Damn Great Empires! offers a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs James's overlooked political thought by treating his anti-imperialist Nachlass - his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States' annexation of the Philippines - as the key to the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence on a modern world without ultimate foundations. Livingston explores the persistence of political questions in James's major works, from his writings on the self in The Principles of Psychology to the method of Pragmatism, the study of faith and conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the metaphysical inquiries in A Pluralistic Universe. Against the common view of James as a thinker who remained silent on questions of politics, this book places him in dialogue with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as a transatlantic critique of modernity, in order to excavate James's anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy.

Collects classic, contemporary, and previously unpublished examples of public philosophy in action from across James Tully's four decades of scholarship. Provides readers with a perspicuous representation of public philosophy as an ongoing experiment with reconstructing the practice of political theory as a democratizing and diversifying dialogue between scholars and citizens.

Damn Great Empires! offers a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs Jamess overlooked political thought by treating his anti-imperialist Nachlass his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States annexation of the Philippines as the key to unlocking the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence on a modern world without ultimate foundations. Livingston explores the persistence of political questions in Jamess major works, from his writings on the self in The Principles of Psychology to the method of Pragmatism, the study of faith and conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the metaphysical inquiries in A Pluralistic Universe. Against the common view of James as a thinker who remained silent on questions of politics, this book places him in dialogue with champions and critics of American imperialism, such as Theodore Roosevelt and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as a transatlantic critique of modernity, in order to excavate Jamess anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy.

These seventeen papers, from a colloquium held at the XIVth UISPP Congress at the University of Liege in 2001, combine archaeological, ethnographic and technical approaches to present the current state of research in the study of pottery technology. The colloquium's aim was to highlight key topics, such as clay preparation, shaping techniques, decoration and firing and post-firing treatments, whilst addressing problems in methodologies. Ethnographic contributions present case studies from the Amazon, Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Gambi and Senegal; two papers present methods of technical identification; nine papers reconstruct and interpret pottery manufacturing processes in archaeological contexts. These examine assemblages from Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Mauritania and the Levant. Nine papers in English, the rest in French; all have English and French abstracts.