This chapter looks at the assumption that there is a relationship in world politics between international organization and peaceful change. That premise is the working hypothesis behind many of the chapters in this book, and it provides the justification for the scholarly search for empirical patterns between IOs and change. When international relations is assumed to be comprised of a mechanical ontology (causal mechanisms that lead from initial conditions to predictable effects), then it makes sense to employ a scientific methodology indebted to Isaac Newton. But the shifty concepts of world politics, such as conflict, peace, change, and stability, are not well-suited to machine-like regularity. Concepts such as change are subjective or ambiguous and hence make for poor variables. The chapter examines the gap between methodology and ontology that emerges in the effort to find causal mechanisms that link the practice of international organization to the outcomes of peaceful change.

Dietterlin’s Architectura experienced perhaps its richest reception and afterlife among architectural sculptors in seventeenth-century colonial Peru. The façades of the Cathedral of Cuzco, Cuzco’s Jesuit Compañía church, and the monastery of the church of San Francisco in Lima all adapted motifs from Dietterlin’s Architectura to compare European and Indigenous Peruvian ideas about the stability of matter. Constructed in the wake of catastrophic earthquakes in the 1650s by Andean and other Indigenous sculptors, the façades reinterpret the structural, anatomical and material conceits of Dietterlin’s treatise to overturn its vision of architectural matter and especially stone as a materially unstable entity. Instead, they used the imagery of Dietterlin’s Architectura to promote an alternative ontology that underscored the transience of forms and structures while affirming the fixity of matter such as stone. Even as architectural images like those of the Architectura spurred artistic and natural philosophical discourses on a global scale, Peruvian artists adapted Dietterlin’s ideas to accommodate their own ontologies and philosophies of nature.

Suggestions of a processual orientation in Collingwood’s thought can be found in certain places in his corpus, but Collingwood is not generally known as a process philosopher. This is likely because the Libellus de Generatione, in which he develops a process-oriented ontology, has long been unavailable and thought lost. While a copy was found and is housed in the Bodleian Library, it was only made publicly available in 2019. This chapter explicates the process ontology developed in the Libellus and contextualizes it in relation to Collingwood’s wider corpus and to early twentieth-century process philosophy. Drawing on Sandra Rosenthal, I argue that Collingwood’s understanding of process is closer to Bergson’s than Whitehead’s, especially in ways that allow for genuine novelty and creation, and in its implications for the metaphysics of time. I then discuss implications of this process ontology for the view of Collingwood as an idealist and for other areas of his philosophy. Finally, I consider whether attributing a processual ontology to Collingwood is in tension with his own view of “metaphysics without ontology.”

This chapter endeavors to explain Heidegger’s intertwined thinking about death and “the nothing” and explore the ontological significance of this connection. As we have seen, “death” (Tod) is Heidegger’s name for a stark and desolate phenomenon in which Dasein (that is, our world-disclosive “being-here”) encounters its own end, the end “most proper” to the distinctive kind of entity that Dasein is. Being and Time’s phenomenology of death is primarily concerned to understand Dasein’s death ontologically. Heidegger is asking what the phenomenon of our own individual deaths reveals to us all about the nature of our common human being, that is, our Dasein (and what that discloses, in turn, about the nature of being in general). Understood ontologically, “death” designates Dasein’s encounter with the end of its own world-disclosure, the end of that particular way of becoming intelligible in time that uniquely “distinguishes” Dasein from all other kinds of entities (BT 32/SZ 12).

In Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, Carol White pursues a strange yet once common hermeneutic strategy, namely, reading Heidegger backward by reading the central ideas of his later work back into his early magnum opus, Being and Time. White follows some of Heidegger’s own later directives in pursuing this hermeneutic strategy, and this chapter critically explores these directives along with the original reading that emerges from following them. The conclusion I reach is that White’s creative book is not persuasive as a strict interpretation of Heidegger’s early work, yet it remains extremely helpful for deepening our appreciation of Heidegger’s thought as a whole. Most importantly, I shall suggest, White helps us sharpen and extend our understanding of the pivotal role that thinking about death played in the lifelong development of Heidegger’s philosophy.

This chapter begins by tracing the consequences of the subsuming in modernity of mythos under the auspices of logos, namely the reduction of God to the status of the ‘biggest’ of all beings. The consequences of this for mythopoiesis are many, but chief among them is the foreclosure of the further distancing of plainly theological (that is, mythopoieic) discourse from the realm of the reasonable. By re-examining the relationship between the natural and the supernatural, however, the chapter concludes by pointing towards a way of understanding not only the work of theologians and people of faith as pointing towards the divine, but that all of our mythopoiesis is, in some sense, a making towards God.

This chapter introduces students to the range of theoretical issues that have animated the study of international relations through the years. First, it explains why theoretical reflection is indispensable to explaining and understanding international relations. Second, it addresses unavoidable ontological and epistemological issues in the quest for theoretical understanding. Third, it traces the growth of mainstream International Relations theory up to the present conflict in Ukraine. Finally, it touches on some of the diverse critical approaches to the study of international relations.

This book unsettles regular accounts of knowledge about language in several ways. The idea of assemblages allows for a flexibility about what languages are, not just in terms of having fuzzy linguistic boundaries but in terms of what constitutes language more generally. Languages are assembled from different elements, both linguistic elements as traditionally understood as well as items less commonly included. This is to approach language not as a pre-existing or circumscribed entity but rather as something produced in social action. Language from this point of view is embedded in diverse social and physical environments, distributed across the material world and part of our embodied existence. Once we ask whose version of language counts, we have to base any practical theory of language on what language is within a local ontology. This necessitates an engagement with language ideological assemblages and an understanding that languages are inevitably locally made assemblages (linguistic, semiotic and material). Applied linguistics as a practical assemblage is one way we can start to address the needs for a practical theory of language that can remain both plural and political.

The historical relationship between linguistics and applied linguistics, one producing knowledge about language and the other applying it to real-world contexts, creates a hierarchy of linguistic knowledge, with linguistic knowledge at the top, everyday views on language at the bottom and applied linguistics somewhere in the middle, mediating between the two. This relationship has started to shift as applied linguists have sought to develop their own views of language based on their engagements with language users and contexts. A key framework for this book is a form of critical social realism that allows for more than one reality, grounds epistemologies in social relations and takes a critical-ethical position on choosing between different versions of the world. Central to this discussion are questions of ontology – what language is – and the ontological turn in the social sciences. Alongside ontological questions about what languages are, a related concern is whose version of language counts. Various ways of getting at this, from lay, folk and citizen linguistic perspectives, have emphasized this need to include knowledge of language from outside the disciplinary confines of linguistics. A practical theory of language surely needs a strong relationship with how language users think about language.

This chapter examines the notion of being in the Consolation of Philosophy and contrasts it with modern notions of existence. The notions in the Consolation relevant to this inquiry are those expressed by the verbs esse and exsistere. The chapter argues that the basic notion of exsistere in the Consolation should be understood as “to be manifest,” while the basic notion of esse should be understood as “to be something or other” or “to be intelligible.” Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates that the notion of esse in the Consolation differs from typical modern notions of existence in two significant ways. First, unlike modern notions of existence, according to which there are things that do not exist, the notion of esse or being in the Consolation has no contrary. Everything that can be spoken of or thought about “is” in some way. Second, the notion of esse in the Consolation, as in Aristotle, is “said in many ways.” In this it differs from modern notions of existence, which tend to be univocal. The chapter shows that once the notions of exsistere and esse are properly understood, certain arguments in the Consolation that might initially appear confused turn out to be quite clear and highly plausible.

Chapter 5 argues that an alternative ontological basis, derived from non-Western ontologies, is both possible and urgent for renewing sustainable development. It analyses how the voice of the Global South; particularly Africa, can improve the discourse on sustainable development by evolving a view on the importance of customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms as law. It echoes the idea of ‘ecology of knowledges’ and the legal value of reviving non-Western epistemologies for sustainable development. The spotlighting of ethics, customary norms, and other forms of local and Indigenous knowledge as legal norms has been done before. However, in this book, I extend the discussion even further and do so through a comparative analysis with other bodies of legal ideas and normativity like transnational law, legal pluralism, and social construction as law in themselves. In this process, I give these ideas a unique twist for the purposes of the overall critical perspective of this project by demonstrating their usefulness for foregrounding customary law or Indigenous knowledge as law. The discussion refracts the idea of reimagining sustainable development praxis through the lens of oft-neglected African legal cosmologies, and how such experiences can provide helpful signposts in Africa and elsewhere.