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February 25th, 2010

Lehigh talk

The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations, round two: a talk delivered at Lehigh University on 24 February 2010, to an audience mainly consisting of undergraduate students. Basically the same slides as the USC talk, but different audiences produce different emphases and an overall distinctive tone.

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February 21st, 2010

Battlestar Galactica as methodology

Here are my comments from the (in)famous Battlestar Galactica panel from ISA 2010 in New Orleans. The paper in question is still rather rough, but I’m happy with the overall shape it’s taking.

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February 21st, 2010

Sociology of IR panel

My somewhat elliptical discussant comments from a panel entitled “What Language(s) Do You Speak? KNowlegde, Networks and Sociology of IR,” from the 2010 ISA conference in New Orleans.

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February 17th, 2010

Two Philosophers Shoveling Snow

Here is the live performance of my not-a-classic-of-philosophical-drama dialogue “Two Philosophers Shoveling Snow,” an earlier version of which was posted over at The Duck a few days ago. The attached file is the slides from which Benjamin Herborth and I read the dialogue during a roundtable on critical realism at the 2010 ISA annual meeting. I took the part of “Roy” the critical realist, and gave Benjamin the part of “Will” the pragmatist — and he started his subsequent presentation by announcing that he was not Will. Obviously I’m not Roy, either.

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February 12th, 2010

On Comparison

This is a little presentation I whipped up for the ISA Compendium project. The title and the topic — “On Comparison” — are a bit of an outtake from my forthcoming book The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations.

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January 26th, 2010

Conduct of Inquiry book talk — USC

Here’s a talk on my new book “The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations” — scheduled for release this summer — that I gave at the University of Southern California, 25 January 2010. Watch this space for more book talks over the next few months.

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September 2nd, 2009

2009 NSF workshop presentation

Here are the two parts of my presentation and the 2009 NSF Workshop on Interpretive Methodologies in Political Science. The workshop — held in Toronto, Canada, conveniently just prior to the APSA annual meeting in that city — was on interpretive political science; my presentation was on philosophy of science, research methodology, and such things. Based on my forthcoming book, of course, but a slightly different mix of the same themes I’ve played with in other performances archived here on the site.

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May 8th, 2009

Watson Institute presentation

Here’s the talk I delivered yesterday at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. This is a remix of the civilizations talk I have previously given at GW and Rutgers; this version/performance is more about the configuration of social-scientific disciplinary knowledge than previous versions was, because that’s where my brain is at the moment.

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April 12th, 2009

lecturelet 11

Still hovering around 50 minutes. Here’s the eleventh installment in the series; this lecture(let) focuses on realist constructivism, and extends/complements last week’s thoughts on liberal constructivism.

One clarification: the “social construction” / “not social construction” fractal is not a replacement for the 2×2 that arranges realism, liberalism, liberal constructivism, and realist constructivism as ideal-typical combinations of commitments; that said, the fractal might be the analytical engine driving the debates. You decide.

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March 9th, 2009

another performance of the philosophy of science book talk

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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