Work on the relation between figurative language and the law is a fairly recent trend, within legal discourse studies, linguistics, and semiotics. The work in conceptual metaphor theory, for example, is starting to unpack the underlying metaphorical and metonymic structure of legal language, producing some new and important insights into the nature of this language. Missing from this emerging line of inquiry are the views of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who was the first to understand the power of figurative (...) language in the creation of symbolic systems, like language and the law. His tripartite evolutionary model of language shows that there is not one language of the law, but three “languages.” By integrating Vico’s model with the work in conceptual metaphor theory it will be possible to penetrate the underlying conceptual structure of legal discourse and thus lead to a more insightful science of this discourse. (shrink)

Accounts of the evolutionary past have as much in common with works of narrative history as they do with works of science. Awareness of the narrative character of evolutionary writing leads to the discovery of a host of fascinating and hitherto unrecognized problems in the representation of evolutionary history, problems associated with the writing of narrative. These problems include selective attention, narrative perspective, foregrounding and backgrounding, differential resolution, and the establishment of a canon of important events. The narrative aspects of (...) evolutionary writing, however, which promote linearity and cohesiveness in conventional stories, conflict with the underlying chronicle of evolution, which is not linear, but branched, and which does not cohere, but diverges. The impulse to narrate is so great, however, and is so strongly reinforced by traditional schemes of taxonomic attention, that natural historians have more often abandoned the diverging tree than they have abandoned the narrative mode of representation. If we are to understand the true nature of the evolutionary past then we must adopt tree thinking, and develop new and creative ways, both narrative and non-narrative, of telling the history of life. (shrink)

Although a great deal of literature has looked at how individuals respond to stigma, far less has been written about how professional groups address challenges to their self-perception as abiding by clear moral standards. In this paper, we ask how professional group members maintain a positive self-perception in the face of moral stigma. Drawing on pragmatic and cultural sociology, we claim that professional communities hold narratives that link various aspects of the work their members perform with specific understanding of the (...) common good. These narratives allow professionals to maintain a shared view of their work as benefitting society and to perceive themselves as moral individuals. As a case study, we focus on the advertising industry, which has long been stigmatized as complicit in exploitative capitalist mechanisms and cultural degradation. We draw on nine total months of fieldwork and seventy-four interviews across three US advertising agencies. We find that advertising practitioners use narratives to present their work as contributing to the common good, depicting themselves as moral individuals who care about others in the process. We analyze three prevalent narratives: the account-driven narrative, which links moral virtue to caring for clients; the creative-driven narrative, which ties caring to the production of meaningful advertisements; and the strategic-driven narrative, which sees caring in finding meaningful relationships for consumers and brands. (shrink)

In what follows I explore the question of fictionality in history writing. First, I venture into the unfamiliar genre of ego-histoire and make my own professional training in the tenets of positivist or realist historiography an object of theoretical reflection and critical analysis. Then as a way of dealing with the literary dimension of written history, I make a canonical work in history of education an object of rhetorical analysis. Finally, as another way of coming to terms with the “fictions (...) of historiography,” I revisit one of my own productions and make it an object of metacritical consideration. My central theme is that historiographical realism alone will not suffice, that historians are as dependant upon literary invention as upon documents, that history cannot be written without the aid of the “fictions of historiography,” and that the difference between the historian and the novelist is narrower than we may have been accustomed to think. I further argue that attention to the literary or rhetorical dimension of history is long overdue in history of education, where it flourishes unacknowledged. I conclude that historical writing is not just a literary pastime and the issue remains: how to come to grips with fictionalizing and the truth claims of historiography. (shrink)

In the current culture of regulation in higher education and, in turn, the history discipline, it is timely to problematize discipline standards in relation to student agency and creativity. This article argues that through the inclusion of a critical orientation and engaged pedagogy, historians have the opportunity to bring a more agentic dimension to the disciplinary conversation. Discipline standards privilege that arrogant historical moment in the higher education sector when certain skills development and knowledge creation becomes a hegemonic discourse. As (...) a result, there is less emphasis on creativity, agency, and individual opportunities for the demonstration of the historical imagination at work. We need to ensure that the insights gained from teaching and learning practice and research are not lost in the rush to meet discipline standards through compliance. (shrink)

Like other sciences, biosemiotics also has its time-honoured archive, consisting of writings by those who have been invented and revered as ancestors of the discipline. One such example is Jakob von Uexküll. As to the people who ‘invented’ him, they are either, to paraphrase a French cliché, ‘agents du cosmopolitisme sémiotique’ like Thomas Sebeok, or de jure and de facto progenitor like Thure von Uexküll. In the archive is the special issue of Semiotica 42. 1 (1982) edited by the late (...) Sebeok and introduced by Thure von Uexküll. It is in the opening essay that Thure von UexküIl tries to restore Jakob von Uexküll’s role as a precursor of semiotics by negotiating the Elder with Saussure and the linguistics-oriented ‘semiology’ in his wake. However, semiotic mapping, in the strictly ‘disciplinary’ sense, of Jakob von Uexküll is no easy task because he ‘knew neither Peirce nor Saussure and did not use their terminology’ (Thure von Uexküll 1982,2). Because Thure prefers to call the Elder’s science ‘general semiotics’ (Thure von Uexküll 1982), this paper begins by assessing Thure von Uexküll’s semiotic configuration of Jakob, probe into the force and limits of the linguistic analogy, revisit the already time-honoured debate on the primary and secondary modelling systems, which was made famous by the Moscow-Tartu semioticians in the early 1970s, but severely criticized by Sebeok and his followers. The paper engages Sebeok from several fronts, directed first at his relegation of the Saussurian linguistic model, then at his critique of the Primary Modelling System, and finally at his reservation about evolutionism in light of the current debate on gene/meme co-evolution. (shrink)

The question of the identity or persistence of the self through time may be interesting for philosophers, but it is hardly a burning question for most individuals. On the other hand, the question of who I am, what or who I take myself to be, can be a vital, even burning question for most of us at some time in our lives. This is the notion of personal identity I take up in this paper. It is an identity that is (...) not pre-given a priori but is always in some sense an open question, never completely decided. Here the narrative conception of self is relevant, since it is often a question of what story or kind of story my identity instantiates. This notion of personal identity is inherently temporal, but not in the sense of temporal persistence but of temporal coherence of past, present and future. And here the question of personal identity is inevitably social, since it is largely a question of what group I identify myself with, what social role I take myself to embody. And what complications occur when I identify myself with more than one group? Here many social conflicts and also intrapersonal conflicts have their source. My topic thus turns on ideas of personal identity that are reflected in the popular expressions “identity crisis” and “identity politics.”. (shrink)

Straipsnyje analizuojamas Lietuvos partizanų, partizaninio karo, istorijos vaizdavimas keliuose romanuose: Mariaus Ivaškevičiaus Žali, Teodoro Četrausko Tarsi gyventa, Juozo Jasaičio Per sutemas, Petro Venclovo Kartybių taurė – iki dugno, Antano Šileikos Pogrindis, Justino Sajausko Neužmirštami Suvalkijos vardai. Romanai nagrinėjami aktualizuojant Maurice‘o Halbwachso kolektyvinės atminties koncepciją, Haydeno White‘o istorijos diskurso sampratą, Umberto Eco interpretacijos teoriją. Tyrimas atskleidė, kad dauguma autorių renkasi istorinį diskursą, kuris pasakoja, o mažuma – kuris naratyvizuoja. Partizaninio karo kolektyvinė atmintis yra siejama arba su abstrakčiais, arba su konkrečiais partizanais; (...) istorijos diskursas suponuoja įvairias interpretacijas, kurios rodo skirtingas autoriaus, teksto, skaitytojo intencijas. (shrink)

The present discussion contribution argues that O. Müller not only suppresses Goethe’s declared intentions with regard to the latter’s Theory of Colors and ignores his place in what in any case is a different scientific culture than his own or Newton’s, namely a premodern culture of “narrative knowledge” in the sense specified by Lyotard. Moreover, Müller entangles himself in the paradox of wanting on the one hand to back up Goethe on the level of fact when the latter opposes the (...) militant selfrighteousness of the Newtonian school, but doing so on the other hand by constructing an epic-heroic narrative of Newtonian militance, not to say eristic belligerence contradictory to Goethe’s own “tolerant enlightenment” in Lakatos’ sense. Thus, we are confronted with one of those cases where, as Paul de Man puts it, a multidimensional critical reading on the semiological as well as rhetorical levels shows “that the text does not practice what it preaches”. (shrink)

(1995). Theoretical issues surrounding interdisciplinary interpenetration. Social Epistemology: Vol. 9, Boundary Rhetorics and the Work of Interdisciplinarity, pp. 175-187.

As any etymologist knows, the word ‘text’ is derived from the past participle of the Latin verb texere, to weave. Text is therefore something that is ‘woven’. It’s a persuasive metaphor, to imagine writing in terms of the warp and weft of ideas and words, of narrative threads woven together to become a piece of fabric. The idea of history as fabric brings together a whole different set of tropes, not just of weaving, but of the very materiality of fabric. (...) Does the fabric have a nap, or a pattern? Is it cut with the grain, or on the bias? What of its folds, its seams? All these qualities of fabric have application in the interpretation of history, and some of these images are already familiar in historical discourse. (shrink)

Throughout religious, scientific, and humanist literature on ideas one finds categorical subdivisions that are four in number: the four corners of the Earth, the four cardinal directions, the four proteins constituting DNA, Maxwell's four equations, Toynbee's four societies, Pythagoras’ four elements of arithmetic, Pythagoras’ four elements, Hayden White's four aspects of imagination. The list is endless. From where does the “four” come? Why not five, or six, eight, or nine? Andersen tracks back to the beginnings of arithmetic utilized in the (...) architecture of conceptual thinking. He finds the answer not only in the quadration of the human body as having four sides and giving a stabilizing structure to the brain but equally in the architecture of memory. Using the slot-theory of short-term memory processing, he demonstrates how easily the four-count comes to mind and how the brain resists moving on to five. (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)

This article develops a concept of lyrical sociology, a sociology I oppose to narrative sociology, by which I mean standard quantitative inquiry with its "narratives" of variables as well as those parts of qualitative sociology that take a narrative and explanatory approach to social life. Lyrical sociology is characterized by an engaged, nonironic stance toward its object of analysis, by specific location of both its subject and its object in social space, and by a momentaneous conception of social time. Lyrical (...) sociology typically uses strong figuration and personification, and aims to communicate its author's emotional stance toward his or her object of study, rather than to "explain" that object. The analysis considers many examples and draws on literary criticism, the philosophy of time, and the theory of emotion. It also addresses contemporary debates in ethnography. (shrink)

This article brings out ethical aspects arising in Plato’s classical critique of narrative and imitative art in The Republic, especially when it comes to reading stories about the past. Socrates’s and Glaucon’s most important suggestion, I argue, is to cultivate an ethical consciousness where one ought to see the distinctions between how the real and the imaginary in narratives are to be conceived, and what that insight ethically demands of the reader. Taken as an ethical insight for the reader when (...) engaging in narrative understanding, this should be to resist the temptation to think that past suffering and misery as told in a story can be read analogously to narratives having a tragic plot. The article clarifies the meaning of Plato’s critique through the ideas of Simone Weil, Emmanuel Lévinas and Iris Murdoch. These existential moral philosophers work towards having an ethical consciousness in one’s personal relationship with stories of our lifeworld. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the issue of truth-telling in non-fictional narratives of (in)justice. Based on examples of rape narratives, domestic abuse narratives, human trafficking narratives and asylum seeker narratives, I examine the various difficulties in telling the truth in such stories, particularly those related to various culturally conditioned ideas of how the world works, which at the same time form the basis of, among other things, legal discourse and officials’ decision-making processes. I will also demonstrate that such culturally conditioned ideas, (...) which are the basis of official discourse, can be considered within the category of both the social imaginary of the just world in the Taylorian sense of the term, and the social master narrative, which in the case of stories of (in)justice is often based on the just world hypothesis. (shrink)

R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) was an English philosopher, historian and practicing archaeologist. His work, particularly in the philosophy of action and history, has been profoundly influential in the 20th and 21st century. Although the importance of his work is indisputable, this is the first book to consider how and why it actually matters. Giussepina D'oro considers the importance of Collingwood as a thinker who thinks kaleidoscopically and, unlike lots of contemporary philosophers, refuses to focus on narrow, technical interests but instead, observes (...) the whole world of thought. Why Collingwood Matters revives Collingwood's conception of the role and character of philosophical analysis and shows how it informs his understanding of the mind, what it means to act, and what it means to understand the past historically. It also argues for the relevance of his metaphilosophical approach to the challenge posed by the Anthropocene and the global environmental crisis. Both an elucidation of Collingwood's thought and a lively exploration of it's contemporary relevance, Why Collingwood Matters provides a much-needed examination of a 20th-century polymath. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the discipline of history, its methods, subject, and output. A brief overview of contemporary analytic philosophy of history is provided, followed by critical discussion of historical realism. It is argued that the insistence on the idea that historians inquire into the real past and that they refer to the actual past entities, events, or agents is widely open to sceptical objections. The concept of an abstract historical chronicle of past events which are explained or retold by (...) historians is identified as misleading. The idea of historical antirealism is then introduced. It is argued that in the centre of historian’s attention are present phenomena that are identified as historical evidence and require historical explanation. Historical explanation consists of constituting an historical past—a fictional model that accounts for present data. The identification process of historical evidence and the discursive nature of historical enterprise are analysed and accompanied by several concrete examples. According to historical antirealism, historians are not interested in the real past, but in the present empirical data. In their pursuit of historical knowledge, they produce fictional models—an historical past. Lastly, several common caveats against historical antirealism are addressed. The historical antirealism is presented as a viable fictionalist account of the historical inquiry that is capable of avoiding sceptical attacks on historical method and it is argued that antirealism allows history to retain its worth as a distinctive kind of scientific discipline. (shrink)

Rejecting or reforming anthropocentrism for the sake of human survival is a central moral challenge in our time. The rejection of anthropocentrism relies on the view that anthropocentrism has pervasively constituted the historical character of humankind and must be replaced in the future as understood by historical theory. This critique arises from new realist ontologies, including neo-materialisms and object-oriented ontology. Their rigid rejection of anthropocentrism requires the view of history and sociality proposed by proponents of object-oriented ontology. It is based (...) on a specialized form of the totalized logic of identity, the concept of antitypy; and by careful examination this is found to be inadequate. The consequence is that rigid rejection of anthropocentrism from any ontologically realist point of view must therefore fail because it is necessarily based on a logic that must be rejected. A better approach relies on the necessity of relatedness in moral and social thought. (shrink)

This book addresses how our revisionary practices account for relations between texts and how they are read. It offers an overarching philosophy of revision concerning works of fiction, fact, and faith, revealing unexpected insights about the philosophy of language, the metaphysics of fact and fiction, and the history and philosophy of science and religion. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of literature, literary theory and criticism, (...) and history and philosophy of science and religion. (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)

This article affords particular attention to the relationship between memory, the narrativization of news and its linear construction, conceived as journalism’s ‘memory- work’. In elaborating upon this ‘work’, it is proposed that the Hegelian notion of retroactive causation (as used by Slavoj Žižek) can examine how analyses of news journalists ‘retroactively’ employ the past in the temporal construction of news. In fact, such retroactive (re)ordering directs attention to the ways in which journalists contingently select ‘a past’ to confer meaning on (...) the present. With regard to current literature, it is noted that a retroactive analysis can highlight two important dialectics within the practice of news journalism: 1) the relation between contingency and necessity; and, 2) the relation between content and form. Indeed, it is argued that this theoretical account offers a novel approach to examining the significance of memory in news journalism as well as the inconsistencies which underscore journalism’s memory-work. It is in accordance with such inconsistency that broader reflections on time, temporality and our relations to the past can be made. (shrink)

The rich have two defining capabilities: independence from and command over others. These make being wealthy very pleasant indeed, but they are also toxic to democracy. First, I analyse the mechanisms by which the presence of very wealthy individuals undermines the two pillars of liberal democracy, equality of citizenship and legitimate social choice. Second, I make a radical proposal. If we value the preservation of democracy we must limit the amount of wealth any individual can have and still be a (...) citizen of our polity. (shrink)

Kirjasymposioartikkeli esittelee Hanna Meretojan teoksen The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible (Oxford University Press, 2018) keskeisimmät ajatukset ja kytkee ne laajempaan hermeneuttiseen ja jälkistrukturalistiseen ajatteluperinteeseen, etenkin Jean-François Lyotardin luonnehdintaan jälkimodernista aikakaudesta suurten modernien historiallisten metakertomusten horjumisen ja pienten paikallisten kertomusten moneuden aikakautena. Tässä valossa Meretojan hermeneuttista kertomusetiikkaa voidaan lukea ennen muuta pienten, ei-totalisoivien kertomusten etiikkana. Artikkeli esittää, että tällaiselle etiikalle löytyy hedelmällinen vertailukohta Hannah Arendtin totalitarismiteoriasta, joka sijoittaa ideologiset metakertomukset totalitaarisen hallinnan ja sen tuottaman ”banaalin pahuuden” (...) ytimeen; niin Arendtin kuin Meretojankin kertomusetiikan keskeisenä viitekohtana on holokausti moderniteetin eettisenä nollapisteenä. Nämä yhteydet tuovat esiin Meretojan hahmotteleman hermeneuttisen etiikan laajan teoreettisen kaikupohjan myöhäismodernissa ajatteluperinteessä. Lopuksi pohditaan kysymystä hermeneuttisen pienten kertomusten etiikan jatkuvasta ajankohtaisuudesta sosiaalisen median ja sen ”kuplien” aikakaudella. (shrink)

Several scholars observed that narratives about the human past are evaluated comparatively. Few attempts have been made, however, to explore how such evaluations are actually done. Here I look at a lengthy “contest” among several historiographic narratives, all constructed to make sense of another one—the biblical story of the conquest of Canaan. I conclude that the preference of such narratives can be construed as a rational choice. In particular, an easily comprehensible and emotionally evocative narrative will give way to a (...) complex and mundane one, when the latter provides a more coherent account of the consensually accepted body of evidence. This points to a fundamental difference between historiographic narratives and fiction, contrary to some influential opinions in the philosophy of historiography. Such historiographic narratives have similarities with hypotheses and narrative explanations in natural science. (shrink)

The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene predicament is best made sense of by narrative means. Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories we can tell in the (...) Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told. What we need to find are meaningful ways to reconcile an inherited commitment to narrativization and the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of understanding the Anthropocene as our current predicament. (shrink)

Plato’s theory of virtue in the Laws could be striking for someone who is more familiar with Aristotle’s ethics for conceptual complementarity between the two positions (contrary emotions, the ordering element of reason, virtue as a mean which lies between two forms of vice, typically linked to excessive actions, etc.). Plato’s theory, however, still differs from that of Aristotle in two crutial points. First, the source of emotional dynamism is, according to Plato, supraindividual as far as the psyche is a (...) cosmological principle. Only if it comes to be formed and ordered, it separates from the universal cosmic context and make up the emotional nature of an individual soul. But the soul is not, and this is the second point of difference, ordered by some external element (training or education, organized by a rational agent). Plato counts on a pre-arranged order of emotions at a particular ontological topos of the individual soul into which reason eventually descends. Emotions, on their part, seem to include a nexus between formable and forming that is chronologically and methodocally prior to that between the biological substratum and its rational organization, as assumed by Aristotle. (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)

En una primera parte expondré la crítica pragmatista a la visión tradicional del lenguaje; luego, contrastaré las visiones dentro de las que critican a la tradición: contextualismo y contextualismo radical. En una segunda expondré el tipo de semántica que se podría sostener bajo esta concepción del lenguaje: una semántica no proposicionalista. Finalmente, quisiera proponer que, así como en las ciencias sociales el localismo metodológico plantea la emergencia de entidades colectivas (ya sean las clases o instituciones) —sin ser meramente epifenomenales, que (...) no obstante son realizadas y en principio deben poder ser reducidas a la agencia de actores racionales—, para el caso del lenguaje sería similar. Esto llama a recoger cierto espíritu en Saussure, que buscó otorgar a la ciencia lingüística un objeto de estudio con autonomía. (shrink)

One of the still unsolved problems in liberal anarchism is a definition of social constituency in positive terms. Partially, this had been solved by the advancements of liberal discourse ethics. These approaches, built on praxeology as a universal framework for social formation, are detached from the need of any previous or external authority or rule for the discursive partners. However, the relationship between action, personal identity, and liberty within the process of a community becoming solely generated from the praxeological a (...) priori remains largely disputed. In order to develop a testable constitutional model, this study revises how the “ontological turn” was introduced into liberal theories and redefines the concept of liberty. Liberty is usually understood as a moral goal or measurement for just actions, as the generative principle of all social existence - individual and interpersonal. For this purpose, the function of performative contradiction within the mechanism of interpersonal “encounter”, as part of the co-generative process of the individual becoming and social formation was explored through the production of a game-based narrative historiography grounded on 19th century life writings. This narrative historiography was developed in the context of Swiss history, with a “design-based” research approach, and resulted in a prototype for networked storytelling through which the transformative learning process could be visible and the negotiation of competing individual visions of the future could be re-enacted. (shrink)

According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...) explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena. (shrink)

The thesis adapts Bourdieu’s theory of hexis as a method for approaching the Baillie (Hegel/Baillie, 1910/1931) and Pinkard (Hegel/Pinkard, 2008) translations of Hegel’s Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hegel, 1807/1970) as embodiments of a translatorial practice informed by social and philosophical contextual factors. The theoretical concept of a translatorial hexis is analogous to Bourdieu’s habitus but differs in that the translatorial hexis embodies a specifically dominant, honour-seeking stance of the translator with regard to the micro-dynamics of the surrounding sub-fields; the translatorial (...) hexis is also embodied primarily in the detail of the text and in the peritexts to the translations. Chapters 3 and 4, which focus on the Baillie and Pinkard translations, are each divided into three sections: an analysis of the historical background to the translation in terms of interrelated Bourdieusian fields defined by rival positions vying for academic reputation; an analysis of lexical patterning identified in TT corpora with reference to the translations of two ‘dialectically ambiguous’ terms Geist [mind/spirit] and aufheben [cancel/preserve/sublate]; an analysis of peritexts to the two translations. Starting with a discussion of Hegel’s ‘dialectical ambiguity’ in chapter 1 and an elaboration of the Bourdieusian theoretical framework in chapter 2, the thesis attempts to explain the lexical findings with reference to the concept of translatorial hexis in a manner which takes philosophical and sociological factors into consideration as determinants of the translators’ strategies. The analysis focuses on the positioning of Sir James Black Baillie with regard to Absolutist and Personalist versions of British Idealism and Terry Pinkard with regard to the non-metaphysical readings of Hegel and the development of communitarian ideologies.The publication of new translations of Hegel’s works and new critical works on German Idealism suggest that a Hegel revival is in full progress. Given the centrality of translation to this phenomenon, it is appropriate that translation studies should contribute to the discussion, especially to demonstrate the value of a self-reflexive, multi-disciplinary approach which brings linguistic analysis and sociological contextualisation to bear on some of the philosophical issues at stake. (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)

This paper attempts to analyze in detail the difference between a pragmatic and non-pragmatic approach to explanation. Proponents of a pragmatic explanation analyze it by means of the concepts of context or audience. However, there could be various disguises of this type of approach. It is possible to include pragmatic concepts into the characterization of the item to be explained or the item that explains. On the other hand, pragmatic approach may focus on the specific relation between the item to (...) be explained or the item that explains and context or audience. Finally, the paper underlines that there is a distinction between a pragmatic approach to explanation and the pragmatics of explanation, which should not be ignored. (shrink)

The traditional mode of explanation in physics via deduction from partial differential equations is contrasted here with explanation via simulations. I argue that the different technologies employed constitute different languages, which support different sorts of narratives. The narratives that accompany simulations and articulate their meaning are typically historical or natural historical in kind. They explain complex phenomena by growing them rather than by referring them to general laws. Examples of such growth simulations and growth narratives come from the evolution of (...) wave functions in quantum chaos, snowflake formation, and Etruscan genetics. The examples suggest a few concluding remarks on historical explanation. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

Philip Hefner identifies three settings in which to assess the future of science and religion: the academy, the public sphere, and the faith community. This essay argues that the discourse of science and religion could improve its standing within the secular academy in America by shifting the focus from theology to history. In the public sphere, the science-and-religion discourse could play an important role of promoting tolerance and respect toward the religious Other. For a given faith community (for example, Judaism) (...) the discourse of science and religion can ensure future intellectual depth by virtue of study and ongoing interpretation. The essay challenges the suggestion to adopt irony as a desirable posture for science-and-religion discourse. (shrink)

A crisis of our age that is usually identified with the loss of the sacred was one of the causes of the fall into irony in the nineteenth century. In the case of historians, as Hayden White has shown in Metahistory, this irony was caused by a "bitterness" stemming from the failure of reality to fulfill their expectations. An ironic apprehension of the world arose in an atmosphere of social breakdown or cultural decline. A current stage of irony manifests itself (...) in a doubt as to the capacity of language to grasp reality. Thus we live in a "prison house of language." An intellectual parlor-game produces "second-hand knowledge" that cannot satisfy the needs of post-postmodern men and women still looking for another metanarrative. Therefore, the main purpose of this essay is to answer the question: how can we go beyond irony?This text is a "post-postmodern post mortem to postmodernism." I am grateful to postmodernism for many things, especially for giving me an alternative apprehension of the world in terms of difference and continuity rather than binary oppositions, but I am tired of ontological insecurity and epistemological chaos. I need order. I miss metanarrative.In trying to break with some modern/postmodern "principles" and retain within my discourse the premodernist perspective, I follow the current trend in the humanities. We observe at present the breakdown of methodology and the rise of a more poetic approach in the human sciences. Evidence of this phenomenon is the more autobiographical form of writing in anthropology and a more literary style in historical writing . This trend is associated with a revaluation of the subjective aspects of research. Perhaps, and I would welcome it, it also could be identified with a reappearance of a Collingwoodian idea of history as human self-knowledge, knowledge about human nature, knowledge about "what it is to be a man . . . what it is to be the kind of man you are . . . and what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is.". (shrink)

This book addresses a central dilemma in critical theory today: how to theorize the subject as both a construct of oppressive discourse and as a dialogical agent. By engaging a wide range of leading philosophical and critical thinkers—James, Habermas, MacIntyre, Rorty, Taylor, Derrida and West are all critiqued—Meili Steele proposes linking language with human agency in order to develop an alternative textual and ethical theory of the subject. Developing this theory through readings that address issues of identity politics, race and (...) feminist theory, Steele argues that we do not have to choose between an idealized or demonized modernity, offering new ways of understanding the ethical and political dimensions of imaginative narratives. (shrink)

(1996). Hans Küng's historical paradigm for postmodern theology. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas, pp. 1126-1132.