Donald Rumsfeld Research Articles

Classical Realism and the Rise of Sino-American Antagonism: A Review Essay

Abstract Has the United States been trying to contain China? If so, why now? Still, proponents of Chinese containment have been critical of the United States' continued fixation with Russia - a declining state - arguing that this diversion undermines a focused Chinacentric strategy. This is not the first time that U.S. strategic attention has been diverted from China. Back in 2001, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, embarked on an ambitious endeavor to revise U.S. grand strategy and focus on China which was perceived as the sole state capable of becoming a peer rival to the United States. However, following the tragic events of 11 September 2001, the Bush administration redirected its focus away from great power antagonism with China towards the Global War on Terror. Could any political scientist, speculating upon the direction of American grand strategy in the summer of 2001, by any accounts have foreseen that the United States would waste significant strategic capital in pursuing terrorists in Afghanistan and promoting democracy in the Middle East over the next decade? Nowadays, could any political theorist in December 2021 have foreseen that the United States would drive Russia into the open arms of China and create Mackinder's Eurasian nightmare? Classical realism may have the best answers. Jonathan Kirshner's latest treatise explains why past is more than prologue and how classical realism is superior to other “realisms” in providing the most authoritative insights about the complex strategic behavior of states.

Known Unknowns: The Inevitability of Cyber Attacks

As described by Former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld in his 2011 book, Known and Unknown, “there are many things of which we are completely unaware—in fact, there are things of which we are so unaware, we don’t even know we are unaware of them. Throughout history the world has faced numerous catastrophic events that were not foreseen but in hindsight were discoverable including the devastating effects of Pearl Harbor, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. More recently, the potential for catastrophic loss has been magnified in the 2020 Solar Winds and 2021 Colonial Pipeline cyber-attacks. We may not know when or how these events will occur or how much damage or destruction will occur, but we do know that these events are possible. The literature differentiates between events that occur totally by surprise, and outcomes or events that actors have identified as possibly existing but do not know whether they will take place or not. The aim of this paper is to provide insight, based on an empirical review of selected attacks both within and outside the cyber space literature to uncover the underlying risk, uncertainty, and complexity that may have been known but not seriously considered by those who had the knowledge and capability to investigate the warning signs. Based on the case study analysis, this paper will present the reasons for inaction and how we can learn from these experiences. The following two theories – institutionalization and rationalization have been found to provide some reasons for the occurrence of behaviors which increase the possibility of unobserved risks. In this paper we explore these theories through case study analysis and propose a framework consisting of four concepts for increasing awareness of these situations.

What might Donald Rumsfeld know about nitrate, nitrite and hypertension?

What might Donald Rumsfeld know about nitrate, nitrite and hypertension?

Mexican Food: (an essay presented to the Tucson Literary Club, March 16, 2015)

Mexican Food(an essay presented to the Tucson Literary Club, March 16, 2015) Joseph C. Wilder (bio) If you have lived long enough around here—that is, Tucson, Arizona, and various points nearby—you will have experienced the singular and enduringly devastating loss occasioned by the death of a favorite Mexican restaurant. I grew up in the fifties in Tucson, and I have a keen appreciation for a very particular food of my childhood and youth, a kind of Mexican food that has been fairly eclipsed and, who knows, might not stand up to the present-day competition. But for me, it remains a standard against which I judge the plate before me. Sometimes a restaurant can open and close and a half century can go by before its tales are revealed. There is always a significance, sometimes lasting, to these human endeavors, however obscure. We remember and our lives are so formed by these memories and the understandings of self and world they indicate. They constitute for us our history in place, writ small, but with importance and value and rich in human meaning. Out of this well of memory we construe our biographies and assemble a history of place. Possibly my earliest memory in this lineage is being happily sandwiched in somewhere between mother and father or mother and siblings, the youngest, my eyes virtually level with the tabletop, eating at El Charro on Broadway, across the street from Ronquillo's Bakery and the gazebo in the Plaza de la Mesilla, Kippy's, the bus station, and Pat's. I always ordered a beef tamale—yes, I know, "tamal" chronically mispronounced, but nonetheless… There must have been years and years of tamales, before I graduated to the harder stuff: that being, of course and invariably, no matter the venue, the classic Number 2 Combination: cheese enchilada, taco, tamale, and rice and beans. The food was different elsewhere. In New Mexico it struck my young palate as weird, enchiladas swimming in heavy, crude red chile sauce—stacked, [End Page 572] not rolled—no bean tostadas, plates of chile, red and green, and too, too hot and lacking a certain refinement. In California the food was bizarre: tasteless, smothered in cheddar cheese, pretty to look at, impossible to eat, digging through piles of shredded lettuce, surmounted by heaps of yellow cheese. But at home, in the heartland of Arizona, it was done just right, according to an unsophisticated boy, who would dream of his next plate. Years and years later, starving in Europe during my so-called teenage gap year when I searched out a penniless existence to better taste the true essence of life, my mother merrily wrote to me (the only and slow way of communication, you may recall) "I bet you wish you had a bean burro right now." I did. Oh, I did. In high school in the late sixties, the treat for me (maybe I had aced a test or maybe it was judged I had gone too long without) was to be taken to Tia Elena's on Grant—first the original, later the replacement down the block—with its incredible architectural sculptures like something out of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In the original you would sit in a hall-like narrow room with the fantastic sculptures snaking up the walls and looming over you, like a well-lit cavern. The Number 2 Combo, if I recall correctly—and I do—was $1.65. The loss of Tia Elena's many years later remains particularly painful—couldn't they find someone in the family to carry on?mm,, The other beacons of my life were reserved for road trips. To paraphrase the great American folk poet Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns and unknown unknowns and Sofia's in Casa Grande, a definite known known, was called on whenever we traveled somewhere plausibly near, to Phoenix for example. I have distinct memories stretching into middle and late youth of stopping at Sofia's a block off the main drag through town—you could see their sign, like a big fountain, above the rooftop line—and parking next to this big warehouse of an...

The rapidly evolving monkeypox epidemic: A call to action to leave no one behind.

Within 5 months, an emerging human monkeypox virus (MPXV) pandemic has caused >65,000 cases, leading the World Health Organization to declare it a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). Applying former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's idiom, we reflect upon the "known knowns," "known unknowns," and "unknown unknowns" to improve prevention and treatment for this and future pandemics.

“Thy Words Do Finde Me Out”: Aaron Kunin’s Love Three

“Thy Words Do Finde Me Out”: Aaron Kunin’s <i>Love Three</i>

Introduction: Severe Uncertainty in Science, Medicine, and Technology

Introduction: Severe Uncertainty in Science, Medicine, and Technology

Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns

Little did Donald Rumsfeld realize that his contribution to the world of quotations would also help clarify the status of carotid endarterectomy (CEA) and carotid artery stenting (CAS) in patients with asymptomatic carotid stenosis (ACS). Meta-analyzed data from the Carotid Revascularization Endarterectomy versus Stenting (CREST-1) Trial and the Asymptomatic Carotid Trial-1 (ACT-1)1 can now be combined with data from the Stent Protected percutaneous Angioplasty of the Carotid artery versus Endarterectomy (SPACE-2) trial2 and the Asymptomatic Carotid Surgery Trial (ACST-2).

A species by any other name would sound as sweet.

David Smith argues against the prevalent practice of naming newly discovered species after human beings.

Lasting Cruelties

Lasting Cruelties Lyle Jeremy Rubin (bio) Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman Viking, 2021, 448 pp. On the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2003, Iraqis plundered and burned government offices, banks, businesses, and hospitals. Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time, responded: While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who have had members of their family killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime. And I don't think there's anyone in any of those pictures … [who wouldn't] accept it as part of the price of getting from a repressed regime to freedom. In Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Spencer Ackerman repurposes Rumsfeld's words in his chapter on the aftermath of George Floyd's murder. That juxtaposition between post-invasion Iraq and the Black Lives Matter uprising encapsulates the thesis of Ackerman's sweeping history of America's early-twenty-first-century wars. Ackerman details not just how the reactionary mindset and methods of the War on Terror have been brought home, but [End Page 130] also how U.S.-led militarism diverts liberationist energies abroad while containing or distorting them at national borders. Ackerman begins his striking prologue with the story of what was at that point "the worst terrorist attack in American history": the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which claimed 168 lives, with hundreds of others maimed or dismembered. Its perpetrator, Timothy McVeigh, was a veteran of the first Gulf War, a white supremacist, and an associate of a robust far-right network with the Christian Identity movement at its center. His two accomplices, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, were Army pals. Yet journalists and officials were reluctant to explore the significance of these facts and instead tended to treat McVeigh as a curious loner. The days after the bombing, before McVeigh was identified as the suspect, politicians from both parties, along with FBI agents, blamed the mass murder on Muslims. (They had in mind the culprits behind the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.) One pundit claimed—;without any grounding—;that Oklahoma City was "probably considered one of the largest centers of Islamic radical activity outside the Middle East." Another called for the mass surveillance or assassination of threatening foreigners. Law enforcement recorded an uptick in instances of Islamophobic harassment nationwide. And a year later, in a prelude to the 2001 Patriot Act, Congress passed the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, authorizing the FBI and federal prosecutors to spy on and prosecute any Muslim suspected of association with "international terrorists." Ackerman goes on to chronicle the boomerang effects of militarized weaponry, tactics, and culture. In this project, Reign of Terror joins the scholarship of historians like Kathleen Belew and Karen J. Greenberg, along with many other academics and reporters cited by Ackerman. But Ackerman insists on an even more discomfiting verdict: the U.S. security Click for larger view View full resolution Donald Rumsfeld in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2005 (Jim Young-Pool/Getty Images) [End Page 131] policies that have contributed to the hollowing out of American democracy and encouraged the rise of Donald Trump and the far right are part of a longer story of domination that can be traced back to the nation's founding as a settler-colonial project and slaveholding behemoth. The title of the book itself, an explicit reference to the French Revolution, is an implicit jibe at how perseverations over the crimes of lowlier challengers can obscure the more lasting cruelties of the Global North. Ackerman's career as a journalist spans nearly the entire War on Terror. He has embedded in Afghanistan and toured Guantanamo Bay's notorious detention camp, interviewed generals like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, and played a central role in monumental scoops like the Snowden leaks. The breadth of his knowledge and experience are evident throughout Reign of Terror, which focuses primarily on political dynamics within the United States. Ackerman moves chronologically from the...

Stefano Bottoni. Orbán: Un despota in Europa.

Stefano Bottoni. <i>Orbán: Un despota in Europa.</i>

Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer

Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer

Capabilities-Based “Confusion”: Why Capabilities-Based Planning Systems Struggle

In the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that the Department of Defense would henceforth use capabilitiesbased planning to guide the development of the armed forces. The popularity of the idea spread to many allied countries that also embraced the concept. However, the successful implementation of the method has been hindered by a number of factors: lack of an agreed lexicon, confusion in many defense organizations to the degree to which “threats” are used, inattention to policy priorities, heavy institutional analytical requirements, and a lack of acknowledgement of the importance money must play in any planning system. The paper concludes that whilst elements of the method are well-suited to providing objective data in support of senior leadership’s decision-making; alone, it is insufficient to drive planning, which is inherently a political process.

A Critique of The Laffer Curve

In December 1974, the economist Art Laffer had dinner at a Washington D.C. restaurant with Jude Wanniski, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. The tax rate was so high in the United States, Laffer argued, that reducing the tax rate would increase government tax revenue. As legend has it, he drew the Laffer Curve on a napkin to illustrate how reducing the tax rate would raise tax revenue. The Laffer Curve has been a mainstay of Supply-Side Economics ever since.The Laffer Curve relates government tax revenue to the tax rate. Figure 1 is the Laffer Curve (Laffer, 2004). The x-axis shows tax revenue and the y-axis shows the tax rate. The Laffer Curve plots the relationship between the tax rate and tax revenue. As figure 1 shows, tax revenue is maximized, or optimal at RO, when the tax rate is TO.&#x0D; [Fig 1: LAFFER CURVE]&#x0D; Further, the Laffer Curve illustrates that tax revenue decreases as the tax rate rises above the optimal tax rate. For example, imagine the tax rate is suboptimal at TS. At this tax rate, government revenue is suboptimal at RS. Even though the tax rate TS is higher than TO, tax revenue RS is actually lower than RO. In this case, government can increase tax revenue by reducing the tax rate. Generally, government can increase tax revenue by lowering the tax rate whenever the economy is located on the downward sloping part of the Laffer Curve. In short, the Laffer Curve suggests that extremely high taxes are counterproductive even from the government’s own perspective.Murray N. Rothbard stressed that Laffer’s analysis contains a hidden value judgement: maximizing government tax revenue is desirable. Rothbard writes,“Laffer assumes that what all of us want is to maximize tax revenue to the government. If—a big if—we are really at the upper half of the Laffer curve, we should then all want to set tax rates at that “optimum” point. But why? Why should it be the objective of every one of us to maximize government revenue? To push to the maximum, in short, the share of private product that gets siphoned off to the activities of government? I should think we would be more interested in minimizing government revenue by pushing tax rates far, far below whatever the Laffer Optimum might happen to be” (Rothbard, 1984: 17-18; Block, 2010).Economists who use the Laffer Curve conduct their analysis with a fixed curve. However, in a progressing economy, the Laffer Curve is constantly expanding. Put differently, the Laffer Curve is always shifting to the right in a progressing economy. Advocates of the Laffer Curve fail to realize that the position of the curve is far more important than the economy’s place on a given curve.The position of the Laffer Curve depends on the stock of accumulated capital. As economists underscore again and again, capital accumulation is the only way to raise overall living standards. Ludwig von Mises writes,“there is but one method available to improve the conditions of the whole population, viz., to accelerate the accumulation of capital as against the increase in population. The only method of rendering all people more prosperous is to raise the productivity of human labor, i.e., productivity per man hour, and this can be done only by placing into the hands of the worker more and better tools and machines.” (1951: 282)Significantly, capital accumulation and hence overall living standards depend on the tax rate. As economists have known for centuries, high taxes impair capital accumulation:“If the funds which the successful businessmen would have ploughed back into productive employments are [taxed and] used by the state for current expenditure or given to people who con-sume them, the further accumulation of capital is slowed down or entirely stopped. Then there is no longer any question of economic improvement, technological progress, and a trend toward higher average standards of living” (Mises, 1955: 51).

Strangers in Our Own Homes: The pandemic's xenophobic discourse

Strangers in Our Own HomesThe pandemic's xenophobic discourse Divya Victor (bio) I am writing for myself and strangers. This is the only way that I can do it. —gertrude stein As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. —donald rumsfeld i tell my four-year-old that she may, whenever she wants, smile at strangers. I began telling her this a few weeks ago, when we were walking in our neighborhood and she announced to me, with [End Page 5] pint-sized ferocity, "If I see a stranger, I will punch him in his skin." Raised for a third of her life under the mandate of social distancing, my child responded to the emergence of an imagined stranger with violent rejection, a fear as commonplace as it is piercing to someone like me, who is no stranger to being a stranger. When we finally settled on a park bench, I asked her what that stranger would look like. She looked at me confidently and answered, "Like Shere Khan"—the burned beast of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. Her fear coiled itself in my lap. I sat with its weight moving within me like an asp. In a study published during World War II, the Austrian sociologist Alfred Schutz defined the stranger as an "adult individual of our times and civilization who tries to be permanently accepted or at least tolerated by the group which he approaches." He cited the immigrant as his main example of the stranger. The feminist scholar and theorist Sara Ahmed argues that dominant cultures imagine the stranger as "a shape that appears to have linguistic and bodily integrity," one that functions as a cipher for the unknowable. The stranger encroaches, breaches, transmits, and transmutes. We recognize strangers by their unrecognizability, and through our misrecognition of them as strangers, rather than as mothers, fathers, children, partners, aunties draped in dupattas, uncles in turbans as bright as summer marigolds—rather than as, simply, beloved. While quarantining with my family in 2020, I became obsessed with the question of how immigrants and their children might move through public spaces in the United States without losing their sense of self, direction, or safety. In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a long history of nationalist representations of Asian immigrants as a peril, contagion, infection, or infestation crystalized into the term "China virus," which recalled earlier terms like "Yellow Terror" and "Dusky Peril," as the daily newspaper Puget Sound American collectively dubbed East Asians and "dusky Asiatics" in 1906. More than a century later, I want to understand what it means for Asian American immigrants to be seen as a contagion, a threat, as strangers in our own home. After all, crimes [End Page 6] of violent misrecognition are routinely perpetrated against South Asian Americans. In 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi was shot outside his own gas station in Mesa, Arizona, by a violent racist who mistook him for a terrorist. In 2012, Sunando Sen was pushed under an oncoming subway train during his daily commute in Queens, New York, by a woman who made no distinction between Hindus and Muslims, and blamed both for the September 11, 2001, attacks. In 2017, Srinivas Kuchibhotla was shot at his favorite after-work bar in Olathe, Kansas, by an anti-immigrant nationalist who thought he was an undocumented Iranian. In 2021, five members of the Muslim Afzaal family were mown down by an Islamophobic man in a pickup truck in Ontario, Canada, leaving only the family's nine-year-old son alive. Balbir ji, Sunando da, Srinivas gaaru, and the Afzaal family were strangers in the neighborhoods where they lived, worked, and owned businesses. They were seen and then unseen. First they were "recognized as not belonging, as being out of place," as Ahmed writes, and then they were misrecognized as strangers (a terrorist, "Muslim," "illegal") in a way that led directly to their deaths. Because...

Permanent War, Elusive Peace: The Evolution of America's Compellence Policy Towards Iran

Permanent War, Elusive Peace:The Evolution of America's Compellence Policy Towards Iran Nader Entessar (bio) "Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran."1 I'm thinking of hitting [Lt. General Qassem] Soleimani."2 Introduction In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, a new fluid strategy has been emerging to guide American foreign policy well into the twenty-first century. This strategy has been largely the product of a group of influential neoconservative hawks, or, in the words of James Mann, the "Vulcans" inside and outside of the U.S. government.3 With their emphasis on regime change, the neoconservatives have continuously drafted grandiose plans to redraw the geostrategic map of the Middle East to Washington's liking. For example, [End Page 95] the "Vulcans" in George W. Bush's administration replaced Europe and East Asia with the Middle East as the "fulcrum of geopolitics, the zone wherein the shape of world order will be forged. Remaking the Middle East, above all by bringing democracy to the Arab and Islamic nations of the region, therefore, must be America's overriding mission, since it is only by remaking these societies that the United States can be secure."4 Although such neoconservatives as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were known for their advocacy of muscular foreign policy and valued unilateralism, the developments on the ground in the post-invasion Iraq and elsewhere in the region compelled the Bush administration to ultimately abandon its pretensions as an international social engineer in the Middle East in favor of a more traditional "realist" approach to foreign policy decision-making. Realpolitik soon gave way to a new "grand strategy" whose foundations, as John Lewis Gaddis noted, lie in the nineteenth-century American tradition of hegemony and unilateralism.5 But unlike its nineteenth-century variation, the twenty-first century American "grand strategy" of robust interventionism is meant to be global in scope. The term neoconservatism was first coined by Michael Harrington to refer to a philosophy espoused by such anti-Soviet liberal democrats as Humbert Humphrey, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Henry "Scoop" Jackson. Many of these early American neoconservatives referred to themselves as "paleoliberals" to distinguish themselves from economic conservatives. As Michael Lind, himself a prominent former neocon has aptly noted, today's neocons are a "shrunken remnant of the original broad neocon coalition."6 In terms of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the neocons charted a new course for America's regional policy in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf War and the failed Shi'a uprising against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and later the Deputy Secretary of Defense and a leading proponent of the Iraq war took the lead in drafting a set of military guidelines called the "Defense Planning Guidance," which are normally prepared every few years by the Pentagon. Wolfowitz's draft argued for a revolutionary military and political strategy in the Post-Cold War era by rejecting the utility of containment as a relic of the Cold War. Most importantly, the report called for the [End Page 96] adoption of a new strategy of preemption to replace containment and to be prepared to act alone when military action becomes necessary. Thus, Wolfowitz challenged the primacy of both containment and multilateralism in favor of compellence in advancing U.S. foreign policy objectives in the broader Middle East. By the same token, the neocon promoters of the compellence strategy denigrated the rule of law and international norms if they conflicted with the broader goals of compellence. In this vein, John Bolton, an influential neocon official who held numerous high-level positions in the U.S. government, including a stint as the national security advisor in the Trump administration, stated: "It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want...

Covid‐19: Where We Are, What Got Us Here, and Where We Are Likely to Be Going—A Review Essay*

Covid‐19: Where We Are, What Got Us Here, and Where We Are Likely to Be Going—A Review Essay*

The Known Unknowns of Obesity and Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation.

The Known Unknowns of Obesity and Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation.

The Ford Administration, the National Security Agency, and the “Year of Intelligence”: Constructing a New Legal Framework for Intelligence

Abstract:In the mid-1970s, Congress and the judiciary moved to regulate the National Security Agency (NSA) at a moment when such regulation might have restricted the growth of electronic surveillance. The Ford administration played a crucial role in preventing that from happening. It did so by controlling the flow of intelligence information to Congress and by establishing a flexible new legal framework for intelligence based on broad executive orders, narrow legislation, and legal opinions written by executive branch lawyers. This framework fostered a perception of legality that headed off calls for comprehensive legislation governing intelligence. The Ford administration’s actions protected NSA from meaningful regulation, preserved the growth of electronic surveillance, and sustained executive branch preeminence in national security affairs. The episode proved formative for the Ford administration officials involved—including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Antonin Scalia—and solidified the central role of executive branch lawyers in national security policymaking.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Arien Mack the papers in this special issue of social research were first presented on April 4 and 5, 2019, at the thirty-eighth Social Research conference at the New School, "Unknowability: How Do We Know What Cannot Be Known?" From the earliest moments of humanity's search for answers and explanations, we have grappled with the unknowable—that which we are unable, or not permitted, to know. In this issue, our authors explore how we decide that something is unknowable rather than merely not yet known, and what criteria we use in determining that some knowledge is beyond our reach, and whether these criteria differ across fields and disciplines. What does the history of the unknowable look like? What are the now-answered questions that we once thought unanswerable? Are there enduring unknowables? Are there modes of understanding that are different from the ones used by scientists, and what is the status of knowledge gained in these alternate ways? These and other questions were the subject of our conference and are addressed in this issue. The question of what we cannot know is not only important in its own right but has also taken on additional importance in light of the rise of misinformation and "alternative facts." A better understanding of whether or not something can possibly be known has the capacity to shape inquiry, scholarly research, and public education. Furthermore, identifying what kinds of questions are unanswerable is of great intellectual and perhaps even political significance—to wit, Donald Rumsfeld's now-famous statement that "there are known knowns … there are known unknowns … and there are also unknown unknowns," to which Fintan O'Toole added "unknown knowns." [End Page xxxi] The "Unknowability" conference afforded a rare opportunity for scholars from different fields to engage with these questions during this seemingly post-truth moment in which we all are living. We hope the conference papers collected in this special issue will encourage our readers to explore these questions themselves. We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for providing the funding that made the "Unknowability" conference possible. [End Page xxxii] Copyright © 2020 The New School