This chapter examines a literary critical ‘methodological moment’ from the middle of the nineteenth century to modernism. It argues that the re-emergence of the scientific method in this period was key to the normal scientific study of poetry. By returning to a series of forgotten critical debates about the relevance of the scientific method to the study of poetry, the chapter demonstrates how the nineteenth-century revival of method introduced a technical vocabulary into twentieth-century poetics, an epistemologically and politically charged discourse that centred on concepts of method, hypothesis and scientific law. The second half of this chapter goes on to examine published and unpublished poetry by George Oppen to show how he offered a new way of conceptualising the relationship between poetry and the scientific method. It suggests that Oppen turned to mathematics and set theory to create a new nominalist method that could create rather than explain. However, it is also argued that Oppen’s employment of the mathematical method actually ends up illustrating the epistemological power of poetic artifice: its ability to create the sights and sounds of the invisible but not inexistent multitude that Oppen’s poetry sought to bring into being.

This chapter offers a description of the method. Elaborating on the tradition of adda, the chapter explains its significance within post-colonial thought and life in India. It then explains how adda is shaped as a method in the book by drawing on and joining insights from the works of scholars who are located within the disciplines of law and/or the humanities. The chapter provides a detailed description of how diverse scholarly works of post-colonial, feminist and jurisprudential thought are brought together and then enacted as field research for this book.

This introduction offers an overview of the volume’s variety of literary critical approaches to reading William James, and its account of James’s equally various approaches to literature. We draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. In outlining the three sections of the book – Style, Influence, and Method – we show how James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study. As we contend, the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. Our volume foregrounds these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature.

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a city of innovations. Explosive economic growth and the expansion of overseas trade went hand in hand with a high level of religious tolerance. In this world of increasing complexity, legal and governmental innovations were essential in order to adapt the urban institutional landscape to the challenges posed by these great social, economic, and cultural changes. The topic of insolvency legislation, as a crucial junction of the fundamental contextuality of commercial law, is most suitable to shed new light on the precise circumstances under which the most striking and seminal developments in the rise of a modern commercial order took place. This introductory chapter explains how new empirical evidence from Amsterdam's legal archives can help understand how innovative governance and legal practices interacted with moral thought in order to produce a liberal, open-access insolvency regime.

In the first, introductory part of this chapter I explain the tension inherent in these dual beliefs by examining the rules that Leibniz set forth for the reform of the philosophical lexicon as well as the attempts to apply these rules made by two key figures prior to Kant, namely, Christian Wolff and Christian August Crusius. In the second part of the chapter, I show how this tension is explicitly discussed and presented as a central problem facing metaphysics in the writings of Johann Nicolaus Tetens, who exerted a profound influence on Kant’s intellectual development in the years leading up to the Critique of Pure Reason. In the last section of the chapter, I explain what I take to be Kant’s solution to this tension by examining hither-to ignored passages in the first and especially the second Critique. The key thesis I defend is that Kant proposes to overcome the above-mentioned tension regarding philosophical terminology using the same, revolutionary conception of systematicity that lies at the basis of his transcendental philosophy.

In Tusculans 1 Cicero gives a lengthy rebuttal of the thesis that death is an evil. This raises a puzzle: how can such a one-sided presentation aspire to reveal whether it is more plausible that death is or is not an evil? Invoking the Tusculans’ practical aim – the removal of emotional disturbance – does not fully satisfy, since it is unclear how effective persuasion can be if the contrary position does not receive a fair hearing. I show that as main speaker in the book Cicero warns against over-confidence in embracing positions that one wishes to be true; and I argue that as author Cicero portrays the interlocutor of Tusculans 1 as a salutary example of how not to approach the kind of questions about death with which the work engages. We are encouraged to see the interlocutor’s failure as one not of character but of inexperience in philosophical method.

Authenticity plays key methodological and normative roles for early Heidegger: as he puts it, to ‘work out the question of Being adequately … we must make an entity – the inquirer – transparent in his own Being’. But the precise nature of those roles, and how Heidegger differs from other thinkers of authenticity, is much less clear. This chapter considers three possible interpretations of authenticity found in the contemporary literature. On a transcendental reading, authenticity is what allows us to first recognize reasons as such and act in light of norms at all. On a unity reading, authenticity unifies Dasein’s commitments, and thereby grants a special narrative or judgmental coherence to my life. Finally, on the structural reading, ultimately defended here, authenticity is an inchoate awareness of the structural features of normative space and of Dasein’s own way of being. It is only this interpretation, it is argued, that can make sense of Heidegger’s text and the centrality of authenticity within his early work.

The artes of the early Roman Empire are much more than manuals or handbooks intended to communicate the elements of practical expertise: they are vehicles for the articulation of Roman understandings of nature, knowledge, and society. This intellectual culture is premised on a theoretically sophisticated notion of ars that developed in the late Republic. It deserves to be regarded as a scientific culture because inter alia the artes elaborate different theories of nature and knowledge, draw upon many branches of ancient scientific inquiry, and employ methods characteristic of ancient scientific thought and practice. The artes Romanize specialized knowledge insofar as they plot their scientific contents along the geographic and temporal axes of Roman power. Ultimately, the artes constitute a unified intellectual phenomenon and should be studied as a part of the scientific culture to which they belong.

This chapter reviews the perspectives and levels of an analysis that inform how an observation is made. This is done by demonstrating that there are two perspectives (language use and the human factor) and five levels (summation, description, interpretation, evaluation, and transformation) of analysis in discourse analysis. These perspectives and levels can be used to understand the frameworks of established methodologies, such as conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. After reading this chapter, readers will know that the analytic process can combine different perspectives and levels of analysis.

This chapter is written for conversation analysts and is methodological. It discusses, in a step-by-step fashion, how to code practices of action (e.g., particles, gaze orientation) and/or social actions (e.g., inviting, information seeking) for purposes of their statistical association in ways that respect conversation-analytic (CA) principles (e.g., the prioritization of social action, the importance of sequential position, order at all points, the relevance of codes to participants). As such, this chapter focuses on coding as part of engaging in basic CA and advancing its findings, for example as a tool of both discovery and proof (e.g., regarding action formation and sequential implicature). While not its main focus, this chapter should also be useful to analysts seeking to associate interactional variables with demographic, social-psychological, and/or institutional-outcome variables. The chapter’s advice is grounded in case studies of published CA research utilizing coding and statistics (e.g., those of Gail Jefferson, Charles Goodwin, and the present author). These case studies are elaborated by discussions of cautions when creating code categories, inter-rater reliability, the maintenance of a codebook, and the validity of statistical association itself. Both misperceptions and limitations of coding are addressed.

Conversations involving people with communication disorders or other forms of communicative impairment, such as those with dementia, autism, aphasia, or hearing impairment, differ in systematic ways from typical conversations (i.e., those involving participants without significant communicative or cognitive challenges). Drawing from CA work over the last few decades, this chapter discusses methodological issues involved in data collection in this field and in the transcription and analysis of these types of data. Analysis of the ways in which these interactions are distinctive and ‘atypical’ as regards social actions and the practices used in their construction and deployment involves a form of comparative analysis drawing on CA findings concerning typical interaction. The chapter also discusses other, more explicit, forms of comparative analysis regularly undertaken in this field, including comparison of participants’ conversations over time, and the comparison of how conversations involving participants with one type of communicative impairment compare with those of participants with a different form of impairment. One way in which the latter type of investigation can be developed is discussed in relation to a certain interactional feature – here, interruptive, other-initiation of repair – and how it may be traced across conversations involving participants with different communicative impairments.

The All-Affected Principle is of limited help in thinking about immigration. Immigration raises important normative questions about who should have access to citizenship, what is required for the full social and economic inclusion of immigrants, what legal rights immigrants admitted by a state should have, how migrants who enter and settle without permission should be treated, what criteria should be used in selecting and excluding immigrants, what states ought to do in dealing with refugees, and whether controlling immigration is really morally justifiable at all. The All-Affected Principle is directly relevant only to the first question of who should have access to citizenship, and even in that case, it needs to be supplemented. The other questions are not primarily about who should participate in democratic decision-making but about what justice requires and about the moral constraints on democratic discretion. So, using the All-Affected Principle to think about those questions would not help, and starting from that principle in thinking about immigration might lead us to miss the key normative issues.

The aim of this chapter is to reconceptualise climate politics as a struggle to name the problem and thereby determine how it is known and acted upon. I suggest that underpinning the visible elements of contestation over the reality of climate change, who is responsible and by how much, is a struggle over order – the distribution of economic, social and political resources and the values that organise it as such. Describing the politics of climate change as a field of activity orientated around determining the meaning of the problem enables me to situate the IPCC centrally within this struggle as the key site in producing international assessments of the issue. The IPCC’s role in establishing collective interest in climate change and the knowledge base for action has generated the structures and forces in which the IPCC as an organisation and method for producing authoritative ways to know climate change has emerged, which in the book, I identify as the IPCC’s practice of and for writing climate change.