Bruno Latour was once asked : "Do you believe in reality?" This text is an attempt to answer this question.

Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict ...

The book examines theories (models) of how systems (those of humans, nature, and combined humannatural systems) function, and attempts to understand those theories and how they can help researchers develop effective institutions and policies for environmental management. The fundamental question this book asks is whether or not it is possible to get beyond seeing environment as a sub-component of social systems, and society as a sub-component of ecological systems, that is, to understand human-environment interactions as their own unique system. After (...) examining the similarities and differences among human and natural systems, as well as the means by which they can be accounted for in theories and models, the book examines five efforts to describe human-natural systems. The point of these efforts is to provide the means of learning about those systems so that they can be managed adaptively. The final section of the book uses case studies to examine the application of integrated theories/models to the real world. (shrink)

In his 1992 book, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook, Gananath Obeyesekere used this very issue to attack Sahlins's decades of scholarship on Hawaii. Accusing Sahlins of elementary mistakes of fact and logic, even of intentional distortion, Obeyesekere portrayed Sahlins as accepting a naive, ethnocentric idea of superiority of the white man over "natives" - Hawaiian and otherwise.

A summation of the work of one of the most influential and provocative interpreters of science, it aims at saving what is good and valuable in modernity and ...

In this collection of essays, Clifford Geertz explores the nature of his anthropological work in relation to a broader public, serving as the foremost spokesperson of his generation of scholars, those who came of age after World War II. ...

L'ambition de ce livre, et elle est grande, est de faire vivre à son lecteur, qu'il soit ou non philosophe, le trajet fulgurant qui, en quelques années, a transformé le mathématicien Alfred North Whitehead en philosophe spéculatif. De la pierre grise que je vois là jusqu'à la création du Dieu qu'exige la cohérence spéculative, il s'agit bel et bien de cette " libre et sauvage création de concepts " associée à la philosophie anglaise par Deleuze et Guattari dans Qu'est-ce que (...) la philosophie? Mais " sauvage " signifie d'abord ici l'humour d'une mise à l'aventure de tous les " nous savons bien " qui rassurent, et l'expérimentation tranquille des concepts qui portent à leur plus haut degré, pour les faire converger, liberté et contrainte, audace et obligation. De l'aventure, nul ne devrait ramener une doctrine ou un mode de pensée unanime ; plutôt, différent pour chacun, un certain goût pour les questions qui mettent en risque, et une grande indifférence aux mots d'ordre qui prétendent nous dire comment penser. (shrink)

In this extraordinary work Gilles Deleuze reflects on one of the figures of the past who has most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration of the tasks of philosophy.