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Experience versus Recollection: Reinhart Koselleck and Aleida Assmann on Collective Memory Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Jan Ferdinand
Since the 1990s, Reinhart Koselleck has been one of the critics of the concept of collective memory. This includes contributions to practical debates on the one hand and reflections on a more theoretical level on the other. In contrast, with her concept of cultural memory, Aleida Assmann has taken a more positive view of the concept of collective memory. She defends this concept against Koselleck’s
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Hont and Koselleck on the Crisis of Authority Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Lasse S. Andersen
This paper examines the reception of Reinhart Koselleck’s Kritik und Krise by the intellectual historian István Hont. Relying on hitherto unpublished manuscripts, it argues that the later work of Hont can be seen as a critical response to Koselleck and his characterisation of the crisis of modern politics as a crisis of political authority.
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Idea or Concept? Progress in Comparative Methodological Perspective Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Tyson Retz
The history of the idea of progress and the history of the concept of progress are two different things, not least because they emanate from considerably different intellectual traditions. In anglophone history of ideas, progress has typically been viewed as a belief. Historians of ideas explore the past evaluating the extent to which a given society met certain conditions of belief. By contrast, in
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Koselleck and the Problem of Historical Judgment Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Zachary Riebeling
This article undertakes an exploration of Reinhart Koselleck’s ideas concerning historical knowledge and moral judgment. Koselleck’s position is exemplified by the maxim “knowing is better than knowing better,” declaimed throughout his career. I argue that Koselleck’s separation of knowledge and judgment was unstable, with the prescription to know repeatedly folded into the proscription against knowing
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The One Big Idea: Koselleck’s Structures of Repetition and Their Historiographical Consequences Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Peter Vogt
What is the one big idea of Koselleck’s Historik understood as a methodological framework for the attempt to combine a theory of historical times with a theory of historical time? In part (1) of this paper, I criticize the two most basic attempts to understand Koselleck’s one big idea as mistaken because they are exclusively interested either in history (in the singular) or in histories (in the plural)
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Frege and the Logic of the Historical Proposition Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-11-22 Luke O’Sullivan
This article argues that history played a larger role in the thought of Gottlob Frege than has usually been acknowledged. Frege’s logical writings frequently employed statements about the past as examples that included references to historical persons. Frege also described history as a science and argued that historical propositions could support valid inferences and reliably identify historical persons
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Frameworks in Historiography: Explanation, Scenarios, and Futures Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Veli Virmajoki
In this paper, I analyze how frameworks shape historiographical explanations. I argue that, in order to identify a sequence of events as relevant to a historical outcome, assumptions about the workings of the relevant domain have to be made. By extending Lakatosian considerations, I argue that these assumptions are provided by a framework that contains a set of factors and intertwined principles that
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Memory, Folk Narratives, and Social Critique: Notes on Jane Addams and the “Devil Baby” Legend Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Tullio Viola
The article focuses on the link between memory, folk narratives, and critical thinking. I suggest in particular that there are instances in which the transmission of a folkloric story, such as a legend or a tale, can intersect with a person’s life experiences and facilitate the articulation of critical perspectives on society that might otherwise go unexpressed. The opportunity for discussing this
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Narratives, Events & Monotremes: The Philosophy of History in Practice Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Adrian Currie
Significant work in the philosophy of history has focused on the writing of historiographical narratives, isolated from the rest of what historians do. Taking my cue from the philosophy of science in practice, I suggest that understanding historical narratives as embedded within historical practice more generally is fruitful. I illustrate this by bringing a particular instance of historical practice
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On Compatibility between Presentism and Anti-Presentism in History of Science Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Karoliina Pulkkinen
Presentism – the influence of the present on historians’ work – has been met with resistance among historians of science; many hold that excessive reference to the present can compromise the aim of understanding past practices in their own terms. In response to this concern, a number of authors have argued that not only is such influence inevitable, it can also be legitimate and helpful. In probing
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On Plurality and Relativism in History Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Eugen Zeleňák
The existence of differing historical interpretations of the same happenings and the consequences of this phenomenon have attracted scholarly attention and deserve to be studied in the future by philosophers of history. Plurality repeatedly surfaces in historical discussions and relativism seems to be one of the obvious conclusions drawn from the existence of competing historical accounts. In my paper
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Pre-Narrativist Philosophy of History Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Jonas Ahlskog
Prior to the narrativist turn in the 1970s, philosophy of history focused on action and agency. Seminal pre-narrativist philosophers of history – from Collingwood and Oakeshott to Dilthey and Gadamer – argued that agent-centred action explanation constitutes an irreducible element of historical research. This paper re-examines the agent-centred perspective as one of the key insights of pre-narrativist
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Thinking about Past Minds: Cognitive Science as Philosophy of Historiography Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Adam Michael Bricker
This paper outlines the case for a future research program that uses the tools of experimental cognitive science to investigate questions that traditionally fall under the remit of the philosophy of historiography. The central idea is this – the epistemic profile of historians’ representations of the past is largely an empirical matter, determined in no small part by the cognitive processes that produce
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Semantic Externalism and the History of Ideas: A Critical Review Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Edmund Handby
A recent innovation in the study of methods in the history of ideas is the introduction of elements of semantic externalism from the philosophy of language. Studies that rely on semantic externalism have done so to address particular questions of method in political theorising, including the interpretation of ‘essentially contested concepts’, and the issue of relativism in historical contextualism
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Counterfactual History: Three Worries and Replies Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-06-14 Helen Zhao
This article aims to shed light on what lies at the heart of skepticism towards counterfactual, alternative, or what-if history. On its face, counterfactual history gives historians and philosophers good reason to worry. First, because counterfactual pasts leave no traces, historians lack an important source of empirical warrant. Second, because rewriting historical events might unpredictably change
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Culture’s Impact on the Historical Sciences Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-06-14 T.J. Perkins
In this paper I introduce the thesis of cultural readiness about science found in the historical analysis of the Alvarez impact hypothesis of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Cultural readiness posits that in some scientific domains, there are scientifically apt questions, methodologies or theories that are only developed, considered, and adopted by a scientific community once some combination of
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George G. Simpson and Stephen J. Gould on Values: Shifting Normative Frameworks in Historical Context Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-06-14 Alison K. McConwell
George G. Simpson (1902–1984) and Stephen J. Gould (1941–2002) were both engaged with the normative – i.e., social, cultural, political, and even ethical – consequences of their evolutionary theorizing. However, there is a normative point of departure between Simpson and Gould’s work in that regard that has received little attention. Yet, their motivations converge into a larger program of resistance
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Narrative Explanation and Non-Epistemic Value Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-06-14 Derek D. Turner, Ahmed AboHamad
Explanations in the natural historical sciences often take the form of stories. This paper examines two accounts of the sources of narrative’s explanatory power: Beatty’s suggestion that narrative explanation is closely connected to historical contingency, and that narratives explain by contrasting what happened with what might have happened; and Ereshefsky and Turner’s view that narratives explain
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Of Records and Ruins: Metaphors about the Deep Past Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-06-14 Adrian Currie
Consideration of evidence and data in historical science is dominated by textual metaphor: we reconstruct the past on the basis of various incomplete records. I suggest that although textual metaphors are often apt, they also lead philosophers and scientists to think about historical evidence in particular ways, and that other perspectives might be fruitful. Towards this, I explore the notion of natural
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On the Ambivalence of Control in Experimental Investigation of Historically Contingent Processes Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-06-14 Eric Desjardins, Derek Oswick, Craig W. Fox
Historical contingency is commonly associated with unpredictability and outcome variability. As such, it can be seen as an undesirable aspect of experimental investigations. Many might agree that experimental methodologies that include enough control help to by-pass this problem and thereby make for more secure knowledge. Against this received view, we argue that, for at least some historically contingent
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Wonderful Mind: Convergentism and the Crusade Against Evolutionary Progress Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-06-14 Rachell Powell, Irina Mikhalevich
Stephen Jay Gould argued that the shape of animal life as we know it is a radically contingent accident of history determined more by fortune than comparative functional merit. Acknowledging the formative role of contingency in macroevolution is crucial, Gould believed, to vanquishing the lingering vestiges of progressivism that continue to buttress anthropocentric views of life. Gould’s contingency
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Figural Realism and the Politics of Literature: Hayden White and Jacques Rancière Read Erich Auerbach Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-06-06 Jakub Muchowski
Hayden White and Jacques Rancière both drew on the account of the history of European literature offered by Erich Auerbach to construct their own theoretical treatments of historical and literary writing: White conceptualized the figure-fulfillment model, modernist realism, and figural realism, while Rancière critically commented on the undemocratic character of the writings of the Annales school and
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Rethinking Historical Aspects Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2023-05-18 Mariana Imaz-Sheinbaum
Explaining the persistence of multiple interpretations of the same historical event has been an ongoing question in the philosophy of history. In this paper I illustrate two possible answers and argue that neither offers a satisfactory resolution. First of all, the realist view, which holds a metaphysical commitment to the past that precludes it from fully recognizing the legitimacy of variability
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Jerzy Topolski’s Restoration (ad Integrum) of Historics/Historyka Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2022-12-30 Zenonas Norkus
This book is a collection of papers published in English by the best internationally known Polish writer in metahistory during the last three decades of the past century. Expanded by translation of selected fragments from Polish, it provides international readers for the first time a synoptic picture of Jerzy Topolski’s contributions to theoretical self-reflection of historical studies. During his
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A Naïve Realist Rumination on the Roth-and-Dewulf versus Currie-and-Swaim Exchange Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2022-12-30 Branko Mitrović
The paper presents a realist perspective on the recent exchange in the Journal of the Philosophy of History between Adrian Currie and Daniel Swaim on the one side and Paul Roth and Fons Dewulf on the other. The first part presents a critique of Currie and Swaim’s view that the past is not determinate and can be changed. The second part states a series of arguments against Roth’s view that events exist
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Situating the Enlightenment in Herder’s Philosophy of History Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2022-12-30 David James
Although Herder is critical of the Enlightenment, I show that his philosophy of history commits him to the claim that the age and culture shaped by the Enlightenment in some way makes a distinctive contribution to the development of humanity. Yet this contribution cannot make this age and culture superior to earlier ones, for this would violate Herder’s commitment to the principle that each age and
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The Unconscious in History: Eduard von Hartmann among Schopenhauer, Schelling, and Hegel Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2022-12-30 Anthony K. Jensen
This article exams the philosophy of history of the now mostly-forgotten 19th Century philosopher, Eduard von Hartmann. Hartmann inverts Hegel’s rational teleology by his reliance on a notion of ‘unconscious ideas’. Purposes are a species of idea. All natural things, including unintelligent natural things, will purposes of which they are often not conscious. These unconscious ideas cannot be held by
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How Should Philosophers Approach the History of Philosophy? Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2022-05-20 Nathaniel Goldberg
Philosophers’ attitudes toward the history of philosophy are mixed. Regardless, likely all philosophers interact with the history of philosophy through research, teaching, or professional life. How should they approach it? I answer by analyzing the notion of ‘history of philosophy’. I then consider prominent recent answers given by others converging with mine. I conclude that (as long as they are clear
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Welcome Note from the Editor-in-Chief: The Task of Philosophy of History Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2022-04-29 Chiel van den Akker
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Empathy and History: Historical Understanding in Re-enactment, Hermeneutics and Education, written by Tyson Retz Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2022-03-18 Jörg van Norden
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The Modern Concept of History and its Value: An Introduction, written by Chiel van den Akker Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2022-02-14 Verónica Tozzi Thompson
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Peirce on the Uses of History, written by Tullio Viola Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2022-02-04 Serge Grigoriev
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Empathy and the Historical Understanding of the Human Past, written by Thomas A. Kohut Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2022-02-04 Jonas Ahlskog
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Perspective and the Past: Modeling Historical Representation from Camera Obscura to Virtual Reality Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-12-16 Rūta Kazlauskaitė
This article examines the concept of “perspective” as an embodied metaphor with ontological and epistemological implications for the modeling of historical understanding of contested pasts. The metaphors employed in modeling past reality shape how we make sense of the controversial past. In particular, I explore how perspectival metaphorical models conjure the notions of presence/proximity/engagement
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History and/as Science: Rereading Paul Lacombe Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Philippe Carrard
Forgotten during several years and rediscovered by historians of the Annales in the 1930s, Paul Lacombe’s De l’histoire considérée comme science (1894) is now quoted in such books as Antoine Prost’s Douze leçons sur l’histoire and the Sage Handbook of Historical Theory. Lacombe’s work is important from an historical standpoint. Against the focus on single events that prevailed in the late nineteenth
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Kittsteiner’s History Out of Joint Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Mario Wimmer
In this article, I portray both the “thinking historian” Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner and his philosophical analysis of the unavailability of the historical process. In his book Out of Control (2004), Kittsteiner builds on Immanuel Kant’s concept of the historical sign to demonstrate how history is out of joint due to the contingent character of the historical process. This understanding demands a new
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One-Dimensional Man, One-Dimensional History: Re-reading Herbert Marcuse Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Ethan Kleinberg
In this article I revisit Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 work One-Dimensional Man with the goal of reactivating Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensional society but in regard to the current practice and discipline of history. On my reading, it is in the field of history that the dangers of one-dimensionality are felt most acutely today. Especially in the ways that historians and philosophers of history continue
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Peter Munz and Historical Thought Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Frank Ankersmit
Few philosophers of history ever recognized the profundity of Peter Munz’s The Shapes of Time that came out in 1977. In this book Munz upheld the view that no part or aspect of the past itself provides us with the solid fundament of all historical knowledge. For him, the historian’s most fundamental logical entity is what he calls the Sinngebild. The Sinngebild consists of two events defined and held
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The Spinning Silkworm: Benedetto Croce’s History as the Story of Liberty Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Rik Peters
This article explores the abiding relevance of Croce’s last book in the philosophy of history, which, due its publication during the war has always been neglected. After discussing the context of Croce’s antagonism to the anti-historicist tendencies of his own times, the book is interpreted as theoretical underpinning of Croce’s ‘ethico-political’ histories by which he sought to close the gap between
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Tolstoy’s War and Peace: Philosophy of History Defamiliarized Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Hans Kellner
Tolstoy’s War and Peace asserts an opposition to the discourse of philosophy of history and of any theorizing of human life because of the complexity of events, the possibilities not realized, and the insignificance of our moment in time and space. Without that sort of consideration of the possibility that human events cannot be theorized, explained, correctly narrated, or anticipated, we may miss
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What’s Forgotten About The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a classic, and it is certainly not forgotten. However, an essential aspect about it has been neglected. That is, Kuhn’s Structure is a book in philosophy of history in the sense that Structure attempts gives an account of historical events, focuses on the whole of the history of science and stipulates a structure of the history of science to
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The Windowless Room of the Present: Rereading David Harlan Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Herman Paul
This essay unearths the guiding question of David Harlan’s 1997 book, The Degradation of American History. While most commentators have focused their attention on Harlan’s biting criticism of the historical profession, this essay argues that Harlan’s diatribe against historical scholarship pursued “for its own sake” stems from a deep concern about the moral education of citizens in an age that François
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Introduction: The Posterizing Impulse in Philosophy of History Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Herman Paul,Larissa Schulte Nordholt
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Historicism Now: Historiographic Ontology, Epistemology and Methodology Out of Bounds Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-09-20 Aviezer Tucker
This article examines historicism as the expansion of historiography beyond its bounds, analogous to Physicalism, Naturalism, Psychologism, and Scientism. Five senses of historicism are distinguished: Ontological Historicism claims ultimate reality is, and only is, historical. Idiographic historicism considers historiography an empirical science that results in observational descriptions of unique
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Past Facts and the Nature of History Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-09-20 Adrian Currie, Daniel Swaim
We defend a realist account of history: past facts are discoveries not creations. We show how ‘moderate’ realists, who admit the critical role of perspective, while insisting on history’s metaphysical independence from historians, can accommodate Paul Roth’s arguments in favor of irrealism. Moreover, our position is consistent with a dynamic past: as history unfurls past events gain new properties
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Editorial: How Many Worlds of History Are There? Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-07-09 Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
The focus on the narrative aspects of the writing of history since the 1970s has reinforced constructivist and pluralist assumptions about historiography. Narrativization and narrative features in texts have typically been understood as being dependent on the subject-side, and thus, on the narrator and her culture. Assuming then that narrativity is an essential feature of historical presentation, the
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Editorial: Living and Editing in the Online World Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-04-19 Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
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A Narrativist Revival? Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-03-29 Frank R. Ankersmit
Up till the 1980s narrativist philosophers of history were mainly interested in the cognitivist dimension of historical narrative. With Hayden White this interest was exchanged for an exclusive preoccupation with the literary aspects of the historian’s narrative representation of the past. However, it may seem that a revival of pre-Whitean narrativist philosophy of history is at hand. Two recent books
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What is a Classic in History? Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2021-03-09 Jaume Aurell
What is the classic in history? What is a classic in historical writing? Very few historians and critics have addressed these questions, and when they have done so, it has been only in a cursory manner. These are queries that require some explanation regarding historical texts because of their peculiar ambivalence between science and art, content and form, sources and imagination, scientific and narrative
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Clio’s Laws. On History and Language, written by Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-12-15 Jaume Aurell
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Conflicts of Planetary Proportion – A Conversation Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-11-19 Bruno Latour, Dipesh Chakrabarty
The introduction of the long-term history of the Earth into the preoccupations of historians has triggered a crisis because it has become impossible to keep the “planet” as one single entity outside of history properly understood. As soon as the planetary intruded into history, it became impossible to keep it as one naturalized background. By problematizing the planetary, Dipesh Chakrabarty has forced
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Historical Thinking and the Human: Introduction Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-11-19 Marek Tamm, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon
In recent years the age-old question “what is the human?” has acquired a new acuteness and novel dimensions. In introducing the special issue on “Historical Thinking and the Human”, this article argues that there are two main trends behind the contemporary “crisis of human”: ecological transformations (related to human-induced climate change and planetary environmental challenges), and technological
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Human Flourishing and History: A Religious Imaginary for the Anthropocene Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-11-19 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson
The Anthropocene denotes the impact of human activity on Earth systems, resulting in mass extinctions of plant and animal species, pollution of oceans, lakes and rivers, and altering of the atmosphere. The Anthropocene signifies the mass control of nature by humans, the erasure of boundaries between humanity and nature, and the threat to human existence by human-made technology. How can biological
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Museums in the Long Now: History in the Geological Age of Humans Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-11-19 Libby Robin
History in times of crisis is practical: future action depends on historical framing. Moving beyond “human scales” to include the evolutionary and the geological, and beyond humans to include other species, demands different approaches and new “archives” like ice-cores. This paper considers history in the Long Now, and particularly how museums and big public arts institutions develop new sorts of history
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Ours Is the Earth: Science and Human History in the Anthropocene Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-11-19 Sheila Jasanoff
History at one time drew unproblematically on records produced by human societies about themselves and their doings. Advances in biology and the earth sciences introduced new narrative resources that repositioned the human story in relation to the evolution of all else on the planet, thereby decentering earlier conceptions of time, life, and human agency. This essay reflects on what it means for our
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Unbinding from Humanity: Nandipha Mntambo’s Europa and the Limits of History and Identity Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-11-19 Ewa Domańska
This article shows that the question of “Historical Thinking and the Human” demands expanding the field of the philosophy of history. What I propose is to investigate the issue from two perspectives: firstly, by positioning it in the broader philosophical context, one that increasingly transcends the boundaries of the humanities to enter the realm of the life sciences; and secondly, by drawing on a
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What Should We Require from an Account of Explanation in Historiography? Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-09-28 Veli Virmajoki
In this paper, I explicate desiderata for accounts of explanation in historiography. I argue that a fully developed account of explanation in historiography must explicate many explanation-related notions in order to be satisfactory. In particular, it is not enough that an account defines the basic structure of explanation. In addition, the account of explanation must be able to explicate notions such
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Editorial: The Philosophy of Intellectual History and Conceptual Change Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-07-13 Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
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Radical, Sceptical and Liberal Enlightenment Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-07-13 James Alexander
We still ask the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Every generation seems to offer new and contradictory answers to the question. In the last thirty or so years, the most interesting characterisations of Enlightenment have been by historians. They have told us that there is one Enlightenment, that there are two Enlightenments, that there are many Enlightenments. This has thrown up a second question
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Confrontation and Its Problems: Can the History of Science Provide Evidence for the Philosophy of Science? Journal of the Philosophy of History Pub Date : 2020-06-26 Thodoris Dimitrakos
In this paper I am concerned with the relation between the history of science and the philosophy of science from the perspective of philosophy. In particular, I examine two philosophical objections against the idea that the history of science can provide evidences to the philosophy of science. The first objection is metaphysical and suggests that given Hume’s law, i.e. that norms cannot be derived