Bshp conference Spring 2006 Philosophy and Historiography: Abstracts
Session 8A: The theory and practice of history (Umney Theatre)
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- Session 8B: Pragmatism and American analytic philosophy (Music Room)
- Session 8C: Ancient and medieval philosophy (Umney Lounge)
- Session 9A: Historiography and the philosophy of mind (Umney Theatre)
- Session 9B: Semantic issues in historiography (Music Room)
| Session 8A: The theory and practice of history (Umney Theatre)
Avi Tucker (Belfast), ‘Our knowledge of the past: or how to prove that your students plagiarized’ How do historians, comparative linguists, biblical and textual critics and evolutionary biologists establish beliefs about the past? How do they know the past? I argue that they do so by following the same three stages inference of a common cause as you would if you’d wish to prove that a student plagiarized when more than one student submitted an identical exam. Using the analytic tools of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science I explain the relation between evidence, theory, and methodology in the disciplines that offer scientific knowledge of the past. These disciplines should be thought of as an effort to explain the evidence of past events. I believe that the philosophy of historiography should offer the best explanation of the history of historiography. Therefore, I illustrate my theory with illustrations from the history of historiography. Adrian Wilson (Leeds), ‘Historiography and the resistance to theory’ Traditionally, historians have been notoriously reluctant to engage with theory; my starting-point is that this reluctance, or – adapting Paul de Man on the case of literature – resistance should itself be theorized. I intend to argue that the “resistance to theory” manifested by historians is partly justified, and partly inappropriate. It is justified (I shall suggest) insofar as history, being irreducibly grounded in temporality, is a unique pursuit for which borrowed theoretical resources are unsuitable in principle. On the other hand that resistance is inappropriate, since if history is a rational activity, it must be amenable to theorization, just as R.G. Collingwood always claimed. My conclusion, which will also echo Collingwood, is that the proper theorization of history is a wholly distinctive philosophical enterprise; that is to say, history’s uniqueness at the level of practice is mirrored at the level of theory. Session 8B: Pragmatism and American analytic philosophy (Music Room) Sami Pihlström (Helsinki), ‘Synthesizing traditions: rewriting the history of pragmatism and transcendental philosophy’ This paper examines the relation between the history (and historiography) of philosophy and systematic philosophy through a case study comparing the tradition of pragmatism with the transcendental tradition. This comparison requires partly rewriting the history of both traditions, in cooperation with systematic work on contemporary philosophical problems. Early pragmatists, especially James and Dewey (though not Peirce), saw the proper path of philosophy as going “round” rather than “through” Kant. They saw pragmatism as the true heir of British empiricism – a holistic, processual, experimentalist empiricism. However, pragmatism is indebted to Kantian transcendental philosophy: pragmatists, early and late, have been concerned with the conditions for the possibility of meaning, knowledge, rationality, etc., locating these in (historically changing) human practices. Arguably, the traditions meet in Wittgenstein, whose later philosophy is practice-oriented enough to be “pragmatist” and condition-oriented enough to be “transcendental” (though these are not his own self-descriptions). Recent thinkers (e.g., Putnam) influenced by both Kant, the classical pragmatists, and Wittgenstein are similarly classifiable as “transcendental pragmatists”; others (e.g., Quine) sometimes depicted as pragmatists do not deserve the label. (Cf. S. Pihlström, Naturalizing the Transcendental: A Pragmatic View [Amherst, NY: Prometheus/Humanity Books], 2003.). This understanding of the history of pragmatism and transcendental philosophy is available to us in a way it was not available to the early figures of either tradition. A synthesis of these traditions requires that we revise our conceptions of both and rethink the standard ways of writing their history. Pragmatism should no more be pictured as the naively instrumentalistist philosophy it is often regarded as; transcendental philosophy, in turn, should be liberated from orthodox Kantianism with a fixed a priori set of categories and cognitive faculties. Contrary to many pragmatists and transcendental thinkers, I claim that transcendental pragmatism is plausible and promising, both historically and systematically. Still, problems remain: Is the concrete practice-orientedness of pragmatism lost if the practices it celebrates are turned into meaning-constituting transcendental structures? Is the nature of transcendental philosophy as a rigorous a priori enterprise of grounding knowledge claims lost if the relevant sort of transcendentality is located in changing practices and distinguished from foundationalist concerns? Instead of arriving at any final answers to my questions, I examine them in a way that suggests revisions to the traditional historiography of these traditions, also assessing Brandom’s way of reading pragmatist ideas into the Kantian-Hegelian tradition he reconstructs. Contemporary discussions of realism, idealism, and transcendental arguments point to interesting possibilities. By engaging in such debates one may, I argue, arrive at a well-motivated view on the historical question of how the two traditions should be construed. It was Putnam’s work on realism in the 1970-80s, as well as Rorty’s claim to represent Deweyan pragmatism, that largely stimulated philosophers’ interest in early pragmatism; it is the Kantian dimension of the realism debate that should lead us to investigate the relation between (both early and later) pragmatism and transcendental philosophy. Kant scholarship, pragmatism scholarship, Wittgenstein scholarship, and systematic philosophical work are all relevant to each other in this situation. Hence, the history of pragmatism, as written by the early pragmatists themselves, looks very different from the history of pragmatism, as written today from the perspective of the neopragmatist and neo-Kantian contributions to the realism debate. For pragmatists, however, the value of philosophical historiography should be measured in terms of its (potential) results in the practice of philosophy. Joel Isaac (Cambridge), ‘Beyond platonism and social determinism: American analytic philosophy in historical context’ Attempts to place analytic philosophy in historical context have become increasingly polarized. As the historian Bruce Kuklick has noted, recent accounts of Anglophone analytic philosophy have tended to be either Platonistic (as in the recent studies of the tradition by Scott Soames and Avrum Stroll) or reductionist (as in John McCumber's argument that the success of analytic philosophy in America is to be ascribed to McCarthyism). In this paper, I argue that this state of affairs is due in part to the neglect to which intellectual and cultural historians have subjected the analytic tradition. The lack of historical appreciation of analytic philosophy has been especially notable in American intellectual history, where scholars of twentieth-century philosophy in the United States tend to skip from Dewey to Rorty without acknowledging the significance of Carnap and Quine. In the light of these observations, I argue that American intellectual historians should accord analytic philosophy—one of the most durable philosophical traditions in American history—the attention it merits. They should use their knowledge of cultural trends in the United States to move the historical study of analytic philosophy beyond its current polarized state and integrate it with historical research that is being carried out on the history of the university and the academic professions; on the de-Christianization of American intellectual culture; and on the political significance of the human sciences during the Cold War. These contexts locate American analytic philosophy within a varied cultural matrix without thereby conflating its content with that matrix.
Miira Tuominen (Helsinki), ‘Are the ancient commentators on Plato and Aristotle historians of philosophy?’ I shall address the question of whether the ancient commentators on Plato and Aristotle should be counted as historians of philosophy or not. I presume most of us would say that they should not. However, it is an intriguing question to study why this is the case. Certainly the explanation is not that they were too close in time. Approximately a half a millennium separates, e.g., Alexander of Aphrodisias from Aristotle. Therefore, the crucial difference seems to lie in the methodology. But what exactly is the difference? Alexander of Aphrodisias does not comment on his methodology very extensively. Themistius, for his part, endorses a method that deviates from the one Alexander had used. According to Themistius, the commentary practice had already reached its peak before him and he was, thus, reluctant to write commentaries. Rather, he chose the form of paraphrasis which he thought was useful in teaching the doctrines of the great philosopher(s) of the past. But is it not the case that if we teach the doctrines of a philosopher who died more than 600 years ago through the help of paraphrases, this will qualify as teaching history of philosophy? One alternative might be to say that the commentators were not teaching history of philosophy, because they were still working within the same philosophical paradigm. However, today the claim that a philosophical paradigm may be preserved through that many centuries would, I believe, be considered highly problematic. We would perhaps assume that it is evident that during five centuries or more ways of thinking have been changed drastically and, hence, we will not be able to access texts as old as that as directly as would be needed if the very same paradigm should be followed. What if we respond that the commentators were able to preserve the same paradigm because there was a continuous chain of teachers from Plato and Aristotle down to the earliest commentators? Even if we assume for the argument’s sake that this was true we have to grant that the Platonic-Aristotelian doctrines were by no means dominant during the Hellenistic period and longer until the death of Marcus Aurelius. Hellenistic philosophy was also rather non-Aristotelian and non-Platonic. Is it, then, because many commentators assumed that Plato and Aristotle had found the truth? However, this suggestion is not unproblematic either. For example, Alexander of Aphrodisias does not seem to make the relevant claim about truth, and it would be questionable to claim that this is why Alexander was more of a historian of philosophy than the other commentators. Frédéric Goubier (University of Québec), ‘Late medieval philosophy and rational reconstruction: the ideal match?’ Late medieval philosophy of language, sometimes known under the name of ‘supposition theory’, is one of the fragments of history of philosophy which shows the most immediate affinities with contemporary analytic philosophy. A remarkable proximity whichallowed, since the seventies, number of historians of philosophy, avowed advocates of the analytic approach, to maximally develop the principle of ‘rational reconstruction’ of medieval arguments and theses. These reconstructivist approaches, championed by scholars like P. Geach, N. Kretzmann, D.P. Henry, C. Normore, P.V. Spade, C. Panaccio, among others, have undoubtedly contributed to a better understanding of some of the key figures of medieval philosophy. Whether thematic or by author, these attempts share the presupposition of some kind of equidistance between, respectively, the relations among the theses of late medieval philosophy on the one side and of the relations among their contemporary counterparts on the other. Itis this presupposition, and what it means for a work in history of philosophy, that I would like to consider herein detail. One of the peculiarities of the Supposition theory lies in that at a certain point of its development, its most elaborate debates were developed at a distance from the core of the theory, where the notions used were officially defined. This distance appears to be what allowed the authors , through different presupposition processes, to conquer the freedom thanks to which they were able to build innovative analysis, and by so doing to develop, refine and sometimes partially reassign some of the original theses. What are we to do with these developments which, at first sight, do not respect the presupposition of equidistance? Should we filter them out, and sacrifice the possibility to take into account what the paradigm was really, i.e. in its effective analytic activity, at some point? And if we are to take these developments into account, should we consistently adapt the concepts imported from our contemporary philosophical toolbox or, rather, create new ones? And, in either case, what margin of manoeuvre do we have? By choosing a certain category of technical notions into which we translate some past theses and arguments, we virtually build the filter which will select what, among these past things, is relevant. The fact that it is probably inescapable does not prevent us from tempting to evaluate the cost of such a process in terms of ‘losses’: the filtered out part is not out of reach, and it is probably by considering what it would mean in terms of reconstruction to integrate it that we can decisively determine the ratio between its relevanceand the technical price of its integration. I would like to make, at a small scale, such an attempt with the very basic distinction upon which are based most reconstructions, namely the one between ‘signification’ and ‘reference’. I would like to confront it with a limited number of logical problems which had been during the second half of the XIIIth Century an inexhaustible source of innovations, e.g. quantification and modalities. As a collateral consequence, this confrontation might highlight some presuppositions carried by the contemporary use of these notions. Carlos Eduardo Nogueira Loddo (University of Québec), ‘“Reconstruction” vs. “restauration” in the historiography of philosophy’ During the last two decades of the 20th century, an expressive contingent of francophone historiograpers of philosophy started working according to standards typically associated with the so called “anglo-saxon”, or “analytic” philosophy. Since the main influence in their context, up to then, had been its supposed counterpart, “continental philosophy”, the innovations did not take place without reactions and counter-reactions. The emerging debate, rather than purely reflecting sectary attachments, turned out to throw some good light on a number of important meta-philosophico-historiographical assumptions from both sides, also generating some new and interesting reflections. Not surprisingly, the discussion has been motivated by (and took place during the making of) the historiography about the problem of the universals in the Middle-Ages. The obvious question is: To what extent, that problem of universals is the same as the one discussed under the same label in contemporary analytic philosophy? Conflicting views have been expressed, notably, by historians C. Panaccio and A. de Libera. Panaccio proposed, as a method, “reconstruction.” In fact, he defends that any discourse about past theories is inevitably reconstructive. It could be a more historical reconstruction, or a more theoretical reconstruction. That would be a matter of degree, according to the pragmatic choice of satisfying either one of the two opposing constraints he identifies: (a) (historical) fidelity and (b) (theoretical) pertinence (See: Panaccio 1985, 1987, 1992, 1994b, 1994a, 1998a, 1998b, 1999b, 1999a, 2000, 2001, 2004). According to de Libera, the only historiographical pertinence is fidelity, and strictly, fidelity to the texts. The business of the historiography of philosophy is bounded by textual structures frameworks, and an adequate procedure should presuppose radical relativism and holism. To mark well the contrast, I call de Libera’s proposed method “restauration” (For his own perspectives, see Libera 1992, 1996, 1999b, 1999a, 2000, 2002. For other author’s comments on the Panaccio-de Libera debate, and closely related discussions, see Flasch 1994; Karger 1994; Michon 1994; Panaccio, Melkevik, Leidet, Malherbe, Macherey, Lageux, Boss, Taureck and Lafrance 1994; Engel 1995, 1997a, 1997b, 1999; Lafleur 2001; Piché 2001; Santos 2004. For discussions on the “universality” of the problem of universals within the anglo-saxon tradition, see King 1982; Normore 1987; and also Klima 2001, 2003). While Panaccio’s approach on reconstruction attempts to assure the historiographical legitimacy of reconstructed theories of the past (such as Ockham’s nominalism) being put into philosophical dialogue/debate with present theories (such as N. Goodman’s nominalism); de Libera’s ideas on restauration make of such an attempt a loss of historiographical reference. My aim is to examine the debate, in order (a) to show that both the reconstructive and the restaurative proposed perspectives are associated with relativism and anti-relativism, although of different kinds; (b) to reveal their historico-philosophical ties, hoping to clarify some of the issues involving the analytic-continental opposition; (c) to criticize some elements of each approach; and (e) to present elements for an alternative approach that would both do justice to the relativist challenges, and allows, as a matter of principle, the attribution of minimal sense (with historiographical reference) of inter-framework theoretical confrontations, notably, in the case of the problem of universals. 14.00 Session 9A: Historiography and the philosophy of mind (Umney Theatre) Vivienne Brown (Open University), ‘Historiography, interpretation and philosophy of mind’ Historiographic debates keep returning to issues of interpretation and ‘intention’. This raises a question as to what the implications of debates about interpretation and ‘intentionalism’ might be for issues in the philosophy of mind. In this paper I aim to raise some questions about the coherence of intentionalism as a theory of interpretation by considering the implications of intentionalism for positions in the philosophy of mind (and action). Giuseppina D’Oro (Keele), ‘The philosophy of history and the philosophy of action’ In the 50s and 60s the philosophy of history was at the centre of philosophical debates aimed at defending the methodological autonomy of the human sciences from the natural sciences. At this time, it was W.H. Dray who, via a sensitive reconstruction of the work of R.G. Collingwood, sought to defend a humanistically oriented historiography in a style that succeeded to draw his name to the attention of the larger philosophical community. Since then, interest in the philosophy of history has steadily declined. Key factors in this decline are a) the rise of a distinctive branch of philosophy completely dedicated to the exploration of causalist and non-causalist explanations, and b) a pervading assumption, made since the publication of Davidson’s Actions, Reasons and Causes, that the question how are action explanations possible? calls not for an conceptual answer, aimed at clarifying what we mean when we speak about actions and what we speak about events, but for a metaphysical explanation of how mind can fit in a physical world. In other words, in moving from the philosophy of history to the philosophy of action, the goalposts of the debate have also shifted since, whereas pre-Davidson the predominant assumption was that the task of the philosopher is to clarify the fundamental concepts and categories that underpin different conceptions of reality (as mind and as nature), post Davidson the predominant assumption has been that the task of the philosopher is to account for how an autonomous science of the mind might be possible within the parameters of a naturalistic conception of reality. This paper tries to do two things. First I do a bit of tidying up aimed at showing that the philosophy of history as practiced in mid century was torn between two rather different tasks. The first was the epistemological task of finding out how we can gain knowledge about the past. The second was the rather different conceptual task of isolating the set of assumptions that distinguish a humanistically oriented historiography from the assumptions that govern the study of natural science. In so far as the task of a philosophy of history was regarded as being that of unpacking the conceptual distinction between mind and nature the problem of a philosophy of history were seen as arising not from the consideration that evidence about the past is epistemologically problematic, but from the semantic consideration that we mean different things when we speak about actions and what we mean when we speak about events or that we use the term because in different ways in different explanatory contexts. To the extent that the philosophy of history, as practiced within the Anglo-American tradition, answered this conceptual question, it contained echoes of the continental distinction between the geist and nature wissenschaften. Secondly I suggest and, if time allows will argue, that the position defended by W.H. Dray, via a reconstruction of the work of R.G. Collingwood, provides a powerful articulation of the non-causalist position in contemporary debates in the philosophy of action, a position which should be given serious consideration today.
Franz Leander Fillafer (Max-Planck-Institute for History, Göttingen/IFK, Vienna), ‘Structural isomorphisms of language and reality: historiographical perspectives’ Subconsciously and avowedly historians tend to presuppose a structual isomorphism linking language and reality, an isomorphism that interrrelates language, world and thought. This concept leads to a truncating identification equating world-referential semantics and truth-referential semantics. It is this intriciate correlation that results in an ill-conceived refutation of intentionalism and to a positivist veneration of the truth-effects produced by historical sources. In this paper I shall discuss some aspects of the truth of historical utterances, the phenomenological-mimetic concept of language historians deploy and the problem of world-referential semantics referring to historian’s predecisions, explanations and descriptions. I shall try to flesh out the epistemological and political predicaments of this concept of truth and truth-referential semantics pertinent to the historian’s capacity to make sense of the world. These presuppositions inform historian’s interpretations and descriptions, and I shall argue that there is an important analogy linking intellectual history and empiricist-positivist historiography in their indebtedness to a host of basic assumptions. The following contentions are among these shared assumptions: (1) The historian’s language must match the language that contemporaries he is about to describe could have employed. (2) We are advised to take for face-value the reasons historical actors give for holding their beliefs for true. (3) We are advised to accept the truth-value of historical utterances, being sufficient and irreducible self-descriptions (standpoint epistemology). In addressing these points I hope to highlight some insufficiencies and self-contradictions prevalent in the historians’ grammar – the vocabulary of categories adopted – and in the descriptive and interpretative presuppositions of historical accounts. Jouni Kuukkanen (Edinburgh), ‘Existence and definability of ideas and concepts in history’ Arthur Lovejoy suggested that the history of human thinking could be described as a history of unit ideas. He thought that there are ahistoric, indestructible, and unchangeable ideas that appear in different contexts and times. However, historians and philosophers have subsequently pointed out three main problems with regard to the notion of unit idea. Firstly, ahistoric and unchangeable entities appear to be fit poorly with history writing, which is committed to change and objects that reside in time and place. Secondly, it has not been easy to recognise such ideas. Thirdly, Lovejoy seems to overemphasise continuity. I ask in my paper, on the basis of post-Lovejoy discussion in intellectual history and history of science, whether we need a theoretical unit, such as concept or idea, in the history of thought. My answer is that we do need it both for philosophical and historical reasons. But this raises two problems: What concepts or ideas are? How can they be defined? The ontological question is a question to which cannot be given a definite answer because it is dependent intimately on person’s other metaphysical commitments. Nonetheless, I suggest that all who are inclined to naturalism and feel uncomfortable with Platonic entities would take concept or idea either as a psychological or sociopsychologial entity. There are some historians who have suggested this, but more importantly, a rather recent tradition, the cognitive history and philosophy of science (e.g. Nancy Nersessian), adopts this position relying on tools and recent research in cognitive science. As regards the question of definability, in contrast to the critics of Lovejoy, I hold that the postulation of unit idea catches something important. The logic of history writing appears to require that all historical representations of ”the same concept or idea” share something in common. For example, a history of a concept whose exemplifications do not have any common core is a susceptible version of the history of concept. We are not interested in the history of terms here. This is to say that to take concept or idea as family resemblance, as, for example, the cognitive history and philosophy of science suggests, cannot be an appropriate answer. And yet, the critics are right about the overemphasis of continuity in Lovejoy. My proposal is to understand concept or idea in the context of history as something that has a conceptual core, i.e. ”a necessary condition”, but also as something to which cannot be given a full and complete definition, i.e. it does not have ”a sufficient condition”. This way we can write a history of a concept whose historical instantiations share something minimal in common, which is the reason to subsume them under the covering concept, but also portray the constant changes in other central beliefs that characterise the concept or the idea. In this task, the idea borrowed from cognitive science, that concept has a structure, is fruitful. We may describe continuity as stability of the core component and simultaneously discontinuity as change in the out-of-core components. 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