The chapter explores how architectural historiographies could challenge the dichotomies Western/non-Western and Eurocentric/non-Eurocentric. It also aims to explain why the politics of resistance characterizing the endeavours of shaping historiographical methods that try to represent the other go hand in hand with the intention to challenge concepts and historiographies that are based on Zeitgeist. In other words, the rejection of colonialist models of writing architectural history is related to the endeavour of placing Eurocentric narratives and Zeitgeist theories under critical scrutiny. Models (...) of architectural historiography that intend to challenge Eurocentrism should place particular emphasis on revealing the different agents that contributed to the realization of architectural and urban projects under study. Archival research plays a major role in bringing to light the aspects concerning these different agents. The chapter places particular emphasis on Edmund Husserl’s understanding of Europe, Immanuel Wallerstein’s critique of Eurocentrism, and Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of overlapping temporal layers. (shrink)

Marianna Charitonidou's books discuss the problem of changes in the creation of architecture in the 20th century. The author showed representatives of four generations of architects of this period. The first group is represented by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The second generation was described as a group of opponents to the CIAM environment centered around the Team X grouping and the activities of Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo van Eyck. Generation three was discussed based (...) on the work of Aldo Rossi and Giancarlo Da Carlo. Generation four, active since the 1980s, was linked to the activities of Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi. (shrink)

Essays centred on the methods, pleasures, and pitfalls of architectural interpretation.

Exhibitions are embodied knowledge, and the processes of making exhibitions are also in themselves knowledge production practices. Science and technology exhibitions are therefore doubly of interest to historians of science: both as epistemic agents and as research methods. Yet both exhibitions and exhibition-making practices are ephemeral, as is the subsequent experience of the visitor. How can we research, interrogate, and understand both the productive creation of exhibitions and the phenomenologies and epistemologies of their reception and impact? “Exhibition histories” has become (...) a significant field of late, most closely associated with research on art exhibitions but also extending to world and trade fairs, and now increasingly crossing over into histories of science and technology. It is not an easy task: the range of exhibition archive materials includes – but is not limited to – 35mm slides, architectural blueprints, models, drawings, briefs, memos, budgets, press films, reviews, and personal accounts. This primary material is distributed unevenly across public and organized repositories, closed commercial archives, the personal papers of designers, often embargoed national bureaus of information, and more. Further, the experience of visiting an exhibition leaves far fewer traces to follow, requiring the researcher to do different kinds of things with the same widely varied material. This paper proposes methodologies for historians of science and technology wishing to understand the spatialization of science in exhibition contexts, the impacts of science exhibitions, and the more elusive phenomenological aspects of the exhibition visitor experience. Historians of science must accurately historicize context while researching both along and against the grain of archival material left by the making of exhibitions, as well as understanding the embodied trajectories of visitors. The practice of making exhibitions can also offer the researcher critically valuable insights into what to look for – and what may be absent – in archival records. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein was deeply embedded in Viennese architectural Modernism, culturally as well as personally. His assimilation in recent historiography to existing trends within the local architectural movement—namely Loos—are based on aesthetic and intellectual simplifications. The simplifications eclipse the distinctive contribution Wittgenstein’s Palais Stonborough makes to architecture, to Viennese Modernism, and perhaps to philosophy. The present paper seeks to rectify this constellation by re-situating Wittgenstein as an architect in his own right by re-sensitizing us to the idiosyncrasy of Wittgenstein’s (...) class='Hi'>architecture. (shrink)

Museums and exhibitions of science and technology have received considerable attention in recent historiography. However, little has been done to look beyond individual localities and national borders. Using Yehuda Elkana’s concept of “images of knowledge,” this article shows how a comparison of four interwar projects located across Europe - in Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Soviet Union, and Switzerland - helps to highlight commonalities in the understanding of science at the time. Although these exhibition projects were located in different political systems and (...) their proponents superficially presented irreconcilable ideas about science, their ideas about progress or the need to overcome national and disciplinary boundaries show a preponderance of similarities. However, the political-ideological divide is visible in the way they conceive of the relationship between science and society. Finally, by looking at how images of knowledge were co-produced at the interface of science, architecture, and politics, this article argues for a broadening of the source base to include non-scientific and non-human actors. (shrink)

Is Translational Science and Medicine new? Its dramatic expansion has spelled a dizzying array of new disciplines, departments, buildings, and terminology. Yet, without novel theories or concepts, Translational Science and Medicine may appear to be nothing more than an old concept with a new brand. Yet, is this view true? As is illustrated herein, histories of TSM which treat it as merely an old product under a new name misunderstand its essential architecture. As an expressly economic transformation, modern translational (...) approaches are differentiated precisely by a set of semi-permanent architectures which render it an altogether different kind of object when compared to previous attempts by institutions to turn science into medicine. Powered by new software, embedded within campuses that now house companies, and with legal agreements that outline agreed-upon scientific activity, TSM is now powered by a set of robust and durable structures that differentiate it from previous approaches. Based on ethnographic research about translational neuroscience in North America, this paper suggests that the sense of TSM as not being new is a consequence of analytic modes that tend to see scientific enterprises in epistemic terms alone. Analyzing TSM as primarily a scientific object misses the fact that it is a principally a financial one. (shrink)

To balance radical changes in the built environment that accompany urban renewal, many cities deploy historical design elements to provoke a sense of physical and temporal continuity. By examining the theory and practice of nostalgia in renewal projects, I argue that this strategic deployment of historical signifiers is more complex and normatively problematic than it first appears. Analysing the design and construction of Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards through Walter Benjamin’s theories of cultural production and historical succession, I show (...) the problematic political effect of such image-led regeneration projects. The stadium exemplifies a system of urban and historical design and construction that uses material artifice to make totalizing political claims, deploying specific historical signifiers as a means to silence others. Drawing from Benjamin’s materialist historiography, I conclude with a survey of the resources that remain for the practice of an architecture of memory in light of my critique. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Narrative, Interpretation, and Plagiarism in Mr. Robertson's 1778 History of Ancient GreeceGiovanna CeseraniDays after the successful debut of his History of Scotland in 1759, Dr. William Robertson was busy consulting his friends about what project to undertake next. David Hume solicitously responded by expressing doubts about two of the possible topics—the age of Pope Leo Xth and the Emperor Charles Vth. The first would be difficult because it would (...) require the understanding of that age's "great Works of Sculpture, Architecture, Painting," while attaining the "competent Knowledge... requird of the State & Constitution of the Empire," including numerous European countries, necessary to carry out the second project "would be the Work of half a Life." Rather Hume recommended "the ancient History, particularly that of Greece": "I think," he wrote, "Rollin's Success might encourage you, nor need you be in the least intimidated by his Merit. That Author has no other Merit, but a certain Facility & Sweetness of Narration; but has loaded his Work with fifty Puerilities."1 Yet, after considering further the excellent historical narratives that survived from antiquity, Hume feared that they could indeed turn into a disadvantage for the aspiring modern historian: "For what can you do in most places with these Authors, but transcribe & translate them? No Letters or State Papers from which you coud correct their Errors, or authenticate their Narration, or supply their Defects. Besides, Rollin is so well wrote with respect to Style, that with superficial people it passes for sufficient." On the whole he thought, however, that a "History of Greece till the death of Philip... would be successful, notwithstanding all these discouraging Circumstances. The Subject is noble, & Rollin is by no means equal to it."2 [End Page 413]Despite his friend's advice, Robertson went on to write what became his most successful work, the History of the Reign of Charles V (1769), but Hume's letters are nevertheless revealing.3 Hume's acute concern with publishing success speaks, on the one hand, to his lifelong economic struggle, but also of the flourishing market for history books in his times, on which, before the professionalization of the discipline, authors more and more came to rely in lieu of the literary patronage of earlier times.4 But the issue of the status of the historian was more than an institutional one for Hume's contemporaries. While the classical model of the historian as political man writing history in his retirement from public life was in sharp decline, a clear successor was still to follow. As Pocock puts it: would one who studied, edited, or rewrote past history be an historian at all?5 Hume's concern with historical authority and his consciousness of the difference between a narrative based on experience, in the Thucydidean mode as he would have understood it, and one based on authorities, is clear in his letter advising Gibbon to transform the Decline and Fall's endnotes into footnotes.6 Hume's letters to Robertson show again this concern developed in parallel to a philosophical preference for manners over details of action, human explanations rather than divine ones. From this perspective he found "puerile" the French Jansenist educator Charles Rollin, who in the preface to his Histoire Ancienne (1730–38) set out the goal to reveal the design of divine Providence within human history and whose work was dominated by a moralistic reading of the past.7Hume's reflections and concerns neatly fit the influential interpretation that, more than half a century ago, Arnaldo Momigliano formulated for the genealogy of modern Western historiography. As Momigliano saw it, modern history developed precisely out of the eighteenth-century convergence of traditional historical narrative—what used to be linear accounts of mostly political events—and antiquarian research—scholarship traditionally devoted to systematic treatment of a variety of subjects that relied on the skills of paleography, epigraphy and the interpretation of archaeological material.8 This process—culminating with Gibbon—presupposed the philosophical shift of the age: "what used to be secondary becomes primary. What used to be primary—wars and dynasties—becomes secondary."9 Recent research has since [End Page 414] expanded the Momigliano's formula—this... (shrink)

: Mu1ammad Taqiyy al-Dīn al-Maqrīzī is undoubtedly the historian with the most expansive repertoire of the entire fifteenth century Arabic historiography. His al-Mawā’iẓ wa-l-i’tibār bi-dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa-l-āthār, in particular, is a unique achievement, which manages to present a general historical discourse through the chronicling of buildings and topography. This unprecedented book, this paper argues, may have benefited from the author’s extended association with Ibn Khaldūn, the great interpreter of the notion of ’umrān. Ibn Khaldūn was al-Maqrīzī’s revered teacher for at (...) least thirty years. He seems to have influenced his pupil’s thinking about the city as the domain of civilization in two ways: analytical, that is to look for causes and effects behind events and appearances, and interpretive, that is to see in the urban and architectural history of the city the illustration of the underlying civilizational cycle. In the Khiṭaṭ, al-Maqrīzī seems to have applied his master’s theory to a concrete example – the city of Cairo – and drew from it pronounced moral lessons on the decline he was observing in the Mamlūk sultanate. This is probably why the Khiṭaṭ’s influence has endured for more than five centuries: a tribute to its author’s ardent passion and filial affinity with his city and country, as well as his interpretive framework, which he probably absorbed from Ibn Khaldūn. (shrink)

The three Nubian kingdoms that eventually emerged after the disintegration of Meroe, Noubadia, Makuria and Alodia (Alwa), first enter Byzantine historiography with the dramatic story of their conversion into Christianity told by John of Ephesus in the third part of his Church History, composed about AD 578–588 in Syriac. To be more exact, what John tells us is that, through the initiative of Empress Theodora, the Noubades and Alodians were converted into the Monophysite or (more specifically) Miaphysite creed, while the (...) Makurians remained hostile to the missionaries (later, apparently, to emerge as Dyophysites). RICHTER (R.) takes John's account as his point of departure, devoting half the book to a translation of the relevant chapters (IV.6–10 and 49–53) and a thorough discussion of their historical contents. It is the particular merit of his book, however, that he also comes to grips with the archaeological, especially architectural and epigraphic evidence on the Christianization process that surveys and excavations brought forth in the last century. The other half of the book brings together and systematizes such material from a great variety of secondary sources. The intense archaeological activities prompted by the flooding of vital parts of Lower Nubia have tended to give material remains precedence over literary witnesses in the current rewriting of Nubian history; R. endeavours to redress the balance, with regard to the sixth and seventh centuries, by juxtaposing the textual and archaeological sources. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 64.2 (2003) 149-157 [Access article in PDF] Introduction:The Uses of Historical Evidence in Early Modern Europe Jacob Soll A leading figure at Cambridge University after World War II, Herbert Butterfield seems an unlikely forerunner of the kind of cultural history that is practiced today. Yet Butterfield was a pioneer. He saw the origins of modern historical consciousness in the scholarly practices of the (...) Renaissance. These practices, he maintained, were a significant part of the slow shift to rationalist thinking that occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. In his remarkable work, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (1940), Butterfield sought to show that Machiavelli's inductive use of historical examples was part of a larger empirical movement that slowly replaced religious and classical authority with the new authority of observation and deduction. Like Ernst Cassirer, he saw Machiavelli as an historical counterpart to Bacon, Descartes, Vesalius, and even Copernicus: The significance of the "experimental method" itself was not fully realized or clearly established until after the emergence in the seventeenth century of new scientific apparatus—the telescope, the microscope, and more accurate measuring-instruments for example; and even Bacon and Descartes, whose names have closely been associated with the scientific revolution, can hardly be said to have realized the implications of the new method. There is a transition then, but it is slower than many people have imagined and someone has rightly said that the middle ages do not come to an end until the seventeenth century. Machiavelli, as we shall see, has a place in the transition, for in the political and human sciences as well as the natural sciences a change did occur. Machiavelli is interesting not because he is a modern man [End Page 149] born out of due time, but because he illustrates one of the mediations by which the transition was accomplished. 1Butterfield turned to Emile Durkheim's sociological study of Renaissance education to understand the relationship between traditions of learning and the cosmological shift of the seventeenth century. 2 Durkheim had used Rabelais's portrait of Pantagruel's education to illustrate how the study of ancient language and the rise of historical erudition were not only instruments of aesthetic culture, but also constituted "a mine of positivist knowledge." Citing Erasmus, Durkheim himself maintained that linguistic philology was a preparation for higher disciplines—graviores disciplinæ. 3 The English historian agreed with the French sociologist: traditions of humanist learning were essential elements of a larger ethos of natural and practical studies that differentiated post-humanist Europe from the Middle Ages.Although his later work concentrated on questions of historiography, Butterfield never studied the full effect of historical practices on the learned culture of early modern Europe. 4 These papers seek to pick up where Butterfield left off, to understand the effect that humanist historical consciousness had on educated Europe at large. They will show that questions of historical accuracy and verification were the common link among diverse disciplines between 1400 and 1800. Rather than looking for theories of history and historical method solely in the works of historians, they will examine how non-historians discussed history in terms of their own fields of study. They will show how thinkers in the domains of architecture, art, astrology, education, law, medicine, natural philosophy, politics, and theology saw the importance of historical understanding and how they used it to shape their own particular forms of knowledge. By sketching an overview of the different applications of historical knowledge, we will begin to have a clearer view of the process by which humanism historicized the world of knowledge.Learned culture at the beginning of the seventeenth century is commonly associated with the rise of scientific authority. Church dogma and the Aristotelian logical tradition no longer sufficed to explain natural phenomena and to [End Page 150] quell the curiosity of the learned. 5 As Galileo so recklessly exclaimed, look into the telescope and witness with your own eyes that Aristotle was wrong about the moon. 6 For Galileo's colleague, the great Paduan Aristotelian... (shrink)

How ought the historian to reconcile themselves philosophically with the fact of evental contingency and of its relationship to structural determination? Does the existence of contingent causation undermine the very concept of historical necessity, or do the two instead in dialectical entanglement? In this essay, I engage with the problem of historical contingency from a transcendental-materialist perspective informed by the work of Slavoj Žižek, tendering a philosophically serious response to the famous Pascalian conundrum of Cleopatra’s nose and its challenge to (...) structuralist accounts of historical causation. The position associated with Laplace – that is to say, that the course of history would be entirely predictable were one provided with a complete account of initial conditions – is firmly rejected. Instead, I revive Althusser’s attempt to craft a theory of ‘aleatory materialism’, in which the determinative power of structural forces nevertheless leave space for the radical and unpredictable transformation of a situation by the chance crystallisation of events and encounters. In this effort, I recruit conceptual architecture not only from the fields of historiography and philosophy, but also quantum physics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: In Search of History: Historiography in the Ancient World and the Origins of Biblical History. By John Van Seters. The Hidden God: The Hiding of the Face of God in the Old Testament. By Samuel E. Balentine. Theodicy in the Old Testament. Edited by James L. Crenshaw. Ce Dieu censé aimer la Souffrance. By François Varone. Evil and Evolution, A Theodicy. By Richard W. Kropf. ‘Poet and Peasant’ and ‘Through Peasant Eyes’: A Literary‐Cultural Approach to (...) the Parable in Luke. By Kenneth Bailey. The Biblical Foundations for Mission. By Donald Senior and Carroll Stuhlmueller. New Testament Foundations of Ministry. By Colin Kruse. Church, Ministry and Unity. By James E. Griffiss. Theology of Ministry. By Thomas Franklin O'Meara. Yesterday and Today: A Study of Continuities in Christology. By Colin E. Gunton. I believe in the Holy Spirit. By Yves Congar. Between Jesus and Paul. By Martin Hengel. From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and its Background. By Frances Young. Alan of Lille: The Frontiers of Theology in the Later Twelfth Century. By G.R. Evans. Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. By Clarissa W. Atkinson. Church, Politics and Society: Scotland 1408–1929. Edited by N. Macdougall. Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution. Collected Essays, Volume II. By Frances A. Yates. Seven‐Headed Luther: Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentury, 1483–1983. Edited by Peter Newman Brooks. Ökumenische Erschliessung Martin Luthers. Edited by Peter Manns and Harding Meyer. Luther's Ecumenical Significance, An Interconfessional Consultation. Edited by Peter Manns and Harding Meyer, in collaboration with Carter Lindberg and Harry McSorley. States of Mind: A Study of Anglo‐Irish Conflict 1780 to 1980. By Oliver MacDonagh. The Parish Clergy in Nineteenth‐Century Russia: Crisis, Reform, Counter Reform. By Gregory L. Freeze. Pusey Rediscovered. Edited by Perry Butler. Between Two Worlds: George Tyrrell's Relationship to the Thought of Matthew Arnold. By Nicholas Sagovsky. The Concept of Glaubenslehre. By Walter E. Wyman, Jr. The Existence and Nature of God. Edited by Alfred J. Freddoso. Faith and Reason. By Anthony Kenny. Logic and The Nature of God. By Stephen T. Davis. Personal Responsibility and Christian Morality. By Josef Fuchs. Morality and Conflict. By Stuart Hampshire. Realism and Imagination in Ethics. By Sabina Lovibond. Intentionality. By John R. Searle. Philosophical Papers, I: Practical Reason. By G.H. von Wright. Philosophical Papers, II: Philosophical Logic. By G.H. von Wright. A Model of Making: Literary Criticism and its Theology. By Ruth Etchells. The Return of the Goddess: Femininity, Aggression and the Modern Grail Quest. By Edward Whitmont. The Power of the Poor in History. By Gustavo Gutierrez, translated by Robert R. Barr. The God of the Xhosa. By Janet Hodgson. Our Hymn Tunes: Their Choice and Performance. By Donald Webster. The Almighty Wall: The Architecture of Henry Vaughan. By William Morgan. An Introduction to Plato's Laws. By R.E. Stalley. Plato's Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved. By Kenneth M. Sayre. Plato's ‘Parmenides’: Translation and Analysis. By R.E. Allen. Politics in the Ancient World. By M.I. Finley. (shrink)

Postmodernism once more—that breach has begun to yawn! I return to it by way of pluralism, which itself has become the irritable condition of postmodern discourse, consuming many pages of both critical and uncritical inquiry. Why? Why pluralism now? This question recalls another that Kant raised two centuries ago—“Was heist Aufklärung?”—meaning, “Who are we now?” The answer was a signal meditation on historical presence, as Michel Foucault saw.1 But to meditate on that topic today—and this is my central claim—is really (...) to inquire ‘Was heist Postmodernismus?”Pluralism in our time finds itself in the social, aesthetic, and intellectual assumptions of postmodernism—finds its ordeal, its rightness, there. I submit, further, that the critical intentions of diverse American pluralists—M. H. Abrams, Wayne Booth, Kenneth Burke, Matei Calinescu, R. S. Crane, Nelson Goodman, Richard McKeon, Stephen Pepper, not to mention countless other artists and thinkers of our moment—engage that overweening query, “What is postmodernism?,” engage and even answer it tacitly. In short, like a latter-day M. Jourdain, they have been speaking postmodernism all their lives without knowing it.But what is postmodernism? I can propose no rigorous definition of it, any more than I could define modernism itself. For the term has become a current signal of tendencies in theater, dance, music, art, and architecture; in literature and criticism; in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and historiography; in cybernetic technologies and even in the sciences. Indeed, postmodernism has now received the bureaucratic accolade of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in the form of a Summer Seminar for College Teachers; beyond that, it has penetrated the abstractions of “late” Marxist critics who, only a decade ago, dismissed postmodernism as another instance of the dreck, fads, and folderol of a consumer society. Clearly, then, the time has come to theorize the term, if not define it, before it fades from awkward neologism to derelict cliché without ever attaining to the dignity of a cultural concept. 1. “Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time, of what we are, in this very moment,” writes Michel Foucault in “The Subject and Power,” reprinted as “Afterword” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow : 777-96. Ihab Hassan is Vilas Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee. He is the author of, among other books, Radical Innocence , The Dismemberment of Orpheus , Paracriticisms , and The Right Promethean Fire . His latest work, Out of Egypt, is forthcoming in 1986. (shrink)

Historians of the sciences have paid great attention to the ways that faith in what has been called the quantitative spirit emerged as a dominant feature of the politics of science, a theme of obvious salience in current epidemiological and climate crises. There are instructive connexions between measurement practices and orientation towards other cultures—as though scientific modernity somehow appeared through the primacy of robust quantification over subaltern, past, and exotic worlds, where merely provisional judgment allegedly still operated. This highly simplistic (...) Orientalist distinction accompanied assumptions that the remote was best understood as the ancient, a viewpoint common at the same late Enlightenment moment as the apparent institutionalisation of the regime of the exact sciences within European polities. Under this regime, precision surveys—the way the state saw—have often been understood as integral for European societies and even more so in colonised territories. This version of what might be called metrological Orientalism can be disoriented through excellent recent scholarship that explores complex entanglements of measurement practices circulating across very different scientific cultures, which shows how precision devices that claimed merely to represent phenomena often helped produce them. Studies of select cases of relations between European practitioners and indigenous experts, in fields such as Egyptian hydraulics or South Pacific surveys, can reveal even more: the role that judgment and exactitude played in forging very different, politically significant versions of the past history of the sciences. These disorientations can aid novel forms of historical understanding of the politics of science. (shrink)

ArgumentDuring the interwar period research on turbulence met with interest from different areas: in aeronautical engineering turbulence became a subject of experimental study in wind tunnels; in naval architecture and hydraulic engineering turbulence research was on the agenda because of its role for skin friction; applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists struggled with the problem to determine the onset of turbulence from the fundamental hydrodynamic equations; experimental physicists developed techniques to measure the velocity fluctuations of turbulent flows. In this paper (...) I describe the rise of turbulence in the 1920s and 1930s as a research field under the label of applied mechanics. Although the focus is on Germany, the international development of this research field is illuminated by the role which Ludwig Prandtl played as its acknowledged “chief” (G. I. Taylor). I argue that the multifaceted character of this research field calls for an epistemology and historiography which intrinsically takes the interaction of science and engineering into account. (shrink)

Les rencontres de Royaumont de 1998 ont donné naissance à un superbe volume, richement illustré, faisant le point sur l’histoire des femmes au sein de l’ordre cistercien, du Moyen Âge jusqu’à nos jours. Cet ouvrage vient à point nommé pour enrichir l’historiographie de cet ordre, largement dominée jusqu’ici par le masculin. Les communications, nombreuses et variées, se sont réparties en deux journées selon deux thèmes centraux. Le premier s’intéresse à l’architecture et à l’organisation de l’...

Addressing the recent call to rethink history as a form of presence, the essay works toward a recovery of a space in which such presence of history is encoded. I argue that history as a form of active perception is akin to virtual witnessing of the past in the moment of our encounter with historical artifacts, be they texts, photographs, or buildings.To this end, I engage with the conceptual and material aspects of historical perception, deriving a model of history as (...) “inhabited ruins,” the way it emerges together with historical consciousness and finds an especially dynamic expression in Georg Simmel's philosophy of culture. Throughout, I work with the notion of distance and trans-dimensional presence as the forces that shape and reshape historical awareness.Ruins, intimately connected to the modern historical imagination, are approached not as sites of commemoration or nostalgia, but as spaces of active exchange between presence and disappearance. As such, they are taken to be the models for the transitive character of history itself, blurring the division between perception and thought. In other words, ruins are taken as structures that evoke and summon the past to an encounter with contemporary reality—a type of co-appearance that opens the possibility of virtually witnessing the past. I conclude that the logic of “inhabited ruins” constitutes the event-horizon of modern identity, always placing history right at the threshold of fragmentation. (shrink)

Where is imagination in imaginative resistance? We seek to answer this question by connecting two ongoing lines of inquiry in different subfields of philosophy. In philosophy of mind, philosophers have been trying to understand imaginative attitudes’ place in cognitive architecture. In aesthetics, philosophers have been trying to understand the phenomenon of imaginative resistance. By connecting these two lines of inquiry, we hope to find mutual illumination of an attitude (or cluster of attitudes) and a phenomenon that have vexed philosophers. (...) Our strategy is to reorient the imaginative resistance literature from the perspective of cognitive architecture. Whereas existing taxonomies of positions in the imaginative resistance literature have focused on disagreements over the source and scope of the phenomenon, our taxonomy focuses on the psychological components necessary for explaining imaginative resistance. (shrink)

Volume 23, Issue 2, April 2024, Page 187-223.

Emotion is conceptualised as an emergent, dynamic process based on an individual's subjective appraisal of significant events. It is argued that theoretical models of emotion need to propose an architecture that reflects the essential nature and functions of emotion as a psychobiological and cultural adaptation mechanism. One proposal for such a model and its underlying dynamic architecture, the component process model, is briefly sketched and compared with some of its major competitors. Recent empirical evidence in support of the (...) model is reviewed. Special emphasis is given to the dynamic aspect of emotion processes, in particular the sequence of appraisal checks and the synchronisation of response systems, as well as the capacity of the model to predict individual differences in emotional responding. (shrink)

Central issues in philosophy of architecture include foundational matters regarding the nature of: (1) architecture as an artform, design medium, or other product or practice; (2) architectural objects—what sorts of things they are; how they differ from other sorts of objects; and how we define the range of such objects; (3) special architectural properties, like the standard trio of structural integrity (firmitas), beauty, and utility—or space, light, and form; and ways they might be special to architecture; (4) (...) architectural types—how to consider abstract groups of architectural objects and their instances; (5) meaning and other language-like phenomena in architecture and its objects; (6) formation of and warrant for our basic grasp, and considered judgment, of architectural objects; and (7) social and moral features of architectural objects and architectural practice. Yet other questions engage applied philosophical concerns regarding architecture, such as the character of architectural notation; intellectual property rights; and client-architect obligations. A far-reaching philosophy of architecture extends beyond even a broadly aesthetics-based assessment, to include considerations of ethics, social and political philosophy, and philosophical reflections on psychology and the behavioral sciences. The aesthetics of architecture, by itself, spans traditional issues mooted in philosophy of art, as well as aesthetics of the everyday, and environmental aesthetics. Such traditional issues include the nature of the work; the possibility of classes, kinds, or types in the domain; the character and roles of representation, intentionality, and expression; and the warranted foundations for criticism. The ethics of architecture also addresses traditional issues, including delineation of rights, responsibilities, the good, virtues, and justice in architectural milieus. Still other aspects of philosophy of architecture concern social and technological characteristics. (shrink)

In this article, I propose to see the emotion of anger in the ‘Antapodosis’ by Liudprand of Cremona as an important means of assessing characters. By depicting the anger of the Ottonian kings as just and predictable, Liudprand shows how the ideal ruler should behave. He uses various examples from the Old Testament and especially the Deuterocanonical books of the Maccabees to present the anger of the Ottonian kings in the same fashion. In his vision, the negative counterpart to the (...) Ottonians is played by the Italic kings, who show their unworthiness precisely through the inept and tyrannical use of anger. In addition to this, Liudprand writes about aristocratic anger-management as well as the anger of women. Although a man of the church, Liudprand shows himself to understand and to use the code of honour which applied to noblemen in conflicts. Women do not, on the contrary, show unmediated anger. Their emotion is mixed with grief and tears. (shrink)

The representational nature of human cognition and thought in general has been a source of controversies. This is particularly so in the context of studies of unconscious cognition, in which representations tend to be ontologically and structurally segregated with regard to their conscious status. However, it appears evolutionarily and developmentally unwarranted to posit such segregations, as,otherwise, artifact structures and ontologies must be concocted to explain them from the viewpoint of the human cognitive architecture. Here, from a by-and-large Classical cognitivist (...) viewpoint, I show why this segregation is wrong, and elaborate on the need to postulate an ontological and structural continuity between unconscious and conscious representations. Specifically, I hypothesize that this continuity is to be found in the symbolic-based interplay between the syntax and the semantics of thought, and I propose a model of human information processing characterized by the integration of syntactic and semantic representations. (shrink)

In this paper, I reinterpret Kant’s Transcendental Analytic as a description of a cognitive architecture. I describe a computer implementation of this architecture, and show how it has been applied to two unsupervised learning tasks. The resulting program is very data efficient, able to learn from a tiny handful of examples. I show how the program achieves data-efficiency: the constraints described in the Analytic of Principles are reinterpreted as strong prior knowledge, constraining the set of possible solutions.

The literature on theoretical reason has been dominated by epistemological concerns, treatments of practical reason by ethical concerns. This book overcomes the limitations of dealing with each separately. It sets out a comprehensive theory of rationality applicable to both practical and theoretical reason. In both domains, Audi explains how experience grounds rationality, delineates the structure of central elements, and attacks the egocentric conception of rationality. He establishes the rationality of altruism and thereby supports major moral principles. The concluding part describes (...) the pluralism and relativity his conception of rationality accommodates and, taking the unified account of theoretical and practical rationality in that light, constructs a theory of global rationality--the overall rationality of persons. Rich in narrative examples, intriguing analogies, and intuitively appealing arguments, this beautifully crafted book will spur advances in ethics and epistemology as well in philosophy of mind and action and the theory of rationality itself. (shrink)

There are many modal epistemologies available to us. Which should we endorse? According to Bob Hale, we can start to answer this question by examining the architecture of modal knowledge. That is, we can try to decide between the following claims: knowing that p is possible is essentially a matter of having a well-founded belief that there are no conflicting necessities—a necessity-based approach—and knowing that p is necessary is essentially a matter of having a well-founded belief that there are (...) no conflicting possibilities—a possibility-based approach. Hale argues for the first of these claims, but I contend that his arguments fail. However, it doesn't follow that we should endorse a possibility-based approach. I repurpose Hale's arguments to show those who would endorse possibility-based approaches need to say more about our modal knowledge concerning logic and mathematics; if they can't, then they ought to endorse a hybrid modal epistemology that doesn't give priority to one modality across the board. Additionally, those who endorse possibility-based views may be committed to Peter van Inwagen's modal skepticism. (shrink)

Bien que le colonel Rol-Tanguy ait déclaré dès la Libération que « sans elles, la moitié de notre travail eût été impossible », qu'elles aient obtenu en 1944 le droit de vote, reconnu depuis longtemps aux femmes d'autres pays démocratiques, les résistantes restent les grandes oubliées de l'historiographie des années 1940-1944. Pourtant, par leur origine et leur statut dans la société française de l'époque, leur engagement et les missions qui leur étaient confiées ne comportaient pas moins de risques que ceux (...) de leurs compagnons de lutte. Cette occultation persistante tient essentiellement à deux facteurs : 1) la dévalorisation de leur rôle jugé secondaire, complémentaire par rapport au service armé des hommes. 2) la nationalisation à posteriori de la Résistance, conduisant à passer sous silence l'importante contribution à la libération de la France des étrangers, des étrangères ou des personnes d'origine étrangère. (shrink)