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"State of nature"
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Leaving the State of Nature. Strengths and Limits of Kant’s Transformation of the Social Contract Tradition
I first outline how Kant’s ideal account of rightful external freedom transforms the social contract tradition as found in the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, before proposing a way to see Kant’s two-layered non-ideal theory as complementing his ideal theory of rightful freedom. This enables us to envision a conception of rightful external freedom and of rightful human freedom in particular societies. These arguments also show us the importance of realizing that the four possible political conditions for Kant – anarchy, barbarism, despotism, and republic – are ideas of reason, which means that they are never perfectly realized. Hence, historical societies are not either in the state of nature or in civil society, and in historical republics, there are pockets of injustice or pockets devoid of justice that can only be captured by means of one of the three political ideas that are not constitutive of the republican legal-political framework.
Journal Article
Buzz : urban beekeeping and the power of the bee
\"Bees are essential for human survival--one-third of all food on American dining tables depends on the labor of bees. Beyond pollination, the very idea of the bee is ubiquitous in our culture: we can feel buzzed; we can create buzz; we have worker bees, drones, and Queen bees; we establish collectives and even have communities that share a hive-mind. In Buzz, authors Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut convincingly argue that the power of bees goes beyond the food cycle, bees are our mascots, our models, and, unlike any other insect, are both feared and revered. In this fascinating account, Moore and Kosut travel into the land of urban beekeeping in New York City, where raising bees has become all the rage. We follow them as they climb up on rooftops, attend beekeeping workshops and honey festivals, and even put on full-body beekeeping suits and open up the hives. In the process, we meet a passionate, dedicated, and eclectic group of urban beekeepers who tend to their brood with an emotional and ecological connection that many find restorative and empowering. Kosut and Moore also interview professional beekeepers and many others who tend to their bees for their all-important production of a food staple: honey. The artisanal food shops that are so popular in Brooklyn are a perfect place to sell not just honey, but all manner of goods: soaps, candles, beeswax, beauty products, and even bee pollen. Buzz also examines media representations of bees, such as children's books, films, and consumer culture, bringing to light the reciprocal way in which the bee and our idea of the bee inform one another. Partly an ethnographic investigation and partly a meditation on the very nature of human/insect relations, Moore and Kosut argue that how we define, visualize, and interact with bees clearly reflects our changing social and ecological landscape, pointing to how we conceive of and create culture, and how, in essence, we create ourselves. Lisa Jean Moore is a feminist medical sociologist and Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. Mary Kosut is Associate Professor of Media, Society and the Arts at Purchase College, State University of New York. In the Biopolitics series\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Rational Inattention to Discrete Choices: A New Foundation for the Multinomial Logit Model
Individuals must often choose among discrete actions with imperfect information about their payoffs. Before choosing, they have an opportunity to study the payoffs, but doing so is costly. This creates new choices such as the number of and types of questions to ask. We model these situations using the rational inattention approach to information frictions. We find that the decision maker's optimal strategy results in choosing probabilistically in line with a generalized multinomial logit model, which depends both on the actions' true payoffs as well as on prior beliefs.
Journal Article
Insect artifice : nature and art in the Dutch Revolt
\"This pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low Countries. Insect Artifice explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region's creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At its center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel's encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens. Marisa Anne Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel's writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. Bass reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.\" -- Dust jacket
Book
Integrating anxiety into international relations theory: Hobbes, existentialism, and ontological security
This article draws on Hobbes and existentialist philosophy to contend that anxiety needs to be integrated into international relations (IR) theory as a constitutive condition, and proposes theoretical avenues for doing so. While IR scholars routinely base their assumptions regarding the centrality of fear and self-help behavior on the Hobbesian state of nature, they overlook the Hobbesian emphasis on anxiety as the human condition that gives rise to the state of nature. The first section of the article turns to existentialist philosophy to explicate anxiety's relation to fear, multiple forms, and link to agency. The second section draws on some recent interpretations to outline the role that anxiety plays in Hobbesian thought. Finally, I argue that an ontological security (OS) perspective that is enriched by insights from existentialism provides the most appropriate theoretical venue for integrating anxiety into IR theory and discuss the contributions of this approach to OS studies and IR theory.
Journal Article
The monster's bones : the discovery of T. Rex and how it shook our world
\"A gripping narrative of a fearless paleontologist, the founding of America's most loved museums, and the race to find the largest dinosaurs on record. In the dust of the Gilded Age Bone Wars, two vastly different men emerge with a mission to fill the empty halls of New York's struggling American Museum of Natural History: Henry Fairfield Osborn, a privileged socialite whose reputation rests on the museum's success, and intrepid Kansas-born fossil hunter Barnum Brown. When Brown unearths the first Tyrannosaurus Rex fossils in the Montana wilderness, forever changing the world of paleontology, Osborn sees a path to save his museum from irrelevancy. With four-foot-long jaws capable of crushing the bones of its prey and hips that powered the animal to run at speeds of 25 miles per hour, the T. Rex suggests a prehistoric ecosystem more complex than anyone imagined. As the public turns out in droves to cower before this bone-chilling giant of the past and wonder at the mysteries of its disappearance, Brown and Osborn together turn dinosaurs from a biological oddity into a beloved part of culture. Vivid and engaging, The Monster's Bones journeys from prehistory to present day, from remote Patagonia to the unforgiving badlands of the American West to the penthouses of Manhattan. With a wide-ranging cast of robber barons, eugenicists, and opportunistic cowboys, New York Times best-selling author David K. Randall reveals how a monster of a bygone era ignited a new understanding of our planet and our place within it\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges
Modern Western thinking is an abyssal thinking. It operates through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms, the realm of \"this side of the line\" and the realm of \"the other side of the line.\" The division is such that \"the other side of the line\" vanishes as reality, becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced as nonexistent. What most fundamentally characterizes abyssal thinking is thus the impossibility of the copresence of the two sides of the line. The other side of the abyssal line is the realm of beyond legality and illegality (lawlessness), of beyond truth and falsehood (incomprehensible beliefs, idolatry, magic). These forms of radical negation together result in a radical absence, the absence of humanity, modern subhumanity. This article argues that although colonialism provided the model for modern radical negation and exclusion, this is as true today as in the colonial period. Modern Western thinking goes on operating through abyssal lines that divide the human from the subhuman in such a way that human principles don't get compromised by inhu man practices. First, the tension between regulation and emancipation (on this side of the line) continues to coexist with the tension between appropriation and violence (on the other side of the line) in such a way that the universality of the first tension is not contradicted by the existence of the second one. Secondly, abyssal lines continue to structure modern knowledge and modern law. Thirdly, these two abyssal lines are constitutive of Western-based political and cultural relations and interactions in the modern world-system. The struggle for global social justice must, therefore, be a struggle for global cognitive justice as well. In order to succeed, this struggle requires a new kind of thinking, a postabyssal thinking.
Journal Article
Earth, wind, fire, and rain : real tales of temperamental elements
Examines \"five of America's deadliest natural disasters that were made worse by human error, ignorance, and greed\"--Back cover.
Book
Role and relation in Confucian IR: Relating to strangers in the states of nature
The literature on International Relations theory has yet to align relational theory with role theory, despite the fact that these two theories share so much epistemological common ground. This article uses role theory to bridge the gap between the Confucian and Western conceptions of relationality, whose practitioners regard each other as strangers. With the support of role theory, the comparative analysis of relationality in this article has mainly focused on two different types of relations: prior rule-based relations and improvised relations. The differences in the cultural preparation for these two relations partially explain the plurality of the relational universe and the perception of stranger. Role theory is one way to reconnect the seemingly irreconcilable relational universes. To illustrate the value of a composite agenda of relational theory and role theory, the article will use Kim Jong-un of North Korea as its case. Confucian relations propose that, for all nations, the necessity of having a certain role relation is a more important agenda than insisting on exactly what role to take.
Journal Article