Scientific realism in the philosophy of science and international relations

This thesis sets out to challenge the assumption widely held among IR scholars that Scientific Realism (SR) is the definite and final interpretation of realism. The introduction of SR into IR as the latter’s proper meta-theory has been the incentive for very intense debates about both meta-theoretical and theoretical IR issues. I argue that IR has uncritically adopted the strongest version of SR. This can be seen by comparing the different versions of SR and their anti-realist alternatives - as these have developed in the Philosophy of Science literature - to the version of SR which was introduced into IR. It is Critical Realism (CR), however, a version of SR that originated with Roy Bhaskar, which has dominated the SR debate in IR. This development has had negative consequences with respect to the quality of the argumentation about realism in IR. This notwithstanding, a positive implication of this situation is that IR scholars who belong in various traditions of thought have criticized SR from different theoretical angles and thus shed light on many of its shortcomings. I elaborate on the comments that have been made on meta-theoretical as well as theoretical issues and come up with my own conclusions about SR and CR. In this framework, I also deal with two special issues which have arisen from this debate’s problematique: the question about whether reasons can be causes, which lies in the foundations of Wendt’s ‘constitutive explanation’, and the challenge of ‘meta-theoretical hypochondria’, according to which the extensive concern with meta-theory takes place at the expense of theorizing real-world political problems. Last, I show, by a way of a novel contribution, that Wendt’s latest undertaking, of a ‘quantum social science’, although compatible with SR, suffers inconsistencies and misunderstandings in terms of its methodology, metaphysics, use of quantum mechanics, and application to IR. This thesis is an interdisciplinary study, which draws upon the Philosophy of Science, IR and Physics (namely Quantum Mechanics), in order to scrutinize the use of SR and CR into IR along with its implications for both IR metatheory and IR theory

Without Apparent Occasion: Melancholy and the Problem of Motive in Baroque England

Melancholy primarily presented itself to the English seventeenth century as a problem concerning the causes of passions that were, in the words of Robert Burton, “without any apparant occasion.” The configuration of this problem varied as it moved through a range of discourses. In this dissertation, I attend most closely to those configurations in medicine, dialectic, theater, and an emergent civil science. The desire to discover the possible causes of melancholic passions led medical texts to reproduce nearly the whole range of causality. The baroque medical texts, then, produced a “topics,” a collection of potential arguments, of the causes of melancholy. Melancholics also developed their own set of topical practices, adopting the methods of humanist dialectic for articulating their experience. In the theater, the problem of the melancholic's passion served as a form of encounter between a civil logic that sought to determine its causes and the melancholic articulation of the situation through their own passion. Finally, I argue that the modern architecture of the state as envisioned in Hobbes' Leviathan is premised upon the power to eliminate collective melancholy, that is, the arousal of “causeless fears” while instituting a power that keeps the imagination of the people in fear of the sovereign's punishments. I show that this vision of the state required a repression of the image of the melancholy tyrant