Conscripts of Modernity points the way toward a rethinking of the present postcolonial moment. David Scott argues that if scholars of modernity and postcolonialism want to alter understandings of the stalled and disillusioned present - and thereby offer new prospects for the future - they must reconceive the relation of the past to the present. He asserts that anticolonial stories have typically assumed a distinctive narrative form: that of romance. Usually narratives of overcoming and vindication, of salvation and redemption, these stories largely depend on a certain utopian horizon toward which the emancipationist history is imagined to be moving. Scott suggests that as a mode of narrating the colonial past in relation to the postcolonial present and future, tragedy provides a more useful narrative framework than romance does. In tragedy, the future does not appear as part of a seamless forward movement, but instead as a slow and sometimes reversible series of ups and downs. Scott explores the political and epistemological implications of the narrative relation between the past and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James's masterpiece of anticolonial history, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938. In that book, the story of Toussaint Louverture and the making of the Haitian Revolution is told as one of romantic vindication. As Scott points out, part of what makes The Black Jacobins a work of enormous historical and political interest is the fact that in the second edition, published in the United States in 1963, James inserted new material suggesting that that story might usefully be told as tragedy. Scott uses this shift in James's story to compare the relative yields of romance and tragedy in telling the story of the passage from the colonial past to the postcolonial future.

Stuart Hall’s Voice explores the ethos of style that characterized Stuart Hall’s intellectual vocation. David Scott frames the book—which he wrote as a series of letters to Hall in the wake of his death—as an evocation of friendship understood as the moral and intellectual medium in which his dialogical hermeneutic relationship with Hall’s work unfolded. In this respect, the book asks: what do we owe intellectually to the work of those whom we know well, admire, and honor? Reflecting one of the lessons of Hall’s style, the book responds: what we owe should be conceived less in terms of criticism than in terms of listening.
Hall’s intellectual life was animated by voice in literal and extended senses: not only was his voice distinctive in the materiality of its sound, but his thinking and writing were fundamentally shaped by a dialogical and reciprocal practice of speaking and listening. Voice, Scott suggests, is the central axis of the ethos of Hall’s style.
Against the backdrop of the consideration of the voice’s aspects, Scott specifically engages Hall’s relationship to the concepts of "contingency" and "identity," concepts that were dimensions less of a method as such than of an attuned and responsive attitude to the world. This attitude, moreover, constituted an ethical orientation of Hall’s that should be thought of as a special kind of generosity, namely a "receptive generosity," a generosity oriented as much around giving as receiving, as much around listening as speaking.

This is a philosophical work that develops a general theory of ontological objects and object-relations. It does this by examining concepts as acquired dispositions, and then focuses on perhaps the most important of these: the concept of learning. This concept is important because everything that we know and do in the world is predicated on a prior act of learning.
A concept can have many meanings and can be used in a number of different ways, and this creates difficulty when considering the nature of objects and the relationships between them. To enable this, David Scott answers a series of questions about concepts in general and the concept of learning in particular. Some of these questions are: What is learning? What different meanings can be given to the notion of learning? How does the concept of learning relate to other concepts, such as innatism, development and progression?
The book offers a counter-argument to empiricist conceptions of learning, to the propagation of simple messages about learning, knowledge, curriculum and assessment, and to the denial that values are central to understanding how we live. It argues that values permeate everything: our descriptions of the world, the attempts we make at creating better futures and our relations with other people.

For more than three decades, Talal Asad has been engaged in a distinctive critical exploration of the conceptual assumptions that govern the West’s knowledges—especially its disciplinary and disciplining knowledges—of the non-Western world. The essays that make up this volume treat diverse aspects of this remarkable body of work. Among them: the relationship between colonial power and academic knowledge; the historical shifts giving shape to the complexly interrelated categories of the secular and the religious, and the significance of these shifts in the emergence of modern Europe; and aspects of human embodiment, including some of the various ways that pain, emotion, embodied aptitude, and the senses connect with and structure cultural practices. While the specific themes and arguments addressed by the individual contributors range widely, the essays cohere in a shared orientation of both critical engagement and productive extension. Note that this is not a festschrift, nor a celebratory farewell, but a series of engagements with a thinker whose work is in full spate and deserves to be far better known and understood

This is the first critical commentary on Simondon's seminal work, unpacking its rich potential for students and scholars. One of the most innovative and brilliant philosophers of his generation, but largely neglected until he was brought to public attention by Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon presents a challenge to nearly every category and method of traditional philosophy. Simondon's 1989 book Psychic and Collective Individuation is undoubtedly his most important work and its influence, clearly felt in Stiegler and DeLanda, has continued to grow. This first critical textbook to Psychic and Collective Individuation will both guide new readers through the text and inspire future research. It introduces Simondon's challenging text by clarifying its complex terminology and structure through a chapter-by-chapter commentary. It invites a dialogue with thinkers like Bergson, Deleuze, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Negri. It presents the historical context as well as directs you to those aspects that claim its relevance in current discussions on the biopolitical and speculative materialism.
Review
"The English-speaking public is still waiting for a full translation of [Gilbert Simondon's] Psychic and Collective Individuation (L'individuation psychique et collective). As a foretaste, however, Edinburgh University Press has published David Scott's book, which serves as an introduction and a guide, providing a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Simondon's important work. As Scott follows the structure of Simondon's work very closely, this book will be useful for a parallel reading with Psychic and Collective Individuation ... Scott positions Simondon well in his intellectual and historical context, including a description of his philosophical trajectories ... At the end of the book, Scott suggests possible topics for further research, which could also be very useful for advanced students looking for possible lines of convergence in their research."--Iwona Janicka, University of Cambridge, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Growing up on either side of the Iron Curtain, Alexei Leonov and David Scott shared the same dream -- to become a pilot. Excelling at flying, they were chosen by their countries' burgeoning space programmes to be part of the greatest technological race ever -- to land a man on the moon. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first man to walk in space. He won a place in history, but almost lost his life. In 1966, David Scott and Neil Armstrong were seconds away from dying as Gemini 8 spun violently out of control across space. Both men survived against dramatic odds and Scott went on to command the most complex expedition in the history of space exploration, Apollo 15. When the US and USSR space programmes were eventually brought together in the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, Scott and Leonov finally met. The project marked the end of the Cold War silence and started a friendship that would last for decades.