Rethinking and remaking the contemporary world after International Relations’ philosophical enlargement

Abstract

International Relations as a special filed of knowledge has developed in a contradictory relation with the social sciences. Thus a tension has raised between its identity as a field and the claims to open up to other disciplines. This has spurred a series of interesting changes within the theoretical discussion of I.R. In the last decades the level of theoretical abstraction has raised and a philosophical enlargement of I.R. (as we name it here) has taken place in the sense of epistemological, ontological and axiological discussions of the foundations of  I. R. made themselves more present in its theories. This article tries to account for these movements through the positivism-postpositivism debate and its limits, the epistemological bases of the discipline and theirs limits, and their practical dimensions.