Any successful account of the metaphysics of mechanistic causation must satisfy at least five key desiderata. In this article, I lay out these five desiderata and explain why existing accounts of the metaphysics of mechanistic causation fail to satisfy them. I then present an alternative account that does satisfy the five desiderata. According to this alternative account, we must resort to a type of ontological entity that is new to metaphysics, but not to science: constraints. In this article, I explain (...) how a constraints-based metaphysics fits best with the emerging consensus on the nature of mechanistic explanation. 1Introduction2Renormalizability2.1The first two desiderata: Intrinsicness and productivity2.2The third desideratum: Scientific validity or non-mysteriousness2.3The fourth desideratum: Directionality2.4The fifth desideratum: Perspectival nature of mechanisms3Constraints and Causation3.1Multi-perspectival realism and causal structure3.2Causal structure as laws3.3Causal structures in analytical mechanics: Constraints3.4A metaphysics inspired by analytical mechanics: Constraints as ontologically primitive modal structures4Constraints and Mechanistic Causal Powers 4.1Inter- versus intra-perspectival categories4.2Mechanistic causal powers are grounded by constraints4.3Intrinsicness and constraints4.4Constraints and productiveness4.5Constraints and directionality5Conclusion. (shrink)

In the flowering of Red-Green Thought over the past two decades, metabolic rift thinking is surely one of its most colorful varieties. The metabolic rift has captured the imagination of critical environmental scholars, becoming a shorthand for capitalism’s troubled relations in the web of life. This article pursues an entwined critique and reconstruction: of metabolic rift thinking and the possibilities for a post-Cartesian perspective on historical change, the world-ecology conversation. Far from dismissing metabolic rift thinking, my intention is to affirm (...) its dialectical core. At stake is not merely the mode of explanation within environmental sociology. The impasse of metabolic rift thinking is suggestive of wider problems across the environmental social sciences, now confronted by a double challenge. One of course is the widespread—and reasonable—sense of urgency to evolve modes of thought appropriate to an era of deepening biospheric instability. The second is the widely recognized—but inadequately internalized—understanding that humans are part of nature. (shrink)

Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is "read" as a nineteenth century conceptualization of modernity. Its method is one of induction from a dense mass of details drawn from the literature, historiography, and art of the Renaissance. In some respects, Burckhardt anticipates Weber and parallels Marx, but he also includes certain elements of modernity that are absent from the other theorists, such as the emergence of modernity from the interstices of the political order, the formation of the (...) totalitarian state, the cult of celebrity, and the tendency toward crime. He is particularly concerned with Renaissance society as a transitional form of society, and thus implicitly, with the nature of transitions. (shrink)

From the late 1960s until his death in 2014, the filmmaker and artist Harun Farocki repeatedly returned in his work to the subject of labour. This article examines a selection of Farocki’s films and video installations, delineating his recurrent chronicling of the historical trajectory of the labour process and technological development under capitalist industrialisation. In particular, it focuses on Farocki’s sustained investigation into capitalism’s drive to systematically displace forms of skilled craft from the production process by subordinating both manual and (...) intellectual labour to an incremental process of deskilling and mechanisation, as well as his interrogation of the implication of various instrumental and automated visual technologies in such processes. In doing so, I underline the continuing significance of Marxist theory for analysing Farocki’s critical portrayal of capitalist modernity as dominated by an abstract and alienated historical dynamic toward the increasing rationalisation and control of production and social life. (shrink)

In An Essay on the Vital and Involuntary Motions of Animals, Robert Whytt maintained that the muscular motions that perform the natural functions of the organism are caused by an immaterial power. Here we consider to what extent the philosophical criticism of power urged by Locke and Hume may jeopardize his thesis, how his response mobilizes the resources of the Scottish experimental theism and whether he makes an original use of such resources. First, we examine various pieces of experimental evidence (...) from which Whytt infers the need to evoke this power, before showing how they prompt him to stand by the immaterial power in the face of the empiricist criticisms. Following this, we explore the link Whytt makes between power and agency, in particular comparing his thought with Locke’s. Lastly, we examine his work in the light of Hume’s criticism regarding the question of whether a power may be felt. (shrink)

Ellen Wood replies here to the symposium on her book, Empire of Capital, by laying out her views on the specificity of capitalism and capitalist imperialism, the relation between global capital and territorial states, the problematic concepts of 'globalisation' and 'financialisation', and how our understanding of capitalism affects our conceptions of oppositional struggle.

In The Idea of Justice , Amartya Sen argues for an approach to justice that is comparative and realization-based rather than transcendental and institutional. While Sen’s arguments for such an approach may not be as convincing as he thought, there are additional arguments for it, and one is that it provides a unique and valuable platform on which an account of justice as a virtue of social and political actors (including institutions and social movements) can be built. Hence new dimensions (...) of comparison are opened up: some actors are better disposed and more successful than others at leading social change in the direction of greater justice. The main objective of this article is to use the capability approach to construct such an account. Six dimensions of acting justly are identified: (1) reducing capability shortfalls; (2) expanding capabilities for all; (3) saving the worst-off as a first step towards their full participation in economy and society, (4) which is also to be promoted by a system of entitlements protecting all from social exclusion; while (5) supporting the empowerment of those whose capabilities are to expand; and (6) respecting ethical values and legitimate procedures. I conclude by sketching some underlying moral psychology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlexander Wendt’s Quantum Mind and Social Science is an effort to establish foundations of social science based on the ontology of modern physics. The quantum revolution has deservedly had repercussions in many sciences, but it is unwise to ground social science on physical theories, which are subject to constant revision. Additionally, despite its empirical success, there is no agreed-upon interpretation of quantum theory. Finally, even if there were, the random indeterminacy intrinsic to the quantum world cannot account for the intentionality (...) of human action. Intentional agents act for reasons, not at random; nor are the reasons chosen at random. (shrink)

Alexander Anievas and Kerem Nişancıoğlu’sHow the West Came to Ruleis an important intervention within Marxist historical debates which seeks to use the theory of uneven and combined development to explain the origin and rise to dominance of capitalism. The argument is shaped by a critique of Political Marxist ‘internalist’ explanations of the process, to which the authors counterpose an account which emphasises its inescapably ‘inter-societal’ nature. While recognising the many contributions that the book makes to our historical understanding, this article (...) argues that these insights do not depend onUCD, and could have been arrived at without reference to it. In particular, it will try to show thatUCDis inapplicable in periods before the consolidation of capitalism, but might be more usefully extended spatially rather than chronologically. (shrink)

The ontological and analytical status of Marxian social theory has been a matter of fierce controversy since Marx’s death, both within and without Marxist circles. A particular source of contention has been over whether Marxism should be construed as an objective science of the capitalist mode of production or as an ethico-philosophical critique of bourgeois society. This is paralleled by the dispute over whether Marxism ought to be considered a humanism or a structuralism. This article addresses both sides of this (...) debate. The argument is that, rather than Marx’s own social thought being split into incompatible poles, giving rise to ‘two Marxisms’, it forms a coherent unity. Marx’s social theory is neither humanist philosophy, nor structural science, but is in fact realist science, which synthesizes these apparent antinomies, and thereby transcends both. (shrink)

The extant manuscript is described in relation to Russell’s Trinity College lecture course in 1899 and its subsequent preparation for the book of 1900. Alterations within the MS are reported. So are revisions that must have followed on a missing typescript, as derived from comparing G. E. Moore’s copy of the page proofs with the MS. His suggested changes are compared with the text of the first edition along with emendations Russell must have made on his own copy of the (...) proofs. (shrink)

Newton began his Principia with three Axiomata sive Leges Motus. We offer an interpretation of Newton’s dual label and investigate two tensions inherent in his account of laws. The first arises from the juxtaposition of Newton’s confidence in the certainty of his laws and his commitment to their variability and contingency. The second arises because Newton ascribes fundamental status both to the laws and to the bodies and forces they govern. We argue the first is resolvable, but the second is (...) not. However, the second tension shows that Newton conceives laws as formal causes of bodies and forces. This neo-Aristotelian conception goes missing in Kantian accounts of laws, as well as accounts that stress laws’ grounding in powers and capacities. (shrink)

Originally published in 1979, and with a new preface by the author, this classic book presents a detailed study of the first chapter of Capital and suggest how the rest of the work can be read as a political document with strong implications for today. Cleaver shows how to apply Marx's categories to study in depth the various ways in which the capitalist class seeks to dominate and the methods that can be used to struggle against that domination. The introduction (...) provides a brilliant overview of struggles in the past century and the development of ideas of autonomy. (shrink)

The Reality of Knowledge completes a trilogy begun with The Architecture of Knowledge (1980) and Processes of Knowledge (2001). It presents a holistic analysis of knowledge and the reality that is known. The book shows how living things, including humans, construct reality in specific ways that maximize their ability to know it. Different species construct different areas of reality, but they all use the same methods: objectification, categorization, and generalization. Support for this analysis comes from examining certain logical protocols in (...) computer technology, because computer architectures have evolved to emulate human knowledge. (shrink)

This work is a critique of orthodox conceptions of social exclusion in the global political economy. Following Foucault’s methodology, our argument is that orthodox political-economic discourses, from 18th and 19th century classical political economy to late 20th century neoliberalism, provide only partial and limited accounts of social exclusion, and as such obscure its production and reproduction within the global political economy. We uncover this problem by first examining the contemporary period of globalization, which reveals a discrepancy between orthodox discourse taken (...) at face value and the actuality of social exclusion. Marx’s critique of classical political economy exposes the fundamental basis of this discrepancy as the way in which the false assumptions of orthodox discourse make the market appear ‘natural’ to human social relations. Exclusion is thus conceived as the state of being on the outside of the market and associated structures and institutions. This obscures how both the historical construction and political governance of the market produce patterns of social exclusion. To move beyond this failing we employ Marx’s historical materialism as an alternative perspective which brings to light the production of exclusion within and as a product of social structures and institutions. We combine this with Foucault’s notion of power to establish a framework to investigate the production of social exclusion in terms of land, labour, capital, rights, gender and truth. Initially we develop this as a general mode of inquiry, leading to brief studies of feudal Europe, classical Islam and T’ang China. Then we apply this framework to the historical construction and political governance of the market within the capitalist global political economy, drawing upon the work of Marx along with Stephen Gill, Antonio Gramsci and David Harvey. We study three historical periods to show the production of social exclusion at work. First, agrarian capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in England and their impact upon world trade. Second, the post-1945 ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism. And third, the post-1970s era of globalization. This work makes a contribution to knowledge by being the first attempt to understand the global political economy as a whole in terms of inclusion / exclusion, and the first systematic application of the concept of social exclusion on a global scale. (shrink)

My thesis in this paper is: the modern concept of laws of motion—qua dynamical laws—emerges in 18th-century mechanics. The driving factor for it was the need to extend mechanics beyond the centroid theories of the late-1600s. The enabling result behind it was the rise of differential equations. -/- In consequence, by the mid-1700s we see a deep shift in the form and status of laws of motion. The shift is among the critical inflection points where early modern mechanics turns into (...) classical mechanics as we know it. Previously, laws of motion had been channels for truth and reference into mechanics. By 1750, the laws lose these features. Instead, now they just assert equalities between functions; and serve just to entail (differential) equations of motion for particular mechanical setups. This creates two philosophical problems. First, it’s unclear what counts as evidence for the laws of motion in the Enlightenment. Second, it’s a mystery whether these laws retain any notion of causality. That subverts the early-modern dictum that physics is a science of causes. (shrink)

Social work is a contested tradition, torn between the demands of social governance and autonomy. Today, this struggle is reflected in the division between the dominant, neoliberal agenda of service provision and the resistance offered by various critical perspectives employed by disparate groups of practitioners serving diverse communities. Critical social work challenges oppressive conditions and discourses, in addition to addressing their consequences in individuals’ lives. However, very few recent critical theorists informing critical social work have advocated revolution. A challenging exception (...) can be found in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–97), whose explication of ontological underdetermination and creation evades the pitfalls of both structural determinism and post-structural relativism, enabling an understanding of society as the contested creation of collective imaginaries in action and a politics of radical transformation. On this basis, we argue that Castoriadis’s radical-democratic revisioning of revolutionary praxis can help in reimagining critical social work’s emancipatory potential. (shrink)

This thesis explores the concept of subsumption in the work of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx in order to construct a distinct theoretical problem resting on the articulation of conceptual and social relations. Each of these authors develops a ‘logic’ within which subsumptive relations are operative: Transcendental logic, dialectical logic and finally Marx’s ‘logic of the body politic’; these are investigated in turn. The thesis opens with a close reading of subsumption in Kant’s philosophy, arguing that it is (...) here that the concept first attains its modern or critical sense. This critical sense distinguishes it from the classical notion of subsumption and gives rise to a novel philosophical account of how synthetic subsumption acts unite heterogeneous elements within a compositional totality. In Hegel’s philosophy this account takes on a series of new determinations, as social, historical and developmental aspects to subsumption are introduced. Nonetheless, Hegel’s concept of subsumption remains within the ambit of a ‘closed’ idealist discourse, just as Kant’s does. The second section of the thesis explores how this closure is thrown into crisis by Marx’s materialist attack on philosophy as a self-sufficient branch of knowledge, altering the stakes of conceptual relations as such, and therefore subsumption. Drawing on the work of Mexican-Ecuadoran philosopher Bolívar Echeverría, Marx’s materialism is reconstructed as a theory of social reproduction, encompassing the practical process of social life in its entirety. This then provides the basis for an analysis of subsumption in its specifically capitalist form, which, the thesis argues, must be thought as operative at three levels of social activity: exchange, production and reproduction, each with their own distinct but interconnected logics of power and resistance. Grasping these three dimensions in their unity, the thesis finally outlines an original framework for comprehending capitalist domination in its concrete specificity. In order to do so it goes beyond Marx’s own theory of subsumption as well as interpretations of it that reinstate theoretical closure to historical contingency. Instead, a dynamic theory of capitalist subsumption is proposed in order to register the diverse mechanisms of control through which capitalist power shapes the course of social reproduction and historical development. (shrink)

The introduction of laws of nature is often seen as one of the hallmarks of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. The new sciences are thought to have introduced the revolutionary idea that explanations of natural phenomena have to be grounded in exceptionless regularities of universal scope, i. e. laws of nature. The use of legal terminology to talk about natural regularities has a longer history, though. This article traces these earlier uses.

I develop an interdisciplinary framework for understanding the nature of agents and agency that is compatible with recent developments in the metaphysics of science and that also does justice to the mechanistic and normative characteristics of agents and agency as they are understood in moral philosophy, social psychology, neuroscience, robotics, and economics. The framework I develop is internal perspectivalist. That is to say, it counts agents as real in a perspective-dependent way, but not in a way that depends on an (...) external perspective. Whether or not something counts as an agent depends on whether it is able to have a certain kind of perspective. My approach differs from many others by treating possession of a perspective as more basic than the possession of agency, representational content/vehicles, cognition, intentions, goals, concepts, or mental or psychological states; these latter capabilities require the former, not the other way around. I explain what it means for a system to be able to have a perspective at all, beginning with simple cases in biology, and show how self-contained normative perspectives about proper function and control can emerge from mechanisms with relatively simple dynamics. I then describe how increasingly complex control architectures can become organized that allow for more complex perspectives that approach agency. Next, I provide my own account of the kind of perspective that is necessary for agency itself, the goal being to provide a reference against which other accounts can be compared. Finally, I introduce a crucial distinction that is necessary for understanding human agency: that between inclinational and committal agency, and venture a hypothesis about how the normative perspective underlying committal agency might be mechanistically realized. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with Arendt’s political theory, particularly those elements of it concerned with political institutions. It treats her work as a response to a mis-conceptualisation of politics as being fundamentally formed of rulership and command, which is to say that she opposes treating sovereignty as an essential component of political practice. What Arendt offers, as an alternative, is a full-fledged account of how politics could operate in the absence of sovereignty. This thesis argues that it is a coherent (...) picture, consistent across the course of her work. A particularly important element of this consistency is the closeness of fit between the material which forms the basis of Arendt’s understanding of politics and her account of political foundations. To do so, the thesis begins with a discussion of Arendt’s concept of ‘action’, which forms the basis of her understanding of politics. One of the most distinctive features of this is the importance of individual initiative, understood as responsiveness to the already given. This part of action is an essential part of linking it harmoniously to those other elements of her work which appear here. Arendt’s work on ‘judgment’ is the focus of its own chapter; it is important because judgment is Arendt’s conceptualisation of political discussion modelled on opinion, which has previously been treated as a late-career development, is here treated as consistent with and, essentially, an extension of, certain features of action. On the basis of this combined reading of action and judgment, it is possible to read Arendt’s description of political foundations as an example of the same kind of political activity. Contra Honig’s reading of the political foundation as an opportunity for resistance, this thesis treats it as a political act which invites the participation of later citizens. Finally, an account of Arendt’s institutional thought is completed by presenting her description of the ‘council system’ in combination with Thomas Jefferson’s ‘ward system’. The two combine to form an example of political organisation which both does without a reliance on sovereignty and maximises opportunities for meaningful political engagement. (shrink)

On Newton’s view understanding of the fundamental character of anything can only come from knowledge about that thing, gained from experience, he sought experimental knowledge of light, for example, that would provide, not in the first instance support for a prior theory of its nature, but some systematic basis for further investigation--and--possibly--an eventual more fundamental theory. Among the things to hope for as results of an investigation is the discovery both of new questions that may be profitably pursued and new (...) instrumentalities for conducting further investigations. In Newton’s account of the nature of body, lawsplay a central role; and it is regularities--laws of behavior--that he primarily sought in his study of phenomena. It is these that make the results of the investigations what I have called “systematic.”. (shrink)