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Michael Williams was an historical geographer and environmental historian who received international acclaim for his work on mankind's use of the wetlands, forests and other fragile resources. Born in Wales, his first appointment was at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, and then his subsequent career was in the Geography Department of the University of Oxford, based at Oriel College. Williams's book Americans and their Forests: an Historical Geography appeared in 1989 and was hugely influential in encouraging further research into deforestation. Deforesting the Earth: from Prehistory to Global Crisis, published in 2003, was considered his magnus opus. Williams was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1989. Obituary by Hugh Clout FBA.

The overarching purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the philosophical fruitfulness of expanding epistemology not only laterally across the social space of other epistemic subjects, but at the same time vertically in the temporal dimension. This chapter sets about this by first presenting central strands of Michael Williams's diagnostic engagement with skepticism, in which he crucially employs a Default and Challenge model of justification. The chapter then develops three key aspects of Edward Craig's “practical explication” of the concept of knowledge so that they may be seen to resonate positively with Williams's epistemological picture: the admixture of internalist and externalist features; the proto-contextualism; and, finally, the distinctively genealogical anti-skeptical impetus. In this way the chapter supports and augments the socialized anti-skeptical case mounted by Williams, and so shows that expanding epistemology in the temporal dimension can be a productive move in central debates in epistemology.

Some of our beliefs are the product of reasoning. What is involved when we reason from one belief, or one set of beliefs, to another? Some philosophers have held that all that is involved here is some sort of causal relationship between the former belief (or beliefs) and the latter. Others have held, however, that something more is required: One must have reflected on the transition from the former to the latter and formed the belief that such a transition is warranted. It is argued, following Lewis Carroll, that such a view leads to an infinite regress. A number of technical solutions to the regress problem are considered and found to be implausible. In addition, it is argued that the reflective requirement presupposes some substantive psychological theses about the differences between human and animal cognition, and these psychological claims are, in fact, false.

This chapter considers the works of Christina Rossetti. Rossetti presents a peculiarly useful subject through which to explore how certain writers move in or out of critical attention. In addition, her religious poetry offers a testing ground in which to work out a methodology of stylistic periodization. Because Christian poems, especially in the Anglican and Anglo–Catholic tradition, preserve a more or less stable ideology between the 16th and the early 20th centuries, their period-specific characteristics can be more readily isolated and studied. Anyone who has studied Christina Rossetti knows the frusatration of working with the hitherto ‘standard’ collection of her poems edited by her brother William Michael Rossetti. Meanwhile, her poetry takes up an ideological position which is far more radical than the middle-class feminist positions current in her epoch. The principal factor which enabled her to overleap those positions was her severe Christianity.

Stroud emphasizes, against Michael Williams, the ‘naturalness’ of epistemological theorizing and the apparent irresistibility of scepticism. Stroud argues that even if philosophical assumptions or theories, rather than natural reflection on the basis of our knowledge, are the foundations of scepticism, understanding what seems to support them is likely to prove philosophically rewarding, and hence disagrees with Williams, who regards this fact as a main premise in an argument for the insignificance of philosophical scepticism for theorizing about knowledge.

From conceptual discussions of reification to historical case studies: the next three chapters explore how different communities of IR theorists have understood the challenge of sustainable critique, and tried to meet it. Is there a coherent pattern to their failures and successes? In particular, Chapter 3 focuses on the realist tradition: from Morgenthau and Waltz to the ‘neoclassical,’ ‘constructivist’ and ‘critical’ developments of the past decade. Why, despite a distinctly reflective ethos, did Hans Morgenthau fail to develop a body of theory that could resist reification? Why did Waltz’s critics fail to appreciate those moves toward reflexivity that existed in structuralism, and why did those moves themselves prove insufficient? How do those failures continue to affect contemporary realist research, from Randall Schweller to Richard Ned Lebow and Michael C. Williams?

Can one combine Davidsonian semantics with a deflationary conception of truth? Williams argues, contra a common worry, that Davidsonian semantics does not require truth-talk to play an explanatory role. Horisk replies that, in any event, the expressive role of truth-talk that Williams emphasizes disqualifies deflationary accounts—at least extant varieties—from combination with Davidsonian semantics. She argues, in particular, that this is so for Quine’s disquotationalism, Horwich’s minimalism, and Brandom’s prosententialism. This chapter argues that Horisk fails to establish her claim in all three cases. This involves clarifying Quine’s understanding of a purely referential occurrence; explaining how Davidsonians can avail themselves of a syntactic treatment of lexical ambiguity; and correcting a common misreading of Brandom (answering along the way an objection offered by Künne as well).

Walt Whitman celebrated the pluralistic nature of American society, which he called a ‘teeming nation of nations.’ Whitman claimed that his poetry was a transparent ‘reflection and representation’ of the nation, and most scholars have taken Whitman at his word by reading his poetry as a chronicle of United States culture. However, Whitman looked more nationally representative from abroad. He secured his professional reputation as a uniquely American poet with the help of positive responses from British writers such as William Michael Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and D. H. Lawrence. By studying its roots in his training as a newspaper editor, in his reviews of his own work, and in his transatlantic publicity campaigns, this chapter exposes Whitman’s American identity as an elaborate international fiction.

Introduces ENIAC and sketches its accepted place in the history of computing as a candidate for the disputed honor of “the first computer,” or as the “first general purpose electronic digital computer.” The authors argue that both views simplify ENIAC’s complexities by reducing it to a single point on a historical trajectory. Instead they introduce a number of other perspectives developed in the book: ENIAC as a material artefact, ENIAC at the origin point of computer programming, ENIAC as a site for technical analysis, and ENIAC as an object of contested historical memory.