How might a society wrong people by the way in which it remembers its past? In recent years, philosophers have articulated serval ways in which people may be wronged by dominant historical narratives. The aim of this paper will be to investigate an answer to this question which has yet to be explored by philosophers: a society may do wrong by employing historical narratives that consign people to history. The stories a society tells about its history may place certain identities, (...) or practices central to those identities, in a country’s past but not its present or future. I will begin by examining this phenomenon before going on to articulate the distinctive wrongs and harms involved in consigning to history. I will then argue that people have a prima facie duty not to develop or employ national narratives that consign people to history and a responsibility to challenge and resist the use of such narratives, though there may be cases where employing these narratives is justifiable. (shrink)

This article draws together research from various sub-disciplines of philosophy to offer an overview of recent philosophical work on the ethics of historic preservation. I discuss how philosophers writing about art, culture, and the environment have appealed to historical significance in crafting arguments about the preservation of objects, practices, and places. By demonstrating how it relates to core themes in moral and political philosophy, I argue that historic preservation is essentially concerned with ethical issues.

If you are more likely to continue a course of action in virtue of having previously invested in that course of action, then you tend to honor sunk costs. It is widely thought both that (i) individuals often do give some weight to sunk costs in their decision-making and that (ii) it is irrational for them to do so. In this paper I attempt to cast doubt on the conventional wisdom about sunk costs, understood as the conjunction of these two (...) claims. (shrink)

I try to return the focus of the philosophy of history to the nature of understanding, with a particular emphasis on Louis Mink’s project of exploring how historical understanding compares to the understanding we find in the natural sciences. On the whole, I come to a conclusion that Mink almost certainly would not have liked: that the understanding offered by history has a very similar epistemic profile to the understanding offered by the sciences, a similarity that stems from the fact (...) that both are concerned with grasping how the objects of their study are structured, or how the various elements of the things they study depend upon and relate to one another. At the same time, however, I claim that historical inquiry naturally puts us in a position to acquire further epistemic goods, including the old-fashioned epistemic good of wisdom, which is plausibly constituted by knowledge of how to live well. This is something the natural sciences cannot offer, and it is part of the reason why history is such an important form of inquiry. (shrink)

Our ability to tell stories about ourselves has captivated many theorists, and some have taken these developments for an opportunity to answer long-standing questions about the nature of personhood. In this essay I employ two skeptical arguments to show that this move was a mistake. The first argument rests on the observation that storytelling is revisionary. The second implies that our stories about ourselves are biased in regard to our existing self-image. These arguments undercut narrative theories of identity, but they (...) leave room for a theory of narrative self-knowledge. The theory accommodates the first skeptical argument because there are event descriptions with retrospective assertibility conditions, and it accommodates the second argument by denying us epistemic privilege in regard to our own past. The result is that we do know our past through storytelling, but that it is a contingent feature of some of our stories that they are about ourselves. (shrink)

The place that Arthur Danto gives to history, as constitutive to as and our world, as well as a discipline able to produce knowledge of the past, reach its cenit with his philosophy of art. In “the End of Art”, Danto announces an end of the history of the search of the philosophical definition of art and the beginning of the era of pluralism. It is in this account where essencialism and historicism are combined in a way that estimules a (...) heat debate that continues today. In this paper, I give a reconstruction of Danto’s Philosophy of historical language in order to show why this combination is possible and which compromises that should be assumed by an authentic historicism. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Imperative of Responsibility, by the German philosopher Hans Jonas, is a work that aspires to a re-foundation of ethics based on an analysis of the contemporary world as well as on a prediction about the fate of globalized humanity. Through a discussion of the fundamental concepts of Jonas’ work, the essay shows that the central themes of his research, which are still very relevant today, should be addressed by moving from the ethical level to that of ontology and social (...) ontology in particular. To this end, the paper offers a definition of transgenerational action that aims to replace Jonas’ use of prevision. The transgenerational action is here considered as a particular type of social action: that which enables societies to exist over time. Finally, the essay proposes an essential taxonomy of transgenerational actions, showing how working on this notion might lead to a consciously utopian and positive social model. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show how concern with agency, expressed in the idea that history is the doing of agents, shapes both Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of history and, by extension, the roles they accord philosophical historiography.

hilosophy of history and history of philosophy of science make for an interesting case of “mutual containment”: the former is an object of inquiry for the latter, and the latter is subject to the demands of the former. This article discusses a seminal turn in past philosophy of history with an eye to the practice of historians of philosophy of science. The narrative turn by Danto and Mink represents both a liberation for historians and a new challenge to the objectivity (...) of their findings. I will claim that good sense can be made of “working historical veins of possibility” (contrary to how the phrase was originally intended) and that already Danto and Mink provided materials (although they did not quite advertise them as such) to assuage fears of a constructivist free-for-all. (shrink)

The Internet was born in 1960’s, then Internet ethics appeared as a branch of information ethics. It seems, however, our status on the Net is not yet scrutinized. We investigate this problem with the help of philosophers like Dreyfus, Merleau-Ponty, and Austin.

In our article, “Past Facts and The Nature of History”, we unpack a broadly realist view of the nature of history and historical narratives. Paul Roth’s The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation serves as our primary foil. Fons DeWulf and Roth have replied, and this is our response to their response.

Krzysztof Brzechczyn’s important collection around Roth’s “revival” stimulates thought about the approaches adopted by analytical philosophers of history. Roth revives Danto’s 1965 pragmatic “constructivist” insights: in a narrative, earlier “events under a description” are described in terms of possibly unknowable later ones and, following Mink, in terms of possibly unknowable later concepts. Roth thinks of the resulting narrative explanation as justified in virtue of its constituting the object explained. However, earlier analytical philosophers of history faced different issues and adopted two (...) different approaches: the positivist logical empiricist analysis used by Hempel and the nonpositivist “ordinary language” conceptual analysis of Oxford linguistic philosophers used by Dray. Hempel’s Hume-sourced model of historical explanation set a scientific standard to be achieved, while Dray “tested” that analysis against historiographical practice. Both dubiously made “explanation” epistemologically central, as does Roth. Neither they nor later “narrativists” saw that more problematic was “compositionality”, the Hume-sourced view that the meanings of narratives were fully given by the meanings of their constituent sentences. (shrink)

The article comparatively analyzes A.C. Danto’s and P. Ricœur’s theories of historical narration. Ricœur’s synthetic assimilation of Danto’s views is interpreted as a characteristic phenomenon of the dialogue between hermeneutics and analytical philosophy, and in a broader perspective – of contemporary European continental and Anglo-American philosophical traditions. The version of the analytical philosophy of history developed by Danto is interpreted as being formed in the course of overcoming epistemological program of logical positivism under the impact of a platform of linguistic (...) philosophy, pragmatism and neo-pragmatism as well as F. Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the ideas of existentialism. The articles examines fundamental conclusions of Danto’s “descriptive metaphysics” of history, which influence his understanding of a number of epistemological factors and ontological assumptions specific for the theory of historical narration. At the late stage of the evolution of his philosophy of history, Danto spoke of a radical challenge to his views on the part of T. Kuhn’s theory, but he did not give to it a constructive answer. Despite the significant philosophical differences, a number of Danto’s historical narration theory’s theses became acceptable for Ricœur, especially in the light of the American colleague final confession that knowledge of the past is dependent on the kind of existential presence in history specific for a human being. Taking M. Heidegger’s and H.G. Gadamer’s ideas as a basis of his approach to narration problem, Ricœur considered also important the “linguistic turn” initiated by L. Wittgenstein. Offering a positive evaluation of Danto’s analysis of history language, Ricœur simultaneously rightly criticized him for his neglect of the formal instruments of organizing of narrative – plot, intrigue, and composition that should affect the knowledge resources and testify on the unity of narration features in history and fiction as well. (shrink)

The economists of the Austrian School count among the most consistent supporters of methodological individualism, but they were for the most part strongly opposed to clearly anti-holist trends such as constructivism, reductionism, and positivism. This article discusses why the sort of methodological individualism defended by the Austrians could not, for interconnected reasons, be rendered compatible with any one of these philosophical trends. The manner in which the Austrians managed to reconcile their analysis of economic mechanisms with a strictly subjectivist approach (...) is especially considered. The discussion also underscores some ambiguous dimensions of the debate between holism and individualism. (shrink)

Essays on Aristotle's Sea-Battle, Lazy Argument, Argument Reaper, Diodorus' Master Argument -/- The book is devoted to the ancient logical theories, reconstruction of their semantic proprieties and possibilities of their interpretation by modern logical tools. The Ancient arguments are frequently misunderstood in modern interpretations since authors usually have tendency to ignore their historical proprieties and theoretical background what usually leads to a quite inappropriate picture of the argument’s original form and mission. Author’s primary intention was to draw attention to the (...) complexity of some historical arguments and to the theoretical context in which arguments were created, circulated, developed, and finally tuned. Four well-known ancient arguments – with a common central subject related to the future contingencies problem – are reconstructed from available historical sources: “The Sea Battle”, which is drawn from Aristotle’s treatise De Interpretatione; two arguments, usually ascribed to the Stoics, “The Lazy Argument” and “The Reaper”; “The Master Argument” of the Megarian philosopher Diodorus. Arguments are linguistically and semantically detaily analyzed, formally presented by reflecting some relevant corresponding hypotheses based on physical or logical theories of their ancient authors, and finally covered by appropriate logical tools familiar to a modern reader. Two appendices are added at the closing part of the book. One covering some assumptions relevant for understanding of rival streams in ancient theories of meaning related to the nature of names and naming; the other is devoted to the ancient understanding of logical proposition and attempts to find an adequate Latin translation of the Greek delicate philosophical term “ἀξίωμα”. (shrink)

My purpose in the researching and the writing of this thesis has been to investigate, and to try to explain, Frank Ankersmit's curious shift from his well expressed and firmly held narrativist position of "Narrative Logic", to an arguably contradictory, yet passionately held counter belief in the plausibility of a form of direct historical experience - an authentic unmediated relationship with the past. I am, accordingly, presenting here what I believe to be the most adequate explanatory account of/for Ankersmit's intellectual (...) journey. A journey which, in essence, constituted a substitution of his earlier representational, language centred philosophy of history for what might be taken as a new and mystical non-representational theory. This alternative theory of Ankersmit' s, lacking cognitive foundations, works on the basis of sensations, moods, feelings and therefore a consciousness deemed to be received directly from the past itself, and therein - for this thesis - lies its fatal weakness as a historical theory. Belief in the mystical may be all right at some level, if this is what is wanted, but a mystical experience itself cannot produce a historical re-presentation which is the only way that the past can be presented historically. Thus, I argue that Ankersmit's journey from language to experience - the latter phenomenon being more appropriately situated within the field of sociology/social theory and memory studies - is, in the end, a lost historical cause. (shrink)