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Okay, so maybe 49 minutes is not quite a lecturelet. But it’s shorter than the previous few so-called lecturelets, so that has to count for something. Liberalism is our topic this week: both IR liberalism and the broader liberal tradition from which it (sometimes implicitly) derives.

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Someone commented that these were less lecturelets and mroe lectures; I am not sure how much longer they will continue to run to this size, but these past couple of weeks there seems to have been a lot to say. Maybe this is a temporary bulge; we’ll see.

In any event: here’s lecture(let) 8, on IR realism.

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Here’s the seventh installment in the ongoing, thrilling series “Some Short Lecturelets On International Relations Theory,” or something like that. Anyway, here’s the latest set of slides and my commentary for SIS-301; this time the topic is Hegel, and the rationality of History.

Yes, I know it’s almost an hour long. Enlightenment philosophy is complicated stuff.

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Here’s a little supplemental lecturelet I whipped up for SIS-301. This is based on some diagrams I sketched on the board one day after class; not everyone could stay for that, and some people found them helpful, so I’m making them publicly available in this form. What I’ve done here is to briefly sketch the ruler/ruled relationship according to Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, as I see it. Enjoy!

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Here’s another rendition of the philosophy of science book talk; this one was delivered 9 March 2009 at Johns Hopkins University. I think this version has a bit too much set-up and not enough punchline, but it did serve to spark a great post-presentation discussion, so I consider it a success.

This may have been one of those talks that was more useful for me to give than for anyone else to listen to — the “poetry” comment and brief riff that occurs at about 18:04 and runs for about thirty seconds, for example, was literally an instance of me thinking out loud, and in the ensuing discussion I basically took that whole point back and replaced it with the notion that the thing that distiguishes science from poetry is the notion that science proceeds by replacing an existing account with another that is by some standard a superior account: “progress,” broadly understood, and not necessarily asymptotically approaching some definitive and final account of The World As A Whole As It Really Is In Itself. All of that will end up in the final chapter, so it was very useful for me to go through it, but again, I’m not sure how useful it is for everyone else. Caveat downloader.

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This is a second version of my “requiem for Samuel P. Huntington” talk/presentation. In this version given at the Elliott School at George Washington University on 5 March — the slides have been remixed from the Rutgers version of the talk — I emphasized more strongly the vision of an agonistic social science dedicated to value-clarification. As before I use Huntington’s account of civilizations as a jumping-off point.

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Here’s the sixth lecturelet for SIS-301 — this one’s on Kant. I also took the opportunity to talk a bit about “the international” and the connection between politcal theory and international relations, so this one is a bit longer than usual.

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