In an essay in these pages, Jeffrey Friedman charged that Cultural Theory obscures the unity and uniqueness of modern egalitarian individualism; reduces culture to society; ignores history; is only applicable to contemporary, Western politics; provides an unsatisfactory account of preference formation and preference change; and leaves no place for the vitally important debate over what we should prefer. Although some of Friedman's criticisms stem from a misreading or strained reading of Cultural Theory, others raise vitally important questions not only about (...) Cultural Theory but social theory generally. My reply to Friedman offers not just a defense of the particular categorization of cultures used in Cultural Theory, but a defense of the entire enterprise of constructing general social theories that seek to discern transhistorical patterns in the all too evident diversity and contingency of history. (shrink)

While we are familiar with socialist and fascist aesthetics, liberalism is not usually thought to permit a political role for literature. Nussbaum has attempted to fill this lacuna. She sketches a “liberal aesthetics” by linking three aspects of literature to her normative proposal. The representation of suffering is connected to the capability approach; the presentation of ethical dilemmas to political liberalism; and the reaction of pity to legal and political judgment. Literature is thus hoped to contribute to the stability of (...) liberal democracies. For over 25 years, individual works by Nussbaum on the value of literature have been critiqued on aesthetic grounds: for not dealing with form, for denying the polyphony of texts, for having a limited conception of readerly identification, and for using an elitist and generically limited selection of material. As of yet, no criticisms have, however, considered the full oeuvre of Nussbaum’s defense of literature, and none have examined this aspect of her work in light of her political philosophy. By placing the aesthetic and political aspects of Nussbaum’s work in conversation, this article investigates the proposed relationship between literature and liberalism. It argues that each component of Nussbaum’s liberal aesthetics contains a political danger: foreclosing discussion of intergenerational responsibility; obscuring questions about which doctrines are permissible in the public sphere; and encouraging stereotypes of marginalized people. Literature, understood like this, may risk exacerbating present tensions within liberalism, rather than bolstering its stability. (shrink)

This essay provides a general introduction to the special number on Jacob L. Talmon (1916–1980). The essay sketches the outlines of Talmon's intellectual biography, beginning with his study of the origins of totalitarian democracy, moving through his analysis of nationalism and political messianism, and ending with his study of the ideological clash of the 20th century. The essay raises the question of whether Talmon should be seen as a thinker wishing to defend existing traditions (i.e. a “priest”), or as a (...) radical anti-authoritarian skeptic (i.e. a “jester”). Moreover, being both an anti-nationalist liberal, and a zionist at the same time, Talmon, the essay shows, was aware of the fact his own stance was problematic and at times even paradoxical. The last section of the essay presents the seven essays, which are included in the special issue. (shrink)

This article compares and contrasts the work of Quentin Skinner and Jacques Derrida on power and the State. It argues that despite Skinner's explicit repudiation of Derrida's method of philosophising, he has come to advocate an approach to the history of ideas that bears important and striking similarities to Derrida's thought. I attribute this intellectual gravitation toward Derrida as the logical outcome of a shared understanding on the nature of the cosmos and man's place within it-an understanding profoundly indebted to (...) the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the genealogical history of Michel Foucault. As a means to illustrate the narrowing intellectual gulf between Skinner and Derrida, I compare their respective thoughts on the nature of the modern and contemporary State, a State that both intellectuals see as emerging from a dominant western philosophical tradition that, at its core, is marked by the idea of fear. For both Skinner and Derrida this has profound consequences for the possibilities open to individuals and societies for free thought and political action. (shrink)

This article offers an original, intellectual portrait of G. H. Mead. My reassessment of Mead’s thinking is founded, in methodological terms, upon a historically minded yet theoretically oriented strategy. Mead’s system of thought is submitted to a historical reconstruction in order to grasp the evolution of his ideas over time, and to a thematic reconstruction organized around three major research areas or pillars: science, social psychology and politics. If one re-examines the entirety of Mead’s published and unpublished writings from the (...) point of view of contemporary social and political theory, one can see that his contributions transcend the field of social psychology. Mead’s innovative insights on the communicative aspects of social life and individual conscience are yet to be fully explored by current social and political theorists. This is partly due to the fact that his was a system in a state of flux, ever escaping the final written form. (shrink)

This paper concerns the problem of how to give historical explanations of scientist's decisions to prefer one theory over another. It is argued that such explanations ought to contain only statements about the beliefs and preferences of the agents involved, and, in particular, ought not to include evaluative premises about the theories themselves. It is argued that Lakatos's attempt to build into such historical explanations premises of an evaluative kind is deficient. The arguments of Laudan to the effect that such (...) explanations depend crucially upon evaluative assumptions about the rationality or irrationality of decisions are examined. It is argued that they do not establish the need for such assumptions. Similar criticisms are then shown to be applicable to a version of the 'hermeneutical' model of explanation for human actions. (shrink)

Like it or not, a big picture of the history of science is something which we cannot avoid. Big pictures are, of course, thoroughly out of fashion at the moment; those committed to specialist research find them simplistic and insufficiently complex and nuanced, while postmodernists regard them as simply impossible. But however specialist we may be in our research, however scornful of the immaturity of grand narratives, it is not so easy to escape from dependence – acknowledged or not – (...) on a big picture. When we define our research as part of the history of science, we implicitly invoke a big picture of that history to give identity and meaning to our specialism. When we teach the history of science, even if we do not present a big picture explicitly, our students already have a big picture of that history which they bring to our classes and into which they fit whatever we say, no matter how many complications and refinements and contradictions we put before them – unless we offer them an alternative big picture. (shrink)

This article argues that juristic theories must be understood in relation to the historical conditions in which they have emerged. This is not to reduce theories to their context but to gain essential insight into their aims, meaning, and scope with the aid of such “external” reference points. Here I use the ideas of the Swedish legal realist Vilhelm Lundstedt to illustrate these claims, choosing his juristic theory for this purpose specifically because it has been so widely seen as deeply (...) puzzling and “extreme.” The article argues that his central ideas are readily intelligible in historical context. But such a contextual examination of juristic ideas also makes it possible to assess what in them can properly travel beyond immediate context: in other words, what insights about the nature of the jurist's task can legitimately be taken from them for more universal application. Lundstedt's work, despite having been largely ignored or excluded from international juristic debate, has something to offer here if seen through a contextualising lens that sets the possibilities for its broader application in sharp relief. (shrink)

RESUMEN Una vez que el foco de la reflexión pasa de las teorías ideales a la aplicación de la justicia social, centrada en las instituciones de las sociedades democráticas, se requiere prestar especial atención a los estilos de vida. Estos tienen una alta incidencia en cómo la justicia es realizada y afectan tanto a la desigualdad económica como a la disponibilidad de los recursos naturales. En nuestras sociedades es posible establecer restricciones a los estilos de vida, especialmente en aquellos casos (...) en que, por el efecto de algunas dinámicas sociales, aquellos se desacoplan de las concepciones del bien. Se defiende que, en tales casos, la base normativa que permite exigir el respeto a los estilos de vida se disuelve y por ello es posible justificar su restricción. ABSTRACT Now that the focus of reflection has shifted from ideal theories to the application of social justice, centered on the institutions of democratic societies, it is necessary to pay special attention to lifestyles, since they not only influence the realization of justice, but also have an effect on economic inequality and the availability of natural resources. In our societies, it is possible to place restrictions on lifestyles, especially in those cases in which, influenced by certain social dynamics, they disengage from conceptions of the good. The article argues that, in those cases, the normative base grounding the demand that lifestyles be respected is dissolved, thus justifying their restriction. (shrink)

Is tragedy, as Nietzsche declared, dead? In recent years many philosophers have reconsidered tragedy's relation to philosophy. While tragedy is deemed to contain important lessons for philosophy, there is a consensus that it remains a thing of the past. This article calls this consensus into question, arguing that it reifies tragedy, keeping tragedy at arm's length. With the interest of identifying the necessity of tragedy to philosophy, it draws from Quentin Skinner to put forward an alternative approach to genre as (...) living form. This approach alters our understanding of the philosopher at the heart of philosophy's dialogue with tragedy, Immanuel Kant. Moreover, it shows that tragedy is closer to contemporary philosophy than we might think. (shrink)

Summary Although academic disciplines are given to mythologising their own histories, corrective historicisation is no straightforward matter. Anachronisms are most difficult to avoid where our own tacit understandings of the world are used to help structure contexts that are themselves often unstable and indeterminate. This is often the case in attempts to relate agents and propositions to a context of pre-existing problems. Propositions and concepts that are the result of satiric reduction, or unintended consequence, disrupt narrative sequences that lead directly (...) and neatly to present disciplinary identities. (shrink)

Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God illustrates a distinctive way of understanding the relationship between ideas and history, while posing several connected questions. Among these are how the human condition of alienation may be overcome in a way that is ethically and intellectually defensible; how the search for reconciliation may generate, paradoxically, further alienation, and inspire terrible inhumanity; and whether a meaningful and good human life can be lived without the assurance of future justice—or, indeed, future existence. Rosen evokes the (...) emotional pull of the quest for reconciliation, and reveals the argumentative richness it has generated; yet reflection on human evil and suffering should chasten our aspirations to attain historical reconciliation or rational understanding. We may have good reason to turn away from both the project of theodicy, and the tendency to identify human value in something detached from living individuals, in favor of a reaffirmation of the value of the personal. Rosen’s own work illustrates how a reaffirmation of the personal, and respect for the freedom of others, may be practiced in and through the history of ideas. (shrink)

This article can be read as an Editorial for the first issue of the Journal of Catalan Intellectual History (JOCIH) in its new stage at de Gruyter Open. It offers, first, a methodical review of the concept, roles, and trends of intellectual history in the 20th century. Next, it looks into the particular Catalan tradition, historiography, and cultural analysis to position the aim and the role of the Journal with regard to similar initiatives. It tries to give an answer to (...) the crisis of intellectual history as a discipline, at the end of the past century. The third part of the article describes some of the available resources. The fourth section introduces the contents of the present issue, focussing on the construction of a collective identity and the literary engagement of Catalan writers between 1920 and 1980, either in their country or in exile. The Notes of the present issue highlight the importance of technology, natural language processing, and Semantic Web developments in carrying out contemporary research in this field. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1992, John Dunn published an essay in Italian (which came out in English only years later) in which he summarized and clarified certain aspects of his historiographical vision concerning the history of political theory. A careful analysis of the text – corroborated by a consideration of later comments as well as general historical-theoretical references – gives us an insight into the lights and shadows of his thought. This reinterpretation reveals the originality of a perspective that examined the meaning (...) of ‘canon’ within the history of political theory, and indicated certain cultural and political aims to be consciously pursued through it. This original thought has recently been consolidated by other considerations on the need for a global history of political thought capable of offering interesting food for thought. Nevertheless, these seem to have emerged from a change of opinion on Dunn’s part, focusing to a greater extent on certain (more or less well-defined) moral duties that should be pursued by scholars of the history of political thought. (shrink)

Although first published in 1969, the methodological views advanced in Quentin Skinner's “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” remain relevant today. In his article Skinner suggests that it would be inappropriate to even attempt to write the history of any idea or concept. In support of this view, Skinner advances two arguments, one derived from the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein and the other from that of J. L. Austin.In this paper I focus on the first of these (...) arguments. I claim that the conclusion which Skinner draws from this particular argument does not necessarily follow and that an alternative assessment of the methodological significance of Wittgenstein's philosophy for historians of ideas is possible. On this alternative view, far from ruling out conceptual history, an appeal to the view of meaning set out in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations leads to a quite different conclusion, namely that the writing of such a history is arguably a necessary precondition for the elucidation of the meaning of a number of the core concepts in the canon of the history of political thought.Skinner's views have changed somewhat since 1969. Indeed, from the mid 1970s onwards he came to relax the strict opposition to the idea of conceptual history to which he was then committed. The paper concludes by noting that this evolution in Skinner's thinking has made him much more sympathetic than anybody reading “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas” would have imagined to the research project of the Begriffgeschichte School of conceptual history. (shrink)

This essay, published originally in 2002, is reprinted in “Contextualism—The Next Generation: Symposium on the Future of a Methodology,” because of its impact on the thinking that informs and has led to this new symposium. Burke's argument is that the term context has become “an intellectual slogan or shibboleth” and that “there is a price to pay” for its “more and more frequent use... in a number of disciplines—among them, anthropology, archaeology, art history, geography, intellectual history, law, linguistics, literary criticism, (...) philosophy, politics, psychology, sociology, and theology.” A brief history of the uses of the term and its cognates in these disciplines is provided, along with an examination of “recent interest in the phenomenology of recontextualism or ‘reframing,’” which “depends on agency, creativity, and the power to adapt” and which, indeed, almost defines what is meant by “originality, innovation, invention, or creativity.” The essay concludes that context ought to be used mainly in the plural to indicate that no topic is properly interpretable in any single framework. (shrink)

Mark Bevir's The Logic of the History of Ideas has received considerable attention recently. This article highlights a new problem with his weak intentionalism. Bevir's weak intentionalism holds that on occasion the meanings readers ascribe to texts may trump the meanings the authors express in texts. The article uses the example of Hegel's theory of punishment. The received wisdom is that Hegel is a pure retributivist. Yet, this strays far from his text and stated views. We might think we should (...) keep to this text to uncover Hegel's views. However, Bevir's weak intentionalism has us side with how he has been read over what Hegel has said. This view is problematic as our meanings may well stray far from the texts, words or spirit. Thus, Bevir's weak intentionalism can fall victim to straying from the text when trying to interpret it. (shrink)

Searching for the Political History, Archaeology, and the History of Ideas. Elías José Palti, An Archaeology of the Political: Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, xx + 235 pp.Translation in International Relations and Ottoman-Turkish History. Einar Wigen, State of Translation: Turkey in Interlingual Relations, 276 + xvii pp.The Invention of Conservatism as a Modern Ideology. Amerigo Caruso, Nationalstaat als Telos? Der konservative Diskurs in Preußen und Sardinien-Piemont, 1840–1870 [Nation-State as Telos? Conservative discourse in Prussia and Sardinia-Piedmont, (...) 1840–1870] Elitenwandel in der Moderne, Bd. 20, 516 pp.Reconsidering Friendship in the Face of Anarchy in International Society: Refreshing Insights from Conceptual History. Evgeny Roshchin, Friendship among Nations: History of a Concept, 264 pp.On the Use of Foreign Words. Falko Schmieder and Georg Toepfer, eds., Wörter aus der Fremde: Begriffsgeschichte als Übersetzungsgeschichte [On the Use of Foreign Words: Conceptual History as History of Translation], 328 pp. (shrink)

Is there a political philosophy of conservatism? A history of the phenomenon written along sceptical lines casts doubt on the existence of a transhistorical doctrine, or even an enduring conservative outlook. The main typologies of conservatism uniformly trace its origins to opposition to the French Revolution. Accordingly, Edmund Burke is standardly singled out as the ‘father’ of this style of politics. Yet Burke was de facto an opposition Whig who devoted his career to assorted programmes of reform. In restoring Burke (...) to his original milieu, the argument presented here takes issue with 20th-century accounts of conservative ideology developed by such figures as Karl Mannheim, Klaus Epstein and Samuel Huntington. It argues that the idea of a conservative tradition is best seen as a belated construction, and that the notion of a univocal philosophy of conservatism is basically misconceived. (shrink)

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) has commonly been seen as Europe’s leading philosopher since Kant. His influence extended across the globe down to the Second World War – not least through his dissident disciple, Karl Marx. Since then, despite intermittent revivals, his importance has tended to be eclipsed by a rising tide of anti-modernist polemic, extending from Heidegger to postmodernism. Central to Hegel’s political thought was his view of the French Revolution. But notwithstanding its pivotal role in the development of (...) his ideas, his reaction to that event has been systematically misconstrued. In presenting a more faithful account of Hegel’s interpretation of his own era, the argument presented here places his response to contemporary developments in the context of a series of World Revolutions which framed the meaning of his age. This approach serves to illustrate the unique combination of historical and philosophical reasoning on which Hegel’s thought depended. In the process, reconstructing his arguments raises challenging questions about the applicability of bygone political ideas to later historical periods. (shrink)

U ovom radu pokušavam razviti ono što nazivam 'analitičkom, farabijanskom' koncepcijom orijentalizma. Motivacija za ovu koncepciju je to što nam pomaže sa zadatkom––koji je identificirao Wael B. Hallaq––da idemo dalje od 'rudimentarnih političkih slogana' vezanih za teoriju orijentalizma i umjesto toga da identificiramo orijentalističku 'psihoepistemičku patologiju' ( Hallaq 2018, 4). Da bismo to učinili ispravno, prema Hallaqu, moramo pronaći metodološku alternativu onoj koja orijentalistički diskurs čini mogućim. Hallaq identificira temeljni problem kao predanost sekularnom humanizmu, a rješenje njegovo napuštanje. Međutim, mislim (...) da je problem dublji, koji se grubo može izraziti na sljedeći način: kako možemo prihvatiti sveprisutnost ideološkog utjecaja bez napuštanja ideje da naše teorije ciljaju (i do neke mjere uspijevaju) predstavljati objektivnu stvarnost––tako da možemo reći da je orijentalizam stvaran fenomen, a ne samo nešto za što slučajno vjerujemo da je fenomen. Koncipiranje orijentalizma unutar farabijanske epistemologije i korištenje analitičkih alata za njegovo razumijevanje (za koje tvrdim da predstavlja jedinstvenu i osebujnu vrstu falibilizma) napreduje tamo gdje druge koncepcije ne uspijevaju. (shrink)

This paper presents a framework of four types of meaning and understanding in the history of political thought and intellectual history. Previous frameworks have overlooked a whole type of meaning – the type often prioritised by political theorists and philosophers. I call this “extended meaning.” Correcting a wrong turn in philosophy of language in the 1950s, I show how extended meaning has robust intellectual foundations, and I illustrate its value for textual interpreters. Even historians often need extended meaning, for example (...) to help resolve ambiguous passages. So, the main types of meaning are not alternatives: scholars interested in one kind of meaning still need others. This paper thus celebrates both diversity and unity. (shrink)

Intellectual history is usually seen as essentially historical. It is – but it is also essentially philosophical, both when theorising intellectual history, which some intellectual historians do, and when interpreting texts, which all intellectual historians do. I demonstrate this symbiosis between history and philosophy via critical reflections on Martin Jay’s recent book Genesis and Validity. Philosophical analysis, closely integrated with historical examples, suggests that we should significantly rethink Jay’s theorisation of the relationship between genesis and validity (e.g. whether ideas from (...) one context are valid in others). But the symbiosis between history and philosophy matters more when interpreting texts. Philosophical analysis is a powerful tool for recovering what authors meant, understanding how their ideas fit together, and seeing similarities and differences between ideas, as I show with examples from Quentin Skinner’s interpretations of Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. Yet even Jay and Skinner – two of the world’s most philosophically astute intellectual historians – overlook the crucial symbiosis between history and philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I investigate a hypothesis concerning the supposed influence of Spinoza on Marx’s works. Setting out from a comment made by Althusser – ‘[Spinoza] is the only direct ancestor of Marx’ – I try to demonstrate that even though the relationship between Spinoza and Marx has limited support at a historiographical level, a determined set of ideas of Spinoza can be connected to some of Marx’s political objectives in the period prior to 1845. This argument is supported through (...) Marx’s notebooks devoted to studying Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, written in 1841, and his refutation of Spinoza in The Holy Family. However, contrary to what could be expected, when Marx abandoned his most pronounced idealistic phase, within which Spinoza played a certain role, he rebelled against Spinozism at the same time. Nonetheless, it is one thing to repudiate Spinoza’s name, and a very different thing to repudiate Spinoza’s ideas. (shrink)

In considering the Cambridge School of intellectual history, we should distinguish Skinner's conventionalism from Pocock's contextualism whilst recognising that both of them argue that the study of a text's linguistic context is at least necessary and perhaps sufficient to ensure understanding. This paper suggests that although "study the linguistic context of an utterance" is a valuable heuristic maxim, it is not a prerequisite of understanding that one does so. Hence, we might shift our attention from the role of linguistic contexts (...) in understanding a text, to the role of ideational contexts in our explanations of meanings or beliefs. The explanatory role of contexts can be unpacked in terms of traditions and dilemmas. Here the paper also considers how this approach differs from that of the Cambridge School. (shrink)

Este artículo comienza defendiendo un principio de individualismo procesal según el cual los significados son siempre subjetivos o intersubjetivos. Los textos no tienen significados por sí mismos, sino que más bien son objetos a los que los individuos atribuyen diversos significados. Luego el artículo despliega este análisis del significado para interrogar debates sobre la textualidad. Considera la estabilidad del texto: aunque los textos son indeterminados en el sentido de que individuos futuros pueden atribuirles a ellos significados imprevistos, tienen un contenido (...) determinado en cualquier tiempo dado en el sentido de que los significados que la gente les ha atribuido en ese momento son fijos. Y considera la relación del significado textual con el significado del autor: ambos, autores y lectores, atribuyen significado a los textos, y surgenlas confusiones cuando los filósofos asumen que uno u otro debe constituir el significado del texto en sí mismo. (shrink)

This article provides a critical history of the Cambridge School of intellectual history. Laslett's work on Locke appeared to vindicate modernist historicism. Laslett shunned the broad narratives of romantic developmental historicists. He relied on bibliographies, unpublished manuscripts, and other evidence to establish atomized facts and thus textual interpretations. Pocock and Skinner's theories defended modernist historicism. They argued historians should situate texts in contexts and prove interpretations correct by using modernist methods to establish empirical facts. They attacked approaches that read authors (...) as contributing to perennial debates or aiming at a coherent metaphysics. I argue we should reject modernist historicism with its methodological focus; we should adopt a post-analytic historicism focused on philosophical issues arising from analyses of the human sciences as studying actions by attributing meanings to actors and showing how these meanings fit into larger webs of belief. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 327 - 346 This paper explores the place of historicism in Anglophone and especially analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy arose as part of a general modernist revolt against the developmental historicisms of the nineteenth century with their faith in progress. Modernism inspired more formal approaches to knowledge, philosophy, and the human sciences. It is, however, a mistake to assume the rise of modernism and analytic philosophy left no space for historicism. Three main traditions of (...) historicism continued to persist in Anglophone philosophy through the twentieth century. First, the lingering presence of idealism continued to inspire the historicism of philosophers such as R. G. Collingwood and later Charles Taylor. Second, modernist historians, such as Quentin Skinner, sometimes grabbed at arguments from analytic philosophy to defend their methodological agendas. Third, the rise of holistic themes in analytic philosophy opened the way to historicist moments and themes in philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty. (shrink)

In this article, I present the arguments of three republican women philosophers of eighteenth-century France, focusing especially on two themes: equality (of class, gender, and race) and the family. I argue that these philosophers, Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland, and Sophie de Grouchy, who are interesting and original in their own right, belong to the neo-republican tradition and that re-discovering their texts is an opportunity to reflect on women’s perspectives on the ideas that shaped our current political thought.

In classical American pragmatism, fallibilism refers to the conception of truth as an ongoing process of improving human knowledge that is nevertheless susceptible to error. This paper traces appearances of fallibilism in Jewish thought in general, and particularly in the halakhic thought of Eliezer Berkovits. Berkovits recognizes the human condition’s persistent mutability, which he sees as characterizing the ongoing effort to interpret and apply halakhah in shifting historical and social contexts as Torat Ḥayyim. In the conclusion of the article, broader (...) questions and observations are raised regarding Jewish tradition, fallibility, and modernity, and the interaction between Judaism and pragmatism in the history of ideas. (shrink)

This paper argues against the possibility of presenting a consistent version of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics, characterizing its founders' philosophical pronouncements including those on the realism-antirealism issue, as a contingent collection of local, often contradictory, moves in changing theoretical and sociopolitical circumstances. The paper analyzes the fundamental differences of opinion between Bohr and the mathematical physicists, Heisenberg and Born, concerning the foundational doctrine of the "indispensability of classical concepts", and their related disagreements on "quantum reality." The paper concludes (...) with an explanation of how the appearance of consensus was achieved despite fundamental disagreements among the proponents. The paper undermines the adequacy of the notion of a general conceptual framework to describe the philosophical endeavors of working scientists. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers often purport to ‘borrow’ or ‘refute’ claims made by past philosophers. In doing so they contravene a contextualist methodological prohibition once defended by Quentin Skinner in his seminal paper “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”. Skinner's methodology has been much debated by theorists of textual meaning and interpretation, and yet the precise nature of the logical path from his premises to his prohibitory conclusion remains elusive. This paper seeks to refute two of the most promising variants (...) of an argument for his methodological prohibition on ‘refutation’, one of which draws on his appeal to Wittgenstein's conception of ‘meaning as use’, and the other of which draws on his appeal to speech act theory. (shrink)

Despite a growing body of literature that attempts to draw a line between legitimate and illegitimate forms of presentism in academic history, ‘avoid presentism’ is still often preached as the first rule of historiography. Distinct from other forms of presentism is selective presentism – the practice of taking some present-day activity, event, idea, or problem as a starting point in our selection of historical facts. Throughout the paper I examine the relation of some of the most popular selection criteria – (...) selection by actor intentionality, selection by later effect, and selection by problem – to presentist practices and draw three conclusions. First, each of these selection criteria can produce presentist or non-presentist histories depending on the past of which specific activity, idea, or problem the historian is interested in. Second, the historiographic legitimacy of these selection criteria is independent from their presentist or non-presentist applications; importantly, selective presentism is not among the ‘bad’ forms of presentism and is not to be avoided. Finally, various selection criteria are best understood as complementary; pluralist history invites a variety of selection criteria that help shed light on different aspects of the past, and thus – collectively – enrich our understanding of it. (shrink)

El renovado interés que ha adquirido el pensamiento político desde la segunda mitad del siglo veinte ha dado lugar a nuevas perspectivas para su estudio. Sin embargo, el desarrollo teórico de las ciencias sociales no ha tenido una interacción fluida entre las disciplinas que la componen. En este trabajo argumentaré que los desarrollos metodológicos sobre la posibilidad histórica de la teoría política deberían estar interconectados con los desarrollos en el campo de la historiografía. Para sostener mi posición me propongo realizar (...) una aproximación problemática en torno a la posibilidad de construir un conocimiento histórico-científico de la teoría política, a partir de los siguientes tópicos: la temporalidad histórica; el vínculo entre temporalidad y pensamiento, y la politización del pensamiento. (shrink)

This article analyzes how the relationship between philosophy and history has been conceived within the study of political thought, and how different ways of conceiving this relationship in turn have affected the definition of the subject matter as well as the choice of methods within this field. My main argument is that the ways in which we conceive this relationship is dependent on the assumptions we make about the ontological status of concepts and their meaning. I start by discussing the (...) widespread view that philosophy and history ought to be viewed as distinct if not incompatible ways of studying political thought, and then go on to describe the view that philosophical and historical approaches should be conceived of as identical or inseparable. I end this article by suggesting that these approaches rather should be viewed as mutually constitutive for the benefit of a more coherent study of political thought. (shrink)

Through an examination of French organicism–one of the models proposed for the nascent science of sociology in the late 19th century–this article argues two main points: that organicism was crucial in the establishment of ‘society’ as a scientific object; and that the specific characteristics of this new object were retained by later sociology long after the organic analogies and evolutionary views that justified them had been explicitly abandoned. Organicism played a significant role in establishing a strong notion of society as (...) a concrete, real entity–a notion that had a lasting impact on sociological theory and became one of the most important ‘categories of thought’ of the 20th century. (shrink)

Understanding the social bases of what John Rawls meant by justice requires understanding a central part of Rawls’s professional life: his role as a teacher. As this essay shows, Rawls’s approach to teaching was not ancillary to his approach to heady philosophical issues like the justification of moral reasoning. Rather, there’s an ethic that runs through Rawls’s work, one focused on deliberation and consensus-seeking, and one whose strengths and weaknesses are easiest to see when you examine his teaching.

Beginning with an analysis of the problematic relation of ‘the particular’ to ‘the universal’ in canonical political texts, this paper explores a variety of frameworks for the study of classical Greek political thought. Specifically, after investigating the influence of Quentin Skinner’s contextualism, the paper examines the ideas, approaches, and methods of Bernard Williams, Leo Strauss, and Josiah Ober. I draw attention to each figure’s distinctive motivations for returning to ancient Greece and to the influence of particular political ideals on those (...) motivations. I also assess their strengths and weaknesses and offer a critical commentary on their chief ideas. Toward the end of the paper, I outline a novel dialectical framework for the study of classical Athens – one that emphasizes the remoteness of the ancient past and the contribution that our studies might make to self-knowledge. In sketching this framework, I focus on what I call ‘ethical Athens’, ‘philosophical Athens’, and ‘critical Athens’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article I consider alternate but often complementary models for women’s republicanism from those discussed by Sandrine Bergès. In particular, I make use of Bergès’s insights about extending philosophical inquiry beyond traditional texts to analyse how militant political action was both informed by and informed the creation of philosophical texts, and consider the possibility of bringing direct action into the realm of philosophical investigation.