STUDIES IN EMERGENT ORDER VOL 5 (2012): 64-85 -- cases of extreme “information asymmetry” in which members of the audience of the experts have knowledge that is different from the knowledge of experts. The knowledge is often relevant, and the decision by a member of the audience of the expert to accept or reject the expert’s claims is not, as the models imply, based simply on beliefs about the reliability of the experts, but on the knowledge that the member of the audience already has, and has solid grounds for. In these cases, the better model for understanding how the member of the audience assesses the expert involves the content of the knowledge, not merely the evaluation of the expert. (...) I will treat the problem of expert knowledge as a special case of knowledge aggregation. My suggestion will be that the application of specific decision procedures, such as voting, produces, at the collective level, an emergent form of knowledge acquisition with its own features. Nothing about this account, however, requires an appeal to super-individual entities or processes, collective intentionality, and so forth. My point, rather, will be that to understand these processes it is necessary to eliminate some familiar prejudices about knowledge acquisition and our dependence on others. To put it in a slogan, my point is that “collective epistemology” or social epistemology has failed to be either sufficiently social or sufficiently epistemological. My approach will be to bring both back in, without resorting to appeals to collective facts. -- downloaded via Air to DBOX

AJS Volume 98 Number 2 (September 1992): 237-79 -- Habermas's theory breaks with the Continental tradition that has denigrated pragmatism as an Anglo-Saxon philosophy subservient to technocratic capitalism. While Habermas deftly uses pragmatist insights into communicative rationality and democratic ethos, he shows little sensitivity to other facets of pragmatism. This article argues that incorporating the pragmatist perspective on experience and indeterminacy brings a corrective to the emancipatory agenda championed by critical theorists. The pragmatist alternative to the theory of communicative action is presented, with the discussion centering around the following themes: disembodied reason versus embodied reasonableness, determinate being versus indeterminate reality, discursive truth versus pragmatic certainty, rational consensus versus reasonable dissent, transcendental democracy versus democratic transcendence, and rational society versus sane community. -- downloaded via Air to DBOX - added to Evernote

Bacot Jean-François, « Renouvier revisité par Marie-Claude Blais. », Le Philosophoire 1/2004 (n° 22) , p. 196-220
URL : www.cairn.info/revue-le-philosophoire-2004-1-page-196.htm.
DOI : 10.3917/phoir.022.0196.
Downloaded via iPhone to DBOX

Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1/2, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850 (1997), pp. 117-152 -- downloaded pdf to Note

Passionate Spectators: On Enthusiasm, Nymphomania, and the Imagined Tableau -- Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1/2, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850 (1997), pp. 51-83 -- downloaded pdf to Note

Enthusiasm or Imagination? Eighteenth-Century Smear Words in Comparative National Context -- Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1/2, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850 (1997), pp. 29-49 -- downloaded pdf to Note

Introduction, Lawrence E. Klein and Anthony J. La Vopa, Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1/2, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850 (1997), pp. 1-5 -- downloaded pdf to Note

Recensé : Michael Slote, A Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind, Oxford University Press, 2014, 272 p. -- L’éthique du care entend réhabiliter le rôle des émotions occulté par la pensée morale occidentale. Mais elle a besoin pour cela d’une conception sentimentaliste de l’esprit, dont M. Slote souhaite jeter les fondements. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Recensé : Claude Romano, Au cœur de la raison, la phénoménologie. Gallimard (Folio Essais), 2010 ; 1141 p., 13, 50 €. -- Repenser la phénoménologie dans ses présupposés les plus forts, et la transformer de l’intérieur : tel est le geste théorique de Claude Romano qui, à partir des objections formulées par la philosophie analytique et l’empirisme logique, défend une phénoménologie redonnant toute sa place à la sensibilité dans l’analyse de l’expérience et la saisie des essences. -- downloaded pdf to Note

King's College London -- What unites these experiences of frustrated freedom? It is certainly not the fact that the protagonists in these examples lack the capacity for rational, intentional control over their actions or face legal impediments to their choices. Krause thus parts ways with a long tradition in western political thought dating back to Locke, Kant and Mill, which locates individual freedom in the rational will and the capacity to exercise intentional choice and control. In fact, the originality of Krause's account is showing how freedom can be undermined despite a generally friendly background of political rights and privileges that guarantee the space for intentional choice. Something subtler is going on, which is why certain dimensions of freedom have been absent from standard accounts of what it means to be free. The quality of our everyday interpersonal exchanges matters quite a lot for individual freedom because these interactions are constitutive of personal agency. Krause argues that a proper understanding of agency is inextricably tied to freedom. Following Bernard Williams, she deploys a two-dimensional conception of agency: agency consists both in deliberation and results. To be an agent is both to plan one's actions and to have a recognizable impact on the world. Agency is thus "the affirmation of one's subjective existence, or personal identity, through concrete action in the world." The efficacy dimension of agency distinguishes it from "mere willing or dreaming." (4) Crucially, however, we are not in complete control of how our actions affect the world. Their effect depends, in significant part, on how others perceive and respond to them.

Reviewed Work: The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. -- Journal of Economic Literature
Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1983), pp. 558-560 -- quite positive, but useful on where Olson's theory has blind spots -- downloaded pdf to Note

What role should reason play in the creation of a free and just society? Can we claim to know anything in a field as complex as politics? And how can the cause of political rationalism be advanced when it is seen as having blood on its hands? These are the questions that occupied a group of British poets, philosophers, and polemicists in the years following the French Revolution. (..) argues that much literature of the period is a trial, or a critique, of reason in its political capacities and a test of the kinds of knowledge available to it. For Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin, the historical sequence of revolution, counter-revolution, and terror in France—and radicalism and repression in Britain—occasioned a dramatic reassessment of how best to advance the project of enlightenment. The political thought of these figures must be understood, Michael contends, in the context of their philosophical thought. Major poems of the period, including The Prelude, The Excursion, and Prometheus Unbound, are in this reading an adjudication of competing political and epistemological claims. This book bridges for the first time two traditional pillars of Romantic studies: the period’s politics and its theories of the mind and knowledge. Combining literary and intellectual history, it provides an account of British Romanticism in which high rhetoric, political prose, poetry, and poetics converge in a discourse of enlightenment and emancipation.

A thesis about the rationality of religious belief. A central claim made by the reformed epistemologist is that religious belief can be rational without any appeal to evidence or argument. There are, broadly speaking, two ways that reformed epistemologists support this claim. The first is to argue that there is no way to successfully formulate the charge that religious belief is in some way epistemically defective if it is lacking support by evidence or argument. The second way is to offer a description of what it means for a belief to be rational, and to suggest ways that religious beliefs might in fact be meeting these requirements. This has led reformed epistemologists to explore topics such as when a belief-forming mechanism confers warrant, the rationality of engaging in belief forming practices, and when we have an epistemic duty to revise our beliefs. As such, reformed epistemology offers an alternative to evidentialism (the view that religious belief must be supported by evidence in order to be rational) and fideism (the view that religious belief is not rational, but that we have non-epistemic reasons for believing). Reformed epistemology was first clearly articulated in a collection of papers called Faith and Rationality edited by Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff in 1983. However, the view owes a debt to many other thinkers

Table of contents: Akeel Bilgrami: Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on The Enlightenment and Enchantment. *--* Colin Jager: Literary Thinking: A Comment on Bilgrami *--* Bruce Robbins: Response to Akeel Bilgrami. *--* Justin E. H. Smith: A Comment on Akeel Bilgrami's "Occidentalism, The Very Idea" *--* Steven Levine: A Comment on Bilgrami. *--* Ram Manikkalingam: Culture follows politics: Avoiding the global divide between "Islam and the West" *--* Uday Mehta: Response to Akeel Bilgrami. *--* Akeel Bilgrami: A Reply to Robbins, Jager, Smith, Levine, Manikkalingam, and Mehta
-- downloaded pdf of full seminar to Note -- each contribution also had separate urls

, 2:30 PM
Romanticism, Enlightenment, and Counter-Enlightenment

Participants: Akeel Bilgrami, Taylor Carman, Garrett Deckel, Colin Jager, Joel Whitebook Isaiah Berlin introduced the work of a range of philosophers in the German romantic and German idealist tradition to the English-speaking world. His fascination with some of their ideas was accompanied by a concomitant anxiety about them. The anxiety issued from his staunch liberal commitment to the orthodox Enlightenment. Yet, the fascination was an implicit acknowledgement on his part of some of the limitations of the Enlightenment's liberal ideas. This roundtable will look at this underlying tension in Berlin, which many liberals feel to this day. Panelists will probe the role of reason, perception, and emotion in our individual and political psychology, and ask the question of whether or not there is something for liberalism to learn from what Berlin—rightly or wrongly—called the "Counter-Enlightenment." -- see YouTube bookmark for direct link -- video also embedded in program page

Uploaded on May 4, 2010 -- Roundtable discussion with Akeel Bilgrami, Taylor Carman, Garrett Deckel, Colin Jager, and Joel Whitebook. -- 2 hours -- see dunnettreader account

Jürgen Habermas, Entre naturalisme et religion. Les défis de la démocratie, traduit de l’allemand par Christian Bouchindhomme et Alexandre Dupeyrix, Paris, Gallimard, 2008, 380 p. 22, 50€. -- Et si la raison, comme le montre aujourd’hui la logique marchande, était finalement bien plus capable de calculer des moyens que de poser des fins ? Le dernier recueil de Jürgen Habermas, le chantre de la raison communicationnelle, témoigne d’un surprenant revirement vers la religion et le registre compassionnel. -- Mots-clés : communication | religion | raison | sécularisation

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LA RATIONALITÉ DU RELIGIEUX SELON MAX WEBER - L'Année sociologique (1940/1948-), Troisième série, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2001), pp. 9-50 -- One of the most striking features of Weber's writings on religion is the frequency with which he uses the word rationality. This derives from the metatheory grounding in his mind the interpretative method. This metatheory asserts that the meaning to an individual of his beliefs should be seen as the main cause explaining why he endorses them. Weber's religion sociology owes its strength to this theoretical framework. His « rational » conception of religious beliefs does not imply that these beliefs derive from deliberation. They are rather transmitted to the social subject in the course of his socialisation. But they are accepted only if they are perceived by the subject as grounded. These principles inspire Weber's pages on magical beliefs, on animism, on the great religions, on the diffusion of monotheism, on theodicy or the world disenchantment. He shows that religious thinking cares on coherence, tends to verify and falsify religious dogmas by confronting them with observable facts. He develops a complex version of evolutionism, explaining the cases of irreversibility registered by the history of religions, but avoiding any fatalism. He rejects any depth psychology and any causalist psychology in his sociology of religion, the common rational psychology being the only one that can be easily made compatible with the notion of "Verstehende Soziologie", i.e. of « interpretative sociology ». Weber analyses the evolution of religious ideas supposing that they follow the same mechanisms as the evolution of ideas in other domains, as law, economics or science. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Looks useful for discussion of how previous formulations work and objections - not many references in bibliography however -- downloaded pdf to Note

by Jag Bhalla We are ill-fated idiots. That’s what some “rationalists” believe. An ancient Greek origin myth can avert this modern tragedy of reason (a… -- lots of links

by Jag Bhalla “Reason is larger than science.” So Leon Wieseltier reminds us (while defending the humanities against Steven Pinker’s science cheerleading). 1.… -- lots of links -- nice use of Wieseltier while noting where W goes off the rails

The problem of the nature of values and the relation between values and rationality is one of the defining issues of twentieth-century thought and Max Weber was one of the defining figures in the debate. In this book, Turner and Factor consider the development of the dispute over Max Weber's contribution to this discourse, by showing how Weber's views have been used, revised and adapted in new contexts. The story of the dispute is itself fascinating, for it cuts across the major political and intellectual currents of the twentieth century, from positivism, pragmatism and value-free social science, through the philosophy of Jaspers and Heidegger, to Critical Theory and the revival of Natural Right and Natural Law. As Weber's ideas were imported to Britain and America, they found new formulations and new adherents and critics and became absorbed into different traditions and new issues. This book was first published in 1984 by Routledge. -- Research Interests: Ethics, Political Theory, Continental Philosophy, Max Weber (Philosophy), Social and Political Philosophy, and Max Weber

21 page article -- Explains why "rational choice" fails as explanatory theory in lots of collective action, public opinion, game theory, etc. -- domains where decisions to act aren't based exclusively on instrumental, consequentialist, cost-benefit calculative, and egoistic (directly concerned with impact on self) forms of, and context for, reasoning. Boudon finds "rational choice" superior to hand-wavy explanations that are speculative "black boxes" -- e.g. (1) sociobiology or evo-devo that we're hardwired, (2) Kahneman and Tversky heuristics and biases -- fascinating observations but aren't explanatory, (3) social/cultural explanations such as "socialization" which are tautological or a black box that provide no mechanisms that can differentiate situations or variations in outcomes. E.g. in Roman Empire peasants were more likely to remain pagan and soldiers were more likely to be attracted to the new religion. "Socialization" doesn't explain why soldiers raised in the traditional religious milieu and belief system were more likely to change their beliefs. Great examples of how rationality includes cognitive processes dealing with (1) non-instrumental contexts - e.g. identification with communitarian concerns ranging from voting to immigration policies, (2) aligning actions with one's judgment of what's more likely "true" based on core beliefs and how one has learned to evaluate "evidence" [e.g. Swedes are even more likely to reject "lump of labor" than Americans!] (3) axiological reasoning, including norms of fairness that may be fairly universal (e.g. reaction to Antigone, ultimatum game) or specific to a culture (e.g. due process in political application of "rule of law") -- see article for his tripartite classification of rationality and types of cognition that "rational choice" rejects in its definition. He thinks Weber and Adam Smith got there before, and better than, Becker.

Chair: Andreas Gestrich (German Historical Institute London) -- Discussants: David d’Avray, Peter Ghosh and Joachim Radkau -- Max Weber is one of the most prestigious social theorists in recent history. Many of his academic works are modern classics. Even 100 years after his death, his books are still read, edited, translated and interpreted. In recent years a number of biographies have shed new light on Weber’s life and work. In commemoration of Max Weber’s 150th anniversary, the German Historical Institute hosts a discussion with three Weber experts, British historians David d’Avray and Peter Ghosh and German historian Joachim Radkau, on Max Weber’s work and its relation to historical writing. **--** Peter Ghosh is Jean Duffield Fellow in Modern History at St Anne’ College, University of Oxford. His research interests focus primarily on the history of ideas, both social and political theory and also the history of historiography. His latest publication Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories (Oxford University Press, 2014) offers an intellectual biography of Weber framed along historical lines. **--** David d’Avray, Professor of Medieval History at University College London, has worked on medieval marriage, on preaching, on attitudes to kingship and death, on rationalities, and on ‘longue durée’ structures of papal history. In Rationalities in History: a Weberian Analysis (Cambridge University Press 2010), he writes a new comparative history in the spirit of Max Weber. Reassessing seminal Weberian ideas, he applies value rationality to the comparative history of religion and the philosophy of law. **--** Joachim Radkau is Professor for Modern History at the University of Bielefeld. His latest research interests concentrate on environmental history, the history of nature conservation, and Max Weber’s self and social perception. In his extensive biography Max Weber: Die Leidenschaft des Denkens (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2005) (Max Weber: Passion for thinking), Radkau embeds Weber’s life and work in their historical context. -- MP3 download, 113 min, 64.2 MB -- downloaded to Note

‘First Philosophy and its Metacritique: The Case of Karl-Otto Apel’, unpublished paper presented to the philosophical society Cogito, University College Cork, 10 December 1982 -- [after noting the recurring battle between metaphysics and anti metaphysics, most recently the strange bedfellows of conservative, liberal and radical from Heidegger to Rorty to Derrida proposes a 4-fold rather than binary model] This quadruple constellation has been in evidence ever since the classical Greek period and can be traced back to the existence side by side of everyday language embodying common sense, the paradigmatically regulated language of science which tends to monopolise rationality as such, philosophical language which claims to embody noetic rationality, and finally the claim of metacritical enlighteners to be able to expose the presuppositions of philosophy and thus to clarify the concept of rationality in its broadest conceivable sense. Accordingly, the following four poles can be seen most basically to determine the dispute between the representative of first philosophy and their metacritics: -- (1) "dogmatic first philosophy", including every form of philosophy of common-sense which elevates conventional forms of language use, cognition and action to the status of criterion of argumentation; (2) "self-critical first philosophy" in the sense of all forms of transcendental philosophy which regard common sense as well as science as explicandum and deduce general conditions for them from an irreducible, final and immutable criterion; -- (3) "dogmatic metacitique" in the sense of the scientistic critique of philosophy which on the basis of a determinate concept of science as final criterion implicitly or explicitly seeks the dissolution of both dogmatic and self-critical forms of first philosophy; -- and, finally, (4) "dialectical metacritique" as that form of critique of philosophy which takes in its stride all the above-mentioned types of philosophy. -- downloaded pdf to Note

translated by Michael C. Behrent -- Reviewed: (1) Michael Löwy, La Cage d’acier. Max Weber et le marxisme wébérien [The Iron Cage: Max Weber and Weberian Marxism], Stock, coll. "Un ordre d’idées", 2013, 200 p., 18€ -- (2) Michel Lallement, Tensions majeures. Max Weber, l’économie, l’érotisme [Major Tensions: Max Weber, Economics, Eroticism], Gallimard, 2013, 288 p., 19.90€. -- interesting discussion of his use of dichotomies that don't resolve into a dialectical synthesis -- also nice re how he uses the forces pushing toward rationalization of two interacting types, formal and substantive, that allows him to deploy it in many different cultures and eras, not just modernity -- Useful references to various pieces of his oeuvre in the footnotes -- downloaded pdf to Note

It has been argued that imprecise probabilities are a natural and intuitive way of overcoming some of the issues with orthodox precise probabilities. Models of this type have a long pedigree, and interest in such models has been growing in recent years. This article introduces the theory of imprecise probabilities, discusses the motivations for their use and their possible advantages over the standard precise model. It then discusses some philosophical issues raised by this model. There is also a historical appendix which provides an overview of some important thinkers who appear sympathetic to imprecise probabilities. *-* Related Entries -- belief, formal representations of | epistemic utility arguments for probabilism | epistemology: Bayesian | probability, interpretations of | rational choice, normative: expected utility | statistics, philosophy of | vagueness

Peter Elmer, University of Exeter -- This important work provides the first informed, well-researched and highly nuanced account of the fortunes of ‘occult’ thought and practice in England from the mid17thC to its demise at the end of the 18thC. Building on the work of a wide range of scholars from various disciplines, (..) the fortunes of the occult are argued to have peaked in the second half of the 17thC, dipped in the period from the Glorious Revolution to 1760, and then re-emerged in the last 4 decades of the 18thC in somewhat different but revitalized form. As Monod shows (..) the occult (defined broadly as alchemy, astrology and natural magic) was rarely perceived as a uniform movement of ideas, its adherents frequently picking and choosing those elements of the ‘occult’ which most appealed to them. It was thus a protean body of ideas, susceptible to frequent re-interpretation according to the personal preoccupations of the initiated. At the same time, while some of its adherents may have (in the earlier period especially) seen it as a body of ideas capable of replacing older systems of science and philosophy, it more often than not was studied and developed alongside other, competing systems of thought. (..) What is invigoratingly original here is Monod’s application of the same accommodating features of occult thinking with regard to Newtonianism and the Enlightenment in the later period. (..) it is hard to disagree with his conclusion that ‘the assumption of many historians, that occult thinking was debunked by experimental science … is essentially wrong’.(..) all the arguments against astrology, alchemy and natural magic had been fully developed long before 1650. This is equally true of witchcraft, (..) The occult was not simply argued out of existence. Only wider factors can help to explain this process. (..) in order to understand this process, we need to pay more heed to the wider social, religious and political context in which these ideas were promoted and debated. -- downloaded as pdf to Note

This eBook is an attempt to establish a theory that identifies the commonality within various forms intelligence, including human intelligence, computer intelligence, animal intelligence, alien intelligence, group intelligence, etc. -- NARS (Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System) - Most of the existing AI inference works with semi-axiomatic systems, which attempt to make partial extension or revision of mathematical logic, while keeping the other parts. What AI really needs are non-axiomatic systems, which do not assume the sufficiency of knowledge and resources in any aspect of the system. NARS is a concrete example of non-axiomatic system which uses a formal language "Narsese" to represent goals, actions, and beliefs.The basic unit of the language is term, which can be thought of as the name or label of a concept in the system. (..) The meaning of a term is determined by its extension and intension, which are the collection of the inheritance relations between this term and other terms, obtained from the experience of the system. NARS includes three variants of the inheritance relation: similarity (symmetric inheritance), implication (derivability), and equivalence (symmetric implication). (..)The meaning of a compound term is partially determined by its logical relations with its components, and partially by the system's experience on the compound term as a whole. Event is a special type of statement that have a time-dependent truth-value. Operation is a special type of event that can occur by the system's decision. Goal is a special type of event, that the system is attempting to realize, by carrying out certain operations. Beside goals to be achieved, NARS can accept tasks that are knowledge to be absorbed and questions to be answered. (..)If a event is judged to imply the achieving of a goal, then the desirability of the event is increased, and the system will also evaluate its plausibility(..). When an event is both desirable and plausible, the system will make the decision to turn the event into a goal to be actually pursued. The basic function of inference rules in NARS is to derive new beliefs from current beliefs.

Hegel's Theory of Mental Activity - Originally copyright Cornell University Press, 1988; Cornell kindly gave me back the copyright when the book went out of print, which change has been duly registered with the Copyright Office. So it is now copyright Willem A. deVries. The files contained here are graphical reproductions of the original text with an invisible text overlay, so they reproduce the look and pagination of the original, but can also be searched using Acrobat's find function. My grateful thanks to Stephen Butterfill for scanning the book and putting it into PDF format.

C 2000

Stanford/Yale Jr. Faculty Forum Research Paper 00-05; Cardozo Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 24 -- the so-called "paradox of authority" was first developed in the late 18th Century by the anarchist theorist William Godwin and later popularized by Robert Paul Wolff in the 1960's. Their aim was to demonstrate that legitimate authority is impossible. As they argued, the problem with all authorities is that they claim the right to demand obedience even when they are wrong. However, people should never act in ways they believe to be wrong. Hence, people should never recognize the right of authorities to demand their obedience. This paper discusses the many "solutions" that have been offered on authority's behalf. The responses fall roughly into two groups: those who believe that problems arise due to certain naive views about the nature of authority and rationality and that revision in our understanding is required, and those who maintain that the puzzle can be unraveled without any radical changes. --, the paper accepts that the paradox (or, as it is shown, paradoxes) of authority cannot be solved within standard theories of rationality and morality. Which revisions are necessary, it is claimed, depends on one's underlying theory of legitimacy.

Full title: Blumenberg and Secularization: "Self-Assertion" and the Problem of Self-Realizing Teleology in History - lengthy piece -- downloaded pdf to Note

Parallels and distinctions between Fin-de-Siècle pessimism, especially social theorists, re liberalism and Enlightenment as sustainable modernity and Postmodernism -- both concern re the subject and the possibilities of social knowledge -- helpful bibliography -- downloaded pdf to Note

Works through a more elaborate process of how information can interact with desires and deeper concerns to motivate, provide reasons for acting, or for changing desires, preferences or actions (reasons for acting) -- this "modified" internalist view still mostly Humean and doesn't accept premises of externalist that presumes external objective values -- didn't download

A defense of classical Hume (as distinct from what he calls neo-Humeanism) -- looks like he's on a similar page to Blackburn ironical "the majesty of reason" (2010)

Looks like he extends his Humean approach from 1999 what's so special about Humeanism -- looks useful for normativity, practical reason and externalist debates-- downloaded pdf to Note

Downloaded pdf to Note

Downloaded pdf to Note

This is an early or unrevised version, and is not definitive, and therefore should not be cited. The Citation is Social Epistemology, 2003, 17, pp. 55-63. -- Extends insights from philosophy and sociology of science to conceptual changes more generally, often triggered by a dilemma that can't be handled well using concepts within existing background knowledge or web of beliefs. -- downloaded pdf to Note

This is Bevir's response to the roundtable of articles on his book, The Logic of the History of Ideas -- Additional Info: This is an electronic version of an article published in Rethinking History© 2000 Copyright Taylor & Francis; Rethinking History is available online at http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/13642529.asp -- Keywords:
hermeneutics, intentionality, philosophy, power, rationality, rhetoric

If we are to believe the proponents of the Theory of Practice and of Rational Choice, the gap between these two paradigmatic approaches cannot be bridged. They rely on ontological premises, theories of motivations and causal models that stand too far apart. In this article, I argue that this theoretical antinomy loses much of its edge when we take as objects of sociological investigation processes of historical change, that is, when we try to specify in theoretical terms how and in which conditions historical actors enact and endorse shifts in patterns of relations as well as shifts in the symbolic and cognitive categories that make these relations significant. I substantiate this argument in light of the distinction between two temporalities of historical change: first, the long waves of gradual change and, second, the short waves of moments of breaks and ruptures. Along the way, I develop an argument about the conditions of emergence of self-limiting norms and the centrality of epistemic beliefs in situations of high disruption. -- see bibliography on jstor information page -- from keywords looks like it uses marriage patterns e.g. endogamy as illustrations -- didn't download

Anxieties of Enthusiasm: Coleridge, Prophecy, and Popular Politics in the 1790s -- Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1/2, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850 (1997), pp. 179-203 -- downloaded pdf to Note

The Philosopher and the "Schwärmer": On the Career of a German Epithet from Luther to Kant -- Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 1/2, Enthusiasm and Enlightenment in Europe, 1650-1850 (1997), pp. 85-115 -- downloaded pdf to Note

Toulmin on Cartesian hyper rationality and Derrida on man animal, Montaigne and Descartes -- useful postmodern bibliography as well as articles in last few decades on whether Descartes was a friend or enemy of animals based on where he drew the boundary.