I argue that scientific progress is precisely the accumulation of scientific knowledge.

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the (...) psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework. (shrink)

I examine some of the key scientific pre-commitments of modern psychology, and argue that their adoption has the unintended consequence of rendering a purely psychological analysis of mind indistinguishable from a purely biological treatment. And, since these pre-commitments sanction an “authority of the biological”, explanation of phenomena traditionally considered the purview of psychological analysis is fully subsumed under the biological. I next evaluate the epistemic warrant of these pre-commitments and suggest there are good reasons to question their applicability to psychological (...) science. I conclude that experiential aspects of reality give us reason to remain open to the need for psychological explanation in the treatment of mind. (shrink)

In The Decline of the West Spengler puts forward a type of philosophical anthropology, an account of the structures of human experiential consciousness and a method of “physiognomic” analysis, which I argue has dimensions that can be understood as akin to existential phenomenology. Humanity, for Spengler, is witness to the creative flux of “Becoming” and constructs a world of phenomena bounded by death, underpinned by the two prime feelings of dread and longing and structured by the two forms of Destiny (...) (Time) and Direction (Space). Human existence, Spengler argues, is future-directed and open in the sense that there is a certain degree of freedom in the ways in which humanity can actualize its existential possibilities. In the course of elaborating the existential implications of this future-orientation, Spengler introduces the concept of care (Sorge), the fundamental experiential structure. (shrink)

This essay develops a new account of the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. Imaginative resistance is best conceived of as a limited phenomenon. It occurs when we try to engage imaginatively with different moral worlds that are insufficiently articulated so that they do not allow us either to quarantine our imaginative engagement from our normal moral attitudes or to agree with the expressed moral judgment from the perspective of moral deliberation. Imaginative resistance thus reveals the central epistemic importance that empathy plays (...) for our understanding of rational agents in a context where we try to make sense of the moral appropriateness of their reasons for acting. Reflecting on the phenomenon of imaginative resistance allows us to recognize important features of the relationship between imaginative perspective taking and ordinary moral deliberation. (shrink)

1. Introduction For philosophers, the current phase of the debate with which this volume is concerned can be taken to have begun in 1986, when Jane Heal and Robert Gordon published their seminal papers (Heal, 1986; Gordon, 1986; though see also, for example, Stich, 1981; Dennett, 1981). They raised a dissenting voice against what was becoming a philosophical orthodoxy: that our everyday, or folk, understanding of the mind should be thought of as theoretical. In opposition to this picture, Gordon and (...) Heal argued that we are not theorists but simulators. For psychologists, the debate had begun somewhat earlier when Heider (1958) produced his work on lay psychology; and in more recent times the psychological debate had continued in developmental psychology and in work on animal cognition. (shrink)

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)

In recent decades, scholars of Buddhist philosophy have frequently treated the Trisvabhāvanirdeśa, or “Teaching of the Three Natures,” attributed to Vasubandhu, as an authentic and authoritative representation of that celebrated thinker’s mature work within the Yogācāra tradition. However, serious questions may be posed concerning the status and authority of the TSN within Yogācāra, its true authorship, and the relation of its contents to trends in early Yogācāra thought. In the present article, we review the actual state of our knowledge of (...) the TSN’s possible origins, considering, too, the implications this may have for contemporary treatments thereof. (shrink)

_In real life, emotions can distort practical reasoning, typically in ways that it is_ _difficult to realise at the time, or to envisage and plan for in advance. This fea-_ _ture of real life emotional experience raises difficulties for imagining such expe-_ _riences through centrally imagining, or imagining ‘from the inside’. I argue_ _instead for the important psychological role played by another kind of imagin-_ _ing: imagining from an external perspective. This external perspective can draw_ _on the dramatic irony involved (...) in imagining these typical cases, where one_ _knows outside the scope of the imagining what one does not know as part of the_ _content of what one imagines: namely, that the imagined emotion is distorting_ _one’s reasoning. Moreover, imagining from an external perspective allows one_ _to evaluate the imagined events in a way that imagining from the inside does not._. (shrink)

A number of writers have picked out the way knowledge in the human sciences reflexively alters the human subject as what separates these sciences from the natural sciences. Furthermore, they take this reflexivity to be a condition of moral existence. The article sympathetically examines this emphasis on reflexive processes, but it rejects the particular conclusion that the reflexive phenomenon enables us to demarcate the human sciences. The first sections analyse the different meanings that references to reflexivity have in the psychological (...) and social sciences, in philosophy and in material life, and they link these meanings to the post-positivist philosophy of the social sciences. The discussion considers the problems raised (most influentially in the human sciences by Foucault) by being reflexive about reflexivity itself. They put a large question mark against hopes for a revived philosophical anthropology. Whatever the philosophical arguments, however, there is clearly a reflexive practice in the humanities and human sciences which there is not in the natural sciences. This leads to the argument that there are different forms of knowledge for different purposes and that it may therefore be divergence of purpose, not reflexivity itself, that creates differences among the sciences. It is the fact and purpose of human self-reflection that marks out the human sciences. If this is so, then it explains why an apparently circumscribed question about the classification of knowledge turns out to be inseparable from ontological and moral questions about human identity. (shrink)

Methodological triangulation is the use of more than one method to investigate a phenomenon. Nurse researchers investigate health phenomena using methods drawn from the natural and social sciences. The methodological debate concerns the possibility of confirming a single theory with different kinds of methods. The nursing debate parallels the philosophical debate about how the natural and social sciences are related. This article critiques the presuppositions of the nursing debate and suggests alternatives. The consequence is a view of triangulation that permits (...) different methods to confirm a single theory. The article then explores the consequences for the philosophy of social sciences. (shrink)

The concept of empathy in history education involves students in the attempt to think within the context of historical agents’ particular predicaments. Tracing the concept’s philosophical heritage to R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history and ‘re-enactment doctrine’, this article argues that our efforts in history classrooms to understand historical agents by their own standards are constrained by a tension that arises out of the need to disconnect ourselves from a present that provides the very means for understanding the past. Though (...) rather than serving to undermine the concept, it is proposed that the moderate hermeneutics of H.-G. Gadamer, through a positive conception of prejudice, tradition and temporal distance, transforms the factors typically seen as inhibitors to empathy’s operation into those that potentially enable it. The article aspires to shed new light on what is at play when history students engage in the intellectually demanding task of empathizing in history. (shrink)

It seems that hope springs eternal for the cherished idea that norms (or normativeprinciples) explain actions or regularities in actions. But it also seems thatthere are many ways of going wrong when taking norms and normative principlesas explanatory. The author argues that neither norms nor normative principles—insofar as they are the sort of things with normative force—is explanatoryof what is done. He considers the matter using both erotetic and ontic models ofexplanation. He further considers various understandings of norms. Key Words: (...) explanation • norms • social science • rationality. (shrink)

If we are to understand why psychoanalysis extends ordinary psychology in the precise ways that it does, we must take account of the existence of, and the interplay between, two distinct kinds of explanatory concern: functional and idiographic. The form and content of psychoanalytic explanation and its unusual methodology can, at least in part, be viewed as emerging out of Freud's attempt to reconcile these two types of explanatory concern. We must also acknowledge the role of the background theoretical context (...) that shapes Freud's functional thinking about the mind. A neglect of the role of the background theory in shaping the extension of ordinary psychology leaves us with puzzles about the nature and direction of the psychoanalytic extension and gives rise to an unbelievable history of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Abstract. The dangerous level of individuality in contemporary Western culture is informed by a conception of mind, self, and soul as internal to the central nervous system. The historical development of this view has produced a bounded and self-contained individual at odds with communal life. Happily, scientific and philosophical studies of mind are coming to view the human mind as embodied, enactive, encultured, and embedded in social and technical networks, and as a construction not limited to the boundaries of the (...) individual organism. Mental phenomena are hybrids of events in the head and events in the world to which they are often coupled, not least of which are with other people. There are mutual and reciprocal implications of this externalism for a number of religious themes. Our understanding of redemption might better be bound to our relationships with others, including our bodies and our sexuality, rather than to a private, individual relationship with the sacred. (shrink)

This article argues that the notion of the archive is of some value for those interested in the history of the human sciences. Above all, the archive is a means of generating ethical and epistemological credibility. The article goes on to suggest that there are three aspects to modern archival reason: a principle of publicity whereby archival information is made available to some or other kind of public; a principle of singularity according to which archival reason focuses upon questions of (...) detail; and a principle of mundanity, whereby the privileged focus of archival reason is said to be the commonplace dimension of everyday life. (shrink)

The article analyses the history of the Einfühlung concept. Theories of ‘feeling into’ Nature, works of art or feelings and behaviours of other persons by German philosophers of the second half of the nineteenth century Robert and Friedrich Vischer and Theodor Lipps are evoked, as well as similar theory of understanding (Verstehen) by Wilhelm Dilthey and Friedrich Schleiermacher, to which Dilthey refers. The meaning of the term Einfühlung within Edith Stein’s thought is also analysed. Both Einfühlung and Verstehen were criticized (...) as non-objective and naive methods consisting only in the identification of the subject with the object or the projection of feelings onto the object. The article refers to criticism by Georg Gadamer and Bertolt Brecht and proposes ways to restitute the concept of Einfühlung after this criticism, recalling the theory of empathy by Dominick Lacapra, in terms of its advantages for the historical enquiry, or the myth of Narcissus analyzed in the spirit of psychoanalysis by Julia Kristeva. The article proposes a reformulation of the concept of mimesis, connected to the Einfühlung, understood as the identification, analogy, imitation of feelings (as it was described by Lipss and Vischer). Mimesis does not necessarily mean a passive repetition and reconstruction of the feelings of the object, but serves only as a starting point for the interest of the subject for the outside world or for experiences of historical protagonists. Then there is no identification or projection of feelings, but the creative, active and critical reformulation of knowledge. It is stated that empathy is not a passive, uncritical process, but that it deals with the critical choice of the object of empathy and with an active approach to the perceived feelings and appearances. In addition to this cognitive aspect, empathy may also contribute to the analytical and valuable introspection. Furthermore empathy allows us to connect the analysis of the facts with a personal narrative and understanding of individual identity in historical knowledge. (shrink)

This paper argues that the recent renewal of interest in the philosophy of Oswald Spengler, particularly concerning its warnings of the imminent demise of Western Civilisation, is misplaced. Arguments concerning the accuracy of his predictions or cultural analysis have overlooked the necessity of evaluating the coherence of the philosophical system that Spengler used to generate and justify his speculative declarations. Such an evaluation indicates a number of apparent contradictions at the heart of Spengler’s historical model. The attempt to resolve these (...) contradictions has resulted in a sharp division of interpretation amongst Spengler commentators, into positivist and relativist camps. Neither interpretation, I suggest, is capable of rendering Spengler’s historical system coherent. It is therefore argued that Spengler’s philosophy is fundamentally flawed. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In this paper, I distinguish between two senses of “understanding”: understanding as an epistemic good and understanding as a character trait or a distinctive power of the mind. I argue that understanding as a character trait or a distinctive power of the mind is an intellectual virtue while understanding as an epistemic good is not. Finally, I show how the distinction can help us better appreciate Aristotle’s account of intellectual virtue.

To the realists.—You sober people who feel well armed against passion and fantasies and would like to turn your emptiness into a matter of pride and ornament: you call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way it appears to you. As if reality stood unveiled before you only, and you yourselves were perhaps the best part of it … But in your unveiled state are not even you still very passionate and dark creatures compared to fish, (...) and still far too similar to an artist in love? And what is ‘reality’ for an artist in love? You are still burdened with those estimates of things that have their origin in the passions and loves of former centuries. Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextinguishable drunkenness. Your love of ‘reality’, for example-—oh, that is a primeval ‘love’ … Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—all of your humanity and animality. (F. Nietzsche,The Gay Science, Book Two, extract from Section 57). (shrink)

The paper defends Collingwood's account of rational explanation against two objections. The first is that he psychologizes the concept of practical reason. The second is that he fails to distinguish mere rationalizations from rationalizations that have causal power. I argue that Collingwood endorses a form of nonpsychologizing internalism which rests on the view that the appropriate explanans for actions are neither empirical facts (as externalists claim), nor psychological facts (as some internalists claim), but propositional facts. I then defend this form (...) of internalism against a range of Davidsonian objections which attempt to weaken the distinction between reasons and causes. (shrink)

In their critique of Klein (2014a), Trafimow and Earp present two theses. First, they argue that, contra Klein, a well-specified theory is not a necessary condition for successful replication. Second, they contend that even when there is a well-specified theory, replication depends more on auxiliary assumptions than on theory proper. I take issue with both claims, arguing that (a) their first thesis confuses a material conditional (what I said) with a modal claim (Trafimow and Earp’s misreading of what I said), (...) and (b) their second thesis has the unfortunate consequence of refuting their first thesis. (shrink)

Peter Winch often returned to questions about the nature of logic. In the context of his work on Wittgenstein and political philosophy in the 1990s, Winch described a contrast between ‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Socratic’ reasoning. Aristotelian conceptions of reasoning, attributed to Frege and Russell, would see logic as a formal science and rationality as consistency with pre‐existent rules of inference. The Socratic conception, attributed to Wittgenstein, understands rational argument as a form of socially embedded dialogue that involves moral relationships and a (...) dimension of depth. Rational persuasion may also involve use of persuasive images and examples. (shrink)

Why is there Philosophy of Mathematics at all? Ian Hacking. in Metascience (2015).

Participants in the debate about the nature of folk psychology tend to share one fundamental assumption: that its primary purpose consists in the prediction and explanation of another person's behavior. The following essay will evaluate recent challenges to this assumption by philosophers such as Joshua Knobe who insist that folk psychology and its concepts are intimately linked to our ethical concerns. I will show how conceiving of folk psychology in an engaged manner enables one to account for the evidence cited (...) in favor of an ethical interpretation of folk psychology, without undermining the claim that it is primarily an explanatory practice. Nevertheless, I will suggest that the basic cognitive stance of folk psychology has ethical implications that have been insufficiently noted in the contemporary context. (shrink)

A tradition among certain Hume scholars, best known as the ‘New Humeans’, proposes a novel reading of Hume’s work, and in particular of his conception of causality.2 The purpose of this paper is to conduct a similar move regarding Hume’s historical method. It is similar for two reasons: firstly, it is intended to reintegrate Hume’s theory into present-day debates on the nature of history; and secondly, the reading I propose is directed against the standard interpretation of Hume’s history. This interpretation (...) claims that in spite of being a historian, Hume misunderstands the nature of both historical knowledge and the historical enterprise. In other words, the Humean methodology would be incompatible with a genuine historical practice. This censure is based upon three particular criticisms: (1) The criticism of ahistoricalism: Hume believes human nature is an unchangeable substratum, and thus cannot account for historical change. (2) The criticism of parochialism: Hume is trapped in his own historical province3, and thus understands other times in the light of his own. (3) The criticism of moral condescension: Hume presumes the same standard is applicable throughout history, and thus judges the past according to his own moral standard. I shall argue that these criticisms are the result of a misunderstanding of what Hume means to accomplish through his investigation of history and that moreover, he is aware of these pitfalls. (shrink)

The paper focuses on Nominalism in history, its application, and its historiographical implications. By engaging with recent scholarship as well as classic works, a survey of Nominalism’s role in the discipline of history is made; such examination is timely, since it has been done but scantily in a purely historical context. In the light of recent theoretical works, which often display aporias over the nature and method of historical enquiry, the paper offers new considerations on historical theory, which in the (...) author’s view may solve some of the contradictions that have surfaced in recent times. The Nominalistic stance is argued against by disputing theorists such as Paul Veyne, who has made a case for Nominalism in history. A brief philosophical section introduces Nominalism in its metaphysical dimension and the discussion is speedily brought to its significance for history. The paper also proposes a solution to the misconstrued yet too often vague application of scientism in history, and offers theoretical grounds that might solve some of the ‘stormy grounds’ historiography finds itself today. Articles by Marcel Gauchet and History and Theory’s Anton Froeyman and Bert Leuridan are engaged with, as well as Murray Murphy’s books on the philosophy of history. Works by Georg Gadamer, Marc Bloch, Benedetto Croce, Hyppolite Taine, and Anthony Grafton crucially inform the discussion and brace the consequential conclusion. (shrink)

This paper focuses on two conflations which frequently appear within the philosophy of history and other fields concerned with action explanation. The first of these, which I call the Conflating View of Reasons, states that the reasons for which we perform actions are reasons why (those events which are) our actions occur. The second, more general conflation, which I call the Conflating View of Action Explanation, states that whatever explains why an agent performed a certain action explains why (that event (...) which was) her action occurred. Both conflations ignore the fact that there are at least two distinct objects that legitimately qualify as objects of action explanation2. As Jennifer Hornsby (1993) has previous suggested, one thing we might wish to explain is ‘why did A do what she did?’ another is, ‘why did the event of her doing it occur?’ -/- I shall argue that when these two views are combined they give rise to a futile debate about explanation in the philosophies of history and the social sciences, and to an almost identical debate in moral psychology and the philosophy of mind. In so doing, I shall also examine a proposed distinction between explaining a phenomenon, and rendering it intelligible. I conclude by distinguishing between four different objects of historical understanding, each of which is to be understood in the light of the aforementioned distinctions between event and thing done, and explanation and intelligibility. (shrink)

Leslie R Perry; Objective and Practical History, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 1, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 35–48, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467.

Popper, Polanyi and Duncker represent the widely held position that theoretical and experimental scientific research are motivated by problems to which discoveries are solutions. According to the argument here, their views are unsupported and - in light of counter-instances, anomalous chance discoveries, and the force of curiosity - over-generalized.

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 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.

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses the metaphilosophical assumptions that have dominated analytic philosophy of mind, and how they gave rise to the central question that the best-known forms of non-reductivism available have sought to answer, namely: how can mind fit within nature? Its goal is to make room for forms of non-reductivism that have challenged the fruitfulness of this question, and which have taken a different approach to the so-called “placement” problem. Rather than trying to solve the placement problem, the forms of (...) non-reductivism discussed in this paper have put pressure on the metaphilosophical assumptions that have given rise to the question of the place of mind in nature in the first instance. (shrink)

Whether or not an intentional explanation of action necessarily involves law-like statements is related to another question, namely, is it a causal explanation? The Popper-Hempel Thesis , which answers both questions affirmatively, inevitably faces a dilemma between realistic and universalistic requirements. However, in terms of W.C. Salmon’s concept of causal explanation, intentional explanation can be a causal one even if it does not rely on any laws. Based on this, we are able to refute three characteristic arguments for the claim (...) “reason is not a cause of action,” namely, the “proper logical” argument, the “logical relation” argument, and the “rule-following” argument. This rebuttal suggests that the causal relationship between reason and action can provide a justification for intentional explanations. (shrink)

This article surveys and contextualizes the British idealists’ philosophical writings on language, aesthetics and emotions, starting with T. H. Green and concluding with Michael Oakeshott. It highlights ways in which their philosophical insights have been wrongly overlooked by later writers. It explores R. L. Nettleship’s posthumous publications in this field and notes that they exerted significant influences on British idealists and closely related figures, such as Bernard Bosanquet and R. G. Collingwood. The writing of other figures are also explored, not (...) least F. H. Bradley and J. A. Smith. The article concludes by introducing in turn the remaining articles that are found in this special issue. (shrink)

This article examines the ways in which E. B. Bax and R. G. Collingwood attempted to avoid relativism and irrationalism without postulating a pure and universal reason. Both philosophers were profound historicists who recognized the fundamentally particular nature of the world. Yet they also attempted to retain a universal aspect to thought - Bax through his distinction between the logical and alogical realms, and Collingwood through his doctrine of re-enactment. The article analyses both their metaphysical premises and their philosophies of (...) history. Finally an attempt is made to use their arguments as starting-points from which to arrive at a historicist resolution of the problems of relativism and irrationalism. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between Wolfhart Pannenberg's idea of God and his conception of history, with the intention of determining the precise nature of the link that, in his view, connects both philosophical and the theological reflection on the meaning of history. We shall first analyze Pannenberg's response to the traditional criticism of Christianity as an anthropomorphic projection of the human being. Then we shall pay attention to the features of any possible fundamentum of (...) history. We will show that, according to Pannenberg, a transition from a philosophical into a theological consideration of history is needed in order to provide a rationally acceptable foundation for both the unity and the meaning of universal history. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: Cet article discute l'idée que la philosophie tardive de Collingwood soit d'orientation historiciste et relativiste. Je soutiens que cette accusation de relativisme historique est basée sur deux erreurs, l'une exégétique et l'autre philosophique. L'erreur exégétique est le résultat de l'hypothèse d'une prétendue «conversion radicale». L'erreur philosophique repose sur la conception selon laquelle il n'y a pas de différences substantielles entre le projet d'une métaphysique descriptive et le projet de la sociologie de la connaissance. L'article essaie de saper à la (...) base l'accusation de relativisme en contestant ces deux préjugés. (shrink)

The failure to reconcile views of the past and to address historical injustice has damaged inter-state relations in Northeast Asia. Joint committees, dialogues and the participation of civil society have been used to address historical issues, but scholars in the disciplines of international relations and area studies have largely ignored these dialogues and deliberative forums. At the same time, there is an emergent theoretical literature on how deliberative democracy can address ethnic conflicts and historical injustice. There is a serious disconnect (...) or distance between the theoretical literature on the resolution of conflicts via deliberation on the one hand, and empirical studies of deliberative approach in East Asia on the other. This article aims to address this shortcoming in the study of the politics of historical dispute in Northeast Asia by proposing a deliberative approach to history disputes and highlighting the achievements, limits and dynamics of deliberation. Through mapping and comparative testing, we confirm that deliberation offers some potential for a departure from nationalist mentalities and a shift towards a consciousness of regional history in Northeast Asia. Our empirical test of the utility of the deliberative approach suggests that a new model for addressing regional disputes may be emerging.
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The author calls attention to and discusses certain basic but neglected and/or obscured features of Hegel's idealism. He treats these features as paradigmati cally sociological and uses them as a baseline with which to chart Hegel's critique of, and against which to measure, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Section 1 introduces Hegel's criticism of Kant's idealism; in contrast to his own objective idealism, transcendental idealism is individualistic. This criticism is elaborated in section 2, issuing in the quasi-Wittgensteinian indictment that Kant (...) cannot account for the possibility of language and human thought. Section 3 argues that Hegel's criticism that mind is social and that objectivity cannot be understood in isolation from social interaction amounts to a sociological critique of Kant. (shrink)