Introduction -- Plato -- Aristotle -- The rise of modernity -- Immanuel Kant -- Romanticism and historicism -- Phenomenology and hermeneutics -- Philosophes and philosophers -- Analytic philosophy -- Conclusion.

In this text I analyze Frank Ankersmit’s, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen’s, and Paul Roth’s responses to my claim that anti-realism in the philosophy of history entails that the past did not happen. I conclude that Ankersmit has failed to understand the argument I presented, Kuukkanen de facto agrees with my view, while Roth has addressed my earlier criticism of the view that the past can be changed and not the argument that is currently under discussion.

In this paper, we discuss Foucault’s formulation of the notions of biopolitics and biopower against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic and the public reaction to it. For this purpose, we first identify his body of work relevant to the issue of biopolitics, since this issue – unlike the subject areas represented in Foucault’s earlier work – has not been the subject of a separate study. We narrow the focus to the period between 1974 and 1976, when he wrote five (...) crucial texts for understanding biopolitics. The final one – “Right of Death and Power over Life”, the only one with biopolitics as the sole subject – provides what could be understood as Foucault’s definitive interpretation of the genesis and position of biopolitics in modern technologies of power. In the second part of the paper, we analyze the conceptual structure of biopower and the position of discipline and biopolitics within this structure. We then turn to Foucault’s final determination of biopolitics as thanatopolitics to raise the question of whether this whole perspective is dystopian. We find that it is not, because this perspective depends on Foucault’s understanding of power relations, according to which resistance is primary and power is derived. Finally, we argue that his conceptualization of biopolitics cannot be used to justify any of today’s antibiopolitical tendencies. (shrink)

The work of the Paduan Aristotelian philosopher Iacopo Zabarella (1533–1589) has attracted the attention of historians of philosophy mainly for his contributions to logic, scientific methodology and because of his possible influence on Galileo. At the same time, Zabarella's views on Aristotelian psychology have been little studied so far; even those historians of Renaissance philosophy who have discussed them, have based their analysis mainly on the psychological essays included in Zabarella's De rebus naturalibus , but have avoided Zabarella's commentary on (...) Aristotle's De anima . This has led to an inaccurate, but widespread, understanding of Zabarella's views. The intention of this article is to provide a systematic analysis of Zabarella's arguments about the (im)mortality of the soul in the context of Aristotelian psychology. Zabarella's view that the soul is mortal according to Aristotle is remarkable for his time, while his elaboration of this position is far more comprehensive than that of Pietro Pomponazzi, the other significant Renaissance thinker who shared the same view. (shrink)

In the philosophy and psychology of perception there exists a long-standing debate about the detachability of the visual from the conceptual contents of perception. The article analyses the implications of this dilemma for the attribution of aesthetic properties independent of the classification of aesthetic objects and the possibility of aesthetic formalism.

Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology can be seen as a specific reduction of meaning to its temporal constitution . Temporality as the universal horizon of Being makes any transcendence and meaning beyond time impossible. Levinas opposes such reduction of sense to finitude and historicity for ethical reasons. However, in his attempt to overcome Heidegger's primacy of time and transcend its totality, he must look for a completely different conception of significance which goes hand in hand with a new, "diachronic" understanding of time.

Art and ObjectsHARMANGRAHAM polity. 2020. pp. 204. £16.54.

The dominant view of twentieth century analytic philosophy has been that all thinking is always in a language; that languages are vehicles of thought. In recent decades, however, the opposite view, that languages merely serve to express language-­‐independent thought-­‐contents or propositions, has been more widely accepted. The debate has a direct equivalent in the philosophy of history: when historians report the beliefs of historical figures, do they report the sentences or propositions that these historical figures believed to be true or (...) false? In this paper I argue in favor of the latter, intentionalist, view. My arguments mostly center on the problems with translations that are likely to arise when a historian reports the beliefs of historical figures who expressed them in languages other than the one in which the historian is writing. In discussing these problems the paper presents an application of John Searle’s theory of intentionality on the philosophy of history. The debate between the view that all thinking is verbal and always in a language and the view that human beings think independently of any language has had an extensive history in the philosophy of language for the past hundred years. It also has numerous implications for the philosophy of history, where the problem can be stated in general terms as the question of whether a historian, when reporting the beliefs of historical figures, reports the thought-­‐contents or the sentences that these people believed to be true or false. Among English-­‐speaking historians of philosophy, the latter view was promoted by Arthur Danto, the former by Quentin Skinner and Mark Bevir. Both positions are reflected in specific problems of history-­‐writing, such as, for instance, the question whether and how a historian can report the beliefs of historical figures who articulated them in languages different from the language in which the historian is writing. Both positions also fundamentally rely on the assumption that it is possible and legitimate to provide translations of sentences from one language to another when reporting the beliefs of historical figures; but, as we shall see, they are not on equal footing when it comes to explaining what counts as a legitimate translation. This paper explores the implications that these two views on the role of language in human thinking have for the philosophy of history. It will show that the view that all human thinking is verbal is not compatible with some fundamental and standard practices of history-­‐writing. Thus, the paper can be seen as a contribution to the debate about intentionalism in history-­‐writing. It argues in favor of the intentionalist approach by introducing new arguments derived from the philosophy of language, while at the same time proposing a formulation of the intentionalist position that relies on John Searle’s philosophical elaboration on the concept of intentionality. (shrink)

This book examines the wide-ranging implications for historical research of the view that everything is physical and that no immaterial entities, forces, or phenomena exist. It presents the consequences of materialism for our understanding of the historical past, including the rejection of postmodernist perspectives on history.

Imagine that you have volunteered to participate in a research project in social psychology. You arrive at the venue on time. In the room you find the psychologist and five other people participating in the experiment, who arrived a short time before you. The psychologist explains that the par- ticipants will be asked to respond to a series of questions pertaining to the geometrical figures she will draw on the board. She asks the participants to respond in the order they (...) arrived in the room. Then she draws seven straight lines of different lengths on the board and asks the participants to come individually to the board and point to the shortest line. Much to your surprise, one after another, the participants go to the board and point to the second longest line, declaring it to be the shortest. When your turn comes, you point to the line that is obviously the shortest. You immediately notice that some people in the group look at you with surprise. The psychologist then draws five squares and asks which one is the smallest. (shrink)

In recent decades, a number of authors have relied on the multiple realizability argument to reject methodological individualism. In this article, I argue that this strategy results in serious difficulties and makes it impossible to identify social entities and phenomena.

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 only under description. The third part discusses the ontological (...) problems that Roth’s irrealism about the past fails to address. (shrink)

The debate between individualism and holism in the philosophy of history pertains to the nature of the entities relied on in historical explanations. The question is whether explanations of historical items require the assumption that the collective historical entities used in these explanations are conceived of as irreducible to the actions, thoughts, and beliefs of individual human beings. In this paper I analyze two methodological problems that holist explanations face in the writing of intellectual history. The first problem derives from (...) the fact that holist explanations in intellectual history have to rely on the claim that certain beliefs were inconceivable to some individuals because they were members of specific collectives, whereas it is unclear how historical research can justify such claims when made from the holist position. The second problem pertains to the difficulties the holist position faces when it has to account for the novel properties of artifacts studied by intellectual history. (shrink)

Although Levinas’ “il y a” does not directly correspond to Heidegger’s conception of being, his criticism of Heidegger’s temporal ontology is nevertheless justified. With the reduction of every meaning (and being) to its temporal constitution, Heidegger excludes any possibility of transcendence beyond time. The problem of overcoming the radical finitude and historicity of meaning, which is ethically motivated, brings Levinas to the age-old question of metaphysics. However, taking Heidegger’s thought seriously, Levinas is forced to look for an entirely new understanding (...) of the metaphysical quest. (shrink)

Die Arbeit, die das ethische Denken von Levinas im Lichte seiner Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger zu rekonstruieren und kritisch zu bewerten sucht, ist als Gegenüberstellung der beiden Denkansätze angelegt. Sie gliedert sich in drei Teile, die jeweils eine Grundfrage zum Thema haben (Sein, Zeit, das Gute) und zugleich die Entwicklung von Levinas' Denken nachzeichnen. Ausgehend von einem Heidegger entgegengesetzten Seinsverständnis gelangt Levinas zu seiner spezifischen Auffassung der Transzendenz, die schließlich zur Ethik jenseits des Seins führt. Levinas' Denken zeichnet sich somit durch (...) eine strukturelle Nähe zu Heidegger aus, wenngleich die Distanz zwischen beiden Ansätzen unüberbrückbar bleibt. (shrink)

In contrast to idealistic denial and Heidegger’s absolutization of death Levinas tries to interpret death on the background of the ethical relation towards fellow men. The boundary which death presents to life he interprets as the experience of passivity of subject in front of the absolute otherness of death. The subject also experiences such passivity in ethical relation towards other people whose otherness and difference nevertheless invert into ethical non-indifference and responsibility of the subject. In this ethical relating Levinas finds (...) the source of meaning, which is alienated from Being, and starting from which he tries to derive new meaning for his own death as well as for the death of my fellow man. (shrink)