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)

Wittgenstein had little to say directly on philosophy of history. But some pertinent remarks in _On Certainty_ have received little attention, apart from in Elizabeth Anscombe's short article on Hume and Julius Caesar. That article acknowledges its debt to _On Certainty,_ which responses to Anscombe have failed to recognise. Wittgenstein focuses in _On Certainty_ on apparently empirical propositions that seem to be certainties, but in fact form a rule-like framework for judging. I have called these _Moorean propositions_, and the present (...) article develops the suggestion that history as a discipline rests on them. The result is a qualification of empiricism in philosophy of history. (shrink)

The past is deeply important to many of us. But our concern about history can seem puzzling and needs justification. After all, the past cannot be changed: we can help the living needy, but the tears we shed for the long dead victims of past tragedies help no one. Attempts to justify our concern about history typically take one of two opposing forms. It is assumed either that such concern must be justified in instrumental or otherwise self-centered and present-centered terms (...) or that our interest in history must be utterly disinterested and pursued for its own sake. But neither approach can fully explain, or justify, our concern about the past. I propose a third approach, on which the past matters because it contains much that is of value—all those past people and the things they did or had endured—and this value calls for our fitting response. In short: the significance of the past is past significance. (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)

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.

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)

In the present work, we will analyze the concept of intuition mainly in relation to the epistemological and the metaphysical theses of Schopenhauerian theory. In the first section, we will discuss the central axes of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical system, especially regarding the concept of will (Wille) and the relationship that this entails with his theory of knowledge. Then, we will examine the difference that the German philosopher establishes between representative —or mediated— rational knowledge and direct —or immediate— intuitive knowledge. Likewise, we (...) will trace at first the theses and the fundamental problems of the dualism of representation and we will furtherly establish the problem of the intuition of one’s own body. Finally, we will consider the scope and the limits of intuition, as well as its different variants: mainly aesthetic intuition and its culmination in mystical intuition. (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.

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)

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)

If one were to write a history of the philosophy of science in the spirit of T. S. Kuhn, one would have to consider the model of scientific explanation which Popper proposed and Hempel and Oppenheim developed to be one of the great paradigms of contemporary analytical philosophy of science. This analogue to the historically important paradigms of the individual sciences seems to me to be justifiable for the following reasons: first, the Hempel—Oppenheim model claims universal methodological validity; second, discussions (...) on the problem of explanation have centred on this model for some time; third, the recent cognitive progress in this field has been largely the result of the interrelation between criticism of this model on the one hand and its improvement and explication on the other hand; and lastly, this model stands for a particular comprehension of the problems and possibilities of science, a concept of quite important practical consequence. (shrink)

The response given to C.G. Hempel’s well-known challenge by Arthur Danto in his Analytical Philosophy of History of 1965 – that deductive-nomological and narrative explanations are logically compatible yet employ incommensurable schemata – is here investigated from a historical perspective. It is shown that the developmental trajectory that emerges from an analysis of Danto’s previous writings – including not only a forgotten paper of 1958 but also his PhD dissertation of 1952 – contains distinctive step-changes with publications of 1953 and (...) 1956 still prior to that of 1958–59 which enabled his subsequent discovery of narrative sentences. It is also argued that Danto’s developmental trajectory runs contrary to that presumed by some prominent commentators. Analytical History of Philosophy was not the midpoint of his ascent from mainstream philosopher of science to high priest of postmodern aesthetics, but represents a reasoned retreat from his early historical idealism. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

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.

This article discusses the issue of the conceptual accuracy of descriptions of social life, which, although fundamental for the social sciences, has in fact been neglected. I approach this task via an examination of Paul Roth’s recent work, which recapitulates reflection in analytic philosophy of history and sets out a view of the past as indeterminate until retrospectively constructed in historical narratives. I argue that Roth’s position embraces an overly restricted notion of historical significance and underestimates how anachronistic descriptions vitiate (...) central historiographical tasks. I contend that the importance of conceptually accurate descriptions for history and the social sciences cannot be overstated. (shrink)

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 approach that philosophers have taken to history has too often been one-dimensional. It is my aim in this paper to map out a future multi-dimensional philosophy of history, by invoking the notion of a relation with the past, and by arguing for the philosophical relevance of multiple such relations.

El presente artículo se propone mostrar la vinculación conceptual que se establece en el conjunto de la obra de Arthur Danto –un autor clave en la consideración analítica del concepto de representación- entre asimetrías cognitivas, teoría de la representación y criterio transfigurativo de realidad. Esa articulación nos entrega un modelo de particular predilección por las asimetrías cognitivas vinculadas a la estructura trágica, que es limitativa de las posibilidades aventuradas por el mismo Danto respecto de nuestra capacidad para captar la apertura (...) e incompletud de nuestra aprehensión de la historia. (shrink)

The study of natural disaster and its discursive dimensions from a semiotic perspective can provide a theoretical frame for the scientific communication of global catastrophes. In this paper I will suggest two models; one is a semiotic model on the natural catastrophic events and the other is a hexagon model composed of semiotic dimensions of natural disaster discourse. The six main modules include narration, description, explication, visualization, prevention, and recovery action.

El presente trabajo pretende entablar un diálogo crítico entre la historia conceptual y la filosofía de la historia. Por una parte, en lo tocante al supuesto inicio de la “identidad semántica” de la modernidad; por otra, en la propia noción de “saber histórico” y con ella las experiencias históricas colectivas e individuales que lo conforman: no podemos olvidar que el sujeto del saber histórico no es sólo –o fundamentalmente- el estudioso de la historia, sino también quienes “hacen” esa historia o (...) la “padecen” y que también contribuyen a gestar el humus conceptual de una experiencia que se traduce –o debería traducirse- en responsabilidad ética por esos mismos conceptos. La crítica a la filosofía clásica de la historia tiende así la mano a la propuesta de la rehabilitación de una filosofía crítica de la historia, aspectos ambos en los que se presentan como antecedentes diferentes conceptos leibnizianos, como no podía ser de otra manera en un trabajo dedicado a mi querido y extrañado amigo Quintín Racionero –que ya no será lo mismo sin poder discutirlo con él. (shrink)

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)

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)

Danto sostiene que el fin del arte ha llegado, pero también afirma que el arte sigue siendo importante para nuestras vidas. Las obras de arte pueden encarnar significados que nos conmueven, nos motivan a actuar y nos transforman de alguna manera. El efecto que tiene el arte sobre nosotros depende, en gran medida, de las cualidades estéticas que revisten y modulan el significado de las obras. En el presente trabajo analizaré, puntualmente, el rol que Danto le atribuye a lo bello (...) y lo sublime en ese sentido. Mi objetivo es contrastar la importancia que le confiere a la belleza, como la única cualidad estética que a la vez es un valor -equiparable a la verdad o la bondad-, con el lugar al que relega a lo sublime. Me propongo reivindicar el rol de lo sublime como un valor significativo para la experiencia del arte y la vida en general. (shrink)