This chapter introduces students to the rich and controversial legacy of Marxism and one of its major offshoots in the twentieth century, Critical Theory. The chapter is presented in two parts. The first part touches on the historical and intellectual context that ‘created’ Marxism, Marx’s notion of historical materialism and the issue of how Marx’s ideas have been received in IR. The second part concentrates on the two strands of Critical Theory that have emerged within IR: one derived from the so-called Frankfurt School and the other from Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci.

This chapter introduces students to the range of theoretical issues that have animated the study of international relations through the years. First, it explains why theoretical reflection is indispensable to explaining and understanding international relations. Second, it addresses unavoidable ontological and epistemological issues in the quest for theoretical understanding. Third, it traces the growth of mainstream International Relations theory up to the present conflict in Ukraine. Finally, it touches on some of the diverse critical approaches to the study of international relations.

The flourishing of the essay as a protean literary form in an age marked by growing interest in essaying systematic knowledge reflects a tension within eighteenth-century empiricism. Two divergent subgenres emerged from this tension. The conversational essay, first, drew upon a Montaignian tradition rooted in scepticism, dialogue, and performative rationality; these essays were associated with a form of pragmatic empiricism at ease with the idea of human knowledge as intersubjectively constituted in the public domain. On the other hand, the systematic essays of the Enlightenment, spurred on by John Locke’s attempt to establish ‘order’ in intellectual inquiry, deployed the essay as an instrument for establishing Universal Truth and what Leibniz termed ‘demonstrative knowledge’. In considering the epistemology of the eighteenth-century essay in Britain, this chapter explores not only how this bifurcated empiricism influenced the development of the essay, but also the ways in which the essay reconstituted empiricism itself.

Essayists have long reflected on the reasons for travel – its educational, cultural, and spiritual advantages – often (and uncritically) championing travel for its own sake. This chapter identifies the formal aspects of essayistic British travel writing in authorial perspective, thematic content, and publication format, tracking their change over time. It shows that the discursive and stylistic development of the British travel essay was closely bound up with the diversification of the periodical press and the expansion of the empire. Ultimately, it shows that essayists developed a more self-aware and critical attitude towards travelling, informed by a sense of geopolitical, ecological, and ethical responsibility.

The tradition of philosophical essayism beginning with Montaigne takes experience as its starting point, adopting a sceptical attitude towards grand philosophical systems and a priori truth. It was the favoured form of British empiricists, who looked to experience as the source of philosophical truth, and early analytic philosophers, who saw themselves as inheritors of the empiricist tradition and sought to avoid the perceived philosophical and rhetorical excesses of ‘continental’ idealism. Their adoption of the essay was accompanied by a view of writing, continued in present-day analytic philosophy, that stresses clarity, economy, and simplicity – virtues borrowed from the realm of mathematics and logic. But a tension, evident in Bertrand Russell’s work, emerges between fidelity to experience and fidelity to a mathematical model of clarity. This chapter argues that the notion of experience grounding the essay loses its philosophical richness in the analytic project.

Starting from the Solon-Croesus episode, this chapter argues that Herodotus’ inquiry establishes a horizon of expectation in which historical memory (through the narratives of Tellus and Cleobis and Biton) opens up a new space for philosophical knowledge. The second half of the chapter suggests that the Histories’ generic affiliation with history over philosophy is anachronistic in the fifth century BCE. It demonstrates that Herodotus was not interpreted as a historian in his own time and that "inquiry" and "love of wisdom" characterize the dynamic and highly experimental intellectual culture of this period.

Carnap is commonly considered a great opponent of metaphysics. For good reason, as he made numerous derogatory remarks about metaphysics and metaphysicians. But what does Carnap reject when he rejects metaphysics? I distinguish between Early Carnap (before 1930) and Late Carnap (after 1930) and argue that Late Carnap does not reject a specific set of questions or views. Rather, he rejects a particular methodology that he regards as conflicting with empiricism. For example, in “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology,” Carnap does not reject the thesis that numbers exist as meaningless. Instead, he defends the acceptance of numbers against empiricist concerns. But if merely the methodology and not the subject matter is the problem, then metaphysics can perhaps be saved by fixing the methodology. Indeed, I contend, much of contemporary metaphysics is, from Late Carnap’s perspective, in good standing.

This chapter provides a critical survey of six of the most important interpretations of Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World or Aufbau. I argue that the variety of interpretations of the Aufbau reflect a reasonable pluralism of approaches. This pluralism can be traced to two factors. First, an interpretation of a philosophical text is sensitive to both normative and descriptive elements. Second, there is a reasonable pluralism with respect to the normative elements of an interpretation, especially the philosophical aim that an interpreter attributes to the author of the text. This analysis builds on recent discussions by Beaney of how the history of analytic philosophy should be done. The upshot of the chapter is that a more reflective approach to writing the history of philosophy should help us to acknowledge the plausibility of interpretations of a text that we refuse to endorse.

This chapter covers an account of fieldwork among Filipino Roman Catholic ritual practitioners alongside those of phenomenologically inclined anthropologists and performance studies scholars, particularly those who have deployed a ‘radically empirical’ approach. The author examines how these scholars have channelled the vicissitudes and anxieties of fieldwork towards productive ethnographic insights. The radical empiricist project is particularly feasible in contexts in which ethnographers encounter less ‘rational’ but intrinsically human experiences such as pain, suffering, healing, and illness in the reenactment of Christ’s Passion. This chapter offers a reflection on the methodological feasibility of embodied and ‘distendedly reflexive’ approaches towards a more expansive understanding of religious pain and suffering.

The primary goal of Chapter 3 is to introduce some of the important themes that have come up when philosophers think about the (human) mind, where it comes from and how it relates to the body and to the surrounding world. To this end, we visit a division of philosophy called the philosophy of mind, which will involve a review of a variety of “-isms” (such as rationalism, empiricism, mind–body dualism, monism, materialism, idealism, behaviorism, physicalism, associationism, and so on). We also meet a number of important philosophers who have developed various and often opposing views on the nature–nurture issue. We conclude with a discussion of what philosophers of mind call “the hard problem,” how to explain the notion of consciousness.

Many informed readers of Carnap (and Quine) have taken Quine’s objections to Carnap’s account of analyticity in terms of semantical rules to have failed. This paper counters this, arguing that Quine actually saw himself as applying Carnap’s own philosophical standards more strictly than Carnap himself did. Quine was, as he later reported, “just being more carnapian than Carnap.” This paper offers a careful analysis of Section 4 of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” which shows Carnap conflating two senses of “semantical rule.” Although the first is clear, Quine sees it as being of no use in defining analyticity. The second, though integral to Carnap’s method of defining analyticity, Quine shows to be left unexplained by Carnap’s definitions.

This chapter sets out the origins of the traditional historiography of early modern philosophy based on the dichotomy of empiricism and rationalism. After reconstructing the spread of the notions of empiricism and rationalism in Germany during the 1780s, we argue that the first outline of a history of metaphysics that displays the Kantian, epistemological, and classificatory biases can be found in Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s works from the early 1790s. Two early Kantian historians, Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann and Johann Gottlieb Buhle, turned Reinhold’s outline into fully fledged histories of early modern thought. Tennemann, who became a Kantian after reading Reinhold’s works, developed Reinhold’s historical sketches into a detailed, nuanced, and comprehensive account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy that revolves around the empiricism/rationalism distinction and displays the biases of the traditional historiography. Thus, in Germany, the decline of experimental philosophy and the eclipse of the experimental/speculative distinction went hand in hand with the rise of Kantianism and the development of a historiography based on the empiricism/rationalism distinction.

While a number of commentators have argued that Quine’s account of Carnap’s paper in terms of the category/subclass distinction is simply a misunderstanding of Carnap, this essay argues that it is not. Instead, Quine was correct to construe Carnap’s external questions of existence as all being category questions. Quine’s second claim – that answers to internal category questions of existence are trivial and analytic – was, however, incorrect. Here, this essay then dissents from a view of Ebbs, who has recently argued that Quine was right on both points. Instead, it is argued that epistemic considerations that support Quine’s first point undermine his second point.

Both Carnap and Quine see an element of practical choice in our scientific theorizing but that they diverge on its significance, particularly with regard to a theory of meaning. From Carnap’s standpoint, linguistic frameworks are practically adopted without any prior constraints and then provide for a theory of meaning. In contrast, Quine sees a theory of meaning presupposing a more general assumption that all meaningful elements stand in a systematic relation before translation begins. Without this assumption, there is no work for a theory of meaning to do. In this sense, the dogmas of empiricism can only do explanatory work if the meaningful elements are already systematically linked in a way that translation might recapture.

The arguments for the indeterminacy of Translation in Quine’s Word and Object (1960) form a turning point in his thinking. Quine may have started out as a disciple of Carnap’s, but in the 1940s and 1950s the most salient feature of Quine’s work is a deep asymmetry. Such extensional notions as reference and ontology are central and fully intelligible. Intensional notions such as analyticity and synonymy are not intelligible, and epistemic concerns are, in his published writing, not central. The arguments for the indeterminacy of translation undermine the asymmetry and initiate changes to the role of ontology and reference, to the status of simplicity, to Quine’s understanding of analyticity and synonymy, and to the character and centrality of his epistemology, ultimately including even a return to a two-tier epistemology. The changes do not amount to a wholesale rejection of earlier views, but exist uneasily alongside those previous views. In the aggregate, however, the changes were significant and brought Quine’s position back much closer to Carnap’s.

The Introduction provides an overview of the book and the individual chapters.