It is the ambition of natural science to provide complete explanations of reality. Collingwood argues that science can only explain events, not actions. The latter is the distinctive subject matter of history and can be described as actions only if they are explained historically. This paper explains Collingwood’s claim that the distinctive subject matter of history is actions and why the attempt to capture this subject matter through the method of science inevitably ends in failure because science explains events, not (...) actions. It argues that Collingwood’s defence of the methodological autonomy of history vis-à-vis natural science is not based on a commitment to human exceptionalism, i.e. the exclusion of human beings and their doings from the rest of nature, but on the view that explanations which appeal to norms are different in kind from explanations which appeal to empirical regularities. Given the close relationship between the method and the subject matter of a form of inquiry, actions elude any attempt to explain them through the scientific method because the application of this method entails that what is thus explained is not an action but an event. (shrink)

This essay pursues two goals: to argue that two fundamental types of time—the time of objective reality and “the time of the soul”—meet in human activity and history and to defend the legitimacy of calling a particular version of the second type a kind of time. The essay begins by criticizing Paul Ricoeur’s version of the claim that times of these two sorts meet in history. It then presents an account of human activity based on Heidegger’s Being and Time, according (...) to which certain times of the two types—existential temporality and succession—meet in human activity. The legitimacy of calling existential temporality a kind of time is then defended via an expanded analysis of activity that examines where the two times meet there. The concluding section briefly considers a conception of historical time due to David Carr before showing why history is a broader domain encompassing human activity where the two times meet. (shrink)

A scholar of Hellenistic and Prussian history, Droysen developed a historical theory that at the time was unprecedented in range and depth, and which remains to the present day a valuable key for understanding history as both an idea and a professional practice. Arthur Alfaix Assis interprets Droysen’s theoretical project as an attempt to redefine the function of historiography within the context of a rising criticism of exemplar theories of history, and focuses on Droysen’s claim that the goal underlying historical (...) writing and reading should be the development of the subjective capacity to think historically. In addition, Assis examines the connections and disconnections between Droysen’s theory of historical thinking, his practice of historical thought, and his political activism. Ultimately, Assis not only shows how Droysen helped reinvent the relationship between historical knowledge and human agency, but also traces some of the contradictions and limitations inherent to that project. (shrink)

This paper attempts to reconcile two apparently opposed ways of thinking about the imagination and its relationship to literature, one which casts it as essentially concerned with fiction-making and the other with culture-making. The literary imagination’s power to create fictions is what gives it its most obvious claim to “autonomy”, as Kant would have it: its freedom to venture out in often wild and spectacular excess of reality. The argument of this paper is that we can locate the literary imagination’s (...) complementary power of cultural articulation in this fictional activity. The suggestion is that we should conceive of the literary imagination as expressing its interests in culture not mimetically but by producing a certain kind of meaning. This meaning is irreducibly narratological, and understanding it helps us to see the role of narrative in bringing into harmony the literary imagination’s interests in both the imaginary and the real. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, Hilda Diana Oakeley set out a new kind of British idealism. Oakeley is an idealist in the sense that she holds mind to actively contribute to the features of experience, but she also accepts that there is a world independent of mind. One of her central contributions to the idealist tradition is her thesis that minds construct our experiences using memory. This paper explores the theses underlying her idealism, and shows how they are intricately connected (...) to the wider debates of her period. I go on to explain how the parts of Oakeley's idealism are connected to further areas of her thought – specifically, her views on history and her growing block theory of time – to provide a sense of Oakeley's philosophy as a system. As there is no existing literature on Oakeley, this paper aims to open a path for further scholarship. (shrink)

This is a response to a claim by Sven Ove Hansson to the effect that Poppers dictum that falsification lies at the heart of all pursuit of science has once and for all been falsified by his study of articles published in Nature during the year 2000. We claim that this is based on a misunderstanding of Poppers philosophy of science interpreting it too literally, and that alternative readings of those papers are fully compliant with falsification. We scrutinize Hansson’s arguments (...) as well as giving an overview of Poppers falsification theory. (shrink)

In 1908, Henri Poincar? claimed that: ...the mathematical facts worthy of being studied are those which, by their analogy with other facts, are capable of leading us to the knowledge of a mathematical law, just as experimental facts lead us to the knowledge of a physical law. They are those which reveal to us unsuspected kinship between other facts, long known, but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another. Towards the end of the twentieth century, with many more mathematical (...) facts since discovered, several mathematicians proposed overarching schemes to organise the facts they considered most significant. In this paper, I shall briefly discuss three of these schemes (those of Arnold, Atiyah, and Baez and Dolan), before drawing some philosophical consequences from their attempts. Rather than the kind of claim made by Frege that with the entry of imaginary numbers we reach the ?natural end of the domain of numbers?, we are dealing here with a more open-ended sense of conceptual growth. I shall illustrate this theme by discussing the elaboration of algebraic structures designed to measure symmetry. What emerges is that at any one time mathematicians are operating with a notion very similar to that discussed in the philosophy of science under the heading of ?natural kinds?. We find ?quasi-causal? talk of properties being ?responsible? for a phenomenon, projectability, the transfer of robust mechanisms between domains, and reference to entities not yet fully determined. Debates in philosophy of science prompt further questioning as to the ?naturalness? of these mathematical kinds, whether one should expect them to be dependent on varying human interests, whether there is a distinction between artefactual and real kinds, and whether there is convergence of kinds. I believe that these questions present a wonderful opportunity for a philosophy of mathematics to treat ?real? mathematics, while making powerful points of contact with philosophy of science, and philosophy in general. (shrink)

Ya'qubi, the great 9th century Muslim historian and geographer, left significant works behind. However, his innovative approach to exploring history is what he is particularly famous for. He decided to correct, substantially and seriously, the historiographical method advocated by many generations of historians before him, as well as by some of his contemporaries, such as al-Tabari. He deemed that history could not be viewed in isolation from other related scientific disciplines. In his opinion, a historian must be well aware of (...) geographical and natural features of the region he wants to write about, to obtain thorough information of the conceptual and cognitive platform on which its inhabitants based their beliefs, the culture and demographic specificities of the people, and many other details. Only then will he be able to recognize the essence of historical events, and, above all, the purpose and direction of social trends. Ya'qubi paid close attention to political, financial, military and other social turmoil in history. He reported on them very accurately. Yet, he still believed that all those elements were in fact the consequence of a more serious and fundamental factor, cultural history. That is why cultural, thought and spiritual development in the history of different peoples, both before and after the advent of Islam, was the core and mainstay of his research. (shrink)

This paper (in Finnish) concerns the ontological status of categories of entities. I argue that categories are not be considered as further entities. Rather, it is suffcient for entities belonging to the same category that they are in exactly the same formal ontological relations and have the same general category features.

Owing in part to Rorty’s energetic promotional efforts, Davidson’s philosophy of language has received much attention in recent decades from quarters most diverse, creating at times a sense of an almost protean versatility. Conspicuously missing from the rapidly growing literature on the subject is a sustained discussion of the relationship between Davidson’s interpretive theory and history: an omission all the more surprising since a comparison between Davidson and Gadamer has been pursued at some length and now, it seems,abandoned—all without as (...) much as a mention of history, which does, of course,play a prominent role in Gadamer’s thought. The issue, moreover, is hardly negligible. Davidson understood his work as an attempt to reconcile the demands of rigorous naturalism with the Kantian picture of human rationality,thereby salvaging what he considered to be important and interesting features of the human world from mechanistic reduction. For many thinkers of the 20th century, including Dewey and Gadamer, the irreducibly human had to do with the historical being of mankind, with historicity as the unique mark of our species. Yet, Davidson has virtually nothing to say about history and, in fact, a recent study by Giuseppina D’Oro (2004b), comparing Collingwood and Davidson, concludes that Davidson’s model of interpretation results in a distorted picture of understanding, as judged by the standards of a historically informed interpretive practice. Examining the causes of their disagreement, then,should help us make some headway towards a clearer sense of what it means to understand historically, by gleaning some additional constraints that the requirement of historicity imposes upon an interpretive theory. We start with D’Oro’s criticism of Davidson and discuss the alternative account of interpretation she proposes. Afterwards, we turn to Collingwood to see if either account does justice to his central insights, ending with some suggestions about the conceptual adjustments required to accommodate them. (shrink)

: This article explores certain issues that arise at the borderline between conceptual analysis and metaphysics, where answers to questions of a conceptual nature compete with answers to questions of an ontological or metaphysical nature. I focus on the way in which three philosophers, Kant, Collingwood and Davidson, articulate the relationship between the conceptual question "What are actions?" and the metaphysical question "How is agency possible?" I argue that the way in which one handles the relationship between the conceptual and (...) the ontological question has important implications for one’s conception of the nature of philosophy, and that thinking hard about what it takes to defend the autonomy of the mental and of the agent-centred perspective should force us to think about our underlying conception of philosophy and to choose between one that understands it as first science and one that understands it as the under-labourer of science. (shrink)

The aim of this research is to reconstruct a metaphysical interpretation of the philosophy of history with regard to the spirit of historical thinking. The spirit of historical thinking is to emphasize the relation between what happened in the past and historical thinking about the past in the present. However, current philosophies of history, which are largely epistemologically oriented, have not adequately explored this relation. In order to investigate the relation between past and present, I refer to an Aristotelian philosophy (...) of practice and politics, and adapt it to the domain of the philosophy of history, and argue the case for a metaphysical science of history. A metaphysical science of history contains two primary parts. They are the part on physis and the part on technê/phronēsis. With regard to physis that metaphysically investigates the natural generating progress of entities, I argue that the existence of historical events can be understood as a natural developing progress in which the events are ordered in a chronological sequence. Such chronological sequence is essentially the physis of history in the metaphysical sense. For the part on technê/phronēsis, I demonstrate that Aristotelian knowing is for itself an action of knowing, which is located beyond a given temporal position in the past to both the past and the thinking present, and indicates the fundamental Beingness of history. Finally I conclude that the historical eudaimonia, namely the pursuing of the completeness of historical knowledge, is the final presentation of actualizing Geschehenszeit, as it bridges the past and the present in accordance to the spirit of historical thinking. (shrink)

Seven recent monographs on the philosophical foundations of library science are discussed in light of the questions the authors ask and the assumptions that underlie the questions asked. The author finds that epistemological discussions frequently identify epistemology with philosophy of science while ontological discussions rest upon reifications, and in both cases there is an absence of attention to ethical and political questions. The author's critique links the absence of ethical and political dimensions in several of the works discussed to an (...) approach to philosophy that offers the reader answers rather than questions. (shrink)