...Colin Richmond In an issue of Common Knowledge given over to experiments in scholarly form and to the discussion of them, this piece is one of three on the genre of microhistory. The other two (by Natalie Zemon Davis and Sir Keith Thomas) argue the merits and demerits of the genre, while this piece...

...Frank Kermode; Jeffrey M. Perl This retitled excerpt from Frank Kermode’s introduction to the symposium “Beyond Post-: A Revaluation of the Revaluation of All Values” ( Common Knowledge 1:3 [Winter 1992]: 10–12) is republished here in a special issue of representative pieces from the journal’s...

... when classical repertories were becoming established. A kind of professional collegiality developed during this period on concert programs among pieces of diverse age and taste, reaching far beyond the iconic composers (now seen by most of us to have been Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann...

..., and from Socrates's description of a luxurious city, this piece argues that what we are inseparable from are mostly things and persons that our body can go on without. To the extent that such things and persons, and the relationship in which we stand to them, are distinct from our bodies, what we...

...Jeffrey M. Perl This essay, by the editor of Common Knowledge , responds to a piece by Dionigi Albera that, in turn, responds to Jeffrey Perl’s introduction, published in May 2017, to CK ’s multipart symposium on xenophilia. Albera argues that the ambivalence that Perl observes in many instances...

...Mikhail Epstein Abstract This guest column examines the historical fate of Russia in its catastrophic confrontation with Ukraine and the West. The piece considers the negative self‐definitions of Russia that have arisen in the aftermath of the communist utopia and its virtual transformation...

...Elizabeth Fox-Genovese This text of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's is published posthumously in the context of pieces dedicated to her memory. It is unclear whether she intended it for eventual publication or whether she had intended it as a lecture; nor is there decisive evidence for a date...

...Terry Eagleton This essay introduces a cluster of articles titled “Devalued Currency: An Elegiac Symposium on Paradigm Shifts.” Eagleton's piece addresses, from a perspective indebted to Walter Benjamin, the notion of Thomas Kuhn that “shifts” in the controlling paradigms of disciplines...

...Robin Wagner-Pacifici This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur” is the introduction to its fourth installment. The piece elaborates a new approach, termed “political semiosis,” to tracking event emergence, event formation, and event deformation...

...J. G. A. Pocock This piece is an essay review of Wang Hui's book China from Empire to Nation-State (2014), which is a translation of the introduction to Wang's four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (2004). According to the reviewer, Wang studies less the modern history of China than its...

...G. E. R. Lloyd This piece is a response to Barbara Herrnstein Smith's article, “The Chimera of Relativism: A Tragicomedy,” in the Common Knowledge symposium on “comparative relativism.” The theme is complexity—as distinct from simple contrast or binarism of any kind—similarities as well...

... deadlocks that Smith so elegantly helps put to rest (relativists vs. positivists, etc.); namely, a manner of debate in which a generalized relativity of thinking, including the relativity of that thought itself, would make a merit of academic opposition at all levels. This piece suggests, in other words...

... to a brain domain of knowledge making. Understanding these dynamics, both at a discourse level and at a brain level, this piece suggests, may provide a useful case for a contemporary discussion of relativism. Duke University Press 2011 Symposium: Comparative...

...Jeffrey Kallberg When we view Chopin's later works in the context of his biography, we find a conjunction of real-life machines (trains, the telegraph), mimetic mechanical music (music boxes), and prolific textual variants. Particularly fascinating are several late pieces that feature canons...

...Isabelle Stengers This piece is an answer to the responses of Helen Verran, Steven D. Brown, and Brit Ross Winthereik to the author's article, “Comparison as a Matter of Concern.” She acknowledges the difficulty of her respondents to accept her claim that the sciences may be destroyed as many...

...Bruce Kapferer This piece addresses Marilyn Strathern's article, “Binary License,” and the important contribution she makes to the development of an anthropology that is truly comparative and that aims to escape some important disadvantages of an earlier relativism. This comment places her...

...Annemarie Mol This piece is a response to Marilyn Strathern's article, “Binary License,” in the Common Knowledge symposium on “comparative relativism.” Arguing that, across noncoherent practices, there is room for different natures, the essay suggests that modes of relating (the briefly invoked...

... “Aristotelian, bivalent logic” in favor of a “fuzzy logic” based on Zadeh's “fuzzy set theory.” This introductory piece relates these theoretical works of the past half-century to the sorites paradox and to classical issues of vagueness raised and still unresolved in Western philosophy. Returning then to Rorty...

...Marilyn Strathern This piece answers responses by Bruce Kapferer, Annemarie Mol, and Morten Pedersen to the author's article “Binary License,” appearing in the Common Knowledge symposium on “comparative relativism.” She emphasizes that, whatever contributions to theory may be attributed to her...

... of suspended possibility, avoiding either belief or disbelief, assent or dissent. Candea's piece draws out the logic of the complementary and inverse move that grounds Viveiros de Castro's stance: “not taking seriously” the world of the “same,” in this case, that of Western intellectuals such as Richard Rorty...