Chapter 1 reconstructs the conceptual history of tact as a social, ethical, and aesthetic category. Starting out with Voltaire’s 1769 definition that marks tact’s fundamental paradigm shift from a sense of feeling to a form of sociability, I reconstruct the word’s ensuing career as a key concept in 19th- and 20th-century pedagogical, philosophical, and literary discourse. I discuss tact’s history within the context of the demise of the ancien régime and the rise of the bourgeois subject, reflecting on a variety of different historical and philosophical explanations (Elias, Adorno, Foucault). I reconstruct how and why, around 1800, tact turns into a key philosophical term, depicting an intuitive form of empirical judgement (Kant). I show how, in the second half of the 19th century, tact, understood as an individual deviation from normative structures, came to occupy a key position in the method dispute between the humanities and the natural sciences (Helmholtz). I conclude by reflecting on how psychological tact went on to become a key category in modern and contemporary hermeneutics, uniting the otherwise antagonistic work of scholars incl. Adorno, Gadamer, Barthes, Felski, and Macé.

The knowledge that is used in IPCC assessments predominantly stems from a wide variety of academic disciplines. Given the high scientific and political profile of the IPCC, the production of knowledge in disciplines is impacted by the existence and dynamics of the IPCC assessment process. In some cases, the dynamics between academic disciplines and the IPCC is characterised by the presence of positive feedback loops, where the production of knowledge is structured and programmed by the IPCC. The subsequent findings then receive a preeminent role in later IPCC assessments, and so the cycle continues. It is important to critically reflect on these dynamics, in order to determine whether visions of climate change’s past, present, and future – for example, pathways for the climate-change problem and its potential solutions, as far as they exist – have not been unduly constrained by the IPCC process. The IPCC runs the risk of unreflexively foregrounding some scientific and policy approaches at the expense of other approaches.

Chapter 2 discusses the ways in which liberal ideas of Western origin shaped Russian political theory during the period roughly between 1895 and 1903. The pan-European reassessment of many fundamental positivist assumptions after about 1890 inspired the Russian Silver Age, and occasioned a debate between liberally inclined thinkers about the proper philosophical assumptions on which to base their views of selfhood, freedom, and history. Neo-idealist liberalism thus developed as part of the search for new forms of understanding to accompany the social and cultural transformations that Russia was undergoing. The chapter argues that both positivism and neo-idealism contained the philosophical resources to support a moderate, pluralist view of human values, but not all of their variants were liberal.

My main aim in this chapter is to clarify Nietzsche’s approach to the relationship between philosophy and the natural and physical sciences. I focus on Nietzsche’s free spirit writings. I begin by showing that Nietzsche’s free spirit project requires the development of a new type of philosophers who can experiment, and who will therefore be able to create and legislate new values. I suggest that the experimentation requirement entails a relationship of dynamic co-constitution between philosophy and the sciences, in which philosophy and the sciences act as partners in a continuous process of experimentation. I claim that adopting this approach to understanding the relationship between philosophy and the sciences in Nietzsche’s free spirit writings strengthens the case for an aesthetic naturalist interpretation of the relationship between philosophy and the sciences in Nietzsche. I also claim that this approach helps to explain why Nietzsche makes both positive and negative remarks about the natural and physical sciences in his free spirit writings, and why his position is consistent.