Bshp conference Spring 2006 Philosophy and Historiography: Abstracts

BSHP Conference Spring 2006

Philosophy and Historiography: Abstracts

14.00 Opening Address (Umney Theatre)

Quentin Skinner (Cambridge), ‘The post-modern challenge and the interpretation of texts’

For some time we have been warned not to talk about intentions in relation to interpretation on the grounds that the yardstick of intentionality is simply not available as a means of trying to elucidate the meanings of texts. One might wonder if this thesis has been overstated. But even if the thesis is accepted, one might still wonder if it follows that the recovery of intentions is irrelevant to the understanding of texts. To understand any utterance, one needs to grasp not merely what has been said but what has been done. But if we are to appreciate the performativity of texts, it is arguable that we shall have to find means to recover the intentions embodied in them. Can we hope to do so? The lecture ends on a practical and optimistic note.

Dale Jacquette (Pennsylvania), ‘Collingwood on historical authority and historical imagination’

Nick Jardine (Cambridge), ‘Gadamer’s “merely historical understanding” of dead philoso­phical questions’

In Truth and Method Gadamer insists that questions that are no longer real for us can form no part of the “effective history” of philosophy. Unlike the authentic understanding of past issues that remain live for us, our vicarious “merely historical” understanding of the coming-into-being and passing-away of dead questions cannot contribute to our critical reflections on current philosophical positions and practices. I shall argue that Gadamer’s dismissive attitude towards the interpretation of dead philosophical questions is directly at odds with his own claims about the power of historical critique. In fact, Gadamer’s own account of “merely historical” understanding provides precisely the materials needed to validate radically critical uses of philosophy's history, and hence for a proper response to Habermas, Apel, and others who have charged Gadamer’s hermeneutics with undue subservience to tradition.

20.15 Session 2: Postanalytic and sociological approaches to history of philosophy (Umney Theatre)

Mark Bevir (Berkeley), ‘Philosophical historiography: a postanalytic perspective’

This paper looks at the relation of philosophical and historical arguments. It suggests that post-analytic philosophy ascribes a role to analysis but only up to the point where our concepts become vague. In addition, analysis can not ground itself. Instead it must be embedded with narrative or historical explications. Equally, however, these historical arguments always will presuppose various philoso­phical positions. Philosophical historiography is thus about elucidating and defending a web of beliefs.

Martin Kusch (Cambridge), ‘Sociological approaches to the history of philosophy’

A number of philosophers (Frede, Gracia, Normore ...) have argued that the sociology of philosophical knowledge is (a) of little philosophical interest, and (b) based upon indefensible philosophical views regarding the causes of beliefs, the relationship between act and content of judgements, the nature of reasons and logic, and the structure of explanation. I shall try to rebut these arguments and suggest that many arguments against the sociology of philosophical knowledge are themselves relying on questionable philosophical premises.

9.00 Session 3A: Early modern philosophy and science (Umney Theatre)

Sarah Hutton (Middlesex), ‘Books, history and philosophy: libraries and the history of early modern philosophy’

This is a paper concerning sources in the history of philosophy: the relevance of book-collections. The main focus will be two major seventeenth-century book collections with significant holdings of philosophical books: the library of Edward, second Viscount Conway (1594-1655) (father in law of Anne Conway) and the library of Locke’s Quaker friend, Benjamin Furly (1636-1714). I shall discuss some of the methodological issues involved in interpreting book-lists, and what we can learn about the nature and development of philosophy from the holdings of these libraries.

M. A. Stewart (Aberdeen), ‘Placing Hume historically’

Hume was equally significant both as a philosopher and as a historian. This suggests an obvious but under-explored pair of questions: (1) what sense (if any) did he have of the history of philosophy, and (2) how did he see his own philosophy historically? The latter question I want to connect with how others in the 18th century and after saw it, in order to assess whether Hume was as much an architect as a victim of the notion of a ‘British empiricist’ tradition in philosophy.

With regard to (1), we should distinguish Hume’s theoretical stance from his practice. His theoretical stance is to wave the flag for the moderns in a fairly stereotypical ancient-moderns division. But he does it in a way that re-enacts the tensions between Stoicism and Scepticism that he found early in his career in reading Cicero and other classical sources. His History of England includes a certain amount of cultural history, particularly the history of literature. But philosophy is absent from his picture of the medieval world and the Renaissance. With regard to (2) he places himself within a strictly recent British tradition, and yet his practice shows him to be deeply imbued with French thought.

Philosophy in Hume’s day was still a comprehensive and unitary discipline for which ‘natural’ philosophy, albeit much altered, provided the guiding methodology. He was to some extent heading out of philosophy as we conceive it, towards psychology and the social sciences, and yet it is the philosophers in the narrower sense who have now reclaimed him. The roles of Reid, Brown, Kant and others in moulding his posthumous reputation are interesting but confusing. The interpretations they created have led to fluctuations in his reputation according to fluctuations in other philosophical fashions than his own.

Richard W. Serjeantson (Cambridge), ‘Problems in the historiography of early modern philosophy and science: the case of human understanding’

No scholar of the period can be ignorant that the natural sciences were conceived of in the early modern period as part of the larger discipline of ‘philosophy’. And yet, with certain notable exceptions (and the Cunningham thesis above all), there has been a persistent failure on the part of historians of philosophy on the one hand, and of historians of the sciences on the other, to engage with the implications of the early modern unity of their subjects. This paper explores some of these implications, taking as its focus the treatment of the idea of ‘human understanding’ in the seventeenth century. The understanding in this period served as a fulcrum between the different philosophical disciplines; its treatment in modern historiography exposes some confusions that can arise if this is not recognised. More generally, the paper is a contribution to the recent and growing dissatisfaction with the rationalist/empiricist divide in the historiography of early modern philosophy. It concludes with a proposal for a new direction in the history of early modern knowledge.

Christopher Minkowski (Oxford), ‘Sanskrit knowledge and the world history of science’

Study of the philosophies and sciences communicated in Sanskrit has taken a markedly historicist turn in the group project that analyzes the “Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism”. The project has proposed a meaningful periodization of learned communication in Sanskrit, from ca. 1500 to 1750 C.E. During this period, it is argued, there was a remarkable efflorescence of literary activity, in which something distinctively and self-consciously new appeared. The history of Jyotisha, the Sanskritic discipline that combined astronomy, mathematics, and divination, presents special problems for the historiographical program, however, because of that discipline’s separate intellectual trajectory, social status, and practical niche. In considering what historiographical practices can serve the “Knowledge Systems” project as a whole, we have encountered both particular difficulties and general problems. The particular difficulties have to do both with the kind of evidence that is available – vast amounts of textual material, very little social historical or institutional-archival information – and with the applicability of the models of intellectual historiography that have been evolved for the study of early modern Europe. Here the viability of the proposals of the “Cambridge School” deserves special consideration. Is there a way to capture, for example, in analytically powerful terms, forms of intellectual dynamism that ordinarily are labelled “traditional”, while retaining methodological proposals concerning illocutionary intent? The general problems have to do with writing an intellectual history of a grouping of knowledge systems that operated for most of their life outside the European sphere, without predetermining that comparison should be the prevailing mode of engagement with them, much less what the terms of that comparison should be. To put it too simply, what is the value of the “area” as an analytic category in the narrative of the world’s scientific history? If the grand narrative of European exceptionalism in the history of science – the “Plato to NATO” formulation – has lately been refused by historians of science, or at least avoided by recourse to micro-history, does that guarantee that the narrative has lost its pervasive structuring role, or that a world history has become possible?

Teresa Castelão-Lawless (Grand Valley University), ‘Does science have the history of philosophy it deserves?’

In Le Materialisme rationnel (1953), French epistemologist Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) noted that “science does not have the philosophy it deserves”. In this paper I explore the scientific and cultural contexts in which this asserion was made, the epistemological model that Bachelard constructed as an alternative to the philosophical models of science available in his time. Finally, I will show how Bachelardianism opens avenues of research for philosophy of science and technology, cognitive science, and the social studies of science.

Theodore Arabatzis (Athens), ‘The historiography and the philosophy of science: towards a two-way traffic’