Crisis

Abstract

The present analysis is not concerned with providing another collection of definitions of what crisis means and how it causally induces social change. The book focuses instead on the very nature of the social, and—a bit more to the point—it is a book about the social domain that has come to be known as international relations. “International relations” denotes a certain sphere of social life that expands beyond the borders of nation states and includes so-called inter-, trans-, and supranational relations. In its capitalized version, it is also the name of a discipline in the social sciences: International Relations (IR). As much as this book is on international relations, it is on IR, studying the philosophical debates in the field and its substantive matters at the same time. Philosophy is most aptly characterized as “the formal institutionalized academic practice and not some general dimension of reflective thought,”¹ and is categorized into diverse subfields, one of which represents the philosophy of science. Taking an interest in how science works, the philosophy of science is basically concerned with the epistemological question of “how is reliable knowledge (Erkenntnis) possible.”²