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.

The intellectual trajectories of social scientists Robert N. Bellah and Clifford Geertz are compared as a case study in the production of successful interdisciplinary work. Geertz and Bellah started from a similar position, in terms of scholarly habits, network centrality, and symbolic capital. However, while Geertz became an interdisciplinary star and left his mark in disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, and cultural studies, Bellah’s interdisciplinary appeal was more limited, while his ability to speak to the general public as a (...) public intellectual was unmatched by Geertz. We thus review Bellah’s and Geertz’s parallel careers using a multidimensional analytical model intended to complete current field-based and performative-pragmatist models of intellectual success, arguing that interdisciplinary success can be accounted for by a combination of local ecological factors, images of intellectual work, and texts showing a high degree of cross-disciplinary fluency. (shrink)

In the age of the `return to the empirical' in which the theoretical disputes of an earlier era seem to have fallen silent, we seek to excavate the intellectual conditions for reviving theoretical debate, for it is upon this recovery that deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of empirical social science depends. We argue against the all too frequent turn to ontology, whereby critical realists have sought an epistemological guarantor of sociological validity. We seek, to the contrary, to crystallize (...) a culturally-based, hermeneutic account of a rational social science. Derived from disputes within the sociology of culture, on the one hand, and the long-standing concerns of interpretive philosophy, on the other, we offer a cultural-sociological approach to epistemology. We view the production of truth in social science as a reading of a meaningful social world, and as a performance of truth-claims that is constrained by evidence, but whose success depends on other contextual factors. We conclude that the rationality of social science can be achieved only by forgoing ontology. Theories are abstractions of investigators' meanings that allow the interpretation of social meanings in turn, whether those are actions, relations, or structures. Successful explanations are those that intertwine these meaning structures of investigators and actors in an effective way. (shrink)

Que veut dire « vivre de sa plume»? L'expression a souvent été invoquée par des historiens avançant le récit d'un progrès dans les pratiques littéraires marqué par le passage des écrivains du patronage au marché, afin de définir la « modernité » auctoriale par rapport à un modèle ancien de l'homme de lettres protégé par la noblesse. Or un examen plus attentif montrera que ce progrès vers une autonomie gagnée par la vente des écrits n'est guère aussi évident qu'on a (...) eu tendance à le croire. Cet article étudie donc les ambiguïtés du récit historique implicite dans la notion de « vivre de sa plume ». Il propose ensuite une approche différente qui considère cette représentation non pas comme le reflet d'une nouvelle réalité professionnelle, mais comme un élément dans une nouvelle rhétorique de la présentation de soi en tant qu 'intellectuel. Comme topos, l'image va désigner - et en fait, constituer - à la fois la libération sociale de l'auteur à l'égard de la noblesse et son autorité morale lorsque ses tentatives de vivre de ses écrits échouent et qu'il persiste tout de même à sacrifier son bonheur personnel à son art. (shrink)

The word ‘pseudoscience’ is a marker of changing worries about science and being a scientist. It played an important role in the philosophical debate on demarcating science from other activities, and was used in popular writings to distance science from cranky theories with scientific pretensions. These uses consolidated a comforting unity in science, a communal space from which pseudoscience is excluded, and the user's right to belong is asserted. The urgency of this process dwindled when attempts to find a formal (...) demarcation petered out, and the growth of social constructionism denied science any special access to truth. The reaction to this led to the science wars, which ushered in a new anxiety in the use of ‘pseudoscience’, especially from the least secure branches. But recent writings on the disunity of science reveal how the sense of support drawn from it may be based on an illusion, creating a disunity of pseudoscience as well as of science. (shrink)

In January 1776, Thomas Paine demanded to know whether “the Power of feeling” did not require that American colonists declare independence from Great Britain. Paine's efforts included an appeal to “common sense,” to the idea that it was only natural for colonists to end their ties with Britain. For Paine, independence did not depend on elaborately wrought arguments; instead, it should be obvious to all, even the most unlettered. His own emotionally charged language—the king was akin to a “crowned ruffian” (...) descended from “a French Bastard landing with an armed Banditti”—sought to stir even those who still longed for reconciliation to “examine the passions and feelings of mankind” and to throw off the yoke of oppression. Paine's formulations, like these two books, raise numerous questions. How significant has the expression of emotion been in American history? How far can scholars go in attributing to it sufficient momentum to effect major historical change? Can something so universal be harnessed into nationalist political trajectories? Should America be seen as having a unique emotional culture in the eighteenth century? Did this exceptional culture of feeling contribute to the Revolution itself? These two authors answer yes to the last three questions, thus prompting re-evaluation of the “power of feeling” in the American Revolution itself. (shrink)

A prominent historiographic theme in the past decade has been a movement away from causal explanation of large-scale processes and outcomes and toward narrative interpretation of singular historical processes. This article argues for the continued vitality of large-scale historical inquiry and surveys the historiographic issues that arise in large-scale historical explanation. The article proceeds through an examination of several important recent examples of large-scale history: comparative history of Europe and China, the history of alternative forms of industrial organization, and the (...) history of technology. These three cases provide the basis for a conception of what may be called "conjunctural contingent meso-level" explanations: explanations that identify intermediate-level structures and processes and highlight both the structural factors that govern change and the multiple pathways that change can take. (shrink)

Interaction between humans and cats in urban environments is subject to dynamic change. Based on the frequency and quality of relations with humans, we can distinguish several populations of domestic cats : pedigree, pet, semi-feral, feral, and pseudo-wild. Bringing together theoretical perspectives of the Tartu school of biosemiotics and ethological studies of animal societies, we distinguish two basic types of cat cultures: the culture of street cats and the humano-cat culture of pets. The difference between these cultures is documented on (...) the level of zoosemiotic interactions, ecological relations, and human representations. We introduce a threefold model of human-animal interactions in urban environments which steer a careful course between the Scylla of realistic ontology and the Charybdis of social constructivism. A case study on Estonian cat shelters illustrates the significance of cultural representations and institutionalized actions in human-cat cohabitation. (shrink)

D'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse, a once‐influential eighteenth‐century consideration of the utility of the humanities, is relevant to contemporary concerns about the declining importance of humanistic education. A sympathetic appraisal of d'Alembert's critique of humanistic erudition as largely useless can serve as a starting point for reconceiving of the humanities as studies that help train the professionals who administer the institutions of modern society to better understand their own commitments.

This article argues that popular revolution was closely tied to the establishment of capitalism. Contrary to the revisionist George V. Taylor’s view that the Revolution had nothing to do with the advance of capitalism because financial and productive capital were divided from one another, this article contends that the Revolution played a critical role in tying them together. Prior to the Revolution financiers began to make limited investments in wholesale trade, manufacturing and mining. But during the revolutionary crisis the sans-culottes (...) pushed the Jacobins to create a national money and to curb speculation in order to foster production and exchange and reduce unemployment. With speculative activity blocked by popular resistance and state interference, bankers and other capitalists increasingly turned to productive investments and forged a link between financial and productive capital which proved crucial to further capitalist accumulation. (shrink)

Philosophy may relate to interdisciplinarity in two distinct ways On the one hand, philosophy may play an auxiliary role in the process of interdisciplinarity, typically through conceptual analysis, in the understanding that the disciplines themselves are the main epistemic players. This version of the relationship I characterise as ‘normal’ because it captures the more common pattern of the relationship, which in turn reflects an acceptance of the division of organized inquiry into disciplines. On the other hand, philosophy may be itself (...) the site for the production of interdisciplinary knowledge, understood as a kind of second-order understanding of reality that transcends the sort of knowledge that the disciplines provide, left to their own devices. This is my own position, which I dub ‘deviant’ and to which most of this article is devoted. I begin by relating the two types of interdisciplinarity to the organization of inquiry, especially their respective attitudes to the history of science. Underlying the two types are contrasting notions of what constitutes the ‘efficient’ pursuit of knowledge. This difference is further explored in terms of the organization of the university. The normal/deviant distinction was already marked in the institution’s medieval origins in terms of the difference between Doctors and Masters, respectively, an artefact of which remains in the postgraduate/undergraduate degree distinction. In the context of the history of the university, the prospects for deviant interdisciplinarity were greatest from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century—the period called ‘early modern’ in the philosophy curriculum. Towards the end of that period, due to Kant and the generation of idealists who followed him, philosophy was briefly the privileged site for deviant interdisciplinarity. After Hegel’s death, the mantle of deviant interdisciplinarity increasingly passed to some version of ‘biology’. I explore the ‘Natur-’ and ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ versions of that post-philosophical vision, which continue to co-exist within today’s biological science. I then briefly examine the chequered reputation of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, someone who exemplified the promise and perils of deviant interdisciplinarity over the past 200 years. I conclude with an Epilogue that considers contemporary efforts to engage philosophy in interdisciplinary work, invoking William James as an exemplar. (shrink)

In this article, we document how, in the public arena, British readers of the first edition of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (1687) tried to make sense of the relation between gravity, matter, and divine and natural causation—an issue on which Newton had remained entirely silent in the first edition of the Principia. We show that readers attached new meanings to the Principia so that parts of it migrated to a different intellectual debate. It will be shown that one (...) particular result Newton obtained in the Principia, namely the rejection of a vacuum in Corollary 3 to Proposition 6 in Book 3, was the most important locus in debates on the relation between gravity, matter, and causation. (shrink)

We show how an epistemology informed by cognitive science promises to shed light on an ancient problem in the philosophy of mathematics: the problem of exactness. The problem of exactness arises because geometrical knowledge is thought to concern perfect geometrical forms, whereas the embodiment of such forms in the natural world may be imperfect. There thus arises an apparent mismatch between mathematical concepts and physical reality. We propose that the problem can be solved by emphasizing the ways in which the (...) brain can transform and organize its perceptual intake. It is not necessary for a geometrical form to be perfectly instantiated in order for perception of such a form to be the basis of a geometrical concept. (shrink)

Resource rationality may explain suboptimal patterns of reasoning; but what of “anti-Bayesian” effects where the mind updates in a direction opposite the one it should? We present two phenomena — belief polarization and the size-weight illusion — that are not obviously explained by performance- or resource-based constraints, nor by the authors’ brief discussion of reference repulsion. Can resource rationality accommodate them?