Ibn Khaldun and Philosophy: Causality in History

Ibn Khaldun was a statesman, diplomat, scholar and judge. His masterpiece Muqaddimah bears testimony to his skills in some other fields like economy and poetry too. As an intellectual of his time, he was naturally interested in philosophy as well. He had an education in philosophy and had a considerable knowledge in both Greek and Islamic philosophy. In fact, he is considered a philosopher of history and even the first one. This article will display an aspect of Ibn Khaldun's interest and relation to philosophy. It will discuss his conception of causation and analyze how it works in his history.     

A 14th Century Critique of Greek Philosophy: The Case of Ibn Khaldun

This article discusses the critique of Greek philosophy by a Muslim scholar of the middle age Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406 CE). It begins with a brief introductory background of Ibn Khaldun, followed by a trace of the elements of Greek philosophy in his writings. The main purpose is to track the line of argument Ibn Khaldun used in his criticism and the basic premises he used in his attempt to position himself in his critiques. This article ends with concluding remarks on Ibn Khaldun's real attitude and how he drew a balance between rejection of certain philosophic notions and the acceptance of reasons and logics as crafts practiced in human civilization.     

Locating an American romanticism: Emerson,Cavell, 'Experience'

Abstract

This article reads Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1844 essay 'Experience' as a work of mourning that gives rise to critical reaction in the romantic tradition to specific philosophical ideas New England had imported from Europe early in the 19th century. The author reads this transatlantic interaction in the wider context of journal entries, arguing that the death of Emerson's son is a test to Emerson's philosophy and his literary form, indeed, the highest challenge, against which the claims of philosophy and literature could only fail. Moreover, it is the failure of his philosophy to contain his son's death, to express it, that makes Emerson's essay romantic. Defining romanticism as incompletion: the impossibility of a total system which would include, for example, the death of the other (Cavell, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Blanchot). This, the author argues, proposes a 'location' for American romanticism that constitutes an adequate response to Critchley's contention, in his reading of Cavell, that Emerson is not, in fact, romantic.     

THE POLITICS OF HERBERT BLUMER'S SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD

Prevailing wisdom among sociologists is that Herbert Blumer's sociology is not useful in modern contexts because he did not provide a method for researching his ideas. This article contends that Blumer's appreciative view of the actor's perspective is a methodological contribution; and that his methodological perspective is political in two respects: it is anti-elitist and democratic.     

The Authenticity in Ambiguity: Appreciating Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Abductive Logic as Communicative Practice

This article is a reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "An Unpublished Text" (1964a), as an exemplar of communicative praxis. As a poetic, "stylistic" account of the body of his life's work, this text self-signifies his potential as an "authentic" scholar. Employing a motivated logic that is abductive (Peirce, 1955), he argued for an appreciation of our phenomenological and semiotic circumstances of existential ambiguity. Furthermore, from this phenomenal ground, he articulated the pragmatic conditions of authenticity that inhere within every communication engagement with an Other. My interpretation of the Etre Au Monde of his philosophy depicts authenticity as human potentiality in the context of an existential dialectic between personal consciousness and sociocultural experience. We find that ambiguity and authenticity implicate one another as philosophical issues and thus remain highly relevant for a postmodern philosophy that problematizes our constitution as communicative beings.     

Ludwik Gumplowicz (1897–1898), Ibn Khaldun: An Arab Sociologist of the 14th Century

Ludwik Gumplowicz (1838–1909) was one of the key figures of the early period of sociology. Polish Jew, born in Krakow, he was Professor of Public Law at the University of Graz. His theory focused on intergroup conflict, but also on the origins and functioning of the state. His 1897–1898 contribution Ibn Khaldun: An Arab Sociologist of the 14th Century is a highly original attempt to use Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of history to defend his own sociological concepts, including the role of group dynamics and the significance of political and cultural factors in the constitution of communities. Gumplowicz argues for the relevance of Ibn Khaldun's ideas for the world of late nineteenth century, with its hectic academic debates and its troubled politics.     

Freedom and Sociability for Bergson

This paper discusses the way that Bergson relates the notions of freedom and sociability. It retraces a path leading from his first major work to his last, from a proto-phenomenology of freedom to a kind of biology of social life. The continuity of this passage is explained, at least in part, by Bergson's continual rethinking of his chief philosophical invention: the concept of qualitative multiplicity. This paper also seeks to indicate the importance of Bergson's understanding of both freedom and sociability for the poststructuralist political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.     

Bosanquet's social theory of the state

Bosanquet's political philosophy was a social theory of the function of the State as ‘hinderer of hindrances to the best life’, where individual development was supported by relationships within a community. This was worked out in the context of considerable knowledge of conditions among the London poor at the turn of the century, and reinforced by his wife's practical work and research. He sympathized with Durkheim's pioneering sociology, and was in contact with him through the Sociological Society. His ‘New Liberal’approach, seeing problems of poverty as to be met by informed charitable activity, was restricted by insufficient recognition of the structural aspects of social problems and conflicts. The bearing of his Idealist Metaphysics is critically considered, and it is claimed that, although a good deal of this may not be acceptable, it gave a background to a kind of social thinking which is of interest to those looking for a communitarian type of political philosophy.     

Joseph Mainzer (1801–1851) and the Popularisation of Choral Singing in Britain

Singing master Joseph Mainzer came to England in 1841 as a political refugee from Germany. Through his music schools, his textbook Singing for the Million, and his journal Mainzer's Musical Times (today The Musical Times) he contributed significantly to the popularisation of choral singing in Britain. This essay takes Mainzer's political background as a starting point to investigate the complex relationship between refuge and artistic production. It is argued that the latter was deeply informed by the former. Mainzer not only transferred choral traditions but also a politicised concept of popular culture which started to take hold in pre-revolutionary Vormärz-Germany. The case study is integrated into the larger framework of Anglo-German cultural relations and political refuge in mid-nineteenth century Britain.     

The urban psychology of Stanley Milgram

Abstract

Although his obedience research will always remain Stanley Milgram's most important work, his involvement with the social psychology of the city occupied a much larger portion of his professional career. This article traces the evolution and intensification of Milgram's interest in cities, starting with his pre-professional years, through his early research at Harvard, culminating in his multifaceted engagement with urban psychology at the Graduate Center of CUNY. There, as head of the social psychology program, he was able to infuse it with an urban emphasis. He created and taught a variety of courses on urban psychology and got his students involved in a potpourri of experiments comparing behavior in cities and towns. Those experiments provided much of the substance for Milgram's seminal article in Science, “The experience of living in cities,” in which he also introduced the theoretical concept of stimulus overload to help account for the city-small town differences he and his students found. This article evaluates the overload concept and concludes with Milgram's overarching legacy for the study of city life.     

An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America

There exists a long-standing historiographical mystery concerning the legal origins of the practice of Spanish American slaves suing their masters for freedom in royal courts. This essay highlights the importance of working judges' judicial philosophy in the formulation of this customary ‘right’. A close reading of two rare eighteenth-century judicial opinions from Lima, Peru, exposes the rationale of the judges, particularly the Creole judges, who admitted slave cases. High court minister Pedro José Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla considered two legal issues that made slavery distinctive in the region: the right to self-purchase and grants of conditional liberty. In a 1746 letter, the judge rendered a relatively liberal opinion on slaves' legal rights by reading Creoles' own political ‘liberty’ into freedom suits. But as Lima's slaves increasingly entered the secular court system, his judicial philosophy would contract.     

Mutual agreement,subliminal persuasion,and the possibility of pluralism

This article concludes the correspondence between Michael Warren Tumolo and myself about the roles of philosophy and rhetoric in each other’s business. It builds upon his original article “A Sublimed Experience of the Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic,” my response to this, and then his response “On Critical Faith and Metacritical Agnosticism: Nietzsche, Socrates, and the Searches for Knowledge.” Tumolo begins with a discussion of Plato’s method in his Republic and his use of deceitful rhetoric in the Metals Myth at the same time as he is devaluing rhetoricians for being deceitful. My response concerns his selective and literal versus my holistic and contextual readings of Plato and the complexities of reading a dramatic dialogue. His response illuminated the orientation for his method in the antiepistemologist stance he shares with several colleagues and the metacritical or pluralist stance he claims to share with Nietzsche. My conclusion examines the difficulties of maintaining a pluralist position when certain of one’s argument. Tumolo’s antiepistemological and pro-rhetoric polemic belies his advocacy of pluralism. I find Nietzsche to be compatible with a dramatic and dialogical Plato and suggest that Tumolo’s method would be stronger if inspired by this Plato rather than fighting against him.     

The ‘Glasgow King of Billingsgate’: James MacQueen and an Atlantic Proslavery Network1

This article examines the ‘imperial career’ of James MacQueen, one of the most outspoken critics of the British antislavery campaign in the 1820s and 1830s. Rather than considering the particular proslavery discourses that he articulated in his writing, however, the article focuses on his central place within an Atlantic network of proslavery advocacy. Using published and unpublished sources to explore this network, the article begins with MacQueen's time as a plantation overseer in Grenada. Next, it considers his involvement in the slavery controversy after he returned to Glasgow, including his attack on the History of Mary Prince (1831) and its aftermath. Finally, the article considers MacQueen's unexpected role in the Niger Expedition following the abolition of British slavery. In this way, the article demonstrates MacQueen's central place in nineteenth-century anti-abolitionism.     

Dramatic performances in the play of politics: Egypt,Obama and the works of Jeffrey Alexander

This review article explores Jeffrey Alexander's cultural theory of political transformations. In his two recent works Performative Revolution in Egypt (2011) and The Performance of Politics: Obama's Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power (2009), Alexander analyses the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the rise of President Barack Obama, respectively. Alexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on the material conditions of a population, demographic changes, and the capacity of a group of contenders to gather material support for an overthrow. He also argues that the stagecraft of the political horserace matters for national elections. The strong versus weak dramaturgical performances of presidential candidates (rather than macroeconomic or geopolitical changes) proved consequential for changes in the poll numbers of Obama versus McCain, for example. Macroeconomic conditions had to be filtered, interpreted, and made meaningful; the candidate who could cast these material conditions onto the sacred side of civil discourse improved his likelihood of victory. Curiously, many social scientists and political pundits have largely taken performances for granted in the democratic struggle for power, and have therefore rendered the charismatic speeches and the grand narratives (culture) as epiphenomena, plays in the shadow of large structural shifts – a residual variable, or else as shifting, evanescent meanings produced in local, face‐to‐face settings. In the newer understanding, ‘culture’ is a level of analysis researchers use to investigate symbolic patterns and meaningful practices that structure how people act, how they define identities, even how they define what counts as ‘strategic’ or instrumental. Since the 1980s, sociologists working with this notion of culture have crafted different approaches to political culture, in national, organizational, and informal everyday arenas. Their different culture concepts carry different strengths and liabilities for research and they rely on different assumptions about action and meaning. This article reviews these arguments and asks what the limits to Alexander's performative theory are, how his theory can be reformulated to address settled versus unsettled political regimes, and how disaggregating Alexander's concept of audiences along with their roles in political change would provide the theory with greater predictive power.     

Poetry of the Swamp: Blok’s “Folks” Cycle Bubbles of the Earth

Gogol'’s “A Few Words about Pushkin” has traditionally been viewed as evidence that Gogol' idolized Pushkin as a national poet par excellence. This article argues that behind Gogol'’s deference for Russia’s greatest poet lie layers of polemic and subversive iconoclasm. Though he initially proclaims Pushkin Russia’s national poet, Gogol' goes on to use his trademark rhetorical tools to effectively strip the poet of the honour. In doing so, he attempts to influence the reception of his own writings, which at the time predominantly concerned Ukrainian themes, in ways that would encourage his Russian audience to consider him—and not Pushkin—as Russia’s premier national writer. Countering Pushkin’s Russocentric model of national culture, Gogol' champions instead a centrifugal conception of national-imperial identity that places Russia’s imperial periphery at the center of the “Russian” experience.     

“Machinisme”, Marxism,humanism: Georges Friedmann before and after WW II

Georges Friedmann (1902–1977) is known for the humanist sociology of work he founded after World War II. Before the war he was a Marxist intellectual, close to the French Communist Party and an admirer of the young Soviet Union. The effect of this political and ideological itinerary on his sociology of work has never been analyzed systematically. Here the question is handled by following the presence of a central concept in his work, “machinisme” [see note¹]. This concept does not come from Marx's thinking but from that of the Romantic historian Jules Michelet, whose writings Friedmann was fully familiar with. A key term in Friedmann's early writings, it was abandoned after World War II in favor of the “natural milieu/technical milieu” conceptual pair. This terminological change went together with a radical change in Friedmann's point of view.     

Fantasy Theme Analysis in the Interplay of Charles M. Sheldon's In His Steps and his Jesus Newspaper

This article applies fantasy theme analysis to explore the remarkable work of the Reverend Dr. Charles M. Sheldon, a Congregationalist minister. Fantasy theme analysis is used to examine the rhetorical vision that emerges from Sheldon's work. In 1897 Sheldon published In His Steps, a best-selling novel, and gained international recognition. This novel depicted ordinary people who were inspired to make decisions by asking themselves "What would Jesus do?" In the novel, a newspaper editor applied the question to his business and altered his advertising and editorial policies to conform to standards he believed Jesus would practice. In 1900 Sheldon was invited to become that fictional newspaper editor in person and lead a daily newspaper from March 13 to March 17, 1900. This research examines the way Sheldon's approach to journalism formed a web of meaning for his audience that led to a shared worldview. Using the "What would Jesus do?" question, Sheldon created a rhetorical vision for his readers. The fictional world described in the novel was reproduced in real life as Sheldon's rhetorical vision spread through his work in the daily newspaper. The rhetorical vision suggested in Sheldon's newspaper work is a middle-class haven where no one drinks alcohol, and wealth is not hoarded. According to the rhetorical vision, the "What would Jesus do?" question provides a wide variety of answers to life's complex questions.     

Truth,lies, and racial consequences in Ernest Hemingway's True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

Abstract

This article examines Ernest Hemingway's posthumously published novel True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir, by relating the author's vision of the role of Africa in the literary imagination to issues the novel raises for postcolonial cultural and historical criticism. Analyzing the novel's narrative, which draws upon Hemingway's second safari to Kenya in 1953–4, offers insight into Hemingway's 'African American' consciousness, and the new awareness that he was able substantively to arrive at for the first time in this novel, less than 10 years before his death. This awareness inaugurated what might be called a fictional reverse migration, whereby Hemingway reconnects with the black native perspective on Africa that he encountered on his first safari in 1933–4, in order to acquire material insight into what blacks were experiencing in America at the time of his second safari. Identifying this awareness also leads to the possibility of (re)reading Hemingway's racial perspective in his earlier works with African settings.     

The Dean Pike Show: An Examination and Comparative Analysis of Bishop James A. Pike's 1950s Television Program

During the religious revival and television revolution of the 1950s, future Episcopal Bishop James Pike broadcast a live religious television program to a national audience from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, where he was then serving as Dean. By so doing, he joined evangelist Billy Graham and Catholic Bishop Fulton J. Sheen as prominent church leaders of the day hosting their own TV shows. Together, these programs reflected varied strands of the American religious landscape in the 1950s. The article examines Pike's show, which focused on a discussion with guests of critical political, social and ethical issues facing the nation and church. It examines how the program reflected Pike's life-long ministry and identity as a High Church liberal, as well as Reinhold Niebuhr's theology. Further, the article compares the format, approach and content of Pike's show with those of Graham and Sheen, examining how each program's format derived from its featured cleric's theology and approach. It finds that Pike's show was distinctly more political, pragmatic and introspective than those of his fellow TV clerics.