...John McDowell In his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein describes, and represents himself as pursuing, a way of doing philosophy without putting forward philosophical theses. I exemplify his approach with a sketch of his treatment of rule following. I focus in particular on the simple case...

...Terrill G. Bouricius Abstract Part 1 of this article, which appeared in the first installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” presented reasons why elections are an inappropriate method for selecting representatives in a democracy. Part 2, published in the symposium's second...

... representatives. Part 1 focuses on factors that make elections ill suited for democracy. These include a variety of human traits studied intently by contemporary psychologists. Part 1 assesses many studies of this type. Discussed as well are the ignorance and inattention of voters, which can be rationally...

... and symptoms of Warburg's psychosis, which uncannily prefigure real historical terrors, this article represents the lecture as (in Warburg's words) a powerful “seismograph” of the European soul. Placing us at Warburg's writing desk at the pivotal moment of the author's cure-by-writing, the title page also...

... acquisitiveness and develop instead observational capabilities, a capacity simply to admire (or stand apart, in awe), and, above all, patience. To the extent that it fosters in us a principled “do nothing” stance with respect to our natural ecology, King concludes, quietism of Gilbert White's kind may represent...

... both these controversies rose from the same underground stream of medieval dissidence, discussing the contributions of the leading characters in the story and seeking to describe the common ground of idea and ideology which unites the history and which suggests that Quietism represents an archetype...

...Caroline Walker Bynum Written two days after the women's march in New York on January 21, 2017, this essay — a guest column in Common Knowledge — describes the event and emphasizes two aspects: its multi-issue focus and its response to the denigration of women's expertise represented in much...

... in Beaumarchais are not fixed and eternal but evolve in historical time. Figaro himself emerges as a characteristically modern figure, neither noble nor base but mixed, many-sided, energetic, and enterprising, an individual rather than a type, and thus a more realistic representative of Enlightenment and post...

... performers who were contemporaries of Rossini as to how they went about their task of representing the composer's work on stage. Duke University Press 2011 Symposium: Between Text and Performance The Written and the Sung Ornamenting Il barbiere di Siviglia...

... that represent an idolatry of absolute rights that push aside Christian spiritual and moral concerns. Now that liberalism has become the pervasive model for society, the church finds it may more easily express its critique, with the aim of making society more conducive to allowing people to become fully human...

... Michael chronicles the processes through which power in Romania following 1989 was quickly seized by representatives of the former Communist Party and the communist secret police (Departamentul Securităţii Statului or Securitate). Led by Ion Iliescu, a former communist leader and one-time protégé...

...), suggest different angles of perception, but all represent fuzzy modes, modes that would seem to have no place in science, especially in climate science, which is pressed to be ever more precise. Yet an analysis of the genealogy of these terms and, in particular, of the differential relation between...

...Jeffrey M. Perl; Jeffrey M. Perl This introduction to the third and final part of the Common Knowledge symposium “Unsocial Thought, Uncommon Lives” (13:1 [Winter 2007]: 33–39) is reprinted here in a special issue of representative pieces from the journal’s first twenty-five years. The title...

...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...

... in Western Europe seemed to graduate students to represent a kind of “other.” Recently the European Middle Ages has come to seem familiar, and medievalists, still in search of the unfamiliar, have reached beyond the borders of Western Europe and the type of documents traditionally studied to research new...

...Yaakov A. Mascetti Abstract The third and final installment of this book-length contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation” treats two further writers in seventeenth-century England whose work is not representative of any stance or discourse that contextualist...

... the independent democratic power of the Athenian demos , though both words can be translated as “people.” Whereas today, in representative democracies, the conflict of populism and democracy can and does do serious damage to the latter, under the regime of ancient Greek direct‐democracy populism was more a demon...

... philosophy as a direct self-expression of the thinking subject in the process of attaining self-cognition — as represented, for instance, in the work of Augustine, Montaigne, Kierkegaard, Emerson, and Nietzsche. Philosophical subjecthood as a means of self-expression for the transcendental subject...

... among professional philosophers toward the kinds of alien and marginal thinking with which anthropology is concerned. After the narrative reaches what has been called the “ontological turn” in anthropology, which is generally assumed to represent the current moment in relations between the disciplines...

...—in keeping with the project’s international, interdisciplinary, and innovative working methods. This contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Inside the Humanities Classroom” represents individual perspectives on a dynamic and demanding group project that the participants feel, in retrospect, had much...