The title of this book, Adventures of Ideas, bears two meanings, both applicable to the subject-matter.

History of the human race from the point of view of mankind's changing ideas--sociological, cosmological, philosophica.

Every historian has some attitude toward the speed and direction of human development, and this is the historian's concept of time. Historians should not be seduced by abstract chronology into assuming that time flows evenly; their task is to discern the swiftness or slowness, the advance or retrogression of the movement of events. The alleged difference between the "unhistorical" Greek conception of cyclical time and the "historical" Christian conception of linear time is not supported by the evidence from Greek and (...) Christian historiography; it reflects a confusion between what philosophers have said about time and what historians in all ages have meant. (shrink)

A number of authors have recently argued that the mathematical insights of "chaos theory" offer a promising formal model or significant analogy for understanding at least some historical events. We examine a representative claim of each kind regarding the application of chaos theory to problems of historical explanation. We identify two lines of argument. One we term the Causal Thesis, which states that chaos theory may be used to plausibly model, and so explain, historical events. The other we term the (...) Convergence Thesis, which holds that, once the analogy between history and chaos theory is properly appreciated, any temptation to divide history from the rest of science should be greatly lessened. We argue that the proffered analogy between chaos theory and history falls apart upon closer analysis. The promised benefits of chaos theory vis-à-vis history are either fantastic or, at best, an extremely loose heuristic which, while retaining nothing of the considerable intrinsic interest of nonlinear dynamics, easily seduces the unwary into taking at face value terms and concepts that have a specifically precise meaning only within the confines of mathematical theory. (shrink)

In response to Roth and Ryckman, I explain in more detail why narratives fashioned with ideal, quantitative covering laws cannot be combined into large-scale covering-law explanations and specify further reasons for supposing that history can be conceived as dynamically nonlinear. I also appeal to an episode in the history of science to examine the idea that dynamical complexity is local in historical space and time and to suggest that such complexity does not pose a unique problem for historical narration. Finally, (...) I suggest that Roth and Ryckman's critique of the use of nonlinear dynamical concepts in historical explanation must extend to explanations employing concepts from linear science. I conclude that their warning against the incoherence of scientism is not convincing. (shrink)

Hempel's proposal of covering laws which explain historical events has a certain plausibility, but can never be actually realized due to the chaotic nature of history. The natural laws that would govern both individual lives and greater history would be nonlinear; consequently, in the terminology of chaos theory, the final states of both are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Initial conditions would need to be exactly known in order to account correctly for historic phenomena, especially for causes and effects which (...) span long, historically interesting, lengths of time. Covering-law history therefore fails because the details of initial conditions are generally unknowable. Since this constraint diminishes as the time over which covering laws operate is divided into smaller consecutive intervals of scenes, covering-law explanations resolve into those having a narrative temporal structure. (shrink)

There is a similarity between the most technical scientific reasoning and the most humanistic literary reasoning. While engineers and historians make use of both metaphors and stories, engineers specialize in metaphors, and historians in stories. Placing metaphor, or pure comparison, at one end of a scale and simply a listing of events, or pure story, at the other, it can be seen that what connects them is a theme. The theme providing the connecting link between poles for both the engineer (...) and the historian is time. Themes in engineering that mention time are those titled differential equations. The differential equation is story-like because it speaks of time and therefore organizes experience in time, at least implicitly. Time- speaking themes shape the raw experience, as a story does when it is more than a mere unthematized chronicle. The chaotic nature of non-linear differential equations parallels the chaotic nature of history in that large results need not have large causes. Narration becomes difficult in chaotic systems because the knowledge of initial conditions is rarely sufficiently detailed to allow for accurate explanation or prediction for either engineers or historians. (shrink)

Mandelbaum believes that views regarding history and man and reason pose problems for philosophy, and he offers critical discussions of some of those problems at the conclusions of parts 2, 3, and 4.

To develop this theory, Karl Löwith—beginning with the more accessible philosophies of history in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and working back to the Bible—analyzes the writings of outstanding historians both in antiquity ...

The Post-Modern Reader edited by Charles Jencks An Anthology of a World Movement Post-Modernism has been debated, attacked, and defended for a generation, but only in the last few years has it come into focus as a coherent way of thought embracing all areas of culture. This is the first anthology that presents the synthesising trend in all its diversity, a convergence in architecture and literature, film and cultural theory, sociology, feminism and theology, science and economics. It is however, a (...) synthesis with a difference; it is one which stresses a contested pluralism, the ‘dialogic' that underlies the growth of sciences as well as the development of other art forms such as the novel. Some of the key historical texts are reprinted in part - those of Daniel Bell on the post-industrial society and Jean-François Lyotard on the post-modern condition. The new cultural logic of contested pluralism is analysed in seminal papers by Andreas Huyssen and Jim Collins. The fundamental ideas on post-modern literature are defined by Umberto Eco, John Barth and David Lodge and the theories they present challenge the notion of post-modernism as an ultra avant-garde movement and the expression of a consumer society. New Cultural Theory Late Modernism Literature, Art, Architecture and Film Sociology, Politics and Geography Feminism Science and Religion Tito Arecchi, John Barth, Jean Baudrillard, Daniel Bell, Charles Birch, David Bohm, Jim Collins, Norman K Denzin, Umberto Eco, Edward Goldsmith, David Ray Griffin, Jürgen Habermas, David Harvey, Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon, Andreas Huyssen, Charles Jencks, Heinrich Klotz, Hans Küng, David Lodge, Jean-François Lyotard, Robin Murray, Craig Owens, Paolo Portoghesi, Margaret Rose, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Edward W Soja. (shrink)

Sequel to History offers a comprehensive definition of postmodernism as a reformation of time. Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth uses a diversified theoretical approachdrawing on post-structuralism, feminism, new historicism, and twentieth-century scienceto demonstrate the crisis of our dominant idea of history and its dissolution in the rhythmic time of postmodernism. She enlarges this definition in discussions of several crises of cultural identity: the crisis of the object, the crisis of the subject, and the crisis of the sign. Finally, she explores the relation (...) between language and time in post-modernism, proposing an arresting theory of her own about the rhythmic nature of postmodern temporality. Because the postmodern construction of time appears so clearly in narrative writing, each part of this work is punctuated by a "rhythm section" on a postmodern narrative (Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, Cortezar's Hopscotch, and Nabokov's Ada); these extended readings provide concrete illustrations of Ermarth's theoretical positions. As in her critically acclaimed Realism and Consensus in the English Novel, Ermarth ranges across disciplines from anthropology and the visual arts to philosophy and history. For its interdisciplinary character and its lucid definition of postmodernism, Sequel to History will appeal to all those interested in the humanities. (shrink)

The essays collected here present a cross section of the debates on postmodernism being waged in philosophy and the arts. Some contributors raise general questions about postmodernism, for example, its language and its politics. Others offer specific readings of architecture, painting, literature, theatre, photography, film, and television.

In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Lowith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the ...

Originally published in 1971. The purpose of this book is to draw attention to important aspects of thought in the nineteenth century. While its central concerns lie within the philosophic tradition, materials drawn from the social sciences and elsewhere provide important illustrations of the intellectual movements that the author attempts to trace. This book aims at examining philosophic modes of thought as well as sifting presuppositions held in common by a diverse group of thinkers whose antecedents and whose intentions often (...) had little in common. After a preliminary tracing of the main strands of continuity within philosophy itself, the author concentrates on how, out of diverse and disparate sources, certain common beliefs and attitudes regarding history, man, and reason came to pervade a great deal of nineteenth-century thought. Geographically, this book focuses on English, French, and German thought. Mandelbaum believes that views regarding history and man and reason pose problems for philosophy, and he offers critical discussions of some of those problems at the conclusions of parts 2, 3, and 4. (shrink)