My Voyage in the Year 1769
John K. Noyes
, Idealism, Empiricism In an essay written in Riga on the topic of learning foreign languages, Herder had argued that, through geographical separation and through the different languages, nature organizes human life into separate cultures, but it also
An Intellectual Genealogy of the Revolt against “Esprit de Système”
From the Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment
Jeffrey D. Burson
empiricism. 8 To begin with, humanism is now considered to be far less inhospitable to scholasticism and early modern Aristotelianism than was once commonly assumed; indeed, much of the Renaissance anti-scholasticism and anti-Aristotelianism was rhetorical
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 21–44 (24 total)
Assumptions matter
Reflections on the Kanbur typology
Paul Shaffer
In contradistinction to Ravi Kanbur's (2003) summarization of a recent conference on qualitative and quantitative poverty analysis in which he proposed a typology of differences between 'qual and quant' approaches, I argue that key elements in this typology are derivative of more basic distinctions in the philosophy of social science between three research programs: empiricism/positivism, hermeneutics, and critical theory/critical hermeneutics. The point is not simply of academic interest but has practical implications for aspects of poverty analysis, including numeric transformation of data, assessment of the validity of empirical findings, and inferring policy implications from research results.
Crimen Sollicitationis
Tabooing Incest after the Orgy
Diederik F. Janssen
Late modernity’s binary intrigue of child sexuality/abuse is understood as a backlash phenomenon reactive to a general trans‐Atlantic crisis concerning the interlocking of kinship, religion, gender, and sexuality. Tellingly dissociated from 1980s gay liberation and recent encounters between queer theory and kinship studies, the child abuse theme articulates modernity’s guarded axiom of tabooed incest and its projected contemporary predicament “after the orgy”—after the proclaimed disarticulation of religion‐motivated, kin‐pivoted, reproductivist, and gender‐rigid socialities. “Child sexual abuse” illustrates a general situation of decompensated nostalgia: an increasingly imminent loss of the child’s vital otherness is counterproductively embattled by the late modern overproduction of its banal difference, its status as “minor.” Attempts to humanize, reform, or otherwise moderate incest’s current “survivalist” and commemorative regime of subjectivation, whether by means of ethical, empirical, historical, critical, legal, or therapeutic gestures, typically trigger the latter’s panicked empiricism. Accordingly, most “critical” interventions, from feminist sociology and anthropology to critical legal studies, have largely been collusive with the backlash: rather than appraising the radical precariousness of incest’s ethogram of avoidance in the face of late modernity’s dispossessing analytics and semiotics, they tend to feed its state of ontological vertigo and consequently hyperextended, manneristic forensics.
In Boyhood Studies
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2010
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 168–192 (24 total)
Heinrich Gomperz and “Vienna Contextualism”
Historical Epistemology and Logical Empiricism
Luke O'Sullivan
The Historiography of Logical Empiricism and Historical Epistemology Logical empiricism's place in the history of philosophy has been undergoing significant reassessment. Michael Friedman, for example, has emphasized that members of the Vienna
In Contributions to the History of Concepts
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2022
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 70–94 (25 total)