I Swear I Saw This records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig’s reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006—as well as its caption, “I swear I saw this”—Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery. Notebooks mix the raw material of observation with reverie, juxtaposed, in Taussig’s case, with drawings, watercolors, and newspaper cuttings, which blend the inner and outer worlds in a fashion reminiscent of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s surreal cut-up technique. Focusing on the small details and observations that are lost when writers convert their notes into finished pieces, Taussig calls for new ways of seeing and using the notebook as form. Memory emerges as a central motif in I Swear I Saw This as he explores his penchant to inscribe new recollections in the margins or directly over the original entries days or weeks after an event. This palimpsest of afterthoughts leads to ruminations on Freud’s analysis of dreams, Proust’s thoughts on the involuntary workings of memory, and Benjamin’s theories of history—fieldwork, Taussig writes, provokes childhood memories with startling ease. I Swear I Saw This exhibits Taussig’s characteristic verve and intellectual audacity, here combined with a revelatory sense of intimacy. He writes, “drawing is thus a depicting, a hauling, an unraveling, and being impelled toward something or somebody.” Readers will exult in joining Taussig once again as he follows the threads of a tangled skein of inspired associations.

A collection of fourteen essays in which Professor Postan draws together for the first time his contributions to the debate on historical method, and discusses from a variety of different angles, the inter-relation of history and the social sciences. After making, in his first three essays, a direct statement of his point of view, the author deals with two main aspects of the subject: time sequences and theoretical relevance of facts. He then proceeds to exemplify his point of view more particularly with relation to macro-economics and to certain specific issues within economic history as well as to economic history in general. In the final two chapters, one is on Karl Marx, the other on Hugh Gaitskell, he seeks to describe the intellectual climate in which the debate on methodology was held and in which his opinions on the subject were formed. The essays contained in this book will be of interest to all those involved in the social sciences, economics and history, as well as to those specifically concerned with historical methodology.

Beginning with Nietzsche's discovery of the experimental disposition, Ronell explores testing's ascension to truth in modern practice. To know something, and to know that it is true, has never been a simple matter of recognition and assent. Instead, increasing numbers of tests of ever increasing complexity have been established to determine and constitute what is true, probable, or verifiable. Tests are pervasive, and inflect the master-narratives of our historical existence. The Bible dramatically presents tests of Abraham and Job, great works of literature track the tested subject, the vast apparatus of modern science and technology is built upon extraordinarily exacting tests, and the need for truth in times of trial and crisis links state-run testing apparatuses to events of arrest, torture, and death. On the evening of 9-11 the President of the United States said, We are being being tested. What propels this drive to test? What can satisfy it? What is the subterranean history of its effects? In The Test Drive, internationally acclaimed scholar Avital Ronell explores vast areas of testing in the works of Husserl, Popper, Freud, Lyotard, Derrida, and others, including Zen ph

Two distinguished historians, one an advocate of the new scientific or 'cliometric' history and the other a traditional historian, debate the validity of their respective methods of studying the past.

EditorsG++ introduction Part I Philosophy of Mathematics 1 Infinite regress and foundations of mathematics 2 A renaissance of empiricism in the recent philosophy of mathematics? 3 Cauchy and the continuum: the significance of non-standard analysis for the history and philosophy of mathematics 4 What does a mathematical proof prove? 5 The method of analysis-synthesis Part II Critical Papers 6 The problem of appraising scientific theories: three approaches 7 Necessity, Kineale and Popper 8 Changes in the problem of inductive logic 9 On Popperian historiography 10 Anomalies versus G++crucial experimentsG++ 11 Understanding Toulmin Part III Science and Education 12 A letter to the director of the London School of Economics 13 The teaching of the history of science 14 The social responsibility of science References Lakatos bibliography Indexes.

"The Rhetoric of Morality and Philosophy, one of the most groundbreaking works of twentieth-century Platonic studies, is now back in print for a new generation of students and scholars to discover. In this volume, distinguished classicist Seth Benardete interprets and pairs two important Platonic dialogues, the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, illuminating Socrates' notion of rhetoric and Plato's conception of morality and eros in the human soul.

Comparison is held to be one of the central methods of the academic study of religion. While many ostensibly engage in the comparative act, often overlooked is what it actually means to do this. What is comparison? Why engage in it and for what purposes? Can there be such a thing as a valid or invalid comparison? Can comparison itself be compared to anything? This book starts with the premise that while there are good comparisons and bad comparisons, what is common to both is the sheer artificiality of the enterprise and develops an analytical framework for using the method in the context of religious studies. After briefly tracing the history and genealogy of the category, Hughes draws on his own extensive work in Judaism and Islam to argue that comparison can be a useful method, but only under strictly controlled conditions.

Interest in German Idealism--not just Kant, but Fichte and Hegel as well--has recently developed within analytic philosophy, which traditionally defined itself in opposition to the Idealist tradition. Yet one obstacle remains especially intractable: the Idealists' longstanding claim that philosophy must be systematic. In this work, the first overview of the German Idealism that is both conceptual and methodological, Paul W. Franks offers a philosophical reconstruction that is true to the movement's own times and resources and, at the same time, deeply relevant to contemporary thought. At the center of the book are some neglected but critical questions about German Idealism: Why do Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel think that philosophy's main task is the construction of a system? Why do they think that every part of this system must derive from a single, immanent and absolute principle? Why, in short, must it be all or nothing? Through close examination of the major Idealists as well as the overlooked figures who influenced their reading of Kant, Franks explores the common ground and divergences between the philosophical problems that motivated Kant and those that, in turn, motivated the Idealists. The result is a characterization of German Idealism that reveals its sources as well as its pertinence--and its challenge--to contemporary philosophical naturalism.

Philosophical work comes in different sizes: there are systemic treatises, monographic surveys, philosopher-expanding texts. But there is also room for smaller studies that focus on highly particularized ideas and issues: studies that deal not with entire continents but with mere reefs and estuaries. The present essays are of this limited nature. Their aim is less to give a view of the overall lay of the land than to give a tranistic view of the diversity of the landscape. The present book continues Rescher's longstanding practice of publishing groups of philosophical essays that originated in occasional lecture and conference presentations. Notwithstanding their topical diversity the essays exhibit a uniformity of method in a common attempt to view historically significant philosophical issues in the light of modern perspectives opened up thorough conceptual clarification.

While philosophers from Plato to Kant and beyond have discussed the mission and methodology of philosophy, this area of deliberation has only recently been acknowledged as a distinctive branch of philosophy as such, duly entitled metaphilosophy. There are, as yet, very few books on the subject so that the present volume joins a rather select group. Professor Rescher has published in the field for some thirty years and this book gathers together a representative sampling of his contributions. Taken together these pieces convey an instructive overview of the field, as well as vividly conveying their author's take on the key issues that constitute its problem domain.