In decision-making, facts should be distinguished from values. Values influence the decisions by scientists about what kinds of research to do and how to do it. But the norms of science, over time, promote the evolution of increasingly accurate understanding of facts. It is easier to establish facts when observations are repeatable and ostensible. Sustainability decisions usually require assessment of facts in very specific contexts, and that can increase uncertainty. In such cases, deliberation with interested and affected parties can help get the science right and get the right science. When the powerful see their interests threatened by increasing awareness of risks, they often try to slow the emergence of scientific consensus, especially by emphasizing uncertainty.

A research design is the sequence of things done in order to collect the information needed to answer a research question. The design states which data will be sought, from which sources, at which times, and in which ways. This chapter describes the influences that shape the decisions researchers must make when constructing a research design. Research designs differ in the source of information used, whether data used are naturally occurring or a result of intervention, and the way data are elicited, recorded, and analyzed. Typically, the nature of the research question, assumptions on which it is based, and ethical considerations drive the design construction. I describe seven major influences on design choice in this chapter: research question novelty; levels of analysis and explanation used; epistemological and ontological assumptions; characteristics of data sources; data analyzability; piloting results; and various practicalities. Understanding these influences will improve research design decisions.

Engaging two intertwined and yet competing literatures detailing moral aspects of suffering through the lenses of sympathy and empathy, this chapter examines the extent to which suffering (and responses to it) may be viewed as a condition of possibility for ethical/moral experience. While arguably distinctive responses to suffering that have unique ethical entailments, sympathy and empathy still share, however, a more primordial manifestation in pathos. Drawing upon insights from the phenomenological tradition, the chapter argues that pathic attunement is the generative, responsive ground from which sympathy and empathy arise. Moving beyond the either/or framework that often emerges in anthropological discussions of empathy and sympathy, a focus on pathos leads to a different way of envisioning suffering as a condition of possibility for moral experience. Without collapsing the ethical and political, pathos is thus a phenomenon through which recursive relationships between ethical, political, and ontological orientations to others becomes discernible and therefore analysable.

Social inquiry needs representations of social reality, and such representations involve ontological choices of how much to freeze history and geography. The freezing metaphor relates to how much social inquiry relaxes conditional independence and unit homogeneity, the two key assumptions of VBA. Unfreezing history and geography brings to light historical and geographic particularities, makes possible new inductive insights into updating theories, and generates new research questions. Comparisons help turn such explorations into discoveries by identifying patterns. CHA employs four comparisons: cross-sectional, serial, contextual, and historical. It thus differs from VBA, which uses comparison for the strictly methodological purpose of controlling for confounders. CHA goes back to the late nineteenth century and has explored four key themes: the evolution of capitalism, regime changes, the administrative transformation of states, and the changing nature of war. CHA does not have a monopoly on historical thinking. VBA employs historical thinking when exploring confounders and historical boundary conditions that might bias their test results.

The aim of this book is to explore the impact of the First World War on German philosophy through a series of analyses of the paths taken by central figures of the German 20th-century philosophical tradition in such a way that recognizes the complexity of the philosophical issues that animated their thinking, as well as the demands of wartime and its aftermath to which these thinkers responded: Hermann Cohen, Max Scheler, Martin Buber, Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch, Gyorgy Lukacs, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl

“What now? Enough is enough. Now we have to begin. Into our hands, life has been given.” With these exasperated words, Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia begins like no other work of philosophy. In anger and aspiration, it does not begin with a pedantic preface or scholarly introduction. It begins in situ with a catastrophe that has thrown human existence back upon itself, from which no deliverance seems to be at hand. What is to be done? How can one survive? Caught in the condition of pitching “senselessly back and forth,” something nonetheless endures, we know not what, we know not how, but with nothing in our hands save our own obscurity, life still darkly speaks, for which, in this end of days, we want to be its initiative as well as its end.

For countless soldiers, revelation as to the significance of their lives entwined with the fate of God, the Nation, or whatever Absolute claimed to give meaning to it all could occur in the most fearful of situations, but also in the most inauspicious of moments. For many, the war was experienced as a rite of passage and self-discovery. Many emerged from the war transfigured, set upon a new course of life. There were those, as with Ernst Jünger, who entered the war with an adventurous heart in search of something more than what domestic life had on offer; there were those, as with Karl Löwith, who did not go to war adventuring but in need of an ill-defined alternative, returning from the war scarred for life; there were those, as with Dietrich Mahnke, who through the war found confirmation of what had already been known but as yet existentially evidenced; there were those whose philosophical promise was extinguished on the battlefield, as with the deaths of Emil Lask and Adolf Reinach; and there were those who, philosophically active before 1914, disappeared from the stage of history after 1918, whose postwar quietude, as with Johannes Daubert, poignantly bespoke the extinguishing of thinking.

On September 13, 1918, as autumn settled upon the Western Front after the costly failure of Ludendorff’s Spring Offensive and ensuing loss of strategic initiative against strengthening Allied Armies, Martin Heidegger, serving in a weather unit in the vicinity of Verdun, sat down in the early morning at his observation post to write a letter to his recently betrothed Elfriede, at home in Freiburg with their newborn son. He is sitting “at the telephone and passing huge quantities of numbers on to the artillery, airship men, [and] gas officers” against the backdrop of “heavy artillery” and the “thunder of bombs, making everything in the hut shake.”

Engaging with Indigenous legal traditions brings to light the existence of different forms of legal conscience. The Indigenous legal traditions catalyse both the ontological questioning and its response. And they also offer a response to the critique of law and the evolution of legal practice. Approaching different legal traditions requires, however, a change of perspective. This reflection considers the insights of anthropology, linguistics, literature, translation and semiotics as applied to law. Towards a ‘shared framework’ and ‘common legal sense’, the semiotic approach enables us to visualise the legal landscape, beyond the borders of modern constituted forms, on a wider horizon of legal communication. It allows us to approach the narrative semiotics of different legal traditions, such as the dances, storytelling, artefacts like Wampum belts and protocols for ceremonies in Indigenous law. Furthermore, reconnecting legal traditions contributes to recalling, re-embodying and reconnecting the legal subject with the more-than-human realm – reconstituting the legal experience in its integrity. Beyond the operation of translation, what is at stake in the evolution of the legal language and practice is the constitution of a common semiotic space, a space of legal communication and understanding.

Chapter 4 considers power as essential to understanding who is legally liable and who is socially and politically responsible, for addressing historical-structural injustices. The chapter outlines competing conceptions of power, preferring and applying political scientist Mark Haugaard’s four-dimensional conception of power to address the complexities of historical-structural injustices, namely power as agency, structure, epistemic, and ontological power. The chapter then examines the role of national and religious myths as justification narratives that maintain existing distributions and structures of power and construct limitations in addressing the past in transitional justice. As a result, it argues that changes in the distribution of power are central to addressing historical-structural injustices, which have coalesced to form national and religious myths that support the existing distributions of power and modern national and religious identities.

This chapter explains the council and king’s ratification of hundreds of thousands of royal decrees, and the unique categories that these edicts contained, such as mestizo and mulato. It outlines the pathways through which vassals of all social backgrounds suggested new laws to the ruling Council of the Indies. Pressed for time, the council’s overwhelmed ministers often transplanted petitions’ vocabulary verbatim into decrees. This meant that subjects often phrased imperial laws minor and major, regional and Indies-wide. Using a multistep archival methodology, this chapter demonstrates how scholars can match vassals’ petitions to decrees, then shows how legal categories such as mestizo and mulato came about through the petitions of not only Spaniards but also Indians, mestizos, and mulatos themselves. Subjects of any social background could therefore introduce and shape Indies legal constructs, and the empire’s agenda from the ground up. It considers the lawmaking royal signature, as well as some vassals’ dangerous decision to attempt its forgery. Lastly, it reflects on the nature of the de partes/de oficio divide in decree production, the number of gobierno royal decrees, and the costs of their production for vassals.

While a number of commentators have argued that Quine’s account of Carnap’s paper in terms of the category/subclass distinction is simply a misunderstanding of Carnap, this essay argues that it is not. Instead, Quine was correct to construe Carnap’s external questions of existence as all being category questions. Quine’s second claim – that answers to internal category questions of existence are trivial and analytic – was, however, incorrect. Here, this essay then dissents from a view of Ebbs, who has recently argued that Quine was right on both points. Instead, it is argued that epistemic considerations that support Quine’s first point undermine his second point.

This essay considers Carnap and Quine’s views on ontology. While both Carnap and Quine see their disagreement over the status of ontology as a legitimate philosophical undertaking as ultimately rooted in their disagreement over the analytic/synthetic distinction, it argues that this cannot be so since Quine comes to accept a notion of analyticity without changing his views on ontology. Instead, it is argued that the more fundamental point underlying the disagreement about the status of ontology is Carnaps advocacy of the Principle of Tolerance, which Quine never comes to accept.