James Juniper

To properly understand the nature of the digital economy we need to investigate the phenomenon of a “ubiquitous computing system” (UCS). As defined by Robin Milner, this notion implies the following characteristics: (i) it will continually make decisions hitherto made by us; (ii) it will be vast, maybe 100 times today’s systems; (iii) it must continually adapt, on-line, to new requirements; and (iv) individual UCSs will interact with one another. This book argues that neoclassical approaches to modelling economic behaviour based on optimal control by “representative-agents” are ill-suited to a world typified by concurrency, decentralized control, and interaction. To this end, it argues for the development of new, process-based approaches to analysis, modelling and simulation. The book provides the context—both philosophical and mathematical—for the construction and application of new, rigorous, and meaningful analytical tools. In terms of social theory, it adopts a Post-Cognitivist approach, the elements of which include the nature philosophy of Schelling, Marx’s critique of political economy, Peircean Pragmatism, Whitehead’s process philosophy, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the flesh, along with cognitive scientific notions of embodied cognition and neural Darwinism, as well as more questionable notions of artificial intelligence that are encompassed by the rubric of “perception-and-action-without-intelligence”.

Mirowski’s justification for replacing the foundational principles of neoclassical economics – methodological individualism and rational choice theory – with a theoretical framework informed by cybernetics, information theory, and computational biology, is subject to a critique informed by the work of Karl Polanyi, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. Mirowski’s proposed alterative is called into question on the basis of two crucial weaknesses. First there is Mirowksi’s penchant for what Polanyi has called Laplacian reductionism. Second there is Mirowski’s inability to develop a comprehensive and consistent theory of evolutionary economics. Mirowski’s work is questioned in terms of what social theorists call the ‘structuration paradox’

Deleuze has suggested that Spinoza and Foucault share common concerns, particularly the notion of immanence and their mutual hostility to theories of subjective intentionality and contract-based theories of state power. This article explores these shared concerns. On the one hand Foucault's view of governmentality and its re-theorization of power, sovereignty and resistance provide insights into how humans are constituted as individualized subjects and how populations are formed as subject to specific regimes or mentalities of government. On the other, Spinoza was concerned with how humans organized themselves into communities capable of self-government. In particular, his idea of immanent causality was crucial because central to his ideas of freedom and power. We argue that Spinoza's approach to power and causality prefigures ideas developed by Foucault in his theory of governmentality, especially with respect to his biopolitical rethinking of power and resistance

Social Theorists who wish to embrace a materialist and realist philosophy are, at present, confronted with a dazzling variety of forms of philosophical realism. Many analytical philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians choose to work within the Structural Realist tradition. In contrast, the ‘speculative turn’ towards a variety of new forms of Realism was given impetus by Speculative Realism event held in April 2007 at Goldsmith’s college, London. In this paper, I provide an overview of these three traditions by situating them in the milieu of post-Kantian critical philosophy. To make this somewhat heroic task more manageable I focus on various manoeuvres that have been adopted to advance beyond the seductions of the Kantian “Circle of Objectivity”; specifically, in the approaches taken up by Quentin Meillassoux, John Worrall, and Alfred North Whitehead. These approaches are evaluated in regard to the philosophical manner of their proposed escape from the Circle of Objectivity, and the particulars of their chosen methodology.

The paper is motivated by the desire to identify exactly what Leibniz has contributed to Deleuze and Whitehead’s particular version of vitalism. This reading of Leibniz is compared with those of Badiou. The paper compares each of these philosopher’s interpretations of the fundamental principles that ground Leibnizian monadology, with the intention of highlighting the implications of these readings for political theory. In particular, Badiou’s notion of a schema of torsion is examined and distinguished from Deleuze’s notions of actualization and realization.

From a mathematical perspective, this paper will compare the 'Speculative' Realist Philosophy of Alain Badiou with the Process Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. To this end, each philosophy will be examined in terms of how it departs from the strictures of Kantian Critical Philosophy, specifically, in terms of how it articulates the structural relationship between subjects, objects, and relata. Moreover, each philosophy will also be judged both in terms of how it addresses the mereological distinction between internal and external relations, and how it conceives of the relationship holding between philosophy and its others: the four Althusserian 'generics' of science, politics, art, and love.

In a recent paper, Julie Nelson (2003) argues that the Institutionalist, Pragmatist, and Process Philosophy traditions have been neglected both by orthodox theorists and, surprisingly perhaps, by certain of their heterodox antagonists. Despite this neglect, process philosophy has found enthusiastic supporters amongst natural scientists and philosophers of science such as Prigogine (1997) and, from a Post-Structuralist perspective, Deleuze and Guattari (1994). In his response to feminist critics of an earlier paper (Lawson, 1999), published in the Feminist Economics journal, Tony Lawson (2003) - Convenor of the Cambridge Social Ontology Group - has returned to the question of what Critical Realism as an economic methodology could contribute to feminism critiques of orthodox economics. Few of the feminist respondents were convinced by Lawson's earlier arguments that their interests would be best served by espousing a Critical Realist ontology in debating with orthodoxy. In particular, Julie Nelson (2003 : 115) argued that Alfred North Whitehead's organicist ontology "locates the knower within reality and (through a broader, deeper, and more serious understanding of experience) sees the knower as having a sense of the whole and the many (or in more current lingo, the "other") as well as of the self." Lawson (2003) responded to Nelson's arguments with a five page counter-response, which incorporated a six page appendix on the similarities and differences between Process Philosophy and Critical Realism. This paper concurs with Nelson's arguments about the methodological value of process philosophy. It proceeds by examining how Whitehead's interpretations of induction and probabilistic inference came to influence Keynes during the drafting of The General Theory. While Whitehead's endorsement of the philosophy of organism mirrored the views of Frank Ramsey and G. E. Moore, it is argued that Whitehead went further than the latter authors, insofar as he felt compelled to construct a rigorous justification for probabilistic inference in an organicist world where, otherwise, everything would simply depend on everything else. To this end, he espoused the notion of an hierarchical ontology. In the paper, Whitehead's notion of a hierarchical ontology is evaluated against its Critical Realist counterpart: the three-layered ontology proposed by Bhaskar and other proponents of Critical Realism such as Tony Lawson. The paper counters Lawson's complaints about Whitehead's apparently excessive rationalism, his a priorism, and his penchant for dualistic thinking. Instead, it is argued that Whitehead's Process Philosophy affords more scope for a pluralist approach to economics insofar as it supports a more comprehensive methodological and an ethical critique of orthodox economics.

Research into strategic alliances has traditionally focused on motivation and performance. More recently, network dynamics and alliances as complex and evolving arrangements are emerging areas for investigation. Thus far, little research has been undertaken that integrates these emerging themes in the context of the impact of deteriorating exogenous environments on network alliances. The ICT industry provides such a context, with the rapid deterioration of fortunes in the industry as a result of equity market moves since early 2000. This research looks at the Bluetooth consortium, a loosely framed network of firms involved in the development and commercialization of wireless technical applications for information technology based products. It finds that matters related to intellectual property ownership and inter-firm coordination in complex product development have been problematic, with the deterioration of environmental munificence driving a slowing of network investment and product development success.

The paper compares Whitehead's Process Philosophy with Critical Realism, arguing that the former offers a more comprehensive philosophical frame for heterodox political economy than the latter on ontological, epistemological and ethico-political grounds. It argues that Critical Realism, in building on post-war Epistemological debates amongst Analytical philosophers, reduces all of the non-philosophical conditions of philosophy-science, art, love, and politics-to that of science, per se. Furthermore, it contends that Critical Realism exposes question of epistemology to a further reduction insofar as questions of truth are interpreted in terms of the "logic of scientific discovery". In contrast, due to its reliance upon the Spinozan metaphysical tradition, Whitehead's non-organic Vitalism can avail itself of both Spinoza's hermeneutic "critique of ideology" and his activist and collective political philosophy.