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Ancient Greek Skepticism [The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
Although all skeptics in some way cast doubt on our ability to gain knowledge of the world, the term “skeptic” actually covers a wide range of attitudes and positions. There are skeptical elements in the views of many Greek philosophers, but the term “ancient skeptic” is generally applied either to a member of Plato’s Academy during its skeptical period (c. 273 B.C.E to 1st century B.C.E.) or to a follower of Pyrrho (c. 365 to 270 B.C.E.). Pyrrhonian skepticism flourished from Aenesidemus’ revival (1st century B.C.E.) to Sextus Empiricus, who lived sometime in the 2nd or 3rd centuries C.E. Thus the two main varieties of ancient skepticism: Academic and Pyrrhonian.
Princeton University Press Books in Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America
This wide-ranging series in twentieth-century U.S. political history presents not only works that represent the best of traditional political history but also those that integrate insights and methodologies of social and cultural history, challenge conventional periodizations, and situate the American political experience in a comparative framework.
Hamilton, S.: Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy.
Trucking Country is a social history of long-haul trucking that explores the contentious politics of free-market capitalism in post-World War II America. Shane Hamilton paints an eye-opening portrait of the rural highways of the American heartland, and in doing so explains why working-class populist voters are drawn to conservative politicians who seemingly don't represent their financial interests.
Edge: ECONOMICS IS NOT NATURAL SCIENCE By Douglas Rushkoff
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It's not. It's a product not of nature but of engineering. And to treat the market as nature, as some product of purely evolutionary forces, is to deny ourselves access to its ongoing redesign. It's as if we woke up in a world where just one operating system was running on all our computers and, worse, we didn't realize that any other operating system ever did or could ever exist. We would simply accept Windows as a given circumstance, and look for ways to adjust our society to its needs rather than the other way around.
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In short, these economic theories are selecting examples from nature to confirm the properties of a wholly designed marketplace: self-interested actors, inevitable equilibrium, a scarcity of resources, competition for survival. In doing so, they confirm — or at the very least, reinforce — the false idea that the laws of an artificially scarce fiscal scheme are a species' inheritance rather than a social construction enforced with gunpowder. At the very least, the language of science confers undeserved authority on these blindly accepted economic assumptions.
FT.com / Columnists / Lunch with the FT - Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond
Profile of Jared Diamond
Pragmatism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pragmatism is the philosophy of considering practical consequences and real effects to be vital components of meaning and truth.
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- Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000): pragmatist philosopher, concerned with language, logic, and philosophy of mathematics.
- Clarence Irving Lewis (1883-1964).
- Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007): famous author of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
- Hilary Putnam: in many ways the opposite of Rorty and thinks classical pragmatism was too permissive a theory.
- Stanley Fish: Literary and Legal Studies pragmatist. Criticizes Rorty's and Posner's legal theories as "almost pragmstism"[3] and authored the afterword in the collection The Revival of Pragmatism[4].
- Richard Shusterman: philosopher of art.
- Mike Sandbothe: Applied Rorty's neopragmatism to media studies and developed a new branch that he called Media Philosophy. Together with authors like Juergen Habermas, Hans Joas, Sami Pihlstroem, Mats Bergmann, Michael Esfeld and Helmut Pape he belongs to a group of European Pragmatists who make use of Peirce, James, Dewey, Rorty, Brandom, Putnam and other representatives of American pragmatism in continental philosophy.
- Stephen Toulmin: student of Wittgenstein, known especially for his The Uses of Argument.
- John Hawthorne: Defends a pragmatist form of contextualism to deal with the lottery paradox in his Knowledge and Lotteries.
- Jason Stanley: Defends a pragmatist form of contextualism against semantic varieties of contextualism in his Knowledge and Practical Interest.
- Arthur Fine: Philosopher of Science who proposed the Natural Ontological Attitude to the debate of scientific realism.
- Joseph Margolis still proudly defends the original Pragmatists and sees his recent work on Cultural Realism as extending and deepening their insights, especially the contribution of Peirce and Dewey, in the context of a rapprochement with Continental philosophy.
Analytical, neo- and other pragmatists (1950-)
(Often labelled neopragmatism as well.)
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- Sidney Hook (1902-1989): a prominent New York intellectual and philosopher, a student of Dewey at Columbia.
- Isaac Levi (1930): seeks to apply pragmatist thinking in a decision-theoretic perspective.
- Susan Haack (1945): teaches at the University of Miami, sometimes called the intellectual granddaughter of C.S. Peirce, known chiefly for foundherentism.
- Larry Hickman: philosopher of technology and important Dewey scholar as head of the Center for Dewey Studies.
- David Hildebrand: like other scholars of the classical pragmatists, Hildebrandt is dissatisfied with neopragmatism and argues for the continued importance of the writings of John Dewey.
- Nicholas Rescher
Neoclassical pragmatists (1950-)
Neoclassical pragmatists stay closer to the project of the classical pragmatists than neopragmatists do.
History of Chemical Fertilizer Development -- Russel and Williams 41 (2): 260 -- Soil Science Society of America Journal
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Neolithic man probably used fertilizers, but the first fertilizer produced by chemical processes was ordinary superphosphate, made early in the 19th century by treating bones with sulfuric acid. Coprolites and phosphate rock soon replaced bones as the P source. The K fertilizer industry started in Germany in 1861. In North America the K industry started during World War I and expanded with development of the New Mexico deposits in 1931 and the Saskatchewan deposits in 1958. Modern K fertilizers are more the product of physical than of chemical processes. The first synthetic N fertilizer was calcium nitrate, made in 1903 from nitric acid produced by the electric arc process. The availability of synthetic ammonia after 1913 led to many new N fertilizers, but physical quality was poor. In 1933 TVA was formed with a national responsibility to increase the efficiency of fertilizer manufacture and use. More than 75% of the fertilizer produced in the United States is made with processes developed by TVA.
Major fertilizers and fertilizer intermediates introduced by TVA include ammonium nitrate, high-analysis phosphates, diammonium phosphate, nitric phosphates, ammonium polyphosphate, urea ammonium phosphates, 11-16-0 and other liquid base solutions, superphosphoric acid, wet-process superphosphoric acid, suspensions, granular urea, and S-coated urea. These have had major impact upon the production of mixed fertilizers, bulk blending, and the fluid fertilizer industry. Future fertilizers not only must be technologically feasible, economical, and agronomically suitable—as have been past fertilizers—but also must meet various air and water pollution standards during production and have reduced total energy requirements.
The Valve - A Literary Organ | “Toward a History of the ‘Big, Ambitious Novel,‘“ by Mark Greif
Mark Greif’s piece on the “big, ambitious novel” is a great article—ambitious, inventive, and important. Greif begins:
Criticism works by criteria it is willing to name and others it disowns. The “big, ambitious novel” is one of those categories used by nearly everyone to sift and sort new work. Yet it is not respectable. It is more common to conversation than to professional discourse…
"The Death of the Novel" and Its Afterlives: Toward a History of the "Big, Ambitious Novel" -- Greif 36 (2): 11 -- boundary 2
The category of the "big, ambitious novel," circumscribing works by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and William Vollmann, has come to constitute one of the major forms through which postwar U.S. fiction is sorted and evaluated. A history of this form must not start in the 1970s, however, nor with distant forerunners such as James Joyce's Ulysses, but from 1945. After the Second World War, critics and novelists negotiated the sort of literature that would count as great after the end of high modernism, in service of a new humanism. The novels Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow succeeded stylistically and thematically where Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and William Faulkner's A Fable did not. They offered a new vitality to overcome critics' discourse of the "death of the novel" and probed new forms of human peculiarity that managed fears of the decline of the will of "man." This long history helps to extend our understanding of the origins and significance of interminable and system-centered fictions denounced by critics such as James Wood as mere "hysterical realism." It reorients contemporary criticism of these books to the shared, credible subjects of enforced liveliness and endlessness in narration, and a longer-term questioning of the human in a wider range of American fictions. It also shows how the novelists' apparent betrayal of humanist concerns actually emerged from earlier stages of interaction between novelists and mistrustful critics.
Homo icarus
Home page of Douglas Allchin, at UMN Twin Cities
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