Why did such highly abstract ideas as truth, knowledge, or justice become so important to us? What was the point of coming to think in these terms? This book presents a philosophical method designed to answer such questions: the method of pragmatic genealogy. Pragmatic genealogies are partly fictional, partly historical narratives exploring what might have driven us to develop certain ideas in order to discover what these do for us. The book uncovers an under-appreciated tradition of pragmatic genealogy which cuts (...) across the analytic-continental divide, running from the state-of-nature stories of David Hume and the early genealogies of Friedrich Nietzsche to recent work in analytic philosophy by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Miranda Fricker. However, these genealogies combine fictionalizing and historicizing in ways that even philosophers sympathetic to the use of state-of-nature fictions or real history have found puzzling. To make sense of why both fictionalizing and historicizing are called for, the book offers a systematic account of pragmatic genealogies as dynamic models serving to reverse-engineer the points of ideas in relation not only to near-universal human needs, but also to socio-historically situated needs. This allows the method to offer us explanation without reduction and to help us understand what led our ideas to shed the traces of their practical origins. Far from being normatively inert, moreover, pragmatic genealogy can affect the space of reasons, guiding attempts to improve our conceptual repertoire by helping us determine whether and when our ideas are worth having. (shrink)

This article investigates the power and scope of the imagination in Giambattista Vico’s philosophy by focusing on the role played by the mind of the giants in their attempts to extricate themselves from the chaotic continuity of liquid and pervious matter and in their endeavour to reconstruct reality in post-diluvian nature. In Vico’s account, through the imagination’s efforts to mediate self-terror, self-consciousness and self-delusion, the monstrously ungainly and misshapen bodies of the giants, emotionally electrocuted by the lightning bolt of chemically (...) active matter, became the natural laboratory – the corpolentissima fantasia – in which the human mind could test its original attempts at representing reality and avoiding self-deception. (shrink)

This book argues for the need to put into practice a profound and comprehensive intellectual revolution, affecting to a greater or lesser extent all branches of scientific and technological research, scholarship and education. This intellectual revolution differs, however, from the now familiar kind of scientific revolution described by Kuhn. It does not primarily involve a radical change in what we take to be knowledge about some aspect of the world, a change of paradigm. Rather it involves a radical change in (...) the fundamental, overall intellectual aims and methods of inquiry. At present inquiry is devoted to the enhancement of knowledge. This needs to be transformed into a kind of rational inquiry having as its basic aim to enhance personal and social wisdom. This new kind of inquiry gives intellectual priority to the personal and social problems we encounter in our lives as we strive to realize what is desirable and of value – problems of knowledge and technology being intellectually subordinate and secondary. For this new kind of inquiry, it is what we do and what we are that ultimately matters: our knowledge is but an aspect of our life and being. (shrink)

Johann Gottfried Herder has been described as the founder of cultural relativism within the German philosophical tradition, which would make him the starting-point for one thread in the pattern of ideas leading to the Nazi disaster. More recently, some scholars have rejected this interpretation, arguing that Herder actually supported the universalist values of the Enlightenment. I argue that Herder’s position is actually a complex, and laudable, blend of universalism and relativism. It includes: (1) the presumption of a set of basic (...) human goods, upon which some universal criteria for ethical judgements may be founded: and, (2) the view that human practices, values and beliefs must be interpreted within their social context, and that the happiness and virtue of individuals can only be measured in relation to their specific values, being a function of their capacity to satisfy their desires and to live up to their ideals. Key Words: Counter-Enlightenment • cultural relativism • ethical relativism • Eurocentrism • Johann Gottfried Herder. (shrink)

This article argues that Hannah Arendt’s thought can offer significant insights on political judgement for realism in political theory. We identify a realist position which emphasises the need to account for how humans judge politically, contra moralist tendencies to limit its exercise to rational standards, but which fails to provide a sufficient conception of its structure and potential. Limited appeals to political judgement render the realist defence of the political elusive and compromise the endeavour to offer a meaningful alternative to (...) the moralist tendency to displace politics. The potential and limitations of realist discussions on judgement are made visible in relation to proto-realists Judith Shklar and Isaiah Berlin. In seeking to enrich the realist conception of the political, the article introduces the displacement critique found in the neglected Arendtian ‘realism’. It also provides the foundations for a distinctly realist account of political judgement which, we argue, requires elaboration along two dimensions: the social coding of political judgement and the political capacities that help judgement build a suitable political sphere. (shrink)

This book is a study of what may be called “worldview-making.” I use the gerund here because no one’s worldview is static. Our picture of the world is constantly changing because our context of experience is constantly changing. The way we experience the world and each other depends on our assumptions at a given moment of how the world looks, feels, and works. To understand any given individual, cultural event, or epoch of history, we need to take into account the (...) operative myths, attitudes, and worldviews, which are bound to have deep and hidden roots. LeShan dedicates his book to Giambattista Vico as his forerunner and inspiration, an eighteenth-century philosopher and founding father of the human sciences. Once we see the key role of our “world pictures,” as LeShan does, it becomes clear that each of us lives in a world conditioned by the dominant reality-pictures whose spell we labor under at any given time. An educated person today out for a summer stroll suddenly hears a blast of thunder, and thinks, “Damn, forgot my umbrella.” Vico reminds us that the same blast of thunder heard by a person in a pre-scientific, pre-rational culture is heard as the voice of a god and fills the one who hears it with sacred terror. Vico understood, as I am sure LeShan would agree, that worldviews mediated by mythic imagination generate totally different kinds of experiences than worldviews mediated by modern science. In general, the scope and quality of our experience is always mediated by a particular worldview. This seems to me the vital (and challenging) premise of this book. (shrink)

There is a common problem in artificial intelligence (AI) and information security. In AI, an expert system needs to be able to justify and explain a decision to the user. In information security, experts need to be able to explain to the public why a system is secure. In both cases, an important goal of explanation is to acquire or maintain the users’ trust. In this paper, I investigate the relation between explanation and trust in the context of computing science. (...) This analysis draws on literature study and concept analysis, using elements from system theory as well as actor-network theory. I apply the conceptual framework to both AI and information security, and show the benefit of the framework for both fields by means of examples. The main focus is on expert systems (AI) and electronic voting systems (security). Finally, I discuss consequences of the analysis for ethics in terms of (un)informed consent and dissent, and the associated division of responsibilities. (shrink)

The anthropological sensibility has often been seen as growing out of opposition to Enlightenment universalism. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) is often cited as an ancestor of modern cultural relativism, in which cultures exist in the plural. This article argues that Herder’s anthropology, and anthropology generally, are more closely related to Enlightenment thought than is generally considered. Herder certainly attacks Enlightenment abstraction, the arrogance of its Eurocentric historical teleology, and argues the case for a proto-hermeneutical approach which emphasizes embeddedness, horizon, the (...) usefulness of prejudice. His suspicion of the ideology of progress and of associated theories of stadial development leads to a critique of cosmopolitanism and, particularly, of colonialism. But a comparison with a central Enlightenment figure like the natural historian Buffon (1708-88) reveals shared anthropological assumptions: human beings are characterized by the flexibility of their relationship to their environment, and by their ability to transmit and receive social knowledge. Herder’s critique of progress is thus an unstable one: culture [ Kultur] as the process through which humanity develops can also be called Enlightenment [ Aufklärung]. Herder’s definition of culture is much closer to a unitary Enlightenment model of civilization than is frequently suggested. Herder’s relativism is thus open to question: he holds on to certain universal criteria for transcultural judgements. This reassessment of Herder’s place in Enlightenment anthropology raises questions of contemporary relevance regarding cultural relativism on the one hand, and modernization and globalization on the other. (shrink)

The Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico developed a theoretical framework for the study of human sciences that exerted a strong influence on psychology and other human sciences. He backed the unity of the knowledge about human mind and culture, including history, linguistics, philosophy, philology, epistemology, psychology, and for the first time proposed a method for their study that he ambitiously called ‘new science’. The article presents an overview of Vico’s thought and discusses some of the main axioms of his theoretical system. (...) His critique of Cartesianism as the alternative epistemology he outlined is put forward as a thoughtful tool for reflection on contemporary psychological science. This retrospective look at Vico’s idea would finally provide useful insights for a programmatic view on cultural psychology. (shrink)

This article proposes an understanding of critical international theory as an historical rather than philosophical mode of knowledge. To excavate this historical mode of theorizing it offers an alternative account of CIT's intellectual sources. While most accounts of critical international theory tend to focus on inheritances from Kant, Marx and Gramsci, or allude in general terms to debts to the Frankfurt School and the Enlightenment, this is not always the case. Robert Cox, for example, has repeatedly professed intellectual debts to (...) realism and historicism. The argument advanced here builds on Cox by situating CIT in a longer intellectual heritage that extends from Renaissance humanism and passes through Absolutist historiography before reaching Enlightenment civil histories, including Vico's history of civil institutions. The critical element in this intellectual heritage was the formation of a secular political historicism critically disposed to metaphysical claims based on moral philosophies. By recovering this neglected inheritance of criticism, we can articulate not only a critical theory to rival problem-solving theories, but propose a conception of theory as a historical mode of knowledge that rivals philosophical modes yet remains critical by questioning prevailing intellectual assumptions in International Relations theory. (shrink)

The article situates Vico's hermeneutical science of history between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a redemptive hermeneutics. It discusses Vico's early writings and his ambivalent trajectory from Cartesian rationalism to counter-enlightenment historicist and critic of natural law reasoning. The complexity of Vico's thinking belies some of the popular treatments of his thought developed by Isaiah Berlin and others.

SummaryThe author studies the form of philosophical optimism in Slovak Lutheran ethics in the first half of the 19th century in the views of Ján Kollár and Ján Chalupka. Herder’s philosophy of history and his philosophy of historical progress significantly influenced Slovak Lutheran ethics of the given period. In the author’s view, Kollár and Chalupka mainly appreciated human history as progress in all parts of life and refused glorification of the past. However, they did not limit their assessment to a (...) positive evaluation of the present; they used one’s own mistakes and faults to appeal to moral development of man and placed to the forefront the belief in a better future of mankind in the form of humanity. (shrink)

This article locates Bourdieu’s sociology within the lasting controversy concerning the nature of causal explanation and interpretative understanding in the social sciences, with a special focus on the classical problem surrounding the alleged compatibility between these procedures. First, it is argued that Bourdieu’s praxeological and relational perspective on the social universe leads him not only to join the ‘compatibility field’ of the debate, but to sustain, more radically, the identity between explanation and understanding. Second, the article defends the view that (...) this methodological proposal is tied to a distinction often ignored among the commentators of Bourdieu’s oeuvre, namely that between objectivism, a mode of knowledge of the social which he intends to integrate and overcome in his structural praxeology, and determinism, adopted by the author as a fundamental scientific principle and, at the same time, a potentially emancipatory ethico-political tool bequeathed by his reflexive sociology. While basically sympathetic to Bourdieu’s perspective, the article concludes in a more critical vein, by defending the need to bridge the gap between the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ that marks his portrayal of the reflexive capabilities of the lay agent, on the one hand, and the ‘optimism of the will’ infused in the critical program of reflexive sociology, on the other. (shrink)

Since English is not a neutral scientific language for the description of emotions (or anything else), then the key question is what (meta)language other than English can be used instead. I draw a distinction between “experiential meaning” which can only be acquired through lived experience, and “compositional meaning” which can be adequately portrayed in the mini-language of universal human concepts (NSM) developed through wide-ranging cross-linguistic investigations. The article rejects both the anglocentrism of emotion studies which take English concepts for granted (...) and the “zoocentrism” which seeks to reduce human emotions to “mammalian responses,” behavioral patterns or neuro-physiological states. It argues that any discourse on emotions not anchored in universal human concepts is inherently ethnocentric (more often than not, anglocentric). (shrink)

Este trabajo plantea la necesidad de un análisis semántico de la noción de ‘aspecto’ en la Scienza nuova, y la afirmación de una instancia de comprensión filosófica. La dimensión de la aspectualidad, pensada filosóficamente, se sitúa en el origen de la correlación entre percepción imaginativa, por un lado, y, por otro, comunicación y comprensión de naturaleza expresiva, afectivamente marcada y multisensorial. En ella Vico ha indicado, mediante el modelo genético y funcional de las tres lenguas, la condición necesaria para comprender (...) el desarrollo del lenguaje específicamente humano.PALABRAS CLAVE: Vico, aspecto, aspectualidad, Scienza nuova, percepción imaginativa, lingüística, filosofía.The aim of this paper is to show the necessity of a semantic approach to the concept of‘aspect’ in the Scienza nuova, as well as to defend a particular way of philosophicalcomprehension. From a philosophical point of view, the dimension of aspectuality is in the origin of the correlation between imaginative perception on the one hand, and communication and expressive comprehension on the other . Vico has shown in it, by the genetic and functional model of the three languages, the necessary condition to understand the development of specifically human language.KEYWORDS: Vico, aspect, aspectuality, New Science, imaginative perception, linguistics, philosophy. (shrink)