The aim of the essay is to demonstrate that the contact of European philosophy with Chinese thought in the second half of the 17th and 18th century influenced the rise and development of secularism, which became a distinctive feature of the Western Enlightenment. The first part examines how knowing the history of China and Confucian ethics has questioned biblical chronology and undermined faith as a necessary condition of morality. These allegations were afterwards countered by reinterpreting Confucianism as crypto-monotheism. I will (...) argue this debate has contributed to the birth of secular philosophy of history, which put an end to the Enlightenment Sinophilism. Throughout those changes in the image of China, nothing but an image was discussed: as it would be presented on a basis of the thought of Wang Fuzhi and other representatives of Chinese kaozheng考證 movement, the encounter with the contemporaries of the Westerners would have opened a real dialogue. (shrink)

In this article I introduce the notion of crucial evidence and I use it to shed light on an ongoing scholarly controversy in Hobbes studies, namely whether Hobbes holds a prudential or a deontological theory of contractual obligation. Even though there is important evidence for both readings, I argue that there is crucial evidence for interpreting Hobbes’s account in a deontological fashion.

El objetivo del trabajo es mostrar que la revisión que los historiadores llevan a cabo en su disciplina se debe, en parte, porque se ha puesto en cuestión el presupuesto temporal sobre el que se construyó la historia como ciencia: el “pasado histórico”. En primer lugar, intento señalar de qué modo en Analytical Philosophy of History Danto expresa, en la estructura temporal de las oraciones narrativas, las características del “tiempo histórico” que subyace a la historiografía. La separación y distinción entre (...) pasado, presente y futuro; el tiempo como un flujo del futuro hacia el pasado; el privilegio epistémico del historiador por sobre el testigo constituyen algunos de los rasgos que, para Danto, distinguen a la historia de cualquier otro conocimiento. En segundo lugar, intentaré mostrar que estos presupuestos temporales se hacen visibles cuando, a partir de las catástrofes del siglo XX, la memoria es considerada como una forma privilegiada para acceder a ese pasado reciente. Es decir, el surgimiento de la memoria, a partir de los 80´s, pone en tela de juicio los presupuestos temporales que subyacen a la concepción del pasado histórico “a la Danto” y el rol que el testigo y el futuro tenían para el conocimiento histórico. (shrink)

I argue in this article that an aspect of Imre Lakatos’s philosophy has been largely ignored in previous literature. The key feature of Lakatos’s philosophy of the historiography of science is its non-representationalism, which enables comparisons of alternative ‘historiographic research programmes’ without implying that the interpretations of history re-present or mirror the past. I discuss some problems of this interpretation and show specifically that Lakatos’s philosophy does not distort the history of science despite its normative ambitions. The last section is (...) devoted to updating Lakatos’s programme to answer the needs of contemporary history and philosophy of science. The standard of rationality used in comparative assessments should be understood as a tool for measuring the coherence of an account of history with regard to the ‘actual history’. This standard takes two forms: framework-dependent and framework-independent rationality. The latter is decisive in comparative assessments. (shrink)