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.

Chapter three analyses the period between 1650 and 1800. Many thinkers see The Enlightenment’ as intoxicated with ideas of reason, control and with building perfect knowledge, organizations and societies. I demonstrate that this view is exaggerated. The ravages of wars produced two opposed intellectual movements: on the one hand, natural law and rationalism whose adherents believed in certain knowledge and abstract schemes; on the other, thinking in terms of probabilities, which recognizes and accommodates uncertainty. Hume, Smith, Voltaire and Montesquieu saw the limits of human reason and foresight and made considerable room for uncertainty. Military thinkers cautioned that war is unpredictable and that systematic knowledge is a pipe dream. Uncertainty and unpredictability occupied the centre stage in European culture; in paintings, the picaresque novel and the popularity of gambling and betting. This era was much contested as three different world views established themselves: The idea that the world could be understood and predicted, the sense that it is entirely uncertain and a pragmatic world view that recognizes and accommodates uncertainty as a part of the world.

This chapter describes the motivations for an analytical, “internal” critique of the law-and-economics movement. In particular, it discusses earlier types of critiques and shows that, while they are probably successful on their own terms, they have done little to dislodge economic-style thinking as a dominant force in American private law. Instead, a critique on the law-and-economics movement’s own terms is needed. The chapter also identifies several recurring problems, or “antipatterns,” in legal-economic reasoning.

This chapter summarizes the problems of the law-and-economics movement and tries to outline new ways for economic thinking to make a more lasting contribution to law.

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.

This chapter considers how Fantasy has been shaped by and shaped modern understandings that privilege facts, realism and scientific knowledge. It argues that while Fantasy has often been belittled by discourses that seek to define what is true, right and possible, fantasies have engaged in good faith with such discourses while serving as valuable means for negotiating their limitations. The chapter begins by discussing Enlightenment and its oversights, before pivoting to discuss how Fantasy was side-lined by discourses of genius that exalted authors and demeaned audiences, setting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Francis Jeffrey against more sympathetic appraisals by Joseph Addison, Charles Lamb and George MacDonald. The back half of the chapter explores how Fantasy engages critically with dominant rationalist and realist understandings that emerged during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, considering works including Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan, the animated series Arcane, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Elder Race, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Rivers Solomon’s The Deep.

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.

After summarising our findings in the preceding chapters, the Conclusion assesses the relative merits of experimental philosophy and empiricism as historiographical categories, and in the process we respond to some of our critics. We examine the historicity of both notions, their disciplinary and chronological scope, their contrast classes, namely, speculative philosophy and rationalism, and their explanatory power. Through an examination of the anti-hypotheticalism so prevalent in the early modern period and Margaret Cavendish’s published critique of experimental philosophy, we argue that experimental philosophy, together with the experimental/speculative distinction, have more explanatory power than the rationalism/empiricism distinction.

According to a widespread narrative of early modern philosophy, the early modern period was characterised by the development of Descartes’, Spinoza’s, and Leibniz’s rationalism and Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and Hume’s empiricism. The early modern period came to a close once Immanuel Kant, who was neither an empiricist nor a rationalist, combined the insights of both movements in his new Critical philosophy and inaugurated the new eras of German idealism and late modern philosophy. Several scholars have criticised this narrative for overestimating the importance of epistemological issues for early modern philosophers, portraying Kant’s Critical philosophy as a superior alternative to empiricism and rationalism and forcing most early modern thinkers prior to Kant into the empiricist or rationalist camps. Kant’s three Critiques are the first published works that explicitly contrast the terms ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’. This chapter sets out Kant’s contributions to the genesis of the historiographical narrative based on the dichotomy of empiricism/rationalism and argues that Kant is not directly responsible for the biases of that narrative. Kant did not regard the empiricism/rationalism distinction as purely epistemological, did not portray most of his early modern predecessors as empiricists or rationalists, and did not place himself over and above empiricism and rationalism.

This chapter continues the earlier one's project of outlining Hegel's critique of metaphysics, and distinguishing it from Kant's own. It does so by considering Hegel's relationship to Kant's Transcnendental Dialectic and its three main divisions: paralogisms, antinomies and Ideal. It explains the distinction between finite and infinite categories in Hegel, as well as its bearing on his dispute with Kant. It also finishes the task, begun in Chapter 2, of reconstructing Hegel's ontological proof and response to Kant's critique of this form of argument.

Thinking as a way of coping with the situations in which we find ourselves. Internal dialogue and gestures. Situations calling for thought. Thinking and rational deliberation. Actions and plans for actions as having entirely different ontological status. In the seventeenth century the mechanical worldview separated bodies from minds, and thinking thereby became a disembodied process. The body was instead equated with “the passions.” As a result, movements such as the ballet came to be regarded only as aesthetic objects. Eighteenth-century theories of the origin of language buttressed this claim. The ridiculousness of ballets d’action. Ballet dancers now became sex workers, and the theater became a location where rational, disembodied, human beings keep their emotions.

Modern philosophy of music emerged from the revival of ancient philosophy of music in the Renaissance and music took its place among the fine arts. Old views about the music of the cosmos persisted but debated centred on music’s relationship to emotion. Rationalists believed that the soul responds with sympathetic vibration to musical harmonies. Empiricists, beginning with the Florentine Camerata, revived the resemblance theory of musical expressiveness and held that music resembles human expressive behaviour. Both schools waned in the eighteenth century, and formalism emerged. Writers discussed include Gioseffo Zarlino, Franchino Gaffurio, Johannes Kepler, Heinrich Glarean, Athanasius Kircher, Joachim Burmeister, René Descartes, Marin Mersenne, Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, Johann Philipp Kirnberger, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann David Heinichen, Yves-Marie André, Francis Hutcheson, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Charles Batteux, Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Heinrich Christoph Koch, Kant, Johann Mattheson, Johann Gottfried Herder, Christian Gottfried Körner, Alexander Malcolm, Charles Avison, Charley Burney, James Beattie, Thomas Reid, Thomas Robertson and Adam Smith.

This chapter explains Hegel's critique of pre-Kantian metaphysics, distinguishing it from Kant's own. The shortcomings of "the former metaphysics" are due not to going beyond the bounds of reason but to an uncritical relationship to traditional logic. Hence its lack of self-criticism is analogous to that exhibited by Kant, meaning that the former metaphysics and its most famous idealist critic commit the same mistake.

The main contribution of this book lies in narrowing the existing research gap on the accountability of transnational corporations from emerging and developing states. In addition, it provides a new perspective on the widely documented poor track record of EU Member States in terms of holding ‘their’ corporate nationals, which are directly competing with these corporations for the same ‘share of wallet’ in the globalised marketplace, accountable. Any legal study of a level playing field requires the study of mandatory requirements as a matter of regulatory compliance. This book thus needs to study ‘hard law obligations’ in business and human rights. It assesses how regulation (in laws and trade agreements) and civil judicial remediation in the EU and its Member States function in relation to corporations from emerging and developing states in our globalised world. This book relies on two models of international law-making: constructivism and rationalism.

This chapter shows that early modern metaphysics was far more important for Pufendorf’s moral philosophy than has often been thought. In particular, it is essential to understanding Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities. This theory is often regarded as voluntarist and anti-metaphysical. Opposed to this, it has been argued, was a rationalist belief in objective and eternal moral values that was exemplified by philosophers like Leibniz. However, the main distinction for Pufendorf was not between voluntarism and rationalism, but between moral rules that were specific to a certain society because they were merely conventional, and others that were universal because they were natural, in the sense of being grounded in the physical characteristics of human nature as it had been created by God. The latter, according to Pufendorf, were necessarily true, though their necessity was hypothetical rather than absolute. Pufendorf’s intention was to turn moral philosophy into a science, which would supersede traditional Aristotelian-scholastic views that morality was concerned with the contingent circumstances of actions, and therefore incapable of ‘scientific’, that is syllogistic proof. Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities was central to this project of a moral science, which required him to provide a metaphysical foundation for these entities.

The intellectual excitement of nineteenth-century Germany was reflected by the Romantic and Existential movements, although both had international aspects as well. Both movements were to some extent reactions against the dominant idealism of rationalism, coming primarily from Kant’s views on the active mind, constructing reality. Fichte, von Schelling, and Hegel explored the implication of Kant’s philosophy, with Hegel coming to dominate the age. Romanticism found its roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and exerted tremendous influence in art, literature as well as philosophy, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recognizing the complexities of human experience, particularly in the dimensions of emotions, passions and desires, romanticism explored those aspects not readily explained by rational, intellectual processes. Existentialism was a direct reaction against rationalism and found initial expression in the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard, in Theology, and Dilthey, in psychology. Further, the Kantian notions of the strivings of the will and the unconscious were explored more fully by Schopenhauer and von Hartmann.

This chapter addresses what Heidegger considers one of the basic problems of philosophy, that is, the alleged incompatibility between the notion of Being, our thinking, and logic. To begin with, it discusses how Heideggerians have dealt with this incompatibility by discussing what Casati calls an irrationalist and rationalist interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy. Then, the chapter argues that both of these interpretations face exegetical and philosophical problems. To conclude, it defends an alternative way of addressing the incompatibility between our thinking, logic, and the notion of Being. In this connection Casati notes Heidegger’s suggestion, in some of his late works, that the real problem lies in the philosophical illusion that we can actually assess the limits of our thinking and, thereby, our logic. Heidegger’s philosophy aims, the chapter submits, at freeing us from such a philosophical illusion by delivering an experience that reminds us that we can never look at our thinking, as it were, from “on high,” i.e., from a standpoint that would enable us to grasp its limits or determine that it has no limits whatsoever.