Two Prototypical Creators

In Chapter 5, the author reinforces the idea that models are approximations that work in most cases, most of the time. They capture family resemblances within groups. The members of the group, in this instance artists, “look alike.” Models help because they allow us to predict. But they also, more commonly, allow us to understand, and when we understand, we not only make sense of another person we are interested in, we also, in addition to that, make sense of ourselves. In this chapter, the author applies his model to the lives and art of two famous artists: David Bowie and Frida Kahlo. This discussion reveals that it’s not necessary, and usually not accurate, to think of art as an escape or unintended cure. It is repetition, in thin or thick symbolic terms, of uniquely important experiences.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a brief background of three schools of literary criticism: New Criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction. These three schools exposed serious concerns, emphasizing neglected aspects of literature. The chapters in this book focus on genre, realism, and relations with visual art. Concepts of genre figure in any sound literary theory. Meanwhile, chapters on realism demonstrate how the development of representation, far from being one of steadily improving verisimilitude, has gone through several distinct sorts of realism. They distinguish medieval and Renaissance realisms from the realism of pre-modern novels. Finally, chapters on visual art consider how conventions of visual art offer essential parallels with those of literature. The ‘sister arts’ display many family resemblances—obviously so in imagery, less obviously in their strategies of realism. The essays also look at emblems and emblematic poems.

Plato and Modern Leadership Models

This chapter looks at the relation between Plato’s models and modern leadership approaches. Unlike many recent theorists, Plato avoids trying to find a single definition, but seeks to isolate the different strands in the complex phenomenon of leadership. In this way, his approach anticipates Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘family resemblances’: leadership is not treated as a simple ‘universal’, but a complex with several overlapping strands. Another feature of Plato’s approach is the importance of ethics to leadership. To compare Platonic and modern approaches to leadership more specifically, this chapter looks at four recent theories, and shows that each one has close affinities with one or more of Plato’s models: Burns’ ‘transformational’ leadership resembles the artist and the navigator; Collins’ ‘Level 5’ leadership the weaver; Greenleaf’s ‘servant’ leadership the doctor and teacher; Gardner’s ‘thought’ leadership (in his book, Leading Minds) the sower.

Family Resemblances: Remnants of Populism in Portuguese 2017 Regional Elections

In September of 2017 during the Portuguese regional elections, the mass media began reporting an emergence of a populist movement or, at least, started to label one of the candidates as a populist leader. To understand this phenomenon and see if significant rhetorical aspects of populism were present in the candidate’s discourse as according to the media, we analyzed the four primary Portuguese newspapers. As a first, exploratory approach to the research question, we developed a quantitative content analysis. We found that the newspapers became resonance boxes, not only of this particular candidate but also from all Western society, underlining some of the main rhetorical aspects of the populist discourse used by the candidate.

Epistemology’s Prime Evils

This essay addresses what we can call epistemology’s Prime Evils. These are the three demons epistemologists have conjured that are the most troublesome and the most difficult to dispel: Descartes’ classic demon; Lehrer and Cohen’s New Evil Demon; and Schaffer’s Debasing Demon. These demons threaten the epistemic statuses of our beliefs—in particular, the statuses of knowledge and justification—and they present challenges for our theories of these epistemic statuses. This paper explains the key features of these three central demons, highlights their family resemblances and differences, and attempts to show that a certain kind of internalist view of justification provides the resources to handle these demons well.

Conceptions of quality as family resemblances

Purpose To consider how quality should be conceptualized to improve understanding for researchers and practitioners, some researchers have discussed quality in terms of an essence or necessary condition. Others have regarded quality as individual and experiential, based on differences in actors’ conceptions of quality. This paper aims to resolve the tension caused by these competing views and propose an appropriate method for future research in the area of quality. Design/methodology/approach In many studies, researchers have attempted to understand quality in terms of necessary conditions or through a dualistic ontology. At the same time, an increasing number of researchers have emphasized its experiential nature while discussing quality in conjunction with meeting customers’ expectations. This study investigates how quality can be understood using a conceptual framework based on family resemblances. Findings There is no necessary condition or essence by which quality may be conceptualized or defined. This finding resolves the tension that has arisen from the simultaneous search for a common feature and the assertion that quality is experientially created by individuals. The research also highlights that the nature of quality may differ between people, time and place, or some aspects of it may be the same. Regarding quality in terms of family resemblances accommodates actors’ different conceptions of quality. Phenomenography is proposed as an appropriate research approach with its focus on the qualitatively different ways in which actors make sense of phenomena in their lifeworld. Research limitations/implications Understanding quality as a family of attributes, and using phenomenography as method, provides methodological clarity to long-standing research issues. Using the approaches outlined in this study will enable empirical studies of quality, in any context, to be conducted soundly and relatively quickly. It will also provide a more inclusive and holistic set of meanings based on the experiences of individuals. Practical implications The research provides important insights for researchers and practitioners through clearer conceptions of quality. These include the ability to plan and deliver business outcomes that are more closely aligned with customers’ expectations. Understanding the conceptions of quality, as experienced and determined through family resemblances, has clear implications for researchers and practitioners. Originality/value Understanding actors’ conceptions of quality through the lens of family resemblances resolves long-standing research issues. Using phenomenography as method is innovative, as it is an emerging research approach in the business domain.

Open-Mindedness and Education

Open-mindedness disposes us to value and seek truth, knowledge, and understanding by taking a particular stance toward ourselves, what we know, new information, and experience. It aims to improve our epistemic standing, both individually and socially. Widely accepted as a valuable educational aim, scholarship on the nature and extent of open-mindedness’ epistemological and civic value is growing. Epistemological conceptions range from its role in rational inquiry to thinking of it as an attitude toward one’s self as a knower, or as an attitude toward individual beliefs. Conversations on its status as an intellectual virtue, its associations with personal transformation, and its role in aesthetic experiences are also on the rise. Of particular note for schooling are its connections to democratic citizenship. Theorists argue that open-mindedness operates in respecting others, tolerating differences in pluralistic contexts, and exercising autonomy. Central challenges to its value, however, abound. They include the difficulty of pinpointing the line between open-mindedness and gullibility, and the ways that human cognitive limitations make open-mindedness more aspirational than possible. Its incompatibility with holding strong commitments serve as some of the most relevant challenges to its value. Are there any ideas or beliefs that we ought not be open-minded about? And if (and when) there are, can open-mindedness support structures of power and/or oppressive forces? Additional challenges come from those who explore how open-mindedness fares in posttruth and postfact conditions. The educational discourse on open-mindedness shows that its objects, occasions, and processes have expanded over time and in response to new understandings of historical, social, and cultural conditions. In this light, educational philosophers may no longer be theorizing about a singular phenomenon with a set of agreed upon characteristics. Instead, open-mindedness may have become a constellation of related and overlapping epistemological phenomena with similar features, much like what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls family resemblances. If so, this constellation requires a conceptual framework, such as the one Jürgen Habermas laid out in Knowledge and Human Interests, to provide open-mindedness with theoretical and educational coherence. Despite the growing incoherence of thinking about open-mindedness as a singular phenomenon, most educational theorists maintain a fundamental commitment to open-mindedness as an educational aim. Regardless of whether one considers open-mindedness to have essential characteristics, to be a constellation of epistemic phenomena with Wittgensteinian family resemblances, and/or a concept in search of a singular framework (such as Habermas’s), much of the educational discourse on open-mindedness will likely continue to be maintained as it improves our epistemic, moral, and civic standing. This line of thinking assumes and suggests that we simply need to educate for the right orientation, the right attitude, the right sort of openness, and the right skills to attain these goods. However, increasing exploration of the political nature of open-mindedness and emerging perspectives from critical theory seem to be coalescing into a second strand of counterdialogue. Examination of “the goodness” of open-mindedness in contexts of oppression, intolerance, closed-mindedness, and posttruth/postfact conditions provide increasingly serious challenges to open-mindedness’ secure status as an educational aim.

Land Fictions in the Longue Durée

This chapter argues that the book is dependent on Karl Polanyi and commodity fictions but also pushes well beyond empirical definitions of commodities, entering the sanctum of the fetish broadly construed. It notes that the Land Fictions lays out a rather broad palette of fictions. Sometimes it is not clear whether and how they share family resemblances. The chapter then presents the largely contemporary land fictions explored in the preceding chapters in a longer historical context: specifically, Marxian reflections on the commodity fetish, the historical challenge of peasant production to agroindustry (the agrarian question), and the biological underpinnings and specificities of agriculture. The chapter focuses on the longue durée of the creation of land as a commodity and its various fictional expressions. It indicates ways in which the study of land fictions might be productively expanded from viewing land as a horizontal domain of property into closer consideration of land's vertical properties, including both the subterranean and the aerial.

Introduction

This chapter stresses the recurrent sense of the fragility and contingent character of liberalism not just in relation to external challenges but also its capacity for self-harm. Liberalism’s ideals are prey to erosion through self-regarding practices of crony capitalism and competitive party politics. This diagnosis of liberalism’s ills forms the background to the cross-national attempt to rejuvenate liberalism as conservative liberalism and Ordo-liberalism. The chapter stresses the value of history in examining Ordo-liberalism as a tradition with its own roots and canon, rather than more narrowly as a school or theory; in setting it in its larger context of cross-national family resemblances; in using original archival evidence to go behind published texts; and in clearing up misconceptions of Ordo-liberalism, above all in the English-speaking world. History is also valuable in rescuing thinkers from the neglect and silence that accompanies processes of memorialization. It helps to bring out the nature and significance of stabilization traditions in France and Italy as well as in Germany. It also highlights the imperfect correspondence between Ordo-liberalism and economic policy practice in Germany as well as in the European Union and the euro area. The chapter concludes by asking why Ordo-liberalism is so important; by outlining what is distinctive about the book; and by explaining the book’s structure.

An Empirical Revision of the Definition of Science Fiction: It Is All in the Techne . . .

Researchers employ science fiction and fantasy in public engagement, advocacy, and education as significant sources of insights to identify public interests, inspire public policy, and influence future science. These uses of science fiction as a source that is expected to reflect public interests are undermined if the examples employed by researchers are interpreted differently by the intended audience or beneficiaries of research. We surveyed the public to identify their definitions and discovered a categorization based on clearly defined features. These align with some academic theories but differ from postmodern approaches as the analysis suggests science fiction can be defined categorically. The empirical survey data are consistent and demonstrate an unmistakable distinction between popular definitions of science fiction and fantasy. Our theoretical analysis implies some definitions may be confused by evaluating secondary “fuzzy” characteristics as if they were fundamental features of the genre. We suggest Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, between subjects associated with the genre at any specific time, should be interpreted as an ephemeral grouping validated by correlation with enduring core features, rather than definitive. On the basis of the common themes identified from the survey responses and a critique of existing genre models, we suggest the classical concept of techne may best describe the empirical essence of science fiction. Researchers intending to employ science fiction for applications that have an influence in the public realm may wish to consider this when designing their research.