The ideas of classical pragmatists receive increasing attention by scholars working in diverse fields, who realize their fertility in addressing contemporary theoretical and practical challenges. Pragmatism, as a philosophical perspective, embraces a processual view of the world according to which what really exists is ‘in the making,’ in a process of becoming, and places great attention to action and its meaningful experience. In this chapter, I introduce the common themes in the work of the founding figures of classical pragmatism and examine their convergence with the theoretical assumptions underpinning routine dynamics theorizing. I trace the influence of pragmatism in routine dynamics research and suggest that pragmatist thinking has much to offer to the study of routines as dynamic, processual phenomena.

During pregnancy in humans and rats, plasma osmolality is regulated at a level about 3% lower than in nonpregnant females (or males). This may be, in part, caused by reproduction-related hormonal changes. Late in gestation, fetal sheep show acute swallowing responses to some dipsogens, and the relevant CVOs in the brain appear to have full responsiveness to those dipsogens at this time. Postnatal development of independent drinking in rats shows that responses to hypovolemia are present and vigorous very soon after birth, whereas development of osmoregulatory drinking has a considerably slower ontogenetic trajectory. Further, this trajectory seems to be slower in mice than rats and requires further study. Some aspects of osmoregulatory drinking in rats, as well as food-associated drinking, appear to have an experiential component. Hypovolemia or other circulatory challenges before birth in rats cause alterations in the ontogenetic trajectory of drinking, although the limits and mechanisms of this phenotypic plasticity have not been fully elucidated.

Emanuel Adler’s theory of cognitive evolution lacks an explicit phenomenology. I provide one here, drawing upon the philosophy of John Dewey and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. A phenomenological elaboration of cognitive evolution theory speaks directly to a number of conversations in the field of IR: those on microfoundations, on ontological security, and on materiality. For all three, phenomenology connects the impetus and feedback effects of experience, as a driver and outcome of action, to the ways practices transform. For microfoundations, it provides the causal beginning and end of a period of change. For ontological security, it “institutionalises” sensation by explicating its role within social relations. For materiality, it fixes the mechanisms of cognitive evolution within their physical context – a field of bodies in motion and of intentional stances. I finally offer some remarks on the normative implications of a phenomenological addition to Adler’s existing approach, and suggest that it provides an important language for the evaluation of orders and a foundation for a cosmopolitan ethos in international politics. I conclude on a speculative note, considering what the phenomenology of cognitive evolution might explain about the recent epistemic fracturing of political discourse into a state of “post-truth.”

Chapter 3 shifts from Britain and Switzerland to France, where electric demonstrations and experimental physics courses had become extremely popular in the 1780s. The artist Girodet referenced the visual and structural features of eighteenth-century electricity in both his written and his painted work. Specifically, he was drawn to its treatment of the human body, which was said to be a porous and penetrable entity capable of receiving and transmitting this powerful, immaterial force. Yet Girodet’s paintings featured dissolving bodies, strange atmospheric effects, and highly unorthodox forms of illumination that were incompatible with the empirical procedures that were central to the study of electricity. Reflecting on the revolutionary implications of a porous conception of selfhood, Girodet’s paintings thus interrogated the epistemological and political viability of an electrified body.

The distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience has been a source of consternation to many commentators, since Kant’s claim that only judgments of experience involve the application of the categories seems to run afoul of the central doctrine of judgment found in the first Critique, where Kant proposes that all judgments are categorial. This chapter casts the distinction in a new light, by focusing not on whether all judgments must be categorial, but rather on what processes guide the transformation of judgments of perceptions into judgments of experience. Drawing on a comparison Kant makes between the categories and grammatical principles, the essay suggests that the way that categories apply to perceptual content mirrors how grammatical rules structure linguistic content, and that this allows for a new understanding of the role that judgments of experience play in the Prolegomena, and Kant’s critical idealism more broadly.

Establishing a framework for this book, the introduction examines the themes of encounters, space and contact zones during the First World War. Arguing that colonial experience cannot be understood without attention to spaces beyond the battlefield, I introduce the reader to the contact zones expored in the chapters. I reflect on the conceptsand methodology adopted, including the importance of intimacy.

The introductory chapter traces Surrealism’s critical legacy across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From its initial emergence out of Dada in 1924, Surrealism became a defining critical and creative concept, and not only for the avant-garde movement penned in its name. It inspired a range of critical enterprises and creative practices, including: Walter Benjamin’s anthropological investigation of the everyday material world; the politics and aesthetics of a number of anticolonial enterprises; James Clifford’s investigations of the ethnographic ambitions of dissident surrealism; the political events of May ’68; the October group’s recalibration of Greenberg’s aesthetic formalism; and, more recently, Surrealism’s influence on new materialism, thing theory, animal/human studies, affect theory, and a plethora of contemporary participatory art movements. Described by Maurice Blanchot as “a brilliant obsession,” Surrealism continues to exert a profound rethinking of the relationship between art, politics, and everyday experience.

The afterword considers the crisis of experience in Milton’s Samson Agonistes. Samson’s uncertainties about God’s plans and his difficulties interpreting his own heart capture the plight of the godly individual in a world with a hidden God (a deus absconditus). His desire for freedom and his will to instigate political action in the absence of divine guidance capture the modern condition inaugurated by the nominalist sense of God’s distance and inscrutable power. Baffled by his own inner promptings and unable to tolerate this opacity, Samson feels compelled to experiment and hazard his strength against his enemies. Samson’s skeptical doubt results in revenge and apocalyptic violence. The sublime ending – its atmosphere of dread and horror subdued by twisting rhetorical summations – captures the dialectic of skepticism and the sublime. The illegibility of private experience – with its explosive possibilities – provides a fitting conclusion to a book about skeptical doubt in early modern English literature.

Rorty believed that taking the linguistic turn meant rejecting the idea of “immediate experience,” and he was equally certain that philosophy had nothing of value to offer social and political theory. Those convictions distinguished his version of neopragmatism from those of his contemporaries Hillary Putnam, Ruth Anna Putnam, and Richard J. Bernstein, and from the ideas of his predecessors William James and John Dewey. In his last book, Achieving Our Country, Rorty sought to respond to the critics who challenged his public/private dualism by aligning himself with the Cold War-era labor movement. He remained unwilling, however, to acknowledge the costs of moving from the social democratic “historical Dewey” to his preferred “hypothetical Dewey,” an insouciant proto-Rorty who attributed progressive changes to “lucky accidents” and championed the poetized culture of liberal ironism over the hard work of forging new democratic alliances among a new generation of activists inspired by demands for recognition as well as redistribution.

The analysis in this chapter emphasises that there can only ever be two places that law, in its present state, can lead embryos to: a woman’s womb, or its own destruction and disposal. Ultimately, this chapter has been developed with a view to answering: how might we use a liminal lens to bring lessons from ‘the gothic’, from conceptualisation to realisation? This chapter addresses the latter in four sections. First, it briefly takes stock of the analysis and ‘lessons’ highlighted by the book so far, before going on to synthesise this analysis, and in doing so, considering the ways in which law can lead embryos out of liminality. Second, it focuses on the roles of persons in embryonic processes in vitro; and Third, it draws out the contours of a context-based approach, including what the approach is not; Finally, it, discusses the potential effects of a context-based approach for the issues (i.e. the contours of the ‘legal gap’) discussed in Part One of this book. It suggests that a context-based approach has the potential to justify affording embryos in vitro different ‘statuses’ depending on the relationally guided and defined pathway on which it is, or onto which it is put.

This chapter introduces liminality, an anthropological concept, before going on to explain why human embryos may be described as liminal beings. As an entity in a state of constant and rapid change, embryos sit ‘betwixt and between’ the various realms of legal categorisation. As such, the core problem for law is two-fold: ‘the embryo’ has neither a fixed status, nor is it possible to ‘fix’ its status. Law, accordingly, struggles to capture and regulate what embryos are ontologically (as opposed to what the ‘embryo’ is descriptively). The challenge in capturing these ontologies is perhaps part of the problem; if, indeed, this is what law has sought to do. This chapter argues that an embrace of liminality - both as a state embryos are led into, and as a lens for analysing that state - fully reveals the multiplicity of contexts in which embryos are used and created. This chapter shows that a liminal perspective demonstrates that there are vital aspects of embryos - some of which the law itself creates - that the law might better recognise, namely its contextually variable and relational qualities