Session 3C: Hermeneutics and Merleau-Ponty (Umney Lounge)

Session 3C: Hermeneutics and Merleau-Ponty (Umney Lounge)

One of the central difficulties in theorising about the history and historiography of philosophy is negotiating the apparent conflict between rational and historical forms of reconstruction. The paper argues that these dominant variants of reconstruction need not be regarded as mutually exclusive enterprises. When looked at from the perspective of philosophical hermeneutics they work together in productive ways. The aporia in reconstructive practices, I shall argue, are part of the general failure of the analytic approach to the history of philosophy to move away from an epistemologically–centred position to the adoption of a more hermeneutically-sensitive, Verstehen, model. The paper draws principally upon the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and, to a lesser extent, the writings of R. G. Collingwood and Richard Rorty. After demonstrating how reconstructions are moments within the wider hermeneutic circle of textual interpretation the paper looks at further advantages to adopting a hermeneutical perspective to the history of philosophy. Questions about disciplinary boundaries, the problems of defining the philosophical canon, and why philosophers are so concerned with their own history and yet are so unreflective about it, are usefully addressed from a hermeneutical perspective.

Josep Maria Bech (Barcelona), ‘Merleau-Ponty’s historiography of philosophy encourages sociologism despite its ontological background’

Eelco Runia, (Groningen), ‘Vico and the metonymical structure of historical knowledge’

In an article in History & Theory (43, 295-320) I described the phenomenon that historians engaged in exploring an historical trauma may unwittingly ‘reproduce’ the traumatic events they think they address. The implications of this phenomenon are quite unsettling. Historians like to think that if there is any interaction between themselves and their objects, then it is surely a ‘Kantian’ interaction, an interaction, that is, in which the research object is prefigured by what they, as subjects, bring to bear on it. If, however, historians unwittingly ‘reproduce’ the things they study, historical knowledge may be much more ‘Aristotelian’ than they like to acknowledge: historical knowledge may be determined - in a degree that is barely imaginable - by the object of research. I explored this thesis in another History & Theory-article (to be published in the Feb 2006 issue), in which I concluded that anomalous phenomena like ‘reproduction’, ‘acting out of the past’ and Huizinga’s ‘historical sensation’ can be explained by what one may tentatively call ‘presence’ (‘the unrepresented way the past is present in the here and now’). The concept of presence, conceived as the antithesis of ‘meaning,’ makes it possible to gain a much more profitable view on one of the key issues in historiography: the problem of continuity and discontinuity. It enables one to grasp continuity and discontinuity as fundamentally entwined, as lying in each other, instead of as relations that are mutually exclusive. In my Cambridge lecture I would like to connect the notion of ‘presence’ with Giambattista Vico’s interpretation of topics. My thesis will be that in Vico’s topica the whole of history is regarded as stored in ‘places’ (i.e. ‘institutions’) that can be ‘visited’ on the plane of the present. I will argue that on the level of language, these places can be identified as metonymies: presence may be said to be stored in, and brought about by, metonymy. How exactly the ‘new’ is invented out of ‘old’ metonymical places can, I think, best be grasped by taking a fresh look at one of the least understood aspects of Vico’s topica, his idea of inventio.

Leon ter Schure (Groningen), ‘Presence: a new perspective in philosophy of history?’

Since Descartes started off modern philosophy by giving a final blow to Medieval Aristotelianism in the 17^th century, the project of philosophy has been an essentially epistemological enterprise. The central problem with which philosophers since Descartes had to engage themselves, centred around the question how to bridge the gap between the subject, and an object waiting passively ‘out there’. This epistemological view has also been highly influential in the discipline of history, where it took the form of the question how to make sense of what remains of the past. From Ranke up to Hayden White the central epistemological questions in philosophy of history were questions about meaning. In recent writings however, philosophers like Eelco Runia (Groningen) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford) have proposed a new perspective in philosophy of history. While there are differences between both writers (Runia conceives of presence in a temporal way, while Gumbrecht refers to spatial, bodily relationships), they both argue that the preoccupation with meaning has led to a skewed conception of our relation to our past. Runia and Gumbrecht both distance themselves from the notion of representation. This notion, they argue, may have done a good job in overcoming historical realism, but is, by being bound up with metaphor, exclusively geared to what Runia calls ‘transfer of meaning’. Metaphor, however, cannot help to create continuity, whereas phenomena like historical cataclysms and traumata are actually entwinements of both continuity and discontinuity. According to Runia, this interpenetration can be accounted for by means of the trope of metonymy: presence (“the unrepresented way the past is present in the here and now”) is brought about by metonymy. In my lecture I will examine the place of the new presence-concept in philosophy of history. Furthermore, to clarify the notion, I will point to the way presence connects with earlier non-Cartesian, non-Kantian views on the subject-object relationship. I will argue that presence has things in common with Aristotelian metaphysics. By seeing natural objects as having a substance and a form, one can maintain that in Aristotelianism the object ‘communicates itself to the subject’. In the same way, the notion of presence suggests that ‘the past may thrust itself into the here and now.’ This reversed relationship between the historian and the past suggests that experience may precede interpretation. This implication can, I think, best be illustrated by referring to what Walter Benjamin said about it in ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. Thus, presence tells us it offers a more complete image of our relationship with the past. But can it really fulfil its promise?

Herman Paul (Groningen), ‘Prefiguring the historical field: an empirical study of metahistory’

This paper intends to make two claims. First, I will argue that twentieth-century philosophy of history, as practiced in Europe and the United States, never was an academic discipline in institutional terms or a coherent field of study in terms of research interests. Although philosophy of history could be said to centre around a set of key terms – progress, meaning, objectivity, interpretation and representation come to mind – the meanings attributed to these terms varied according to the types of questions that philosophers of history from the days of Georg Simmel to those of Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht defined as central to their activity. Therefore, historians of twentieth-century philosophy of history might do well to practice some modest form of Begriffsgeschichte. As a way of illustrating how such a Begriffsgeschichte might look like, I hope to show how, from the 1920s to the early 1970s, the word ‘metahistory’ played a crucial role in defining the borders between ‘analytical’ and ‘speculative’ approaches to the past. In tracing the meanings attributed to this term during the crisis of historicism, the debates surrounding Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History and the post-war disputes on historical explanation, I will demonstrate that ‘metahistory’ was often used as a marker of ‘difference’ or ‘otherness’. Secondly, I will claim that, due to a lack of attention to this semantic history, the reception of what is perhaps the most influential study of ‘metahistory’ – Hayden White’s magnum opus from 1973 – has been seriously distorted. In contrast to what most scholarly references to Metahistory seem to suggest, White’s book did not offer anything like an investigation of linguistic structures in historical narratives. In Metahistory, White rather traced the historiographical implications of ‘metaphysical views’ held by historians and philosophers of history in nineteenth-century Europe. Based on a close reading of its chapter on Ranke, I will argue that Metahistory not so much introduced the ‘narrativist’ paradigm that White would later become associated with, but rather sought to overcome the dichotomy between Geschichtsphilosophie and Logik der Geschichte that had originally occasioned the use of ‘metahistory’ amongst philosophers of history.

11.30 Session 4A: Historiography and analytic philosophy (Umney Theatre)

Hanjo Glock (Reading), ‘Analytic philosophy and history – a mismatch’

In recent years, even some practitioners have accused analytic philosophy of being unduly ahistorical. My aim is to defend analytic philosophy against these accusations, which so far have gone largely unchallenged. Against the objection that analytic philosophers have ignored the past, I argue that for the most part they only resist the unfounded claim that an understanding of history is essential rather than merely advantageous to philosophy. Against the objection that analytic histories of philosophy are anachronistic, I argue that approaching the past with a view to substantive issues makes not just for better philosophy, but also for better history.

Michael Beaney (York), ‘Analytic philosophy and historiography’

Analytic philosophy has had an uneasy relationship with the discipline of history of philosophy for most of its life. Analytic philosophers often either scorn history of philosophy or else simply ignore it. Where interpretations have been offered of great philosophers of the past, they have tended to be ‘rational reconstructions’. In recent years, however, philosophers brought up in the analytic tradition have begun to look at the history of analytic philosophy itself more seriously, and debates about the relationship between philosophy and history of philosophy have been brought closer to home. I shall look at this development and explore its historiographical implications, focusing, in particular, on the idea of rational reconstruction.

Marion Ledwig (Stockholm), ‘How one should understand a dead philosopher: experimental psychology applied to the history of philosophy’

I defend the view that one can use similar methods as in interpreting experimental psychology, when answering the question how one should understand a dead philosopher. Moreover, I also point out that criteria used for finding out the credibility of children as witnesses in case of sexual offences can be generalized to other subject areas, so that these criteria can be used for investigating the credibility of fellow contemporaries of philosophers when reporting on these philosophers and their philosophies.

Vasso Kindi (Athens), ‘Glancing at history’

Despite the historicist turn in philosophy of science in the 1960s, which brought historical considerations to bear upon philosophy, the two disciplines, history and philosophy of science have grown apart. There were reservations from both sides: philosophers feared that if they were to rely on history they would have to face the is/ought divide, problems of underdetermination and a slim evidential base comprised of few historical cases which would not satisfactorily support any kind of generalization. Historians, on the other hand, feared philosophy’s embrace which would result in philosophically inspired history of the whig kind. The metaphor of ‘marriage of convenience’ was used to explain the estrangement that followed the early excitement over the encounter of the two disciplines and the failure of the relationship between history and philosophy of science was declared.

Thomas Kuhn, who was largely responsible for the historical bend of philosophy of science, contended in his late writings that although, initially, he thought that his historical work provided him with historical evidence for his conclusions about science, he later realized that he could have derived the same results from first principles with history entering only by glance. Kuhn’s glance at history was supposed to present him with the historical perspective, i.e. a perspective that offers a dynamic conception of science. Yet, one can abandon the static image of science and look at it as an enterprise developing over time from within philosophy itself, without, that is, using any actual historical work. So, glancing at history in the Kuhnian sense becomes a gratuitous gesture and the question then is –given also the aforementioned problems – whether there is any role left for history of science in philosophy of science.

In the paper I want to exploit Kuhn’s suggestion of “glancing at history” in order to show that history of science can have a function in relation to philosophy of science but not in the direction he proposed. My suggestion is to compare summoning facts from the history of science to Wittgenstein’s reminding us of facts of our natural history (real and fictitious). In the Science Studies literature this comparison has been taken to imply that philosophy ought to be replaced by ethnomethodology which virtually reduces philosophical investigation to empirical research. I want to claim that this was not the case with Wittgenstein and it should not be the case with philosophy of science. I will proceed by discussing the status and role of Wittgenstein’s reminders, -itself a much contested issue in the literature-, and then examine whether history of science can be used by philosophy of science in the same manner. I maintain that recourse to cases of the history of science could serve one particular philosophical purpose, that of combating essentialism, by displaying the variety of ways science has been practiced. In that role, history is not an underlabourer ordered by philosophy, but it proves helpful by preserving one of its own proper goals, that of attending to the concrete and variegated details of particulars.

Anja Skaar Jacobsen (Roskilde), ‘The relation between Marxist philosophy of history, philosophy of science, and the historiography of science in the work of Léon Rosenfeld’

The Belgian physicist, Léon Rosenfeld (1904–74), is best known for his works with Niels Bohr on the epistemology of quantum electrodynamics and as a fierce defender of the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Rosenfeld had a strong interest in epistemology and history of physics and published numerous works in both fields. As a Marxist he also took a keen interest in the social relations of science. His historical works clearly reflect the tension between on the one hand seeing science as an intellectual activity, developing according to its own, internal conceptual dynamics, and at the same time as tied to economic preoccupations, class interests, and ideological values of particular historical periods and cultures. A central topic in his works was a general understanding and explanation of society’s reception of scientific discovery. To be sure, Rosenfeld was much more a physicist than he was a historian of science and his historical works have not been that influential. However, through his immense network of historians of science in Europe and his many posts in history of science societies in for example England and Denmark and in history of science commissions under UNESCO, he was an important figure in forming history of science in the period in question. There exists only scarce literature on the historiography of science in the period 1930-60, despite the fact that in this period history of science was institutionalised and strengthened as a discipline and that various, sometimes opposing, intellectual currents attempted to set the agenda as concerns historiography. In my paper I will explore the relationship between Marxist philosophy of history, the influence of Mach and the classic issues of epistemology, and thorough historical investigation in Rosenfeld’s works in order to contribute to the understanding of this important period in the historiography of science.

Session 4C: Early modern philosophy (Umney Lounge)

S.-J. Savonius (Cambridge), ‘Pierre Bayle and John Locke’

Duncan Kelly (Sheffield), ‘Adam Smith: the history of philosophy and the propriety of liberty’

In this paper, I would like to consider Adam Smith’s history of philosophy, particularly as outlined in the later sections of his Theory of Moral Sentiments. In so doing, the discussion will locate Smith’s account of various systems of moral philosophy within the context of a wider concern in his work with the delineation of a notion of liberty understood as a form of propriety. This is understood both in terms of the propriety of particular actions as expressed by individuals and judged by (impartial) spectators, and the way in which those individuals can be said to have some kind of proprietorial control over their passions in the first place. Outlining some of the contexts for understanding these views, and assessing the development of his arguments, leads to an interpretation of Smith that builds on recent attempts to rethink his moral philosophy in the light of broader claims about his work as a whole. The discussion will try to show how Smith’s own historiography of moral philosophy is informed by the desire to defend the notion of propriety. It will highlight once again the importance of appraising sentiments and sociability to understanding Smith’s philosophy itself, but also argue that this informs the very way in which it is written and presented.

14.00 Session 5A: Twentieth-century French historiography (Umney Theatre)

Michael Heidelberger (Tübingen), ‘Emile Boutroux’s conception of the historiography of philosophy: a Franco-German affair’

Émile Boutroux (1845-1921) was the dominating French historian of philosophy for over a generation. His conception of the historiography of philosophy as well as of the contingency of the laws of nature (see his dissertation “De la contingence des lois de la nature” of 1874) was heavily influenced by the German neo-Kantian Eduard Zeller (1814-1908) with whom Boutroux had studied in Heidelberg for a year at the eve of the Franco-Prussian war 1870/71. Zeller’s widely read and translated “Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung” (1856-1868) represented a manifesto against Hegelian history of philosophy as a logic of concepts and has to be seen in connection with Zeller’s plea for “Erkenntnis-theorie”. The paper will trace Boutroux’s modification of Zeller’s programme for the French context.

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (Paris X, Nanterre), ‘Meyerson a chemist turned philosopher’

Meyerson is known as a philosopher who displayed an impressive erudition both in history of science and philosophy, some one who spent his lifetime in reading and writing. His readers can testify (and sometimes complain) that his philosophical claims were based on and tested against a wide range of historical episodes taken from a variety of sciences. Moreover it is clear that he had an intellectualist approach to science, as he was more concerned with theories than with scientific practices. Therefore it does not really matter that he was trained as a laboratory chemist and that he had practised industrial chemistry in his early career. These aspects are biographical details hardly mentioned as mere anecdotes. I would like to question the standard view that chemistry did not really matter or did act as an anti-model in Meyerson‘s philosophy. I will argue that not only chemistry provided a kind of entrance hall in the history and philosophy of science, as Meyerson himself often acknowledged, but it also shaped his philosophy

Cristina Chimisso (Open University), ‘Philosophy as reflection on history of philosophy and science in the work of Léon Brunschvicg’

Léon Brunschvicg’s works are often overlooked nowadays, especially outside France. However, for the historian of twentieth-century French philosophy Brunschvicg is one of the most important authors, also because of the importance that his doctrines had for subsequent French philosophers, such as Bachelard, Cavaillès, Canguilhem and Foucault. In a recent article, Frédéric Worms has rightly written that it is impossible to understand twentieth-century philosophical attitudes towards science without analysing Brunschvicg’s and Bergson’s works. In my paper, I shall discuss the triangular relationship between philosophy, history and science in Brunschvicg’s work, and his conceptions of philosophy as reflection on the history of thought, and of the mind as plastic. I shall show that his philosophy supported the Third Republic’s secular liberalism, and, more specifically, that his conception of the mind supported his defence of progress and of what he saw as ‘western civilisation’.

Alan Richardson (UBC), ‘What, for history, is logical empiricism? Remarks toward an empirical history of logical empiricism’

It is not news that there have been, and continue to be, schools, movements, traditions, themes, and so on in the history of philosophy. Insufficient attention has been given, however, by philosophers to what such historical objects are and why citing them provides understanding. There is little doubt that, within philosophy of science, the project entitled “logical empiricism” began as a movement in philosophy and that it became something like a school, and then passed into the state of being “the received view” before ceasing to be a live philosophical project entirely. There are several doubts that might follow on from such an informal description of the historical arc of logical empiricism, however. First, the explanatory value of such a description might be found wanting, if we lack an account of what, for example, a “movement” in philosophy is and why they are important for the development of philosophy. Second, there may be little empirical purchase in such talk; what, after all, are the hallmarks of a “school” in philosophy and how do they differ from “movements”? This essay asks empiricist philosophers to find resources in history and sociology of science for asking empirical questions in the history of philosophy and finding answers to such questions

Aaron Preston (Malone College, Ohio), ‘What the history of the historiography of analytic philosophy teaches us about historiography, philosophy, and analytic philosophy’

I argue (1) that the historiography of analytic philosophy has undergone an evolution that can be parsed (roughly) into three main phases, (2) that work in the first phase helped to solidify what, at the time, had already been established as the “received view” of analytic philosophy, and (3) that work in the second and third phases, though they differ methodologically, have in common the tendency to define or characterize analytic philosophy in ways that are consistent neither with first-phase characterizations nor with the historical realities surrounding analytic philosophy’s emergence and quick rise to prominence in the first half of the twentieth century. From the puzzle that arises in contrasting first-phase against later-phase characterizations of analytic philosophy, I attempt to draw some general lessons for the historiographer of philosophy concerning the kinds of person-groupings (collectivities) and related phenomena we make use of in “carving up history”. Specifically, I argue that only historiography which keeps the focus on certain types of collectivities (etc.) can be philosophically—as opposed to historically—illuminating. Finally, I draw out some implications of the fact that analytic philosophy cannot be treated in this philosophically illuminating way.

Henrique Jales Ribeiro (Coimbra), ‘On the history of the history of analytical philosophy’

Compared to continental historiography, analytical historiography is not just another methodologically different way of interpreting the history of philosophy. On the contrary, it is truly constitutive, in the Kantian sense of the word, of (analytical) philosophy itself. With that in mind, this paper presents the broad metahistorical and metaphilosophical contexts according to which philosophical research must be (and is actually) carried out. To that effect, a study is offered of the emergence and development of the concept of “philosophical analysis” from Russell’s historiography onwards, taking as a case study the role of the concept of protohistory in the history of analytical philosophy. A protohistory is an ideal period of the beginning of analytical philosophy containing, at an embryonic stage, the norms and criteria of a programmed development for true philosophical analysis as well as of the distinction between the latter and a spurious or contaminated analysis, alien to analytical philosophy’s genuine heritage. The so-called “British tradition of empiricism”, such as can be found in A. J. Ayer and especially in the ordinary language philosophy of the sixties; the theory that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus grounded philosophical analysis in its proper basis; or the theory —this, like the previous one, emanating from some trends in contemporary analytical historiography— that such honour first belonged to Frege, are illustrations of different kinds of such protohistories in the history of analytical philosophy, whose main purpose was not purely historiographic but, more generally, to ensure the legitimacy of what true philosophical analysis was to be. In the light of this close connection between philosophy and historiography, the argument is made for the need of a history of the history of analytical philosophy.

Session 5C: Categorising matter (Umney Lounge)

Kevin Chang (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), ‘From vitalistic earth to materialistic globe: Johann Joachim Becher and Georg Ernst Stahl on subterranean physics and chemistry of minerals’

This paper addresses an important chapter in the history of philosophy of matter by examining the subterranean physics and chemistry of minerals in the works of Johann Joachim Becher and Georg Ernst Stahl. The historiography of chemistry tends to view Stahl as a close follower of Becher's chemical teachings. It is said that his phlogiston theory originated in Becher's theory, and that their view of the earth and minerals formed a school that relied as its foundation on Becher's Physica subterranea, a work which studied the principles, generation, compounding, and motion of subterranean minerals. Although this stereotyped view is not completely wrong, it nevertheless overlooks important differences between Becher and Stahl. One of the most significant ones lay on the generative power of the earth. Becher, like many Renaissance thinkers, supposed a vitalistic earth in whose bowels metals and minerals grew and regenerated themselves. Stahl, on the other hand, rejected this vitalistic earth and replaced it with a materialistic globe that was stripped of its generative power. Also very significant was Stahl's disagreement with Becher on the nature of the mercury principle, usually thought by the alchemists to be the principle of metals. The immediate objective of this paper is to elucidate these differences and their significance in the history and philosophy of chemistry and alchemy. Although neither of Stahl and Becher was articulate philosophy, the development of the alchemical conception of the earth reflected a fundamental transition from the Renaissance, vitalistic view of matter to a mechanistic matter theory, which further laid the ground for, for example, Kant’s philosophy of matter, and for much discussions on the inertness or affinity of matter in the age of the Enlightenment.

Georgette Taylor (UCL), ‘The boundaries of affinity: drawing a line between chemistry and natural philosophy’

In his influential works on the chemistry and philosophy in Enlightenment Edinburgh, A. L. Donovan noted the influence of the Scottish philosophers Hume and Hutcheson on William Cullen’s chemistry lectures. Taking up this point, I argue that their influence is particularly evident in the ‘black boxing’ of affinity tables implicit in his system. While this strategy was justified by Humean causal scepticism, it also imposed a chemical autonomy in accordance with Hutcheson’s empirical prescriptions. In my paper I will show that Cullen distinguished his chemistry from natural philosophy (or the mechanical branch thereof) by its concern for ‘the particular properties of bodies’; a practice that stands in stark contrast to the mechanical properties (extension and figure) highlighted by most philosophically orientated historians who write about this time period. Cullen also felt that Affinity (or ‘elective attraction’) was one of the two agents of chemical change and that it was to be exploited in the pursuance of the utilitarian goal of chemical practice: the inducement of change in the ‘qualities’ of matter. This meant that Cullen’s methodology was founded on the manipulation of affinities and that consequently, the table which ordered those affinities imposed tacit limits on chemical practice, demarcating it from natural philosophy. Such a state of affairs has implicit historiographical repercussions and I will highlight a few. Throughout the paper I shall draw on extracts from Cullen’s 1766 chemistry lecture course.

Matthew D Eddy (Durham), ‘Names, ideas and signs: the medical and philosophical foundations of Dugald Stewart’s ‘nominalistic’ philosophy of mind’.

In Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792) the young Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) declared he was a nominalist. In doing so he verbalised a persuasion that that had already been present in Edinburgh’s Medical School for quite some time, especially in the work of William Cullen (1710-1790). In this essay I suggest that Stewart ‘named’ the philosophical mechanism inherent in nominalistic approach to classification practiced by the Medical School. I do this by first outlining Cullen’s ‘medical nominalism’ and then I move on to show how Stewart transformed this notion into a heuristic model of mental classification. In formulating his position, Stewart drew from the notion of ‘idea’, ‘name’ and ‘sign’ as developed by several Scottish and French chemists and philosophers, especially, Thomas Reid (1710-1796), George Campbell (1719-1796) and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715-1780). Building on both his philosophical and medical influences he created a ‘nominalistic’ philosophy of mind in which names were used as signs for ideas. Consequentially, he held that all human thought, whether scientific or artistic, was simply an act of mental classification. Such a position on the philosophy of mind is slightly different from what many historians and philosophers have taken to be normative in the Scottish Enlightenment. Throughout the paper I will comment on the need for a revised historiography that recognises the nominalistic nuances of Stewart and his contemporaries.

Session 5D: Hegel and historiography (Teaching Room 7)

Raffaella Santi (Urbino), ‘Historiography and the unity of philosophy and of science: Hegel and Whewell’