This article elaborates the continuing significance of Ricoeur’s development of utopia. Ricoeur develops two not necessarily exclusive aspects of the utopia in its positive sense. First, it acts as an imaginative variation on existing reality, and second, it can act to ‘shatter’ and hence recast existing reality. While Ricoeur himself did not tend to distinguish rigorously between these two senses of the utopia, the article seeks to provide that delineation. Imaginative variation opens the sphere of human possibility but remains hypothetical, (...) while the utopia as that which shatters can introduce a new reality into social existence. In the utopia that shatters, the social imagination can be constitutive of social life. The article situates Ricoeur’s discussion of utopia in his Lectures on Ideology and Utopia in relation to other relevant texts in his corpus, principally The Rule of Metaphor and the forthcoming Lectures on Imagination. The argument locates Ricoeur’s treatment of utopia within the broader field of his work on the symbolic structure of action and social imagination. (shrink)

In the approximation that every inertial observer experiences a homogeneous, uniform flow of time and sees a space that is Euclidean, the arena of physics is Minkowskian and one speed is the same in all intertial frames. If a given intertial observer finds an infinitesimal source or particle traveling faster than this fundamental speed near a given event, the source must appear in some inertial frame spread over neighboring positions at a given time as a spacelike structure. If this structure (...) persists over a period of proper time, it can be interpreted as a wave group. If it is conserved, it can be interpreted as a line or tube of force. (shrink)

Philosophy of history before the nineteenth century was based on the classical theory of history. That theory, in justifying the purpose of historical studies, maintained that history was a storehouse of good and bad examples; was of particular use in educating statesmen, since it provided them with vicarious experience; and was a more compelling moral guide than the abstractions of philosophy. The unquestioned authority of Polybius and other ancient historians, as well as. of the definitions of history by Pseudo-Dionysius and (...) Cicero , perpetuated the exemplar theory. The rise of professional, academic historical study rendered it irrelevant; Bolingbroke was its last notable exponent. (shrink)

The Iran-United States Claims Tribunal is the most important source of international arbitral decisions for at least the past half century, and its decisions have contributed significantly to the development of international law and the law of international commercial transactions. Judge Aldrich, who is the only member of the Tribunal to have served since its inception in 1981, has written what will be recognised as the definitive book about the jurisprudence of the Tribunal. The book seeks to preserve and to (...) make accessible the substantial body of Awards and Decisions rendered by the Tribunal during the years since it was established in. Its hundreds of Awards and Decisions may be individually consulted but hitherto there has been no detailed analytical guide through the vast published work of the Tribunal. This important new book provides a two-fold service. First, it quotes from the most significant Awards and Decisions at sufficient length so that both their substance and the reasoning of the Tribunal can be understood from access to the present volume alone. Second, it organizes and summarizes the decisions to facilitate finding complete texts relevant to any particular issue. (shrink)