Americans have long prided themselves on living in a country that serves as a beacon of democracy to the world, but from the time of the founding they have also engaged in debates over what the criteria for democracy are as they seek to validate their faith in the United States as a democratic regime. In this book John Gunnell shows how the academic discipline of political science has contributed in a major way to this ongoing dialogue, thereby (...) playing a significant role in political education and the formulation of popular conceptions of American democracy. Using the distinctive “internalist” approach he has developed for writing intellectual history, Gunnell traces the dynamics of conceptual change and continuity as American political science evolved from a focus in the nineteenth century on the idea of the state, through the emergence of a pluralist theory of democracy in the 1920s and its transfiguration into liberalism in the mid-1930s, up to the rearticulation of pluralist theory in the 1950s and its resurgence, yet again, in the 1990s. Along the way he explores how political scientists have grappled with a fundamental question about popular sovereignty: Does democracy require a people and a national democratic community, or can the requisites of democracy be achieved through fortuitous social configurations coupled with the design of certain institutional mechanisms? (shrink)

A distinctive feature of Ludwig Wittgenstein's work after 1930 was his turn to a conception of philosophy as a form of social inquiry, John G. Gunnell argues, and Thomas Kuhn's approach to the philosophy of science exemplified this conception. In this book, Gunnell shows how these philosophers address foundational issues in the social and human sciences, particularly the vision of social inquiry as an interpretive endeavor and the distinctive cognitive and practical relationship between social inquiry and its (...) subject matter. Gunnell speaks directly to philosophers and practitioners of the social and human sciences. He tackles the demarcation between natural and social science; the nature of social phenomena; the concept and method of interpretation; the relationship between language and thought; the problem of knowledge of other minds; and the character of descriptive and normative judgments about practices that are the object of inquiry. Though Wittgenstein and Kuhn are often criticized as initiating a modern descent into relativism, this book shows that the true effect of their work was to undermine the basic assumptions of contemporary social and human science practice. It also problematized the authority of philosophy and other forms of social inquiry to specify the criteria for judging such matters as truth and justice. When Wittgenstein stated that "philosophy leaves everything as it is," he did not mean that philosophy would be left as it was or that philosophy would have no impact on what it studied, but rather that the activity of inquiry did not, simply by virtue of its performance, transform the object of inquiry. (shrink)

The assumed difference and continuing estrangement between political philosophy and political science is a relatively recent development. Both fields sprang from closely entwined concerns about democracy and matters of social and political justice, and today both must still confront their practical as well as cognitive relationship to their subject matter. This issue, however, has receded into the background of these discourses. Ludwig Wittgenstein's vision of philosophy is in effect a vision of social inquiry. His work, when viewed from this perspective, (...) prompts us to reconsider the logical status of various modes of political inquiry: how can these practices, descriptively and normatively, do justice to their subject matter? How can they deal with such foundational issues as the nature of social phenomena, the concepts of representation and interpretation, the problem of knowledge of other minds and what is involved in making explanatory and evaluative judgments about the objects of inquiry? (shrink)

Contemporary literature in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind points to the locus of significant unresolved theoretical and methodological issues in political theory and political science, and particularly to the persistently anomalous status of mental concepts. The manner in which political and social theorists have accessed and deployed this literature, however, has been highly selective and conceptually problematical. The purpose has often been to justify prior agendas, and issues relating to how brain processes are involved in an explanation of (...) political phenomena have not been satisfactorily confronted. Cognitive science is itself a highly contested field with indigenous theoretical difficulties, and it is necessary to sort out and analyze the salient positions in this conversation and to begin, at least tentatively, to assess critically its implications for both social theory and empirical research and to suggest a direction for further investigation. (shrink)

Although social scientists have been devoted to discovering specific realities of social life, many theorists devoted to critical judgment have turned to philosophy in search of universal grounds of truth and reality. They have, however, worried about the problem of relativism. Although Wittgenstein has often been characterized as a relativist, Cora Diamond, inspired by G. E. M Anscombe, argues that his work, despite internal tensions, provides rational grounds for external criticism of social practices. Her argument and her critique of the (...) work of Peter Winch and Ilham Dilman are, however, neither adequately supported by Wittgenstein’s texts nor sufficiently developed on their own terms. (shrink)

This book is an exploration of the relationship between philosophy and political inquiry. John G. Gunnell is seeking to explain certain dimensions of how philosophy has influenced political science and political theory but also how these latter fields have understood and deployed philosophy. When social scientists and social theorists turn to the work of philosophers for intellectual authority what they extract is often selective and in the service of some prior agenda. The philosophers whose work he discusses have (...) all in various degrees been objects of the conversation of political theory, but close acquaintance with that work is often limited and derivative. Gunnell's goal is to initiate a more genuine "conversation" with certain philosophers and political theorists. (shrink)

The issue of the nature of concepts and the problem of understanding conceptual change have become increasingly important in methodological discussions of the study of the history of political thought as well as in substantive research. The treatment of these matters, however, remains inadequate. This is in part a consequence of metatheoretical agendas that have diverted attention away from a theoretical analysis of concepts and apposite issues such as the relationship between mental predicates, words and concepts. But the failure to (...) confront these matters has also been the result of the pervasive emphasis on contextual analysis in historical interpretation. One of the methodological implications of a more thorough theoretical account of concepts is a greater concern with internal history and conceptual genealogy. (shrink)

Hutchinson, Read, and Sharrock have provided an important analysis of the work of Peter Winch. They succeed in rescuing his philosophy from many of the distorting characterizations and categorizations to which it has been subjected, and they provide a fresh account of its relevance for thinking about the theory and practice of social science.

The realism grounding St. Thomas Aquinas’s pre-modern natural science defends the reception of similitudes of the forms of things known by abstraction. Modern natural science challenges this abstractio- nist account by recasting «form» in the leading role of principle of intelligibility—instead of forms, modern science discovers laws. Thomistic realism is prima facie incompatible with this account. Following Charles De Koninck, this essay outlines a rapprochement between the epistemology of pre-modern, Thomistic natural science and its modern successor. I argue that natural (...) forms are noetic limits towards which physical laws tend, and our grasp of this tendency uses a mode of knowledge comparable to what St. Thomas termed universal in repraesentando. (shrink)

A Thomistic ontology of spacetime seems impossible, given Thomas Aquinas’s (1224–1275) outdated science and mathematics. By extension, it would seem that his modern followers are foolhardy to attempt to defend such a view. Indeed, a critique of Jacques Maritain by Adolf Grünbaum proceeds apace, dismantling his attempts to save Thomistic philosophical realism from Einstein. However, Grünbaum’s attack was given in better form thirty years prior by the Belgian Thomist Charles De Koninck. The two critiques are analyzed here. De Koninck’s arguments (...) are superior to Grünbaum’s due to their greater precision as refutations as well as their more adequate ontology of spacetime, made possible but not explicit in Thomistic philosophy. (shrink)

Discutamos el principio de la acción mínima (PMA) y su conexión con el axioma tomista operari sequitur esse. El PMA se llama uno de los principios más profundos de la naturaleza. Después de una exposición breve del principio, pasemos a investigar esto en tres etapas aporéticas. La primera etapa involucra una pregunta de prioridad: ¿el PMA—es una causa o un efecto? En la segunda etapa analizamos la conexión entre un comportamiento global y los individuos a escala local: ¿es el PMA (...) una característica verdadera debido a lo que es cierto acerca de las naturalezas de las sustancias? En la etapa final, relacionamos el PMA al axioma tomista operari sequitur esse. La idea clave es que las formas de los objetos físicos no son simplemente determinaciones intrínsecas sino que también establecen de manera extrínseca varias relaciones. Las formas de los individuos son, a través de estas relaciones esenciales, extrínsecas y determinables, partes formales de un todo cósmico. Esto concuerda con la idea tomista de que la forma del universo—el tipo natural del mundo—es su misma unidad de orden. (shrink)

Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics deals with these problems is reviewed. A new interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, is presented. The basic element of this interpretation is the transaction describing a quantum event as an exchange of advanced and retarded waves, as implied by the work of Wheeler and Feynman, Dirac, and others. The transactional interpretation is explicitly nonlocal and thereby consistent with recent tests of the Bell inequality, yet is relativistically invariant and fully causal. (...) A detailed comparison of the transactional and Copenhagen interpretations is made in the context of well-known quantum-mechanical Gedankenexperimenre and "paradoxes." The transactional interpretation permits quantum-mechanical wave functions to be interpreted as real waves physically present in space rather than as "mathematical representations of knowledge" as in the Copenhagen interpretation. The transactional interpretation is shown to provide insight into the complex character of the quantum-mechanical state vector and the mechanism associated with its "collapse." It also leads in a natural way to justification of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Born probability law (P = ii iij*), basic elements of the Copenhagen interpretation. (shrink)

Harry S. Broudy has studied the utility of general education through the development and testing of his Newspaper Test of the Uses of Schooling (NPT). The results of research with a new version of the NPT are reported in this essay and some options for future research are presented. The results of the study indicate that continued development and testing of the NPT will prove important. Promising new versions of the test are suggested for future research to pursue, including a (...) Hypertest version. Additional instruments and research strategies are also suggested that could be used to broaden the "search for evidence" of the uses of schooling. (shrink)

This book shines bright light into the dim recesses of quantum theory, where the mysteries of entanglement, nonlocality, and wave collapse have motivated some to conjure up multiple universes, and others to adopt a "shut up and calculate" mentality. After an extensive and accessible introduction to quantum mechanics and its history, the author turns attention to his transactional model. Using a quantum handshake between normal and time-reversed waves, this model provides a clear visual picture explaining the baffling experimental results that (...) flow daily from the quantum physics laboratories of the world. To demonstrate its powerful simplicity, the transactional model is applied to a collection of counter-intuitive experiments and conceptual problems. (shrink)

There has been substantial growth of interest in sustainability in business, management and organisational studies in recent years. This article applies Oswick’s :15–25, 2009) method of bibliometric research to ascertain how this growth has been reflected in scholarly publishing, particularly as it relates to business and management education over the 20 years 1994–2013. The research has found that sustainability as a general topic in business and management studies, as evidenced by scholarly publishing, has accelerated rapidly both in terms of items (...) published and cited. In the mid-2000s, the emphasis of books published in this area began to change from one which advocated ‘sustainable development’ to one which viewed sustainability as a management practice which could help businesses and society simultaneously. The literature on sustainability within the field of management and business education has been smaller, but has enjoyed a similar growth rate which accelerated sharply in the most recent 5 years of the dataset. Most of the scholarly, peer-reviewed articles analysed tend to advocate the inclusion of sustainability on business school curricula, or to demonstrate the various ways in which faculty have integrated sustainability-related principles in their teaching. A smaller amount of research has been undertaken on the learning experiences of the ‘recipients’ of these approaches. There is evidence of an extensive variety of approaches used by educators, but the most significant research need which presented is for more empirically driven studies on how and why business and management students engage with the principles of sustainability. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary book concerns personality, especially intimacy, principally love, and its absence in states of aloneness, primarily loneliness. The author argues that normal and preeminently supranormal personalities are chiefly constituted by intimate connections. Correspondingly, he proposes that the serious shortage of such shared inwardness is the nucleus of every type of personality abnormality.

This book is the second volume of an interdisciplinary study, chiefly one of philosophy and psychology, which concerns personality, especially the abnormal in terms of states of aloneness, primarily that of the negative emotional isolation customarily known as loneliness. Other states of aloneness investigated include solitude, reclusiveness, seclusion, desolation, isolation, and what the author terms “aloneliness,” “alonism,” “lonism,” and “lonerism.” Insofar as this study most explicitly focuses on abnormal personalities, it employs the general and specific definitions of personality aberrations as (...) formulated by the American Psychiatric Association in its latest edition of the _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV)_. The author views personality as preeminently comprised of the individual's interpersonal relationships. Unlike the _DSM-IV_, he proposes that people with personality disorders not only possibly but necessarily manifest deviancy regarding interpersonal functioning via serious shortcomings in shared inwardness, paramountly reciprocated intimacy. This work also engages in an analysis of five social factors that are conducive to predisposing, precipitating, and maintaining negative kinds of personality and aloneness. The author has formed these factors into an acronym titled _SCRAM_ since when they are present, intimacy scurries away and in its absence, loneliness and other sorts of unwanted aloneness scamper in and fill the person with unhappiness via, for instance, sadness and self-worthlessness. The constituents of SCRAM are the following social illnesses: _S_uccessitis (for example, the fixation on fame and fortune), _C_apitalitis (greed-driven, unfettered capitalism), _R_ivalitis (competitivitis), _A_tomitis (hyper-individualism), and _M_aterialitis (for example, the anti-spirituality of consumeritis). In sum, this book provides a different perspective on personality via the lenses of various types of aloneness and their lack of public and private intimacy, especially love. (shrink)

Talks collected from lectures given by Bennett with Gurdjieff's approval, to help people understand All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Bennett regarded Gurdjieff's All and Everything as a work of superhuman genius.

Over the past two decades an increasing number of research papers have signalled growing interest in more responsible, sustainable and ethical modes of management education. This systematic literature review of peer-reviewed publications on, and allied to, the concept of responsible management learning and education confirms that scholarly interest in the topic has accelerated over the last decade. Rather than assuming that RMLE is one thing, however, this review proposes that the literature on responsible management education and learning can be divided (...) into four distinct categories: Teaching Responsible Management; Organizing for Responsible Education; Responsible Individual Learning, and; Responsible Organizational Learning. Although the literature on RMLE has grown, work on how managers learn responsible management in organizational or workplace settings, particularly without the intervention of external educational providers, is minimal. The Special Issue of the Journal of Business Ethics is the first to address this significant lacuna. The vast majority of published peer-reviewed research is related to organizational provider-centric organizing for responsible management education. Each category is explored and the implications of organizing the literature this way for the field of RMLE are discussed. Finally, an agenda for future research and theory development on RMLE is proposed. (shrink)

The present paper examines the arguments and data presented by Nisbett and Wilson relevant to their thesis that subjects do not have access to their own cognitive processes. It is concluded that their review of previous research is selective and incomplete and that the data they present in behalf of their thesis does not withstand a demand characteristics analysis. Furthermore, their use of observer-subject similarity as evidence of subjects' inability to access cognitive processes makes tests of their hypothesis confounded and, (...) at the same time, reveals limitations in the application of the pre-inquiry quasi-control to research on social behavior. Problems with postexperiment questionnaires, such as the demand characteristics of the inquiry procedure are also considered. Although there are difficulties in assessing subjects' cognitive processes, many of these may be overcome through the application of novel techniques and research conducted on more traditional methods. In contrast to the view that subjects have limited access to cognitive processes and that their verbal reports are not valid, it is concluded that subjects' verbalizations are a rich source of psychological data which must be pursued if we are to tap their cognitive processes and are to gain an adequate understanding of human behavior. (shrink)

The problem of the direction of electromagnetic time, i.e., the complete dominance of retarded electromagnetic radiation over advanced radiation in the universe, is considered in the context of a generalized form of the Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory in an open expanding universe with a singularity atT=0. It is shown that the application of a four-vector reflection boundary condition at the singularity leads to the observed dominance of retarded radiation; it also clarifies the role of advanced and retarded waves in the emission (...) of very weakly absorbed radiation such as neutrinos. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman has provided one of the most exciting advances in semiotic aesthetics in years in his recent book, Languages of Art. Among other theses that Goodman defends is the claim that pictures are elements of symbol systems to be understood in the way that languages are understood: that depiction and description are species of a common genus which is to be understood in terms of denotation. One of the consequences Goodman draws from his theory is that depiction is conventional: (...) the fact that a certain picture depicts a man is as much a matter of convention as the fact that a certain phrase describes him. This claim is interesting and exciting, but is it correct? Unfortunately, I do not think we are yet in a position to answer this last question, although I shall try to get nearer to an answer in this paper. (shrink)