Bshp conference Spring 2006 Philosophy and Historiography: Abstracts
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- Session 7B: Anachronism and Skinner’s historiography (Music Room)
- Session 7C: Renaissance and early modern philosophy (Umney Lounge)
Wednesday 5 April9.00 Session 7A: Historiography of mathematics (Umney Theatre) Jeremy Gray (Open University), ‘Geometric fantasies – the philosophies of complex analysis in the 19th Century’ Current work by a number of people focuses on interactions between history of mathematics and philosophy of mathematics. This paper considers the rise of complex analysis – one of the central topics in 19th Century mathematics – from a historical standpoint. There were two rival approaches to the subject, and they lead to important philosophical issues about the practice of mathematics. José Ferreirós (Seville), ‘In and with the rest of knowledge: reflections on mathematics, science and philosophy in the 19th century’ The 19th century was both the period in which current traditions in historiography began to emerge (with the history of philosophy as a particularly relevant example) and a time marked by the widening divide between philosophy and the sciences. The tendency of philosophers to concentrate on what they considered to be landmark authors, fed back by those lines of thought that were dominant at the time, has produced the exclusion of very significant thinkers. Among these, one tends to find all authors who fought to occupy positions in the unstable area of the divide, i.e., thinkers – of particular interest for us today – who tried to fight the growing distance between philosophy and scientific knowledge. These could not only be professional philosophers (of which a key example is Johann Friedrich Herbart, from whose work I have taken my title words), but also personalities who were categorized as scientists, say e.g. Riemann, Fechner, Helmholtz and many others. The analytic tradition has done an interesting work in rescuing some of these names and works from oblivion, but obviously it has also ignored some others. We thus find the usual phenomenon: 20th century categorizations and classifications have oversimplified and distorted the past. The effect is particularly visible with names and works coming from the German-speaking countries, because 19th-century intellectual life in the German area was particularly conducive to interactions between different areas of scholarship. (This was mainly a result of the organization of the university system, the atmosphere in Philosophy Faculties and the Lernfreiheit – consider e.g. the careers of Husserl or Frege.) My talk will concentrate on such names, discussing some of my experiences in the search for adequately understanding the philosophical sides of the work of mathematicians. Prominent in my talk will be Dedekind, Cantor, Herbart, but especially Bernhard Riemann, who offers in my opinion a most noteworthy case study. It is noteworthy because of the importance and impact of his contributions, but it is also very much from the historiographic point of view, because of the way in which his case underscores the poverty of our usual categorizations and reconstructions. Riemann’s mathematical work has recently been shown to constitute a most important background for Frege’s philosophical reflection on mathematics. I shall unravel another intriguing line of influence, the way in which his mathematical and philosophical ruminations on the idea of Abbildung (representation, mapping) found their way into Wittgenstein’s Tractatus by the mediation of Herz’s Mechanics. It seems revealing that these connections could have escaped the attention of scholars for as long as they indeed have. Steve Russ (Warwick), ‘The ‘grounding’ of truths in Bolzano’s philosophy and his mathematics’ Bolzano’s objective semantics, developed in the framework of his an sich realm of propositions and ideas, was a powerful and explicit driving force for fruitful new mathematical concepts such as topological definitions of geometrical objects, purely arithmetic definitions of convergence and continuity, and sophisticated notions of measurable number akin to later constructions of real numbers. The suggestion put forward in this paper is to identify the influence in the other direction: that some of his fundamental philosophical notions themselves owed considerable debt to his early sustained attention to mathematics. A major recurring theme in Bolzano’s early mathematical work is his perception of a profound disorder among the existing presentations of mathematics (beginning in high profile with the geometry of Euclid’s Elements). For example, concepts were being introduced (such as those of the plane or of motion in elementary geometry) which were out of place. Geometrical concepts were being used in analytic results (such as the intermediate value theorem) where logically they were alien or already presupposed in the analytic result. The claim of this paper is that the search for a remedy for this disorder influenced the development of Bolzano’s concept of ‘ground-consequence’: a relationship holding within the objective realm of true propositions in themselves. The relation of ground-consequence (Abfolge) is introduced in §162 of Bolzano’s Wissenschaftslehre (1837). Of the two propositions: (i) it is warmer in location X than in location Y; (ii) the thermometer stands higher at location X than in location Y; each one is a basis for knowing (Erkenntnisgrund) the other but (i) is a ground for the consequence (ii), and not conversely. We shall trace some of the steps in the development of this relationship in Bolzano’s work from its implicit presence even in 1804, through reference to the ‘objective connection’ among truths in 1810, to the notion of justification or ‘grounding’ (Begrűndung) of truths in contrast to a mere ‘making certain’ (Gewissmachung) by 1817. Bolzano evidently believed that his ground-consequence relationship can, and should, be applied to mathematics. We discuss some of the uncomfortable, but fruitful, consequences of this belief. History makes stories as much as it recounts them and one of the challenges of unfolding this story is to do justice to the integrity of Bolzano’s thought that paid no attention to the disciplinary boundaries that beset our thinking. There is a curious asymmetry in the use of history and philosophy in much written history of mathematics. Mathematical ideas are recognised as the foreground actors in a complex dynamic drama while philosophical ideas, if they are mentioned at all, are relegated to a relatively static part of the background scenery. It was quite otherwise for Bolzano working as he was in vigorous opposition to many aspects of Kant’s thinking. The early 19th century was a time of far-reaching developments in both philosophy and mathematics. Bolzano’s contributions and insights, in spite of, and because of, their lack of direct influence, raise fascinating historiographical issues for our understanding of mathematics and its many philosophical neighbourhoods. We shall draw on (among other sources) recent work of Sandra Lapointe (‘Bolzano, Kant and the Burden of Proofs’, forthcoming), Ian Hacking's Historical Ontology and some of the relevant volumes of the ongoing Bernard Bolzano Gesamtausgabe edition.
Carlos Spoerhase (Berlin), ‘Do we have to forget the present in order to understand the past? A vindication of present-centred methodologies in the history of philosophy’ My paper deals with the major methodological problems raised by anachronistic interpretations and argues that anachronisms often play an important and legitimate part of historiographical research. Anachronism and whiggism (i.e. the application of our current concepts to times when these concepts were not part of the conceptual space of the day) is a topic that has recently earned a high level of interest, especially in the history of philosophy, the history of science and the history of ideas. Over the past few decades, the historiographical discussion of the role that so-called whiggisms play has gradually become dominated by anti-presentist methodologies, like those propounded by Thomas Kuhn in the history of science and by Quentin Skinner in the history of political ideas. Indeed, making sense of the past in the vocabulary of the present does involve serious epistemological risks. From the standpoint of an anti-presentist methodology, historians are only proceeding properly if they observe an availability principle, which is seen as the guarantor of respectable scholarship. This availability principle disallows the use of knowledge, descriptive terms, or classification schemes, which were not accessible to the contemporaries of the object of interpretation. This historistic point of view was more often than not set in sharp contrast to a seemingly dubious “whiggism”, which appeared to observe historical phenomena from a purely presentist perspective. While legitimate historiographic research aimed to separate reconstructions of the past strictly from present-day knowledge, the “whiggish” historiographer was supposedly making the mistake of not trying to understand the past ‘from itself’ but from the ‘distorting’ viewpoint of the present. The paper tries to give a short overview of the main participants of the anachronism debate contrasting the different perspectives on anachronism, which have been developed in the last decades (starting with Georges Canguilhem and proceeding to Thomas Kuhn, Quentin Skinner, Nick Jardine, Mark Bevir and Adrian Wilson). It is argued that all anti-presentist positions ultimately derive their plausibility from an historical availability principle. After a thorough reconstruction and critical assessment of the main characteristics of the availability principle, I conclude that the anti-presentist accounts of historical interpretation ultimately face some major problems due to the implausibility of the availability principle. The historical availability principle cannot claim to be universally valid. Therefore, interpretations of the history of science and the history of philosophy, which breach the availability principle, cannot simply be rejected across the board. Against strict anti-presentist methodologies I argue that anachronism still play a relevant, and, still more important, a legitimate role in historiographical research. As a result, it will be concluded that although the anti-presentist objections may be justified in individual cases, they do not disallow all forms of presentist research. In certain contexts, interpretations, which breach the availability principle, can be usefully deployed if they fulfil specifiable epistemic functions. In order to understand the past, historians of philosophy more often than not will be well advised not to forget the present. Richard Randell (Webster University, Geneva), ‘The intentionalist methodology of Quentin Skinner’ In this paper the hermeneutic assumptions of the intentionalist historiography of Quentin Skinner are evaluated in the context of debates within contemporary literary theory and criticism. In an essay published in 1988 Quentin Skinner (1988, 232) remarked that “it would be a relevant and devastating criticism if it could be shown—as Deconstructionist critics claim to show—that this project embodies an impossibility, since there is nothing determinate to recover and understand.Also note discussion of "impossibility" in article referring to Schochet. ” Wishing neither to take up nor eschew the deconstructionist mantle, but taking up the challenge to show that there is indeed “nothing determinate to recover and understand” within the intentionalist project, I argue that those intentions which, it is claimed, have or may be recovered, are none other than constructions of the intentionalist hermeneutic itself. This complex, albeit deceptively simple hermeneutic apparatus, in presenting itself as a relay apparatus that allows for a pre-existing, “determinate” meaning to be conveyed from author to reader, occludes, I argue, the processes by which meaning is created by the hermeneutic apparatus of intentionalism. I argue that Skinner’s claim that it is possible to recover an objective intentional meaning in a text is an untenable claim and that we should thus give up the notion that there is some objective meaning to be found in texts, which can be distinguished from “subjective” meanings. Based on a reading of Skinner’s methodological essays I identify two versions of intentionalism in Skinner’s oeuvre, which I call the strong and the weak versions of intentionalism. I argue that neither the strong version nor the weak version of intentionalism are sustainable: the strong version because it is open to all the objections the weak version attempts to limit and contain, the weak version because the objections it attempts to contain cannot in practice be contained. Sami Syrjämäki (Tampere), ‘Quentin Skinner on anachronism’ Quentin Skinner's early text “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” has become one of the most often cited text of the genre. The text, which Skinner himself has described as “terrorist attack” is polemically written and offers some wonderful slogans for readers to seize upon. My intention here is to clarify Quentin Skinner’s conceptions of anachronism. Skinner does have a reputation of being adamant when it comes to anachronistic interpretations of history and this is much because of what he wrote in “Meaning and Understanding”. He still does not hesitate to call anachronisms sins (‘On Encountering the Past?’ Interview with Quentin Skinner. Interview with Koikkalainen and Syrjämäki, 2002). Yet, already in “Meaning and Understanding” he explicitly states that the historian cannot get rid of his (contemporary) perspective: “it is inescapable […] for the historian of ideas to approach his material with preconceived paradigms” and that […] [I]t will never in fact be possible simply to study what any given classic writer has said (especially in an alien culture) without bringing to bear some of one’s own expectations about what he must be saying? He seems to think that anachronisms are sins but nevertheless the historian is somehow bound give an anachronistic interpretation. What can we make of this? To understand this paradox we have to speak of anachronisms in more detailed way. We need to demarcate between different kinds of anachronisms and here Skinner is able to offer some help. It is well noticed that “Meaning and Understanding” presents a typology of anachronistic interpretations which Skinner calls mythologies. Commentators refer to four different kinds of mythologies Skinner describes: mythologies of doctrines, of coherence, of prolepsis and of parocholism. What has gone almost unnoticed is that Skinner’s typology of anachronistic mythologies is much more detailed. If we count all the subcategories and subcategories of the subcategories we will find that Skinner actually describes up to 19 different types of mythologies. The exact number of different types depends on how we interpret some differences between an upper level category and a subcategory, but if we count only the lowest level categories of each of the four main categories then we can safely say that Skinner distinguishes at least 12 different forms of mythologies, which are some of the sins that the historians are tempted to commit. Yet Skinner does not give an explicit account of the type of anachronism that seems to be the most important to notice. As I mentioned above Skinner insists that historians are bound to present in a way that is inescapable: they necessarily approach the history “with preconceived paradigms”. This is a type of anachronism that is crucial for understanding Skinner’s methodological views. I shall call this type of anachronism “original sin” because there is no way around it. I will present a detailed presentation of Skinner’s typology of anachronisms and along the way deal with some misreadings. Session 7C: Renaissance and early modern philosophy (Umney Lounge) Vasily Arslanov (IMPRS Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte), ‘Can the historian be non-partisan? Philosophical paradoxes in the Chronicle of Sebastian Franck’ This paper attempts to accentuate some philosophical aspects of the Chronicle, or Historical Bible (1531), the major historical work of the German Spiritualist Sebastian Franck (ca. 1500-1542), and, in the broader perspective, sets a goal to contribute to the history of “objectivity” in historiography. Scholars have long debated the glaring contradiction between Franck’s declarative promise to give a thoroughly objective account of the past and his seemingly naïve technique of using doubtful historical sources almost without any serious attempt of critique. Adding to this inconsistency is the introduction to the Chronicle, where Franck declares that a historian's duty is to purify the past from falsities. I will analyze Franck’s use of paradoxes in order to demonstrate that his peculiar philosophical views must be taken in consideration in understanding his historical narratives. One of the most striking inconsistencies of the Chronicle is that Franck repeatedly refers his readers to the biased evidences while clearly opposing to these evidences the idea of history as the objective course of events. I will argue that this incoherence is intentional and that the keys to the puzzle can be found in the Chronicle itself. In the introduction as well as in several passages of the body Franck implies that each written evidence (including the Holy Scripture) is ambiguous: it either misleads the reader or points the way to the truth. Paradoxically, this ambiguity depends not on the particular evidence but on the reader’s spiritual freedom. Only those who are independent from any ideological bondage can see truth through any evidence and thus approximate themselves to God. Others can also extract some information from evidences which may be useful for their egoistic (or “sectarian”) purposes but it will corrupt them morally and move even farther from God. Franck postulates two prerequisites for the correct reading of historical evidences: aversion to any dogma and detachment (Gelassenheit). In the age of Reformation, such views had a highly explosive potential for they challenged the monopoly of religious communities on spiritual matters. According to Franck, truth is shared by individuals, not by institutions; faction interests perverse truth, just as vanity does. Summing up, Franck implies that a historical evidence, if read correctly, can hint at truth, although it is not the truth itself. Thus the historian declines possible charges in subjectivity and in terms of his own epistemology remains wholly non-partisan. I suggest to view Franck's “paradoxical” epistemology within the context of contemporary debates over fake evidences and “true” knowledge. Like many of his contemporaries, Franck both was eager to conceal his non-conformist views by confusing censors and hostile readers and also searched passionately for direct way to the truth. Constance Blackwell (International Society for Intellectual History), ‘The progress of philosophy: Pierre Gassendi’s De origine et varietate logicae and its use as a model for a history of philosophy as the progress of thought: Jena 1700-1744’ Pierre Gassendi’s De origine et varietate logicae is generally over looked today, but in its time, and particularly in the first thirty years in Jena it was considered a work of great importance. It set out how logic had improved over time, and set the pattern for the history of philosophy to be thought of as the improvement of logic. The work was not generally known in England. Gassendi’s Institutio logicae was published by Roger Daniel in 1660 and republished eight years later. The De origine et varietate logicae did not include it. It was not published until the Oxford edition of1718. This was not the case in Europe. The work caught the attention of Christian Thomasius who praised it in his. This praise was taken seriously by the group of theologican-philosophers in Jena. These men followed a certain tradition of Eclecticism that rejected myth and metaphor in philosophy and separated the method used for knowledge of God, natural knowledge from that to be used for natural philosophy, artificial knowledge. Like Gassendi, and indeed like those sixteenth century Aristotelians they praised Zabarella and certain and parts of the Coimbra commentary on the De Anima. They believed held that the only valid knowledge about the natural world was knowledge gained through sense perception. Because they praised some sixteenth century Aristotelian philosophers does not mean these Germans were backward, for the looked to John Locke’s logic to supplant these earlier philosophers. They also like Gassendi rejection of Descartes’s method of reasoning for natural philosophy. Jean Le Clerc is an extremely important figure in the transmission of Locke’s philosophy. Not only did he know Locke personally and discuss him in his journal Bibliotheque universelle et historique and Bibliotheque choise, publish a summary the Essai philosphique touchant la Entendrement, 1688 in Amsterdam, and edit the Ouevres diveres with his life of Locke in 1710 but write a widely used text book. One could argue it was Le Clerc’s text book that included Logica, Ontologica, Pneumatologica and Physica – a work, used throughout Protestant Europe, Germany, the Netherlands and England - that probably had the greatest impact on the young philosophers. Brucker knew this text and quoted from it in his Historia philosophia doctrinae de ideis. In that work the young Jacob Brucker brought together three traditions. 1) The anti-Platonist critique that had carried on from the early 16th to the eighteenth, a critique with which Zabarella and the Coimbra commentary on the De anima agreed. that Pierre Gassendi encorporated into his history of logic, and Le Clerc agreed in his criticizm of the Zoroaster text in Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy. 2) Gassendi’s anti- Cartesianism, and finally 3) Brickler transformed and made contemporary Gassendi’s history of inductive reasoning in the De origine et varietate logicae. Gassendi had praised Epicurus over all ancient philosophers, rejected medieval philosophy and ended with praise for Francis Bacon’s inductive reasoning. Brucker replaced Bacon with Locke and thus makes John Locke the logician of choice for those who want to develop natural philosophy. Locke’s popularity can also be measured by a survey of the collection of his works in German libraries of the time. Leo Catana (Copenhagen), ‘Jacob Brucker’s historiographical concept “system of philosophy”’ Jacob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae (1742-1744) was a very important contribution to the history of philosophy as a philosophical discipline. One of the key elements employed by Brucker in this work, was the methodological concept ‘system of philosophy’, which he applied on all earlier philosophies, in order to achieve what he considered a methodologically sound exposition. What does the concept mean? To Brucker, a ‘system of philosophy’ is characterized by the following four features: (a) it is autonomous in regard to other, non-philosophical disciplines; (b) all doctrines stated within the various branches of philosophy can be deduced from one or a few principles; (c) as an autonomous system it comprises all branches of philosophy; (d) the doctrines stated within these various branches of philosophy are internally coherent. I intend to explain the historical origin and nature of Brucker’s concept ‘system of philosophy’ — a topic, which I have recently dealt with in History and Theory (vol. 44, 2005, pp. 72-90). In my conference paper I also intend to outline the influence of this particular concept on the historiography of philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Several widely read historians of philosophy latched on to it, typically without critical examination or discussion, for instance Tennemann (1761-1831), Ast (1778-1819), Hegel (1770-1831), Cousin (1792-1867), Zeller (1814-1908), Fischer (1824-1907), Ueberweg (1826-1875), Cassirer (1874-1945) and Gadamer (1900-2002). Through Cassirer, the concept was introduced to the historiography of science. Since the concept ‘system of philosophy’ still plays a pivotal role in the historiography of philosophy, at least as a regulative idea, it is relevant to question its legitimacy. In the final part of my paper, I shall discuss some of the four characteristics of Brucker’s concept, mentioned above. How useful is it, I shall ask, to consider past philosophies as autonomous conceptual structures, which are independent of the cognitive content of non-philosophical disciplines? Is it reasonable to assume the existence of so-called principles, from which past philosophers have deduced their philosophical doctrines? And, finally, what does the concept ‘system of philosophy’ entail in an assessment of the ‘coherency’ of a past thinker’s philosophy? These and other methodological questions I would like to discuss. Whereas the emphasis in the two first parts of my paper (Brucker’s concept ‘system of philosophy’; its influence on the historiography of philosophy) is on textual analysis and documentation, the emphasis of the third part is on methodological issues open to debate. My ambition is to present the first two parts as a background for the third part, hoping that it will animate the participants at the conference to discuss the legitimacy of the concept ‘system of philosophy’ as a historiographical tool. Jarmo Pulkkinen (Oulu), ‘Technical metaphors and history of philosophy: Christian Wolff’s clockwork universe’ Nowadays it is widely accepted that some metaphors can be employed as “cognitive instruments”. In particular, relational metaphors (e.g. “an atom is a solar system”) can present insight into “how things are.” These metaphors point to an analogy between phenomena of two different domains. When we use them as cognitive instruments, we attempt to understand and explain the unknown (target domain) with the known (source domain). Technology is one of the most important source domains of “insightful” metaphors. First, we have a very thorough knowledge of technical artifacts, i.e. maker’s knowledge. As a result, they are very useful in our attempts to explain the unknown with the known. Second, as technology advances, new technical artifacts are constantly invented. These artifacts can be employed as new and possibly insightful metaphors in philosophy and science. The level of technological development has influenced the philosophical and scientific thought of a certain age by imposing external limitations to it. The level of technology has made possible certain kind of technical devices, which, in turn, have created the possibility to employ these devices as technical metaphors. However, technical metaphors have also contributed to the substance and structure of philosophical and scientific theories. Metaphors have two important roles in philosophical and scientific thought. First, they introduce terminology where none previously existed. As a consequence of the analogical mapping scientific concepts are not introduced one at a time but as frameworks of concepts. Second, metaphors produce new topics for research, i.e. statements concerning the base domain can be translated into hypotheses concerning the target domain. As a result, metaphor suppresses some details, emphasizes others – in short, organises our view of target domain. In my view, the study of technical metaphors provides an interesting methodological framework that can be applied both in history of philosophy and history of science. I shall present as an example Christian Wolff’s (1679-1754) cosmology which constitutes a remarkable attempt to base a philosophical theory on a technical metaphor. Wolff’s Vernüftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen (1719) is divided into ontology, cosmology, empirical and rational psychology and natural theology. According to Wolff’s cosmology, the world is a clockwork machine in which the present state is rooted the preceding one, and the future state in the present one. Since the use of the clockwork metaphor was typical of the age, Wolff’s philosophy does not offer anything new in this regard. However, while other contemporary philosophers usually referred to the clockwork metaphor in a loose and casual manner, Wolff elaborated the clockwork metaphor at great length. Wolff’s philosophy was characterized by systematization and repetitive thoroughness. As a result, he presented at least a dozen detailed analogies between clock and universe. I shall claim that Wolff used the clockwork metaphor as a cognitive instrument. With its help he attempted to justify and clarify his strictly deterministic view of the universe. 11.30 Directory: philosophy philosophy -> Course descriptions fall 2016 phil 101: introduction to philosophy philosophy -> Freewill & Determinism philosophy -> Evolution and Philosophy Spring 2015 philosophy -> Philosophy Basics philosophy -> Consciousness in the World: Husserlian Phenomenology and Externalism philosophy -> Introduction to the philosophy of science philosophy -> Vita mark H. Bickhard philosophy -> Kant and skepticism philosophy -> The philosophy of duns scotus Download 147.88 Kb. Share with your friends:
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