The Swedish Presidency
This article reviews the performance of the Swedish government whilst holding the European Union Council Presidency for six months during 2009, and thus has the opportunity to 'lead' the European Union. The article is published in the JCMS Annual Review, the Yearbook/special issue of the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS): the world's leading academic peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the study of European integration and the European Union, and the official journal of the University Association of European Contemporary Studies (UACES), Europe's largest academic organization of EU scholars and practitioners
Are the Swedes 'Unofficial Fusionists'?
The article argues that Swedish policy-makers dealing with EU questions operate as 'unofficial fusionists'
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.