World-Making

Professor

Nicholas Onuf

 

Description

”World-making” is appropriately associated with constructivism in philosophy, social theory and the field of international relations. Yet constructivism in IR is typically divorced from discussions of world-making in philosophy and social theory, instead revealing substantial affinities with liberal internationalism. This course reaches back to Aristotle to situate constructivism within a broad and sustained philosophical discourse about language-speaking animals and their socio-political arrangements. The first part of the course deals with Aristotle’s discussion of predication, concept formation and classification; human powers, potential, and practice ; emotions, conventions and ethics; and social arrangements, from households to political societies, predicated on friendship. The second part examines the early modern re-working of the Aristotelian framework by reference to Grotius, Hobbes, Hume, Smith, and especially Kant and his ”epistemological revolution”. The third part tackles the solipsistic implications of Kant’s philosophical constructivism by taking the ”linguistic turn” and grounds an updated constructivism in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. The last part of the course addresses the making of the modern world, first by adapting Foucault’s scheme of successive ”epistemes”, then by working out a republican, as opposed to a Lockean or liberal, conception of late modern civil society, and finally by sketching possible global futures.

 

 

24 February. Introductory formalities

‘World-making’ is a turn of phrase associated with constructivism in philosophy, social theory and the field of International Relations. Yet constructivism in IR is typically divorced from discussions of world-making in philosophy and social theory. This course reaches back to Aristotle to situate constructivism within a broad and sustained philosophical discourse about language-using animals and their socio-political arrangements.

The course follows the plan for a book the instructor is writing, to be called The Metaphysics of World-Making: A Preface to Global Theory. WORKBOOKS 1-4 assemble the instructor’s work, to be re-written as needed for the planned book.

WORKBOOK 5 contains three papers on the instructor’s conception of constructivist social theory as applied to international relations. Students who are not familiar with this conception should read WORKBOOK 5 and/or

Nicholas Greenwood Onuf, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (1989, out of print, on reserve in library).

Students will be able to access WORKBOOKS online. The library will also have print copies on reserve. Assigned books should also be on reserve.

 

3 March. Situating one’s self.

READ

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999), ch, 2-3, 13

WORKBOOK 1, pp. 1-44

 

10, 17 March. Philosophical backdrop

READ

Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (2006)

Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics (2010), ch. 1-2

John R. Searle, Making the Social World (2010)

 

24, 31 March. Back to Aristotle: Logic and Language

 

READ 

Aristotle, The Organon (Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics), Metaphysics (any edition, any translation)

Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, ch. 15-18 

WORKBOOK 1, pp. 44-84

 

7 April. More Aristotle: Powers and practice

 

READ 

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Rhetoric 

WORKBOOK 2, pp. 1-28.

  

14 April. Still more Aristotle: Social arrangements

 

READ  

Aristotle, Eudamian Ethics, Politics 

WORKBOOK 2, pp. 29-82 

 

21 April. Making us modern

 

READ

 

David L. Blaney and Naeem Inayatullah, Savage Economics: Wealth, Poverty and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism (2010) 

Forum on the state as a person, Review of International Studies, vol. 30 (2004), pp. 255-316 

Brent J. Steele, Ontological Security in International Relations: Self-Identity and the IR State (2008), ch. 3 

WORKBOOK 3, p. 1-42

 

5 May (reschedule). Mind over Matter

 

READ

 

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), I, 1^st Part; 2^nd Part, 1^st Division (any edition or translation) 

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, ‘The Psychological Foundations of Culture,’ in Joel Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Cultures (1992), pp. 19-136 (http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/papers/pfc92.pdf)

Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, ch. 9-12 

WORKBOOK 3, pp. 42-51

  

12, 19 May. Conditions of Possibility

 

READ

 

Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (1966)/The Order of Things (1971)

Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (1995)

WORKBOOK 3, pp. 51-90

  

26 May, 2 June. Global Theory

 

READ

 

Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, ch. 3-7

R.B.J. Walker, After the Globe, before the World (2010)

WORKBOOK 4, 1-63

  

Course requirements

 

Keep a diary or notebook with reflections, questions, critical notes and suggestions on the instructor’s book project.

 

Write a 10-20 page essay on the social theoretic framework that you believe best suits your scholarly concerns. Be sure to relate your preferred framework to its philosophical backdrop.

 

Participate actively in class discussions.