PLATO’S APPROACH TO QUESTIONING was built on what he took to be a fundamental distinction between truth and opinion. As he argued in the Republic (534a), while opinion (doxa) is concerned with the world of change and includes all forms of belief (pistis) about things, philosophy asks only after the true world which does not change. Knowledge of these eternal themes (epistêmê) is the aim of the philosopher.

As a student of Socrates who died because of it, Plato (427–347 bce) was well aware of the unsettling consequences of philosophical questioning. As well as undermining social order, questioning also threatens cynicism in the one who questions. This is why, in the section of Republic (538d–e) that he devoted to the education of the philosopher, Plato specified that philosophical questioning must not begin too young (not that the old, set in their ways, are capable of it either):

The problem, Plato elaborated, is that, disabused of conventional notions but not yet arrived at the truth, philosophical questioning tempts the young to seek only pleasure. Finding nothing to be true and not yet fully embarked on the true life, the young questioner will be seduced by ‘a life which flatters his desires’ (Republic 539a). Indeed, even the way he questions will be marked by pleasure-seeking: ‘You must have noticed how young men, after their first taste of argument, are always contradicting people just for the fun of it […] like puppies who love to pull and tear at everything in reach’ (Republic 539b). For Plato, the worst thing in all of this is not that the young questioner discredits himself, but that, in making questioning all about him, he risks the reputation of philosophy.

Contrary to the presumption that relational accounts of International Relations are inherently normative, this chapter offers a radical empiricist account of relationalism to explain the complex processes of nuclear sovereignty in the United States. The chapter argues that the bias for methodological individualism in International Relations and Security Studies obscures the processes and systems that make the communication and control of thousands of nuclear weapons possible. Rather than a sovereign presidential command enacting nuclear decisions, the chapter argues that the vast assemblage of informatic networks, satellites, coded exchanges, preplanned scenarios, and preexisting relations of enmity are the ecosystem which makes something that appears as sovereignty possible. To put it more simply, sovereignty is designed, built, and deployed, not delegated or ordained.

This chapter considers the multiple and changing worldviews of Western Jewry in search of ontological and physical security in a post-enlightenment world of nation-states. Informed by a relational humanism, I interrogate the how different communities facing similar challenges developed different worldviews. The Introduction positions the paper in relationship to the other chapters in the volume, Section I explores the emergence of four different worldviews of western Jews from the beginning of the enlightenment through the early 20th century, and Section II considers the various events and processes that led the world’s two largest Jewish communities, the United States and Israel, to anchor themselves in two different worldviews.

An over-reliance on a simplistic rendering of secularization theory has led many students of International Relations to minimize the role that religion plays in contemporary global politics. A turn to the examination of “worldviews,” however, is a welcome opportunity to remind ourselves of the enduring claim that religion has on how modern individuals and communities continue to understand systems of order, and the relationship between human existence and what is really real. Religion and politics are two foundational aspects of human life and community that relate to each other as mutually constitutive elements of coherent – if often politically problematic – worldviews.

Expressing the predictable and controlled and the unpredictable and uncontrollable as unavoidably linked aspects of human experience in the real world, gardens and forests (or jungles) serve here as metaphors grounded in different fields of human endeavor. Section 10.1 of this chapter explores some of these. Section 10.2 explores the garden of experiments and the forest of experimentation as different ways of operating under conditions of putatively controllable risk and acknowledged uncertainty. Section 10.3 concludes by considering parks as a hybrid of garden and forest, a terrain where Newtonianism and Post-Newtonianism can overlap. It also discusses the role of values in worldviews and discusses science and religion as the two reigning worldviews that help us understand and navigate an uncertain world.

This chapter provides a re-reading of Weber's theory of rationalization in which scientific ideas lay the groundwork for worldviews in politics and social science. The argument rests on a distinction between worldviews and cosmologies. Worldviews are local, coherent, and systematized collections of values and beliefs. Cosmologies are collections of ideas about the nature of the world and the universe. On this basis, the paper argues that rationalization can be understood as a process in which cosmological elements from scientific discourses lay the foundations of worldviews. Cosmological developments in the natural sciences have shaped and constrained the basis of worldviews in world politics. Moreover, the paper argues that the social sciences have also inherited scientific and colonial elements, which constrain their modes of representation and valuation.

In the context of a relational revolution across sciences and social sciences, the need to think through what relational perspectives mean has been an important new development in International Relations. This chapter explores the contributions of relational hyper-humanist perspectives, and relational cosmology in particular, in the context of climate challenge and other related questions, including how we might orient to questions around worldviews as set out in this project. It is argued that while challenging vis-à-vis more classical approaches to International Relations, these perspectives present interesting new challenges and questions to the field.

Contemporary world politics is structured around the world order of nation-states in turn founded largely upon a Newtonian cosmology and an associated worldview. I develop a conceptual framework around the ‘epistemic engine’ which organizes and circulates the cosmological and institutional structures of Enlightenment modernity. Subsequently, I explore how the imperial Chinese world order-- functional until at least the late 19th century--reveals a different cosmology shaping a different world order and politics. I also explore the contemporary PRC view of the world order probing the extent to which its historical experiences can be seen to re-shape the hegemonic epistemic engine. In the final section, I draw from a paradigm of ‘oceanic temporality’ to grasp counter-finalities generated by the epistemic engine on the earth and the ocean itself. Can the counter-flows of social movements allow us to imagine what Katzenstein calls a post-Enlightenment, hyper-humanist cosmology?

This chapter applies a Weberian analysis to selective foreign policy decisions made by US and European elites in the twentieth century concerning war and peace. We look at the behavior of individual actors and the groups they form because, following Max Weber, individuals “give meaning” to the world around them. They interpret the historical setting in which they find themselves and act to shape the world they seek in the future. We examine two varieties of individualist worldviews: differing domestic political ideologies (e.g., liberalism, fascism, communism, and Islamism) and differing foreign policy orientations (nationalism, realism, institutionalism, and constructivism). We ask in each case how these political worldviews interact and favor certain kinds of international relationships/outcomes and preclude others. The approach places ideas and human agency at the center of the analysis of worldviews.

This chapter offers a full-throated, albeit limited, exposition and defense of the Enlightenment/Weberian worldview that underlines modern social science. It rejects the relationalist argument that a quantum world of relationality (entanglement) and holism replaces a Newtonian world of rationality (conflict) and individualism. The Enlightenment liberated the individual human mind from the clutches of Nature and the Divine and spawned a cornucopia of worldviews from liberal to authoritarian. Liberal worldviews emphasized rational and individualistic factors, authoritarian views non-rational (emotion, intuition, ethnicity, psychological, etc.) and holistic factors. In all worldviews, reasoning human beings gave meaning to the world around them, made choices and took responsibility. Now, applying quantum science, relationalist worldviews say the individual (independent observer) no longer exists but blends into the observed world, the observed world is the only world there is and no longer subject to testing against an objective background, and quantum entanglement implies a cosmological worldview of cooperation and harmony which individual human beings cannot affirm or resist. But quantum mechanics neither eliminates the individual, as the independent investigator persists who asks the questions and triggers the quantum world, nor proscribes an objective reality against which it might be criticized.

This chapter discusses the concept of worldview; relates it to paradigms and substantialist and relational reasoning; maps Newtonianism and Post-Newtonianism (quantum mechanics) and humanism and hyper-humanism (scientific cosmology) as two different dimensions structuring implicit worldviews; specifies four analytical perspectives on world politics; and concludes briefly with two illustrative applications.