Tocqueville's Christian Citzen

Tocqueville's Christian Citizen Marinus Ossewaarde Introduction Alexis De Tocqueville is well known for his critique of democracy. A French statesman, he was left with the legacy of the French Revolution that had torn his fatherland and had changed the course of human history for good. Tocqueville, unlike many of his contemporaries, believed that the Revolution ought not to be seen as incidental or unexpected, despite the fact that it was without precedent in human history and so tarnished with human blood. The French Revolution is part of a trend that traces the path of democracy. Living in the revolutionary France of the nineteenth century, he hoped to find out what France may expect from its course of civilization, what it may expect from its democracy. Tocqueville was a social critic: he deplored what he saw happening around him in France. He believed that France was poorly governed. He was critical of the rise of the bourgeoisie and believed that everything had become vulgar, low, and mean. He rejected the rising materialism as "a dangerous disease of the human mind," which he found in positivism (Comte and St. Simon) and socialism (Proudhon and Blanc). He believed that scientific and economic determinisms were serious threats to liberty and human

Making Sense of History? Thinking about International Relations

Can international relations (IR) be a distinctive discipline? In the present paper I argue that such a discipline would be a social science that could be formulated within the perspective of comparative paradigms. The objections to scientific methods are thus overcome by the logic of international oppositions, in other words a model takes several paradigms into account and considers three kinds of foreign relation (enemy, friend, and rival) in the light of three main questions: what is IR about (ontology); what does relate therein (epistemology); and how to assess such a relation (logic)

Critical Foundations of the Contextual Theory of Mind

The contextual mind is found attested in various usages of the term complement, in the background of Kant. The difficulties of Kant's intuitionism are taken up through Quine, but referential opacity is resolved as semantic presence in lived context. A further critique of rationalist linguistics is developed from Jakobson, showing generic functions in thought supporting abstraction, binding and thereby semantic categories. Thus Bolzano's influential philosophy of mathematics and science gives way to a critical view of the ancient heritage acknowledged by Plato.\ud \u

An Argument for Minimal Logic

The problem of negative truth is the problem of how, if everything in the world is positive, we can speak truly about the world using negative propositions. A prominent solution is to explain negation in terms of a primitive notion of metaphysical incompatibility. I argue that if this account is correct, then minimal logic is the correct logic. The negation of a proposition A is characterised as the minimal incompatible of A composed of it and the logical constant ¬. A rule based account of the meanings of logical constants that appeals to the notion of incompatibility in the introduction rule for negation ensures the existence and uniqueness of the negation of every proposition. But it endows the negation operator with no more formal properties than those it has in minimal logic

A Pre-Calculus Controversy: Infinitesimals and Why They Matter

In teaching calculus, it is not uncommon to mention the controversy over the role of infinitesimals with Newton\u27s and Leibniz\u27 calculus, including Berkeley\u27s objections. In a history of mathematics course, it is a required topic! But rancor over infinitesimals and their role in mathematics predates calculus- so much so that a popular new book is dedicated to this topic. In this talk, I will discuss not just the relevant controversies between Cavalieri and the J

Computable Rationality, NUTS, and the Nuclear Leviathan

This paper explores how the Leviathan that projects power through nuclear arms exercises a unique nuclearized sovereignty. In the case of nuclear superpowers, this sovereignty extends to wielding the power to destroy human civilization as we know it across the globe. Nuclearized sovereignty depends on a hybrid form of power encompassing human decision-makers in a hierarchical chain of command, and all of the technical and computerized functions necessary to maintain command and control at every moment of the sovereign's existence: this sovereign power cannot sleep. This article analyzes how the form of rationality that informs this hybrid exercise of power historically developed to be computable. By definition, computable rationality must be able to function without any intelligible grasp of the context or the comprehensive significance of decision-making outcomes. Thus, maintaining nuclearized sovereignty necessarily must be able to execute momentous life and death decisions without the type of sentience we usually associate with ethical individual and collective decisions

Infinitesimal Knowledges

The notion of indivisibles and atoms arose in ancient Greece. The continuum—that is, the collection of points in a straight line segment, appeared to have paradoxical properties, arising from the ‘indivisibles’ that remain after a process of division has been carried out throughout the continuum. In the seventeenth century, Italian mathematicians were using new methods involving the notion of indivisibles, and the paradoxes of the continuum appeared in a new context. This cast doubt on the validity of the methods and the reliability of mathematical knowledge which had been regarded as established by the axiomatic method in geometry expounded by Aristotle’s younger contemporary Euclid. The teaching of indivisibles was banned within the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. In England, indivisibles were used by the mathematician John Wallis, and there was an acrimonious and extended feud between Wallis and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes over legitimate methods of argument in mathematics. Notions of the infinitesimal were used by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and were attacked by Bishop Berkeley for the vagueness of the concept and the illegitimate reasoning applied to it. This article discusses aspects of these events with reference to the book Infinitesimal by Amir Alexander and to other sources. Also discussed are wider issues arising from Alexander’s book including: the changes in cultural sensibility associated with the growth of new mathematical and scientific knowledge in the seventeenth century, the changes in language concomitant with these changes, what constitutes valid methods of enquiry in various contexts, and the question of authoritarianism in knowledge. More general aims of this article are to widen the immediate mathematical and historical contexts in Alexander’s book, to bridge a gap in conversations between mathematics and the humanities, and to relate mathematical ideas to wider human and contemporary issues