Epistemic Communities

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Haas
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Epistemic Community ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Epistemic Communities ◽  
Policy Context ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

As the world becomes more globalised, decision makers grow uncertain about what their interests are and how best to achieve them, and ideas become increasingly important as maps or frames for decision makers in an unfamiliar setting. With the end of the Cold War, decision makers cannot rely on geopolitical doctrines as a guide for various areas of foreign policy and international practice. The environment provides a telling issue area in which to address the role of ideas in an increasingly uncertain global policy context. This article looks at the concept of ‘epistemic communities’, their role in institutionalising ideas in international relations, and, in particular, the role played by ecological ideas in the development of international environmental law and the role played by sympathetic international environmental lawyers in converting such rules of nature to rules of man. First, it considers the concept of epistemic communities and then discusses the intellectual history of scholarship about epistemic communities. Finally, the article examines ecological epistemic community and multilateral environmental governance.

Part VI Actors, Ch.40 Epistemic Communities

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haas Peter M
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Epistemic Community ◽  
Epistemic Communities ◽  
Causal Beliefs ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
History Of

This chapter begins with a definition and intellectual history of epistemic communities. ‘Epistemic communities’ is a concept developed by ‘soft’ constructivist scholars of international relations concerned with agency. Soft constructivists in general focus on the role of various types of norms, principled beliefs, causal beliefs, and discourses in establishing roles and rules in international relations: that is, determining the identities, interests, and practices that shape the identification of actors in international relations. The chapter then applies this definition to the study of international environmental law and discusses whether or not international lawyers constitute an epistemic community. It concludes with a discussion of some of the recent challenges to the influence of epistemic communities in world politics more broadly, and thus the future of international environmental law.

The Intellectual History of International Law as a Research Field—“Lauterpacht and Beyond: Jewish/German Authorship and the History of International Law”

2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 793-805
Author(s):  
Felix Lange
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Research Field ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Trade Law ◽  
International Trade Law ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
The Cold War

Publications on the history of international law written during the Cold War can almost be counted on one hand. A pragmatically-oriented generation studied practical areas like UN Charter law, international trade law, or international environmental law, while the theory and history of international law played only a secondary role. An intellectual history of international law, asking which ideas and concepts inspired and formed international law writing, hardly received any attention.

Idleness and Freedom in Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays”

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.

scholarly journals Authorial Self and Modernity as Reflected in Diaries and Memoirs. Three 19th-Century Hungarian Case Studies

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-97
Author(s):  
Béla Mester
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Self Reflection ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Type ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The One

Abstract The role of the diaries and memoirs in the process of the conscious self-reflection and their contribution to the emergence of modern individual personalities are well-known facts of the intellectual history. The present paper intends to analyze a special form of the creation of modern individual character; it is the self-creation of the writer as a conscious personality, often with a clearly formulated opinion about her/his own social role. There will be offered several examples from the 19th-century history of the Hungarian intelligentsia. This period is more or less identical with the modernization of the “cultural industry” in Hungary, dominated by the periodicals with their deadlines, fixed lengths of the articles, and professional editing houses on the one hand and the cultural nation building on the other. Concerning the possible social and cultural role of the intelligentsia, it is the moment of the birth of a new type, so-called public intellectual. I will focus on three written sources, a diary of a Calvinist student of theology, Péter (Litkei) Tóth, the memoirs of an influential public intellectual, Gusztáv Szontagh, and a belletristic printed diary of a young intellectual, János Asbóth.

Excavating Women: Towards an Engendered History of Archaeology (1998)

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margarita Díaz-Andreu ◽  
Marie Louise Stig Sørensen
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
History Of Archaeology ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
The Usa ◽  
History Of ◽  
Minor Part ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Critical Historiography ◽  
Knowledge Claims

Gender archaeology has by now become a relatively well-established research topic within archaeology. Recent years have seen the publication of a number of edited volumes, a rapidly expanding number of papers, and even a few journals and newsletters dedicated to this subject. It is, therefore, very surprising that in this literature the historiographic analysis of women archaeologists has played only a minor part. Likewise they are hardly acknowledged in the ‘folk’ histories of the discipline (Lucy and Hill 1994: 2). The need to understand the disciplinary integration of women, to appreciate the varying socio-political contexts of their work, to reveal the unique tension between their roles as women and their academic lives, has become obvious and is strongly felt in many areas of the discipline. The insights yielded by such analysis will have significance at many levels and will be of paramount importance for the intellectual history of archaeology. In particular, such insights will necessitate a much-needed revision of disciplinary history by revealing its mechanisms of selecting and forgetting, and will play an important role in the analysis of archaeology’s knowledge claims. Histories of archaeology have broadly accepted, and spread, a perception of archaeology as being male-centred, both intellectually and in practice. These accounts, written by male archaeologists such as Glyn Daniel (1975), Alain Schnapp (1993), and Bruce Trigger (1989), are inevitably androcentric in their conceptualization and reconstruction of the disciplinary past. Their versions have, however, recently begun to be contested, as concern with critical historiography has grown, and a few explicit historiographical accounts of women archaeologists have appeared. So far, with regard to the role of women, the most extensive contributions are the edited volumes by Claassen (1994) and du Cros and Smith (1993). While providing an important beginning, these publications show that there is still a long way to go. In particular they demonstrate a gap in research coverage, as no investigation of the contribution of women outside the USA and Australia exists.

4. Public Law

2019 ◽  
pp. 94-127
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Fisher ◽  
Bettina Lange ◽  
Eloise Scotford
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Constitutional Law ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Administrative Law ◽  
Public Law ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Aarhus Convention ◽  
Constituent Elements ◽  
Public Decision

This chapter explains the important role that public law, particularly administrative law, plays in environmental law. This role comes about because much of environmental law requires vesting decision-making and regulatory power in the hands of public decision-makers at all levels of government. This chapter begins by providing an overview of the different constituent elements of public law: constitutional law, administrative law, the role of the EU and international law, as well the complexities of this area of law. The chapter then moves on to consider the way in which the different types of interests involved in environmental problems and the need for information and expertise provide challenges for public law. The chapter then provides an overview of four major features of public law that are particularly relevant to environmental lawyers: the Aarhus Convention, accountability mechanisms, judicial review, and human rights.

TIM EPKENHANS, Die iranische Moderne im Exil: Bibliographie der Zeitschrift Kave, Berlin 1916–1922, Islamwissenschaftliche Quellen und Texte aus deutschen Bibliotheken (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2000). Pp. 216.

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 149-150
Author(s):  
Kamran Arjomand
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Academic Interest ◽  
Intellectual Community ◽  
History Of ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Intellectual history of modernism in Iran has proved to be a subject of lively academic interest. The role of Iranian exiles in late 19th and early 20th century, in particular, has drawn considerable scholarly attention. In recent years, the Iranian press in exile has also become a focus of academic scrutiny. In Germany, Anja Pistor-Hatam has studied the Iranian intellectual community in Istanbul around the newspaper Akhtar (Nachrichtenblatt, Informationsbörse und Diskussionsforum: Ahtar-e Estānbūl (1876–1896)—Anstöße zur frühen persischen Moderne [Münster, 1999]) and Keivandokht Ghahari's doctoral dissertation is concerned with ideas of nationalism and modernism among Iranian intellectuals in Berlin as reflected in the journals Kâveh, Iranshahr, and Ayandeh (Nationalismus und Modernismus in Iran in der Periode zwischen dem Zerfall der Qāğāren-Dynastie und der Machtfestigung Reżā Schah [Berlin, 2001]). In this context, the bibliography of Kâveh is thus a welcomed contribution.

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