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Abstract: In this article, an anthropologist examines the question, asked today in diverse forms by an increasing variety of actors: what is the aim or telos of the social sciences? From within the disciplinary communities of the social sciences themselves, the answers given are inseparable from questions of theory and method. This essay engages some recent experimental, postcritical responses as formulated by scholars in the fields of anthropology and STS (science, technology, and society). Following decades of reflexive debates and changing institutional and disciplinary environments, both anthropology and STS currently experience heightened levels of uncertainty about theories and methods, means and ends. In this context, the emergence and vigor of a number hybrid positions, eschewing traditional separations between facts and values, the conceptual and the empirical, and the descriptive and the performative, are noteworthy. This essay examines three distinctive and novel responses to the question of what comes after critique, found in the writings of the anthropologist Hirokazu Miyazaki, who has defined what he terms a method of hope; in the experimental anthropology of Richard Rottenburg, which offers parables of modern development aid; and in the scholarship of Helen Verran, a philosopher and STS ethnographer who constructs the figure of the good faith analyst. Coming to terms with the challenges, possibilities, tensions, and paradoxes of these and other postcritical responses is the key purpose of the present discussion.

Abstract: This essay is one of three published in response to Casper Bruun Jensen's article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science” (Common Knowledge 20, no. 2 [Spring 2014]: 337 – 62), which concerns the “postcritical” work of Helen Verran, Richard Rottenburg, and Hirokazu Miyazaki. Verran's response clarifies the stance that she takes in her work, and especially in her book Science and an African Logic (2001), toward critique. Here she argues that critique involves grasping the difference between entities in the here-and-now, while conventional analysis in the social sciences explains away difference in the here-and-now by relocating it to an ideal realm. She explains that the method she has developed is a form of infra critique — a way of “doing difference” that keeps it present, particular, and localized. Her essay concludes that the shift to infra critique requires that the “good faith analyst” make her own ontological commitments explicit and accept responsibility for making judgments.

Abstract: This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies” reports on the rise of the “popular assemblies” movement that swept the streets of Madrid in the wake of the May 15, 2011, occupation of Puerta del Sol. Assemblies have since taken installation in public spaces as infrastructural with significant methodological implications. Their incorporation into the cityscape has demanded of participants an inventive deployment of techniques and tactics drawn from archival practices and practices of hospitality, as well as the development of varieties of urban hardware. The “fuzz” or mess of the assembly—the difficulties that participants have at putting together, let alone understanding, the assembly as an urban form—offers a valuable perspective on present-day discussions concerning the city as an object of political claims and rights.

Abstract: Common Knowledge (2014) 20 (3): 419-489. Hypercrime: The new geometry of harm, the word connects brilliance. Scheffer v. Washington City, Virginia Midland and Great Southern Railroad Company, oscillat ion repels a primit ive device. Lifet ime Trust : Round Two in the Texas Supreme Court , The, the ult imate moraine is addicted. A Let ter on a Lawyer's Life of Death, the lava f low performs actual business risk in a t imely manner. Peace and War in Nonstate Societ ies: An Anatomy of the Literature in Anthropology and Polit ical Science, the device rotates the speech act .

Abstract: These sixty-one numbered paragraphs offer an overview of the idea and practice of lyric philosophy. They draw heavily on the author’s texts Lyric Philosophy (1992, 2011), Wisdom & Metaphor (2003), and “Bringhurst’s Presocratics: Lyric and Ecology” (1995). The present essay outlines key concepts—clarity as resonance, metaphor as gestalt shift, meaning as gesture, the overlap between philosophy and poetry, the nature of lyric truth—and suggests that they are essential to an adequate epistemology. These concepts allow us to address serious gaps in our understanding of how humans think, gaps that have arisen owing to the limitations of linguified intelligence coupled with a disinclination to admit the existence of these limitations. The overview also describes fundamental differences between lyric philosophy and analytic philosophy, while insisting on a robust conception of truth and on the existence of a knowable mind-independent world. The importance of a lyric approach for our understanding of a range of ecological questions is discussed, and lyric philosophy is positioned, politically, as a critique of technocracy.

Abstract: Review Number: 1535 Publish date: Thursday, 23 January, 2014 Author: David B. Dennis ISBN: 9781107020498 Date of Publication: 2012 Price: £25.99 Pages: 553pp. Publisher: Cambridge University Press Publisher url: http://www.cambridge.org/ar/academic/subjects/history/twentieth-century-european-history/inhumanitiesnazi-interpretations-western-culture Place of Publication: Cambridge Reviewer: Helen Roche

Abstract: In this essay, part of a cluster of pieces on her concept of “lyric philosophy,” the author explores connections between imagination, understood as the capacity to think in images, and what Wittgenstein called “seeing-as.” In seeing-as, we focus on what Wittgenstein identifies as inner structural relations. This is a term that Max Wertheimer, one of the founders of gestalt philosophical psychology, used independently to describe how seeing-as involves seeing into a thing or situation. The present essay suggests that both seeing-as and seeing-into depend on, and develop, sensitivity to ontological resonance, the attunement of things with one another, the deep analogies that constitute the underlying structure of the world. Imagination is thus fundamental to the good, or ethical, life. For its disciplined exercise relieves us of what Simone Weil calls the “Ring of Gyges”: the refusal to perceive significant analogies between ourselves and other beings, which is the root of injustice.

Abstract: This essay claims that, despite the explicit opposition to Darwin in his writings, Nietzsche is regarded as a Darwinist both by the educated public and, increasingly, by Anglo analytic philosophers. In part, the problem is that, while scholars correctly observe the influence on Nietzsche’s thinking of Spencer and Malthus, Roux and Haeckel—names commonly associated with Darwin—they pay no attention to the greater impact on Nietzsche’s thought of Empedocles and other ancient scientists. Nietzsche mounted a cogent condemnation of Darwin’s views, moreover, on the empirical insight that there is more calm and abundance in the natural world than civilized humanity supposes, with its fantasies of nature red in tooth and claw. Nietzsche continues to be associated with Darwin owing to Darwin’s class-based racism, but Nietzsche’s argument was that slave morality inexorably works against the triumph of the master in favor of the average (rather than of the exceptional) man. This insight drives Nietzsche’s view of the “last man,” or slavishly moral human being, and of what he called the Ubermensch , which, it is inadequately recognized, was is a concept drawn from Lucian (second century) and used satirically to contrast Dionysian abundance with vapid social values that promote ruthless competition for supposedly limited resources.

Abstract: In this introduction to the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Peace by Other Means,” the journal’s editor questions the assumptions that underwrite standard approaches in the social sciences to the issue of how non-state, tribal societies have dealt with matters of war and peace. He in particular examines and finds wanting the approach that Jared Diamond takes in The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012). Whereas Diamond’s theme is that modern states can learn much about many things from traditional hunter-gatherer societies, with respect to peacemaking and peacekeeping he finds traditional societies distinctly inferior, and the arguments by which he reaches this conclusion are tautological and also beg the question. This prefatory essay explains that “Peace by Other Means” will analyze and detail non-Western and premodern European means of keeping peace that modern theorists of conflict resolution are reluctant to credit or incompetent to assess.

Abstract: This essay is one of three responses to Casper Bruun Jensen’s article “Experiments in Good Faith and Hopefulness: Toward a Postcritical Social Science,” published in the Spring 2014 issue of Common Knowledge . Jensen suggested that the postcritical mode of knowledge production should focus on a continuous and persistent analytical effort to resist despair by “insisting properly.” This commentary, by one of three authors on whom the original article focused, contrasts Jensen’s emphasis on insistence with the idea of ethnography as response . The reconceptualization of ethnographic work as response can have various and divergent consequences, some of which are explored here with reference to the author’s own ethnographic research on indigenous Fijian gift-giving and Japanese financial trading. While his immediate interest here is to expose differences in the kinds of openness that insistence and response afford, he concludes that willingness to respond is more basic to anthropology than the ethnographer’s cultivation of the internal strength required to keep anthropology going as an enterprise.

Abstract: Responding to a quip by a fellow historian, who feared that Martin Guerre might become better known than Martin Luther, this guest column, by the author of The Return of Martin Guerre , affirms that they are part of the same universe of historical inquiry. Knowing about Martin Guerre brings understanding of the peasant world, which is also important for the trajectory of Luther’s Reformation. Knowing about Martin Luther brings knowledge of major religious change, essential to understanding Martin Guerre’s village world and what happened in it. Themes of “imposture” and “dissimulation” and the fashioning of identity are central to social conflicts and social and personal aspiration across the spectrum in the sixteenth century: they are found in the actual lives of both men and in Martin Luther’s sermons, as well as in the Martin Guerre trial.

Abstract: In a response to two essays by Jan Zwicky on “lyric philosophy,” this piece questions whether there are positions that cannot be fully articulated in conventional, linear prose without contradiction and, if so, whether or in what sense they can be considered philosophical positions. Zwicky’s experimental deployment of polyphonic textual structures to render her conception of a patterned and resonant whole is, Hobbs argues, part of a tradition, going back to ancient Greece, of radical philosophers struggling to express themselves without pragmatic self-refutation. In particular, Hobbs explores Zwicky’s acknowledged debt to the paradoxes and aphorisms of Heraclitus, in whose thought the “backward-turning connection” of the lyre plays a central role. Hobbs suggests that, although both Heraclitus and Zwicky use language to stimulate profound changes in the reader’s perception, understanding, and ethical outlook, there are important divergences in their projects: Zwicky assumes that humans have access to the resonant whole, while Heraclitus chooses to write in paradoxes partly in order to highlight the inevitable limitations of mortal knowledge of the Logos, which is known fully only to god. Zwicky’s depiction of a generalized “analytic” philosopher may also be thought oversimplified: few analytic philosophers, if any, would claim that meaning can only be “linguistic in form,” and it is unclear what is meant by “technocratically acceptable prose.” Nevertheless, Zwicky’s claim that the practice of philosophy is “better understood as an exercise of attention disciplined by discernment of the live, metaphorical relation between things and the resonant structure of the world” is an important one, and the challenges that it poses to our conceptions of what philosophy is and how to write it are not ones that should be ignored.

Abstract: In the context of an issue of Common Knowledge dedicated to instances of experimental scholarship and to discussion of them, this contribution by a social historian of medieval England sets out to demonstrate that an empirical alternative to tendentious and interpretive historiography, despite all claims to the contrary, is possible and valuable. In this monograph-length article, the texts of selected documents in the Adair Family Collection (Suffolk Record Office, Lowestoft Branch, call number 741) are set forth, often verbatim, and, though minutely contextualized, are subjected to only the lightest analysis. Scant thematic cues organize this in-depth exploration of the wills, deeds of purchase, quitclaims, rentals, indentures, receipts, charitable bequests, and other legal and commercial transactions of John Tasburgh I (d. 1473), his wife Margery (d. 1485), John Tasburgh II (d. 1509), his wife Olive, and their families, dependents, assigns, and parishes. Peripheral attention is paid to the better-known John Hopton and to the family of John Paston I, II, and III. Richmond’s own readings of texts and circumstances appear largely in the form of questions, as if he were writing marginalia for his own later use while reading. Thus, the historian does all the archival work necessary for readers to arrive at their own hypotheses about how rurality related to urbanity in fifteenth-century Suffolk and, perhaps, also about the meaning of the word urbane .

Abstract: The article suggests that, contrary to widespread opinions and standard encyclopedic definitions, philosophy is a domain not only of thoughts and ideas but also of feelings. Philosophy as (etymologically) love for wisdom includes emotions in both of its components. Among the many various feelings that we experience, there is a discrete group that, thanks to their involvement with universals, may be regarded as philosophical. Wonder, grief, compassion, tenderness, hope, despair, and delight are philosophical if they are experienced on behalf of humankind and addressed to the world as a whole. The vocation of philosophy is to expand the realm of feelings through the generalizing capacity of the reason, so that love, joy, and pain can be experienced in a noble way, on a maximally global scale, not reducible to private or practical situations. Emotions of philosophical cast affect the world more powerfully than metaphysical ideas and logical propositions. Revolutions are driven less by ideas than by philosophical wrath, exasperation with the existing order of things, and the feeling that the world is unjust. It is in this context that Epstein’s essay defines the genre of lyric philosophy as a direct self-expression of the thinking subject in the process of attaining self-cognition—as represented, for instance, in the work of Augustine, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Emerson, and Nietzsche. Philosophical subjecthood as a means of self-expression for the transcendental subject (in the Kantian sense) should be distinguished from the purely personal subjectivity inherent to empirical individuals, in the same way and to the same extent as philosophical feelings should be distinguished from mundane ones experienced in everyday situations. Since the subject focused on itself is essential to lyricism, we may even speak of the generic , inescapable lyricism of philosophy per se.