Adam Morton

(1945 - 2020)

I argue that on an understanding of imagination that relates it to an individual's environment rather than her mental contents imagination is essential to emotion, and brings together affective, cognitive, and representational aspects to emotion. My examples focus on morally important emotions, especially retrospective emotions such as shame, guilt, and remorse, which require that one imagine points of view on one's own actions. PUBLISHER'S BLURB: Recent years have seen an enormous amount of philosophical research into the emotions and the imagination, but as yet little work has been done to connect the two. In his engaging and highly original new book, Adam Morton shows that all emotions require some form of imagination and goes on to fully explore the link between these two important concepts both within philosophy and in everyday life. We may take it for granted that complex emotions, such as hope and resentment, require a rich thinking and an engagement with the imagination, but Morton shows how more basic and responsive emotions such as fear and anger also require us to take account of possibilities and opportunities beyond the immediate situation. Interweaving a powerful tapestry of subtle argument with vivid detail, the book highlights that many emotions, more than we tend to suppose, require us to imagine a situation from a particular point of view and that this in itself can be the source of further emotional feeling. Morton goes on to demonstrate the important role that emotions play in our moral lives, throwing light on emotions such as self-respect, disapproval, and remorse, and the price we pay for having them. He explores the intricate nature of moral emotions and the challenges we face when integrating our thinking on morality and the emotions. This compelling and thought-provoking new book challenges many assumptions about the nature of emotion and imagination and will appeal to anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the role that these concepts play in our lives. The book also has far reaching implications that will spark debate amongst scholars and students for some time to come.

Within the agenda of historical-materialist theory and practice Sociological Marxism has delivered a compelling perspective on how to explore and link the analysis of civil society, the state, and the economy within an explicit focus on class exploitation, emancipation, and rich ethnography. This article situates a major analysis of state formation, the rise of the Justice and Development Party, and the growth of a broader Islamist movement in Turkey within the main current of Sociological Marxism. It does so in order to critically examine the rather bold revision of the theory of hegemony at the heart of Cihan Tuğal’sPassive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism, which posits the separate interaction of political society, civil society and the state in theorising hegemonic politics in Turkey. My contention is that the revision of hegemony that this analysis offers and its state-theoretical commitments are deeply problematic due to the reliance on what I term ‘ontological exteriority’, meaning the treatment of state, civil society and the economy as always-alreadyseparatespheres. The focus of the critique then moves toward highlighting a frustrating lack of direct engagement with Antonio Gramsci’s writings in this disquisition on hegemony and passive revolution, which has important political consequences. While praise for certain aspects of ethnographic and spatial analysis is raised, it is argued that any account of the reordering of hegemony and the restructuring of spatial-temporal contexts of capital accumulation through conditions of passive revolution also needs to draw from a more sophisticated state theory, a direct reading of Gramsci, and broader scalar analysis of spatial relations and uneven development under capitalism.

“Explanation” refers to a wide range of activities, with a family resemblance between them. Most satisfactory explanations in a discipline for a domain fail to satisfy some general desiderata, while fulfilling others. This can happen in various ways. Why? An idealizing response would be to say that in real science explanations fall short along some dimensions, so that for any explanatory failure there is a conceivable improvement that addresses its shortcomings. The improvement may be more accurate causally or possess more unifying power, or deliver deeper understanding. We formulate a drastically less idealizing response. We argue that there are typically trade-offs in explanation, so that in strengthening one explanatory virtue one will usually weaken another. Scientific explanations, if this is correct, are constrained by such trade-offs. Particular trade-offs are appropriate for particular explanatory vehicles. There are the overarching equations of theoretical physics, which produce unification at the expense of causal detail; there are theoretical models of phenomena that occupy a middle ground between generality and the detailed workings of particular cases and get closer to explaining the workings of specific systems at the expense of unification. Sometimes experiments aim at general causal patterns at the expense of particular detail; and sometimes they are designed to give us information of particular detail at the expense of generality. There are further trade-offs associated with other vehicles of explanation. We provide examples from physics and biology.

Amélie Rorty has put together a wonderfully varied collection of writings, with a range in time of three thousand years and a range of style from sacred writings to fiction to analytical philosophy. There is nothing like it in print, and it will be an invaluable source for many of us. The writings she has collected are all about—well, I’m not sure that there is something that they are all about. The title suggests that the collection is about a phenomenon called Evil that has many faces: one underlying factor in human life, which can manifest itself in varied forms. In fact, the writings are about uncooperative behavior, sin, cruelty, lust, vice, impiety, indifference, and cynicism, among other things. All of these are bad; they impact on human life in many different deleterious ways. Some of the writings, for example the selection from the book of Genesis and the excerpt from Jean Hampton, assume that all immorality is of a kind and may be treated together. Others, for example the selections from Theophrastus and from Nietzsche, are trying to persuade us to see differences before disapproval clouds our vision.

Abstract In criticising the Italian idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce ? described by Eric Hobsbawm as the first ?post?Marxist? ? Antonio Gramsci elaborated a distinct theory of history. For Gramsci, philosophers such as Croce developed a subjective account of history based on the progression of philosophical thought rather than problems posed by historical development. This essay develops a ?double reading? of Gramsci. First, it presents an overview of a dominant post?Marxist reading of Gramsci?s approach to historical materialism, which constructs a closed and particularistic understanding of his theory of history. Second, it offers a reading that exposes and unsettles problems within post?Marxism by demonstrating how Gramsci?s focus on changes in social relations threatens the assumptions about both traditional idealism and materialism. It is this theory of history that throws into relief certain features necessary to understanding history as more than just a completely contingent system of articulatory practices. The method of a double reading therefore affords insight into the internal tensions and questionable assumptions of history understood as an association of discourses (first reading). It also avoids developing an account that relies on an ?extrinsic history? of objective forces by combining an appreciation of ethico?political principles alongside economic factors within the struggle over hegemony relevant to contemporary global political economy (second reading)

An account of the virtues of limitation management: intellectual virtues of adapting to the fact that we cannot solve many of the problems that we can describe. I argue that the best response to many problems depends not on the most rationally promising solution, but on the most likely route to success. I argue against techniques that assume that one will fulfil ones intentions, and distinguish between failures of rationality and failures of intelligence. I describe the trap of supposing that one will be capable of following the plan that would best exploit ones limited resources.

This article examines how the Iraq War was a space in the ongoing geographical extension of global capitalism linked tousforeign policy. Was it simply the decision by a unitary, hegemonic actor in the inter-state system overriding concerns from other states? Was it an imperialist move to secure the ‘global oil spigot’? Alternatively, did the use of military force reflect the interests and emergence of a transnational state apparatus? We argue that theusimperium needs to be conceptualised as a specific form of state, within which and through which fractions of national and transnational capital operate. In so doing, the Iraq War is assessed as a moment in the extension of global capitalism in which the interests of a national fraction of capital within theusstate form was dominant, thereby placing processes of class struggle and their relation to wider spaces of imperialism at the centre of analysis.