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Shorter book talk, delivered as part of the University of Florida’s workshop on “Epistemology and Method in International Relations.” Not crazy about the workshop title — none of the participants were! — but it was a wonderful workshop all the same.

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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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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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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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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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Here is part two 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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Here is part one 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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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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Here’s an audio-and-slides (.m4a) recording of a talk on my philosophy of science book (in progress), delivered at the University of Delaware on 22 October 2008.

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