Major depressive disorder is one of the most common serious illnesses worldwide; the disease is also among those with the lowest rates of treatment. Barriers to access to care, both practical and psychological, contribute significantly to these low treatment rates. Among such barriers are regulations in many nations that require a physician’s prescription for most pharmacological treatments including selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). These rules are designed to protect patients. However, such regulations involve a tradeoff between the welfare of (...) “visible” victims, who might suffer negative consequences from a lack of regulation, and the well-being of invisible “victims,” who likely experience negative consequences that result from increased barriers to care. This article explores these tradeoffs and argues in favor of shifting SSRIs from prescription-only to over-the-counter status. (shrink)

Virtues commonly associated with physicians and other healthcare professionals include empathy, respect, kindness, compassion, trustworthiness, and many more. Building upon the work of Bortolloti, Murphy-Hollies, and others, I suggest that curiosity as a virtue has an integral role to play in healthcare, namely, in helping to make those who are invisible, visible. Practicing the virtue of curiosity enables one to engage with and explore the experiences of patients and contributes toward building a physician–patient relationship of trust. As the (...) perspectives and experiences of patients can be too often dismissed or lost within medical settings, curiosity can allow physicians to deeply know their patients, and thus provide better care. However, caution must be exercised so as to not to venture into inappropriate curiosity, where questions are asked for improper reasons or to help satisfy the personal interest of physicians. Finally, I sketch out two cases—on chronic pain and on vaccine hesitancy—to illustrate where curiosity can play a valuable role. (shrink)

The magnificence of Augustan Rome is the indispensable setting for Ovid the urbane love poet, rusticitas is the one unforgivable sin. Yet in Ovid's perpetuum carmen cities are for the most part invisible, at best incidental backdrops; the countryside, present in many vividly drawn landscapes, constantly thrusts itself on our attention, a place where mysterious powers menace the individual's identity. This neglect of the city makes a striking, and deliberate, contrast with the Aeneid, a ktistic epic whose meaning is (...) governed by constant reference forward to the ‘altae moenia Romae’. Ovid, whose main epic time-scale does include the foundation of Rome, devotes five words to the making of those walls. The one major exception to this indifference to the central theme of Virgilian epic is the Theban episode in Metamorphoses 3.1–4.603. The story of Cadmus and his family forms a self-contained unit within the flux of Ovid's epic of transformation. It tells of a ktisis that goes wrong: Cadmus obeys Apollo's injunction to found a city , but in the end the exile who had founded a new home is driven into a second exile: ‘exit | conditor urbe sua’. (shrink)

The title of this special topic in RMM is borrowed from a 1978 paper of Hillel Steiner in which he argues against Robert Nozick's invisible hand conception of the emergence of the state. Steiner believes that central institutions of social order such as money and government need some form of conscious endorsement by individuals to emerge and to persist over time. -/- Tony de Jasay's critique (in Philosophy 85, 2010) of Bob Sugden's plea for a Humean version of contractarianism (...) (see RMM, Vol 0) motivated us, to take this old – but still central – theme of the debate on the origin of social order as one starting point in a new attempt to evaluate the idea of a social contract). -/- Within the 35 years since the publication of Hillel Steiner's paper different advances have been made in economics and philosophy that may well shed some new light on some of the fundamental issues in the debate about a contractarian conception of social order. These make us confident that a new attempt to explore the contractarian idea is well worthwhile. -/- Those who first motivated this project, Hillel Steiner, Anthony de Jasay, and Robert Sugden, as well as a number of other renowned scholars confirmed to contribute. The special topic will actually start with a previously unpublished paper by Hillel Steiner, originally written in 1986, in which he extends and elaborates on his argument about money from the 1978 paper, and with an original article by Anthony de Jasay, in which he further clarifies his worries. A response by Robert Sugden will follow. Further contributions will discuss the matter by reference to the roots of the debate in seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy or to recent advancements in economics, the behavioral sciences or in social philosophy. Some of the contributions confirmed are already in a very elaborated stage and ready to be published soon. They are announced here right from the start and – for the time being – marked as 'to appear'. -/- As always, the special topic is an open ended project and further contributions will be considered; please send your submission to rmm@frankfurt-school.de (see 'How to Submit' for details). Also, readers are invited to submit shorter comments for the discussion section, which may be published after an abridged refereeing process. (shrink)

Alexis Karpouzos' thought is a poetic metaphysics. His philosophical and spiritual thoughts transcend all limits of language, culture, and nationality. In his writings, the poet and mystic takes us on a spiritual quest and gives us a glimpse of the infinite in the midst of the finite, unity at the heart of all diversity, and the Divine in all beings and things of the universe. Alexis karpouzos is one of the most influential mystic poets and teachers of our time. Deeply (...) spiritual and profoundly sensitive, his verse speaks to people from all backgrounds who seek a deeper understanding of self, life creation, Universe, and love. Overwhelmingly mystical and lovely in its simplicity, this unique collection offers insight into Alexis karpouzos' heavenly desires, his ongoing quest for the joy eternal, and illuminates the remarkable diversity that made him the bridge between the spirituality of the East and West in our time. Mysticism is a word derived from Mystes. Mystes comes from Greek language word Muein. It means to keep quiet. Mysticism is the faith that knowledge of Cosmos and of real truth is independent of the mind and sanity. Study mysticism if you want to. It will give your heart joy, your mind inspiration and your life a true, fulfilling and soulful assurance. But do not try to define it. Do not try to interpret it. If you try to define and interpret the mysticism, you you will most deplorably fail. are bound to fail. -/- He says: We get experiences: from science, scientific discoveries; from history, historical revelations; from philosophy, philosophical data; from religion, religious doctrines. In these experiences, we see the presence of subject and object, essence and existence, vision and reality. But a mystic experience, which is immediate oneness, transcends all such distinctions. This experience is the constant oneness with the Beyond, the ever transcending Beyond that always remains ineffable. When it is oversimplified and underestimated, it comes down from its original sphere and stands beside religion. But even here if a person is sincere, he will realize that his highest religious experience is nothing more than an uncertain, obscure and faint perception of Truth; whereas, no matter what kind of mystical experience he has, he will feel the intensity, immensity and certainty of Truth. Yet are our souls the Immortal’s selves within, Comrades and powers and children of the Unseen. (shrink)

“Asian women” is an ambiguous category; it seems to indicate a racial as well as a cultural designation. The number of articles or books on being Asian or Asian-American is on the rise in other disciplines, but in comparison to the material on black or Hispanic identities, Asians are largely missing from the field of philosophy of race. Things Asian in philosophy are generally reserved for those who study Asian philosophy or comparative philosophy, but that focus usually excludes reflections (...) on Asian identities as such. This lack in the literature prompted me to start my own reflection with such questions as: Why do Asians not take an active interest in discourse on race? What does the category “Asian” designate? What contributes to their invisibility in general? Is this a stereotype? Are they simply “white-identified?” Are Asians responsible for their own invisibility, or is there some other factor? What is the relation between Asian philosophy and being Asian, if any? Is there any interesting connection between being Asian and feminism? As a Japanese woman philosopher who is also interested in feminism, these questions seemed natural. This paper is an attempt to clarify some of these issues in the light of my experience working in the profession of academic philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Adam Smith and the History of the Invisible HandPeter HarrisonFew phrases in the history of ideas have attracted as much attention as Smith’s “invisible hand,” and there is a large body of secondary literature devoted to it. In spite of this there is no consensus on what Smith might have intended when he used this expression, or on what role it played in Smith’s thought. Estimates of (...) its significance range from the laudatory—“one of the great ideas of history,” to the dismissive—“an ironic joke.”1 Commentators are also divided on whether Smith’s “invisible hand” has teleological or providential connotations, or whether it is simply a rhetorical device. John Kenneth Galbraith declared that we do a grave disservice to Smith if we insist on understanding his invisible hand as a kind of “spiritual force.”2 Spenser J. Pack maintained that the invisible hand was “a rhetorical device which Smith made up, and knew he made up” and certainly “not [End Page 29] a theological underpinning for Smith’s social and/or economic theory.”3 Others have adopted the opposite view. Jacob Viner contended that Smith’s economic theory becomes unintelligible if “the invisible hand” is evacuated of its theological significance.4 For David A. Martin, Smith’s use of the phrase pointed to the foundational role played by divine wisdom in Smith’s thought, while for Andy Denis, “the invisible hand concept in Smith was entirely and unambiguously theological.”5Surprisingly, given this situation, a systematic study of the uses of the expression before Smith has yet to be made.6 Indeed, it is not unusual to find claims that Smith invented the expression himself, or that it was primarily owing to his influence that the phrase first became widespread.7 Those who have made perfunctory efforts at a history of the phrase generally point to a few scattered literary references with a view either to judging them irrelevant to Smith’s oeuvre, or to suggesting that Smith’s (admittedly meagre) uses of the phrase are empty metaphors. This paper seeks to remedy this deficiency, offering a history of “the invisible hand” with a particular focus on the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. What clearly emerges from this survey is that the concept was relatively common by the time Smith came to use it. Moreover, while “invisible hand” was used in a variety of contexts, by far the most common involved reference to God’s [End Page 30] oversight of human history and to his control of the operations of nature. Almost certainly, then, when readers encountered the phrase in Smith, they would have understood it as referring to God’s unseen agency in political economy. Whether Smith was himself committed to such a view is more difficult to determine, but the history of the expression and the contexts in which it appears in Smith’s writings offer some support for providentialist readings.Hidden and Invisible HandsThe expression “invisible hand” was not commonly used before the seventeenth century. It does not occur in classical literature (although some have suggested that the phrase may be found in Ovid).8 Neither does it appear in the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament.9 The earliest reference that I have found occurs in a Greek liturgy which invokes God’s “invisible right hand which is full of blessing.”10 The liturgy was used by the Alexandrian Church and its origins date back (probably) to the second century. However, [End Page 31] the expression is relatively rare in subsequent patristic and medieval writings. In one of his Old Testament commentaries, Alexandrian Church father Origen (185–254 ce) attributed the Israelites’ defeat of the Amalekites, recorded in Exodus 17, to the agency of God’s hidden hand.11 Some later sources made reference to the work of a “hidden” or “invisible” hand of God in restoring individuals to health. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 ce) thus spoke of the hidden hand of God which heals and makes whole.12 A medieval source refers similarly to a wound being healed by the touch of an invisible hand.13 French Benedictine Petrus Cellensis (1115–83 ce) alluded to the action... (shrink)

The definitive cessation of violence announced by the terrorist organisation ETA in 2011 gave way to a political and cultural debate about which version of history would be fixed in the collective memory. This confrontation of political narratives has become known as the "battle of the narrative". Cultural products, including fiction series, play an active role in this battle as they contribute to the formation of collective memory on the basis of a shared emotional disposition. This article analyses how two (...) of the main audiovisual productions, Patria and La línea invisible, make their particular contribution to the "emotional memory" of terrorism using the narrative of the centrality of the victim, which places those who have suffered the direct consequences of terrorism at the centre of the story. (shrink)

I propose a distinction between two concepts: affliction and atrocity. I argue that an ethical position with respect to history’s horrors can be understood as a practice of refusing to permit affliction to be seen as atrocity. This is a practice of resisting the urge to quantify or qualify affliction in subjecting it to a count of bodies, which would be taken to totalize all the suffering in a given situation. We should, I contend, resist thinking that affliction qualified as (...) atrocity, subject to a count of bodies or the like, captures affliction itself. I then discuss several instances of the qualification of affliction as atrocity, including the Sétif and Guelma massacre, the crucifixion of Christ, and the biblical story of the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt. I conclude by making a case that it’s ethically imperative that we recollect the self’s abnegation to those who aren’t counted, those who can’t be counted because they are afflicted without atrocity. (shrink)

The focus of this essay will be on Freud, although my approach is informed by certain aspects of “post-Freudian” analysis. In the works of Freud, however, history in the ordinary sense often seems lost in the shuffle between ontogeny and phylogeny. When Freud, in the latter part of his life, turned to cultural history, he was primarily concerned with showing how the evolution of civilization on a macrological level might be understood through—or even seen as an enactment of—psychoanalytic principles and (...) processes. And he openly acknowledged the speculative nature of his inquiry into prehistory, “archaic” society, and their putative relation to the civilizing process.One might nonetheless argue that throughout Freud’s work there are theoretical bases and fruitful leads for a more delimited investigation of specific historical processes for which documentation is, to a greater or lesser extent, available. This kind of investigation is, moreover, required to test the pertinence of Freud’s speculative and at times quasi-mythological initiatives. At present one can perhaps do little more than tentatively suggest how such an investigation might proceed and the sorts of issues it might conceivably illuminate. For its elaboration has been relatively underdeveloped in the research of those who looks to Freud for guidance. Dominick LaCapra is GGoldwin Smith Professor of European Intellectual History at Cornell University. His most recent books are “Madame Bovary” on Trial , Rethinking Intellectual History , and History and Criticism . He has just completed a book-length manuscript entitled “History, Politics, and the Novel.”. (shrink)

Supper at Emmaus traces various important intellectual topics from the ancient world to the modern period. Generally, as in its treatment of the question of whether the long-standing contrast between cyclical and linear views of history is helpful, it introduces important thinkers who have considered the question. A preoccupation of the book is the appearance and reappearance across the centuries of patterns used to organize temporal and cultural experience. After an opening essay on transcendental truth and cultural relativism, the second (...) chapter traces a distinction, common in historical writings during the past two centuries, between an alleged ancient classical "cyclic" view of time and history, used to describe the claimed repetitiveness of and similarities between historical events ("nothing is new under the sun"), and a contrasting Jewish-Christian linear view, sometimes described as providential in that it moves through a series of unique events to some end intended by God. In the latter, history is "about something," the education of the human race or the redemption of humankind. As in each of the remaining essays, the book then attempts to draw out the limitations of what the current consensus on this topic has become. It does this for such things as our current understanding of religious toleration, humanism, natural law, and teleology. Some of the essays, such as those on debate about Augustine's understanding of marriage or the concluding illustrated essay on the baroque city of Lecce, are published for the first time. Others are based on previously published contributions to the scholarly literature, though generally each of these chapters concludes with a postscript that engages with current scholarly debate on the subject. (shrink)

How much should we know about the underlying structure of a technological artifact in order to understand its history? Quite a bit, according to the authors of The First Computers: History and Architectures. This book, a collection of papers presented at the International Conference on the History of Computing in 1998, is aimed at computer scientists and programmers as well as historians of science and technology. The term “architecture” is used in computing to refer to the structure and capabilities of (...) a computer; it includes both logical design and physical design . Architecture is an abstraction that helps the authors make comparisons between computers from different countries and eras.The First Computers brings together a wealth of information on computers from the 1940s and 1950s, which the editors present in five main sections. Part 1, “History, Reconstructions, Architectures,” addresses general themes in the history of computing. Michael Mahoney's chapter, “The Structures of Computation,” examines the relationship between computer science and “pure” mathematics. Even in its most theoretical aspects, Mahoney notes, computer science has always focused pragmatically on feasible implementations of mathematical ideas, thus “blurring commonly made distinctions among science, engineering, and craft practice” . Robert W. Seidel examines the rationale for reconstructing historic computers, an activity that has engaged many of the book's contributors. Seidel notes that “as the artifacts of modern computing become invisible, older, larger computers supply a symbol of computing to practitioners, the public, and patrons which is not only visible, but comprehensible” .The four remaining parts cover computing developments in America, Germany, Britain, and Japan. The American computers include the Atanasoff‐Berry Computer, Aiken Mark I, ENIAC, and the Institute for Advanced Study computer. The section on Germany contains several chapters on Konrad Zuse as well as on such developments as the Göttingen machines, which may not be that well known. Britain is represented by the Colossus, Manchester Mark I, Atlas, and EDSAC. Perhaps least familiar to historians are the Japanese computers: Seiichi Okoma surveys nine early Japanese computers, and Eiiti Wada describes the PC‐1, which he helped build. Many of the chapters, especially those written by engineers, begin with a brief history of the machine followed by a detailed technical description of its design and operation. The contributions by historians tend to describe the computer's features in more general terms and discuss the intellectual, organizational, and economic context in which the machine was built.Because so many of the authors are technically trained, they are able to offer in‐depth information on the theoretical underpinnings and design of early computers. But often the discussion is difficult to follow, even for historians working in this area. Tony Sales's chapter on the Colossus, a British code‐breaking computer, exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of accounts written by technical specialists. Sales begins with a clear and engaging narrative of the origins of the Colossus, its method for decoding messages, and its significance to the Allied effort in the Second World War. He then veers into a highly technical discussion that will likely be opaque to readers unfamiliar with terms such as “thyratron rings.” The final section is a personal story of Sales's successful effort to have the machine rebuilt. Like the book as a whole, Sales's chapter can be read for a quick introduction to a milestone in the history of computing or for insight into the meanings embedded in technological artifacts—but readers should be prepared to decipher some formidable technical jargon along the way. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chariton's Erotic HistoryJean AlvaresIt is clear that numerous personages and events of Chaireas and Callirhoe are either taken directly from history or are in some way based on historiographical materials.1 The work has been considered a historical romance,2 yet its mixture of genuine historical fact, gross inaccuracies, anachronisms of Chariton's period,3 and reflections of drama, oratory, and epic4 suggests to some that Chariton merely aims to provide a "general (...) colouring of Greek history, to titillate the readers" (Reardon 1996, 327). I believe Chariton had larger aims. Building upon the insights of Edwards (1987, 29–51) into how Chariton depicts Aphrodite's influence upon politics and society, I consider here how Chariton adapts familiar elements from history in order to provide a contrast to [End Page 613] history, as those elements' usual political and social significances are attenuated or ignored and as they in turn become evidence for the operations of Aphrodite. Thus a Greek assembly pleads for the marriage of teenagers, an eros–obsessed satrap contemplates revolt, and the hero, seeking vengeance against his erotic rival, mimics the deeds of Alexander. I use these elements to produce an outline (not a full–fledged narrative) of an "alternative" history of Syracuse, one that suggests a more satisfying history wherein Aphrodisian values are pursued with the same vigor as those of conventional history.5 I do not assert that Chariton intended his work to be read as a type of history or even as a historical novel;6 I merely wish to reveal the historical narrative that is contained (with much else) within the text and its significance.To provide context for this reading I begin with Müller's observation that Chariton offers his work as a successor to epic inasmuch as Chaireas and Callirhoe concerns a heroic period of Greek history that had by Chariton's time become legendary.7 For such "epic" and "mythologized" history, traditional accounts, such as those of Thucydides, become simply raw material, such as Homer became for later poets, dramatists and rhetoricians—material to be altered according to the author's purposes.8 Further, as Bowersock notes, starting at roughly the [End Page 614] time of Nero, various literary works appeared that challenged conventional history or myth by presenting an alternative version of famous events: for example, the account of the Trojan War offered under the name of Dictys of Crete.9 I suggest that, for Chariton, the glorious period of Syracuse's victory over Athens is sufficiently remote and mythologized to be the legitimate object of a similar rewriting, an "alternative" history which demonstrates that pursuit of the values of Aphrodite and Eros can bring the sort of success achieved by the heroes of conventional histories. The outlines of such an alternative history can be extracted from Chaireas and Callirhoe.The starting point for Chariton's alternative erotic history is an idealized Syracuse, a state whose unique excellence makes it a fitting birthplace for the exceptional Chaireas and Callirhoe. A long–standing literary tradition idealized Syracuse and Hermocrates for their wealth and unexpected defeat of Athens.10 The Syracuse of Chaireas and Callirhoe is a city with recognizably Hellenic political and social institutions that work in surprising harmony.11 Hellenistic and Roman historiography often connect the rise and fall of states and individuals to their character and actions; similarly, the social harmony and success of these fictive Syracusans are linked to their willingness to follow the influence of Aphrodite, whose politically beneficent effects are observed early on.Initially a fierce political rivalry exists between Hermocrates and Ariston (1.1.3–4). Such rivalries were a common historiographical topos as well as a present reality of the Greek East.12 They often brought civic [End Page 615] disaster, but here Eros, "who is a lover of victory and rejoices in paradoxes set straight," decides that the rivals' two children should be married and arranges their meeting. Chaireas and Callirhoe fall in love, and, forbidden to marry, begin to waste away (1.1.4–10). At the next scheduled assembly the Syracusans, dominated by Eros the demagogue, ignore all other public business and instead beg Hermocrates to marry... (shrink)

Inwardness and interiority are concepts that have a multifaceted currency within many areas of medieval studies. These fields include, but are not limited to, historical studies, theology and religious studies, literary studies, and art history. Studies on inwardness, interiority, and selfhood intersect with an interest in what has often been called “popular religion” and in devotional behavior, both clerical and lay, to produce an engagement, across many fields, with inward or private aspects of religious belief and practice. “Popular religion” has (...) sometimes been presented as generally distinct or separate from official, ecclesiastical, or institutional ritual, and, as such, it is associated with other concepts like “private devotion” and even “interior piety.” Unhelpful binary oppositions are implied by qualifying terms like “private” and “popular,” because those qualifiers invoke the unsaid “public” or “official” or “outward.” More recently, terms like “vernacular theology” and Frömmigkeitstheologie have been preferred for their attempt to break down the “high-low” implications of terms like “popular religion” and “private devotion.” Though these terms themselves are not without potential problems or implications, the consonance or dissonance between individual religiosity and official or corporate expressions of religious belief can, and should, be examined in a more subtle manner than has often been the case. Medieval religious devotion was not a universally or solely private activity that was in some way opposite to the public, structured religiosity of the church's liturgy. It has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years that liturgy and devotion should not be opposed in this way, as private versus public, free and expressionist versus structured and defined. That having been said, it is nevertheless the case that the kind of piety that we are accustomed to call “devotional,” or contemplative, or meditative, presupposes and requires a certain inwardness and self-awareness, even if such activity is carried out in the company of others, or even during liturgical services. (shrink)

Philosophy challenges our assumptions—especially when it comes to us from another culture. In exploring Japanese philosophy, a dependable guide is essential. The present volume, written by a renowned authority on the subject, offers readers a historical survey of Japanese thought that is both comprehensive and comprehensible. Adhering to the Japanese philosophical tradition of highlighting engagement over detachment, Thomas Kasulis invites us to think with, as well as about, the Japanese masters by offering ample examples, innovative analogies, thought experiments, and jargon-free (...) explanations. He assumes little previous knowledge and addresses themes—aesthetics, ethics, the samurai code, politics, among others—not in a vacuum but within the conditions of Japan’s cultural and intellectual history. For readers new to Japanese studies, he provides a simplified guide to pronouncing Japanese and a separate discussion of the language and how its syntax, orthography, and linguistic layers can serve the philosophical purposes of a skilled writer and subtle thinker. For those familiar with the Japanese cultural tradition but less so with philosophy, Kasulis clarifies philosophical expressions and problems, Western as well as Japanese, as they arise. Half of the book’s chapters are devoted to seven major thinkers who collectively represent the full range of Japan’s historical epochs and philosophical traditions: Kūkai, Shinran, Dōgen, Ogyū Sorai, Motoori Norinaga, Nishida Kitarō, and Watsuji Tetsurō. Nuanced details and analyses enable an engaged understanding of Japanese Buddhism, Confucianism, Shintō, and modern academic philosophy. Other chapters supply social and cultural background, including brief discussions of nearly a hundred other philosophical writers. In his closing chapter Kasulis reflects on lessons from Japanese philosophy that enhance our understanding of philosophy itself. He reminds us that philosophy in its original sense means loving wisdom, not studying ideas. In that regard, a renewed appreciation of engaged knowing can play a critical role in the revitalization of philosophy in the West as well as the East. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear explores the importance of listening, being able to speak, and those who are silenced, from a psychoanalytic perspective. In particular, it focuses on those voices silenced either collectively or individually by trauma, culture, discrimination and persecution, and even by the history of psychoanalysis. Drawing on lessons from philosophy and history as well as clinical vignettes, this book provides a comprehensive guide to understanding the role of trauma in creating silence, and (...) the importance for psychoanalysts of learning to hear those silenced voices. (shrink)

This is the definitive study of the history and accomplishments of the Frankfurt School. It offers elegantly written portraits of the major figures in the school's history as well as overviews of the various positions and directions they developed from the founding years just after World War I until the death of Theodor Adorno in 1969.The book is based on documentary and biographical materials that have only recently become available. As the narrative follows the Institute for Social Research from Frankfurt (...) am Main to Geneva, New York, and Los Angeles, and then back to Frankfurt, Wiggershaus continually ties the evolution of the school to the changing intellectual and political contexts in which it operated. He also interweaves these accounts with incisive summaries of substantive works by Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Kirchheimer, Lowenthal, Marcuse, Neumann, Pollock, and Habermas.The book is self-contained and can serve as a general introduction to critical theory, but it also has a wealth of new material to offer those who are familiar with this tradition but would like to learn more about its history and context.Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. (shrink)

Antibiotic development and usage, and antibiotic resistance in particular, are today considered global concerns, simultaneously mandating local and global perspectives and actions. Yet such global considerations have not always been part of antibiotic policy formation, and those who attempt to formulate a globally coordinated response to antibiotic resistance will need to confront a history of heterogeneous, often uncoordinated, and at times conflicting reform efforts, whose legacies remain apparent today. Historical analysis permits us to highlight such entrenched trends and processes, (...) helping to frame contemporary efforts to improve access, conservation and innovation. (shrink)

The “Crisis” itself is an attempt of enlightenment by examining origins. Husserl knows three philosophical origins of evidence and justification: (1) consciousness; (2) the life-world; (3) european philosophy and the history of the sciences. There is a tension of historicity and ahistoricity in all of these origins. I will show in how far all three origins are under this tension. Because even concerning the notion of absolute consciousness one can show, that it is linked to historicity. The exact sciences are, (...) as Husserl says, the accomplishments of the consciousness of knowing subjects. Subjectivity and the accomplishments of consciousness are for Husserl therefore the immanent reason (die immanente Vernunft) without which the objectivity of the sciences becomes absurd (widersinnig). As they are not domains of a priori truths, they derive their inherent reason from subjectivity. Subjectivity and consciousness are therefore prior conditions for the sciences and for the life world. The immanent reason that subjectivity and consciousness is for the sciences and the life-world is also part of the ground that enables critique on the sciences. But does it make sense to try to reconstruct historical anonymous subjective phenomena as the immanent reason of scientific developments as Husserl demands? The reduction to a pure intention or absolute ego is a process, which is dependant on a historical development. Therefore even if we conceded that the epoché was feasible it would still depend on a historical evolved concept. An absolute ego is only conceivable for those who live in a culture that allows such an abstraction. But as Husserl does not adopt a history of philosophy like Hegel that explains how the absolute ego comes to itself in time, the tensions between ahistoricity or non-historicity and historicity are not resolved in the “Crisis”. (shrink)

Animals have had a profound influence on human societies, playing a major role in the course of human history. However, their presence and theoretical significance has been overlooked in sociological theory, while being the central concern of the growing field of anthrozoology (the study of the interaction between humans and other animals). To illustrate how a focus on other animal species can improve our understanding of sociocultural evolution, we assess the influential work of Gerhard Lenski and Patrick Nolan and their (...) materialist approach to macrosociology. Animals are largely invisible in Lenski and Nolan’s Ecological-Evolutionary Theory, yet they underlie the key subsistence technologies identified by Lenski and Nolan as crucial for explaining uneven development. By considering the history of domestication, the role animals played in the development of agricultural technology, and the translocation of Eurasian livestock during the colonial era, we show how sociocultural evolution is situated within a larger nexus of socioecological and historical conditions that reciprocally determine technological development and cultural heritage. Our analysis illustrates that anthrozoology, far from being an esoteric field of study, has the potential to contribute to a refined understanding of a wide array of social phenomena. (shrink)

The discovery that the DNA of chimpanzees and humans is incredibly similar, sharing 98% of the same code, suggests that there is very little different--or special--about the human animal. Likewise, advances in artificial intelligence mean that humans no longer have exclusive access to reason, consciousness and imagination. Indeed, the harder we cling to the concept of humanity, the more slippery it becomes. But if it breaks down altogether, what will this mean for human values, human rights, and the defense of (...) human dignity? In a book of breathtaking range, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto takes us on an enlightening journey through the history of humankind, a narrative tour de force that challenges our most fundamental belief--that we are, and have always been, human. Humankind confronts the problem from a historical perspective, showing how our current understanding of what it means to be human has been shaken by new discoveries from science and philosophy. The author shows how our concept of humankind has changed over time, tracing its faltering expansion to its present limits and arguing that these limits are neither fixed or scientifically verifiable. Controversially, he proposes that we have further to go in developing our concept of humankind and that we need to rethink it as a matter of urgency. One of the most imaginative historians writing today, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto here combines astonishing breadth with passionate and exciting storytelling. For the intellectually curious, for those interested in history, philosophy, science and culture, and for anyone who has ever wondered about what makes us human, Humankind offers an exhilarating new perspective. (shrink)

Recent political turmoil has focused international attention on Egypt, yet there is little awareness of the country’s stateless populations—those who lack legal nationality to any state—or the challenges they face. Individuals in situations of protracted statelessness are denied their right to a nationality, resulting in an array of additional rights violations. Such violations include denied freedom of movement, equality before the law, and access to economic and social rights. Drawing from two years’ of fieldwork data, this study highlights the (...) plight of those who are unable to achieve legal status in a country with harsh punishments for illegal presence, entry, and exit. It also evaluates potential solutions for eliminating statelessness in Egypt and protecting the rights of stateless populations. As Egypt seeks to move beyond revolution, it is vital that the government addresses the pervasive and systemic inequalities that deny individuals their right to a nationality. (shrink)

Present-day interest in history among philosophers seems largely limited to a debate over the nature of historical explanation among those who for Humean reasons insist that all explanations must rest upon general laws and history cannot be an exception to this, and those who say the historians do explain and since they do not use general laws the Humean claim is obviously mistaken. Like the latter, the present paper takes the explanations of historians seriously, but unlike the latter (...) it is not willing to limit the role of philosophy of history merely to the elucidation of the language in which historians give final expression of their work. Rather it recognizes that those explanations themselves set the stage for further inquiry in that they are required to be justified. It is here that the theories or general laws demanded by Humean analysis come in. After examining examples of general laws offered by way of example of what the "Humean" philosophers are supposed to have in mind, each of which is an immediate generalization of the explanation it is called upon to explain and is, hence, an instance of what has been called "the dogma of universality," some examples of more promising prospects of theory in history are examined. (shrink)

Kant's philosophical achievements have long overshadowed those of his German contemporaries, often to the point of concealing his contemporaries' influence upon him. This volume of new essays draws on recent research into the rich complexity of eighteenth-century German thought, examining key figures in the development of aesthetics and art history, the philosophy of history and education, political philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. The essays range over numerous thinkers including Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Meyer, Winckelmann, Herder, Schiller, Hamann and Fichte, showing (...) how they variously influenced, challenged, and revised Kant's philosophy, at times moving it in novel directions unacceptable to the magister himself. The volume will be valuable for all who are interested in this distinctive period of German philosophy. (shrink)

At long last, this seminal work is available in English. Originally published in German in 1923, it became almost immediately a center of interest and stormy controversy in both Marxist and non-Marxist circles. With the passage of time, the controversy has abated somewhat, the interest has heightened, and Lukács has become recognized generally as one of the most influential and creative Marxists of the post-World War I world. The tour de force in History and Class Consciousness is its insistence on (...) the indissoluble link between Hegel and Marx and on the centrality of the concept of alienation in Marx's thought--an insistence which was dramatically verified nine years later with the publication of Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and again in 1939 with the appearance of Marx's Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Of perhaps more lasting value are the dazzling expositions on the nature and role of class consciousness, on the open-endedness of history, on the dialectical method as the essence of authentic and orthodox marxism, on the concept of totality, and on fetishism and reification as the inevitable consequences of commodity production relations. Lukács might have rested his laurels on these features of the book and basked in the glory of their popularity. Instead, he chose to emphasize the negative features which he feared might lead the unwary reader down an un-Marxist or anti-Marxist path. Accordingly, he refused to permit republication or translation and those who wanted to read the work had to resort to mimeographed or photographic reproductions, or "pirate" editions. Despite these difficulties, the book managed to circulate widely among serious Marxists and students of Marxism and to exercise an influence which continues to this day. Both critics and admirers of Lukács considered his ban on the book to be "tactical" and his criticisms of it to be tongue-in-cheek, or opportunistic. But when Lukács finally authorized a new edition in 1967 and wrote a new preface for it, there could no longer be any doubt that he truly believed that the book contained grievous failings and that it was these failings which accounted for the book's popularity. Being still in transition from Hegel to Marx, Lukács had not succeeded in wholly reconstructing Hegel along revolutionary materialist lines, as Marx himself had succeeded in doing. In particular, Lukács had succumbed to the identical subject-object relation, which distorted his view of the relationship of man to nature, destroyed the basis for a solid Marxist ontology in which work mediated between man and nature, and disrupted the unity of theory and practice. From the standpoint of Marxism, Lukács' criticisms are unassailable, but this, by no means, entails that his evaluation of the book as a whole has to be accepted. It remains an impressive attempt, during a revolutionary period, to select those elements in Marxism which serve as effective theoretical tools to guide the revolution along a truly socialist path.--H. B. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and History, Customs and EthicsHui-Chieh Loy (bio)Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China: Contestation of Humaneness, Justice, and Personal Freedom. By Tao Jiang. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.Tao Jiang's Origins of Moral-Political Philosophy in Early China is a serious tour de force of a study. In many ways, I am reminded of Angus Graham's Disputers of the Tao and Benjamin Schwartz' The World of Thought in Ancient (...) China—but updated. A signal difference is that it is more constrained in its coverage of figures, texts, and especially in having the topical focus upon moral-political philosophy. At the same time and within the chosen (narrower) confines, it often examines its subject in greater detail and draws on more recent discussions.One neat thing that Jiang does is to deliberately weave in explicit discussions of how each subsequent thinker or text incorporated or criticized ideas associated with earlier thinkers. (I formulated it this way since there isn't enough historical evidence about who-actually-read-what in the ancient world, citation practices being what they were.) In this regard, I am especially heartened to read, for example, the sections on "Traces of Mohist Elements in the Laozi" (3.3.2), and "Mohist Elements in Han Feizi's Thought" (7.3.3).By no means should the desultory remarks below be counted as a full review or assessment (impressionistically, this is the sort of book I will recommend that my grad students read—there, I've said it). Think of them as humble shards of pottery thrown in the hope for some jade in response. To make my task more focused, I will comment on the Sinology versus Philosophy distinction, and Jiang's treatment of the Mohists.I. Philosophy and History of PhilosophyAn important part of Jiang's Introduction is devoted to discussing the situation of Chinese Philosophy as a field in the Western Academy, caught between Sinology on the one hand and academic Philosophy on the other. Due to the different scholarly objectives and norms in the two disciplines, scholars working on Chinese Philosophy often find themselves caught [End Page 420] between two distinct audiences who demand different things. Jiang's aim is to propose an "interpretive model to distinguish two sets of scholarly objects operative in Sinology and philosophy. These objects are related and at times overlap, but they are also often irreducibly distinct, i.e., original text versus inherited text, historical author versus textual author, and authorial intent versus textual intent, with the former in the pairs belonging to Sinologists and the latter to philosophers" (p. 7). In general, I am highly sympathetic to the distinctions Jiang draws. But I do wonder if we need to step back and start from a wider context involving what is potentially a deeper divide.Now, it is entirely a caricature but the joke around the water cooler is that philosophers—especially those of a more "analytic" bent—often exude the attitude that they are not in the business of reading old books. Their project is one focused on issues and problems and puzzles that are ultimately about the natural and human world, rather than about texts and their interpretation, or even the historical thinkers themselves. To give some obvious examples, the intellectual questions they see themselves as answering are the likes of:• Can we know that God exists, if God exists at all?• What is the nature of moral claims? Do they admit of truth and falsity?• How is causation related to possibility?• Is a logic that dispenses with the law of non-contradiction viable?• What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge?• Is abortion morally justifiable?Sometimes the questions they ask even infringe on the results and insights from nearby fields, for instance linguistics and the natural and empirical sciences:• What is time?• Can a presentist conception of time be made consistent with contemporary physics?• What is the nature of consciousness? How is it related to physical neural states or informational computational processes?• Can computers be sentient?• How is morality related to the passions?• In what sense is a political order that does justice to diversity of moral beliefs... (shrink)

_Transcendence and History_ is an analysis of what philosopher Eric Voegelin described as “the decisive problem of philosophy”: the dilemma of the discovery of transcendent meaning and the impact of this discovery on human self-understanding. The explicit recognition and symbolization of transcendent meaning originally occurred in a few advanced civilizations worldwide during the first millennium?.?.e. The world’s major religious and wisdom traditions are built upon the recognition of transcendent meaning, and our own cultural and linguistic heritage has long since absorbed (...) the postcosmological division of reality into the two dimensions of “transcendence” and “immanence.” But the last three centuries in the West have seen a growing resistance to the idea of transcendent meaning; contemporary and “postmodern” interpretations of the human situation—both popular and intellectual—indicate a widespread eclipse of confidence in the truth of transcendence. In _Transcendence and History_, Glenn Hughes contributes to the understanding of transcendent meaning and the problems associated with it and assists in the philosophical recovery of the legitimacy of the notion of transcendence. Depending primarily on the treatments of transcendence found in the writings of twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, Hughes explores the historical discovery of transcendent meaning and then examines what it indicates about the structure of history. Hughes’s main focus, however, is on clarifying the problem of transcendence in relation to historical _existence_. Addressing both layreaders and scholars, Hughes applies the insights and analyses of Voegelin and Lonergan to considerable advantage. _Transcendence and History_ will be of particular value to those who have grappled with the notion of transcendence in the study of philosophy, comparative religion, political theory, history, philosophical anthropology, and art or poetry. By examining transcendent meaning as the key factor in the search for ultimate meaning from ancient societies to the present, the book demonstrates how “the decisive problem of philosophy” both illuminates and presents a vital challenge to contemporary intellectual discourse. (shrink)

We are told in the introduction to this volume that what holds together such an apparently diverse collection of essays under a single rubric is the theme of "human nature." And this is fair enough: themes ranging from Kant's reflections on physiology, to his investigation of the vexed notion of what it is that constitutes a race, to his reflections on philosophy of history, to his lectures on pedagogy all fit reasonably enough under the rubric of "human nature." All point (...) us, that is, toward a clearer understanding of how Kant would have answered the question, "What is a human being?" Yet this straight-laced, somewhat mundane description of this volume's contents belies the quirky, unexpected, and downright strange reflections that can be found therein. Perhaps those familiar with Kant's famous dinner parties would have expected him to say that "[b]odily motions prescribed by a doctor who is not a philosopher weaken the invalid's body, unless they are seasoned with some social amusement and affect the body favorably". But who would have expected Kant to recommend that "[i]n. (shrink)

_The Invisible Dragon_ made a lot of noise for a little book When it was originally published in 1993 it was championed by artists for its forceful call for a reconsideration of beauty—and savaged by more theoretically oriented critics who dismissed the very concept of beauty as naive, igniting a debate that has shown no sign of flagging. With this revised and expanded edition, Hickey is back to fan the flames. More manifesto than polite discussion, more call to action (...) than criticism, _The Invisible Dragon_ aims squarely at the hyper-institutionalism that, in Hickey’s view, denies the real pleasures that draw us to art in the first place. Deploying the artworks of Warhol, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Mapplethorpe and the writings of Ruskin, Shakespeare, Deleuze, and Foucault, Hickey takes on museum culture, arid academicism, sclerotic politics, and more—all in the service of making readers rethink the nature of art. A new introduction provides a context for earlier essays—what Hickey calls his "intellectual temper tantrums." A new essay, "American Beauty," concludes the volume with a historical argument that is a rousing paean to the inherently democratic nature of attention to beauty. Written with a verve that is all too rare in serious criticism, this expanded and refurbished edition of _The Invisible Dragon_ will be sure to captivate a new generation of readers, provoking the passionate reactions that are the hallmark of great criticism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rome's Religious History: Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus on Their GodsHans-Friedrich MuellerJason P. Davies. Rome's Religious History: Livy, Tacitus and Ammianus on Their Gods. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. x + 341 pp. Cloth, $85.Did the Romans believe in their gods? This question, Davies argues, has too long dominated scholarship on Roman religion, and his challenging book eschews this question (along with its dichotomous counterpart: skepticism), aiming instead to (...) engage vigorously more recent scholarship on Roman religion. Davies has read Livy, Tacitus, and Ammianus Marcellinus with sensitive attention to expressions of general religious sentiment and categories, and he has placed his findings squarely in the context of current historiographical analyses of Roman religion's literary functions. Davies sums up nicely: "What we seek here is the nature of the complex cognitive relationship between historiography and religion" (12). Generally excluded from the conversation are scholars who are deceased and who do not write in English. More rigorously excluded are cross-references to ancient authors beyond Davies' chosen three (although they do creep in from time to time, one will not come to this book for Cicero, Caesar, Sallust, Valerius Maximus, Velleius Paterculus, Suetonius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, et al.). Instead, Davies attempts by well-enunciated and conscious choice to conduct a series of experiments: he reads each of his chosen authors in isolation in order to build a coherent and consistent picture of the religious system of each in close conversation with the last two decades' debates on what Roman religion was really about.Although I shall in due course address my own reservations about his methodology, I would argue that we may applaud Davies for his experimental daring. The progress of knowledge requires room for failures as well as successes. We learn from both, and Davies brings before us three separate experiments: two chapters on Livy and one each on Tacitus and Ammianus. Starting from the premise that for the Romans the gods existed, and that Roman society's basic intellectual framework was "Roman religion" (whatever this may have meant to its many and varied practitioners over the course of the centuries preceding Livy), Davies' fresh readings describe what this religion appears to have entailed for each of his chosen authors. Each of those readings yields an instance or "moment" in the history of the religions of Rome and, as such, is a contribution to "Rome's religious history" (thus fulfilling, to this extent, the promise of the volume's title).After a general introduction outlining this methodology (chap. 1), Davies devotes the next two chapters to Livy (chap. 2: "Livy and the Invention of Roman Religion" and chap. 3: "Gods and Men in Livy"). We find, as we would expect, some discussion of Papirius Cursor, who in 293 B.C.E. arose in the third watch of the night to solicit the requisite impetrative auspicium before engaging the Samnites in battle (Livy 10.40.2). Papirius consulted a keeper of the sacred chickens, who announced a tripudium solistimum, despite the fact that the chickens would not eat (10.40.4). On the basis of this false report, Papirius declares that the auspicium [End Page 313] is excellent (egregium), and he orders the troops to prepare for battle (10.40.5). Papirius' nephew, however, learns from some of the cavalry who had overheard an argument among the pullarii that the pullarius' report was suspect, and he dutifully informs his uncle (10.40.9–10). Livy describes the youth as a "iuuenis ante doctrinam deos spernentem natus" (10.40.10). Papirius subsequently commends the youth but commences battle (ultimately victorious) on the grounds that the report he had requested and received itself constituted the auspicium, regardless of these other circumstances, and that any consequences for mendacity would be borne by the liar (10.40.11). The keepers of the sacred chickens are ordered to the front line, and the guilty pullarius is struck, and mortally wounded, by a javelin (10.40.12–13). This the consul interprets in turn as confirmation of his own interpretation of the auspicium as well as expiation of wrongdoing by the guilty party; the consul's statement to this effect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Family in Greek HistoryCheryl Anne CoxCynthia B. Patterson. The Family in Greek History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. 286 pp. 6 figs. Cloth, $35.The purpose of Cynthia Patterson's book is to view family structures and family interests and ideals in the historical development of the Greek polis. In her study she takes us through nineteenth-century scholarship, the worlds of Homer and Hesiod, and the societies of Sparta, (...) Gortyn, and Athens as well.In chapter 1, "The Nineteenth-Century Paradigm of Greek Family History," she explores how Bachofen, Fustel de Coulanges, Henry Maine, Louis Morgan, and Friedrich Engels theorized that matriarchy gave way to patriarchy, patrilineality, and agnation. In this context monogamy was the instrument of the patriarchal state, which subjugated women and forced them into the private sphere of the household. This paradigm saw its way into the studies of Grote, whose political history overlooked the contributions of women in Greece; and into those of Mahaffy, who emphasized the social inferiority of women. It is a paradigm that has also influenced, in the twentieth century, the seminal studies on the Greek family by Lacey and Pomeroy. Needless to say, Patterson attempts to dispel this paradigm.In chapter 2, "The Family in Homer and Hesiod," she emphasizes that there is no evidence of patrilineal clans in Homeric society. Public interest, rather, centered on marriage and the oikos, the individual household. In Hesiod the corporate clan was not heir to a man's possessions, and there is little attention given to lineage and ancestors.In chapter 3, "Early Greek Law and the Family," Patterson looks at early law in Sparta, Gortyn, and Athens. For Sparta, she concludes that Spartan marriages [End Page 153] were the result of traditional household strategy, that is, property devolving to legitimate children. For Gortyn, the household was the center of social and economic order. There is no evidence of evolution from a clan-based society to one of private property. For pre-Solonian Athens, again there is no evidence of clans, while the extended kin group of Athens, the anchisteia, was nonagnatic. Solon restricted the bastard, or nothos, from the household, a move which brought the oikos into clearer focus. Patterson ends her discussion by stating that the public interest in securing a husband for an heiress was articulated through the anchisteia.In chapter 4, "Marriage and Adultery in Democratic Athens," she turns her attention to how the polis was interested in the effects of adultery, or moicheia, on the household. She insists that although there was no formal definition of marriage, and although there were no certificates or registers, marriage was not vague because it was recognized through communally witnessed rituals. If marriage can be seen to have been a social process, we may dispel the widespread notion that it was vague. (On the other hand, I would counter, if we view marriage as social process, then during that process witnesses die or are called liars; marriage can come under attack.) Adultery received the public interest, she continues, because it was a violation of the women of the household--here clearly supporting the traditional definition of moicheia as pertaining to a man's kinswomen, not just his wife. This interconnection between household and polis is reflected by Plato's Laws, in which the state tries to reconcile its interest in the household with its concern for unruly passions.With chapter 5, "Adultery Onstage and in Court," Patterson turns her attention to certain tragedies, comedies, and orations. By focusing on the Oresteia she concludes that Clytemnestra's adultery was a crime against the household. In Sophocles' Electra, the playwright is pessimistic as to whether the killing of Aegisthus can restore the household, while Euripides, in his Electra, points out how adultery can contaminate the next generation. In his comedies Aristophanes feels that punishment against adultery is justified. In the orations the moichos, such as Alcibiades, Agoratus, or Timarchus, is viewed as having sinned against the polis. With Aristotle, however, we find that the philosopher has less interest in the public consequences of adultery.Aristotle's separation of household from politics is taken up again in chapter 6, "Public and... (shrink)

What is the difference between a gambler and a speculator? Is there a readily identifiable line separating the two? If so, is it possible for us to discourage the former while encouraging the latter? These difficult questions cut across the entirety of American economic history, and theperiodic failures by regulators to differentiate between irresponsible gambling and clear-headed investing have often been the proximate causes of catastrophic economic downturns. Most recently, the blurring of speculation and gambling in U.S. real estate markets (...) fueled the 2008 global financialcrisis, but it is one in a long line of similar economic disasters going back to the nation's founding. In Speculation, author Stuart Banner provides a sweeping and story-rich history of how the murky lines separating investment, speculation, and outright gambling have shaped America from the 1790s to the present. Regulators and courts always struggled to draw a line between investment and gambling,and it is no easier now than it was two centuries ago. Advocates for risky investments have long argued that risk-taking is what defines America. Critics counter that unregulated speculation results in bubbles that always draw in the least informed investors-gamblers, essentially. Financial chaos isthe result. The debate has been a perennial feature of American history, with the pattern repeating before and after every financial downturn since the 1790s. The Panic of 1837, the speculative boom of the roaring twenties, and the real estate bubble of the early 2000s are all emblematic of thedifficulty in differentiating sober from reckless speculation. Even after the recent financial crisis, the debate continues. Some, chastened by the crash, argue that we need to prohibit certain risky transactions, but others respond by citing the benefits of loosely governed markets and the dangersof over-regulation. These episodes have generated deep ambivalence, yet Americans' faith in investment and - by extension - the stock market has always rebounded quickly after even the most savage downturns. Indeed, the speculator on the make is a central figure in the folklore of Americancapitalism. Engaging and accessible, Speculation synthesizes a suite of themes that sit at the heart of American history - the ability of courts and regulators to protect ordinary Americans from the ravages of capitalism; the periodic fallibility of the American economy; and - not least - the moral conundruminherent in valuing those who produce goods over those who speculate, and yet enjoying the fruits of speculation. Banner's history is not only invaluable for understanding the fault lines beneath the American economy today, but American identity itself. (shrink)

Cultural historians and historians of medicine are a rarity in bioethics. Even those who write histories of bioethics are philosophers, sociologists, or theologians. Where have all the historians gone? If bioethics is to contribute to the urgent work of addressing social justice, structural racism, and health inequity, we bioethicists need to embrace history as a fully constituent part of our field. Historians can help us apprehend the ideas that shaped bioethics, and health policy more broadly, and discover the (...) dissenting arguments that might inspire us now. Given our annus horribilis, history has become an instrumental necessity. It is only through the study of history that we can understand the past so as to reimagine how bioethics can influence health policy and work toward health equity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 33.1 (2003) 3-22 [Access article in PDF] Rationalism in History Steven Crowell Mark Bevir. The Logic of the History of Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. [L] When Hegel spoke of history as the "slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed" [27], he wished his hearers to find satisfaction in the contemplation of a "reason" in history (...) that would redeem those sacrifices by explaining their necessity. A "logic" of history in this sense—a logic of the events themselves (res gestae) and not merely of discourses about them (historia rerum gestarum)—does not merely relate events to one another by means of a narrative in which they can be seen to make sense, but, going further, attributes necessity to these events by relating them to the (absolute) Idea. That this "Idea or Reason is the True," that "nothing but it... manifests itself in the world," is not, Hegel reminds us, something established historically but "has been proved in philosophy" [11]. Seen thus, post-Hegelian historicism begins the moment that the Idea of history becomes the "history of ideas"—that is, the moment when reason becomes merely the thematic object, rather than the generative subject, of history. In its many forms—Begriffsgeschichte, intellectual history, history of worldviews, Ideologiekritik, history of mentalités, and so on—the history of ideas bears the traces of its birth in the retreat of speculative philosophy of history's robust rationalism, whether of the idealistic Hegelian or the materialist Marxian variety. Under such conditions, to announce a "logic" of the history of ideas is to link historiography with philosophy in a way that might surprise those many who have grown accustomed to thinking that the latter is dead and the former is anything but logical.For "history" has been the shibboleth under which contemporary critical discourse has sought to free itself from the "philosophical" model of knowing that dominated earlier times. If at the outset of the twentieth century the new currents in European philosophy—Husserlian phenomenology and Russellian analysis—were militantly antihistorical, by century's end only the latter remained so. The former very quickly spawned or influenced a host of offshoots (existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, genealogy) with little in common but the belief that philosophy is thoroughly historical. When, in the guise of "theory," critical discourse in fields such as literature, cultural studies, feminism, or postcolonial studies draws close to philosophy, then, it is generally a philosophy that sees itself entangled in history, no longer capable of "master narratives" or logics because suspicious of its own past. Significantly, this skepticism has made itself felt in the discipline of history itself, where the theory of historiography is increasingly integrated into a general postmodern, postphilosophical, model of cultural production that emphasizes politics or poetics over reason, rhetoric over cognition.1 Mark Bevir's proposal for a logic of the history of ideas is a protest against such [End Page 3] integration: historical inquiry—whose principles provide the basis not only for a "general logic of history" but also for a "theory of culture" as such [L 316]—is a rational enterprise that yields objective knowledge guided by the regulative idea of truth as correspondence to a fixed historical reality.There is scarcely a debate in historiography—and in the philosophy of mind, language, and science, as it pertains to such debates—about which Bevir does not have something important to say, but reduced to its bare outline Bevir's book lays out the elements, modes of justification, and modes of explanation that are normative for the practice of the history of ideas. At its basis is the philosophical view, introduced in chapter one and successively developed in subsequent chapters, that the "folk-psychological" concepts we use to understand and explain human behavior—above all, the concept of rationality—are indispensable in the history of ideas as well. A central element of the practice of intellectual history, for example, is the concept of "meaning," and in chapter two, against challenges from contextualists, conventionalists, and others who reject intentionalism, Bevir argues that... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Invisible ChildrenMaureen KelleyИсчезаю в весне,в толпе,в лужах,в синеве.И не ищите.Мне так хорошо...I fade into spring,or into a crowd,or into a puddle,sometimes into the blue.There's no sense in looking for me.I feel fine...—¾"Absentee" by Arvo Mets"You have to go through Lesha to get to Danil," Alexandra told me. Lesha was a small but unmoving dog with matted hair and a fierce growl. The dog was pressed against the (...) little boy, who looked no more than three or four years old. Alexandra later told me he was eight. Danil was wearing a Spider Man shirt that was four sizes too big and came down to his feet and mismatched sandals. He was huddled against his dog not only for security but warmth. His tiny arm circled Lesha's neck and he looked at me with a mix of curiosity and caution. I knelt and put my hand out for Lesha to smell me. Apparently I didn't pass the smell test. The dog didn't budge from his post. We stood like that for a long time, at the base of the steps to the shelter. I tried the few Russian words I had learned while visiting as a volunteer. The dog didn't understand my broken Russian, or pretended not to, but I managed to get a shy smile from Danil.Alexandra, a nurse volunteer at the shelter, eventually mediated the standoff by giving Lesha, the dog, a cookie. I introduced myself to the little boy. And just like that, he leaned up against me and put both arms around my legs. It didn't matter that I was a stranger, and a stranger who spoke terrible Russian. "Spidey" was an affectionate little guy. He gripped my hand while Alexandra led us up the steps and Lesha followed close behind. Inside was a small room, warm and full of color. One wall was covered in kids' drawings. Another had public health posters in Russian, some with instructions for condom use, others on literacy. There were about fifteen kids in the shelter that afternoon. The young ones were drawing pictures at a low table. Two teenage boys were hunched over a small TV playing a video game. There was only one teenage girl, Irina. She was cooing at the little kid's drawings, showing one girl how to draw a princess. Alexandra said quietly to me, "Most of the teenage girls are only here in the morning. The rest are back at work right now." I found out later "back at work" meant on the streets as sex workers. This city was frequented by businessmen and itinerant workers heading to the factories or lumber mills in the North. The best money for homeless girls was in prostitution. Danil unwrapped himself from me and ran over to the two older boys playing video games. One put his controller down long enough to pull Danil into his lap. The three boys stared intently as Super Mario hopped from mushroom to magic cloud, golden coins spinning above his cartoon head.To the right of the main room was a closet-sized office for the shelter director, Anya, a pediatrician who donated her time to running the shelter for homeless and orphaned youth living on the streets. Alexandra and I stood in the doorway waiting for Anya to finish a phone conversation. Her desk was covered in papers. Behind her were photos of the kids who had "graduated" from the streets. There were cards and letters pinned to a cork board. When [End Page E4] she finished, Anya greeted us with bear hugs and showed us to the clinic area. Next to her office was a small bathroom with a shower and tub. She explained that bath days were on Wednesdays. Around back, with a separate entrance was the small clinic space. The outside metal door had a sliding window that you see at some nightclubs. They ran a needle exchange program out of that door. It was funded for street youth, but from time to time they would get adult addicts. Anya was adamant that this side of the clinic remain separate from the central space for the children. In reality the distance... (shrink)

The underlying assumption of Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness is that “history” can be understood as a unified and meaningful meta-narrative, which can be read along the lines of a realist novel. Although the future is not guaranteed, the present contains “objective possibilities” which can be identified and realized through activist intervention in the world by those who are destined to “make” history, the proletariat. In the intervening century since the Russian Revolution, it has become impossible to read “history” (...) as a singular, triumphalist story leading to human emancipation or identify any one group as its subjective agent. To salvage the revolutionary potential of Lukács’ work, it has been read instead in terms of “fidelity to the Event” by such latter-day Leninists as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. But their recourse to a meta-historical notion of pre-figuration and future realization is itself no less beholden to a literary or rhetorical device, that of figura, which was traced by Erich Auerbach in originally religious terms. (shrink)

According to the working definition of the International Big History Association, ‘Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods’. In recent years Big History has been developing very fast indeed. Big History courses are taught in the schools and universities of several dozen countries. Hundreds of researchers are involved in studying and teaching Big History. The unique approach of Big History, the interdisciplinary genre of (...) history that deals with the grand narrative of 13.8 billion years, has opened up a vast amount of research agendas. Big History brings together constantly updated information from the scientific disciplines and merges it with the contemplative realms of philosophy and the humanities. It also provides a connection between the past, present, and future. Big History is a colossal and extremely heterogeneous field of research encompassing all the forms of existence and all timescales. Unsurprisingly, Big History may be presented in very different aspects and facets. In this volume the Big History is presented and discussed in three different ways. In its first part, Big History is explored in terms of methodology, theories of knowledge, as well as showcasing the personal approach of scholars to Big History. The second section comprises such articles that could clarify Big History's main trends and laws. The third part of this book explores the nature of teaching Big History as well as profiling a number of educational methods. This volume will be useful both for those who study interdisciplinary macroproblems and for specialists working in focused directions, as well as for those who are interested in evolutionary issues of Astrophysics, Geology, Biology, History, Anthropology, Linguistics and other areas of study. (shrink)

Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e— the cause and its effect— both occur, (...) but: had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. From this starting point ideas proliferate in a vast profusion. But the remarkable disparity among these ideas should not obscure their common foundation. Neither should the diversity of opinion about the prospects for a philosophical analysis of causation obscure their importance. For even those philosophers who see these prospects as dim—perhaps because they suffer post-Quinean queasiness at the thought of any analysis of any concept of interest—can often be heard to say such things as that causal relations among events are somehow “a matter of” the patterns of counterfactual dependence to be found in them. (shrink)

Drees makes a strong case for the importance of the humanities in the university, providing an excellent resource for anyone in the Western Academy. Its usefulness for those who want to work outside the West is limited, however, because he does not engage with literature that challenges its methods and disciplines. If we are to have a positive global impact, we need to do more than clarify existing boundaries, we need to blur them, beginning with an examination of inherent (...) biases reflected in its history, structure, and content. This article focuses on one critique, a decolonial critique of the Western view that ontology precedes epistemology (an external reality produces knowledge). Outside the modern Western Academy, epistemologies create ontologies (epistemic creations/stories about the world give us a sense of the world and its materiality). I describe a relational understanding of knowledge and how this changes our understanding of the humanities and our epistemic responsibilities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Classical Art: A Life History DAVID CAST This is a wonderful book, rich in its purposes, wide in its range and, thanks to the author’s home institution, Christ’s College, Cambridge, lavishly illustrated with images of objects, many familiar, some less so. And it is written with an elegance and clarity that belies the depths of scholarship in its history. The first letter of the subtitle suggests the tenor (...) of Vout’s account, that since every age has conjured up a different idea of the classical, what is here is yet one more such history, a modest if particular account of what was and is still there in the records made of the Greek and Roman past. The basic metaphor Vout uses to define the focus of this history is that of conversation, whether such conversing is seen to exist between the objects themselves or between the past and the present, between those objects that have outgrown their intended functions to become part of a canon that has dictated taste over the ages, as she puts it, shaping culture and culture’s questions. Thus conversation is here, plus also what Vout is not afraid, when necessary, to call the misappropriations and translocations of the Greek and Roman objects she takes note of. Yet another contribution she adds to the idea of the classical comes from what she calls, perhaps a little awkwardly, the long durée approach to its subjects, seen first when these objects were produced, then as they survived Christianity and the fall of Rome and Byzantium, the French Revolution, modernism and fascism, to live Caroline Vout, Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present, Princeton University Press, 2018. xi + 376 pages; 80 color + 132 b/w illustrations. $39.50. ISBN 9780691177038; E-book ISBN9781400890279. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 on in galleries and auction rooms, making the heart soar and the blood boil, as Vout claims, even today. It is a complex story she has to tell, difficult yet valuable, and its method is nicely exemplified by the first example considered, the two statues, known as the Tyrannicides, dated to 477–476 BCE, and located now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, attributed on the museum caption to the sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes, and dated to 477–476 BCE. The details here are crucial for, on investigation, it is clear these are not the statues that were erected in the Athenian agora to honor the men, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who, by tradition, had killed the tyrant’s brother Hipparchus. Yet even this second group, as she notes, had been a stand-in, since the first piece to honor these men, made by the sculptor Antenor, had been stolen by the Persians in the sack of Athens in 480–479 BCE. Nor is this group here the actual second group but rather a copy, made by an unknown copyist working under the Roman Empire. What we have here are what might be called pretenders—yet ones, despite doubts about their authenticity, that have long been taken to mark a particular moment in the formal history of Greek art, the advent of the so-called Severe style in Athens and the birth of the classical moment of sculpture. Any full account of these statues depends then on a rich history, plus a range of other events; the existence of ancient casts of the Tyrannicides during the Roman Empire, marking out such statues as art, rather than having still their first meaning; the prior history in the Renaissance of the acquisition of ancient sculpture as a sign of power; the sight of the figure of Aristogeiton, then in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, by Johann Joachim Winckelmann; the building up of these statues from fragments of other statues; in 1859 the identification of these figures as the Tyrannicides; and finally a reading of classical texts, those of Pausanias, Pliny and Lucian, that spoke, even if in contradictory ways, of all the actors here, Antenor, Kritios and Aristogeiton. To which should be added the recent accounts of these pieces, provided by schol172 classical art: a life history ars of classical art like Brunilde Ridgway, R. T... (shrink)

When considering a suitable topic for inclusion in this collection, it occurred to me that it might be worth discussing a writer whose interests were largely centred on themes directly related to those cited in the collection's title, and who throughout most of his philosophical career remained particularly insistent upon the need to define the boundaries separating humanistic modes of understanding from ones associated with the physical sciences. The writer in question was R. G. Collingwood. Although Collingwood has justly (...) been credited with perceptive insights into the metaphysical origins and presuppositions of natural science, as well as with raising pointed questions concerning the nature of conceptual change in scientific thought, he had in fact little first-hand knowledge of the subject and it is not in this sphere that his chief claims to importance and originality lie. Rather, they are to be found in an area with which he was certainly intimately acquainted and in which as a practitioner he helped to make significant discoveries on the ground. That was history, a discipline requiring in his view a type of thinking that had either been ignored by his philosophical contemporaries or else misconceived and distorted by those who had troubled to consider it. Thus, as a result of making a serious effort on his own account to come to terms with what it involved, he became—in his own words at the time—‘more and more conscious of being an outlaw’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.3 (2002) 223-243 [Access article in PDF] Style, Rhetoric, and Postmodern Culture Bradford Vivian Modern rhetoricians habitually avoid the canon of style. The reasons for this avoidance should be familiar to those versed in the disciplinary lore of rhetoric. Since the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. E., when oratorical virtuosos like Gorgias proclaimed that "Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the (...) finest and most invisible body effects the divinest works" (41), the suspicion that rhetorical style amounts to irrational verbal excess has dogged those who would argue for the moral integrity of the art. Most recently, twentieth-century rhetoricians, Toulmin (1958) and Perelman (1969, 1979, 1982) in particular, realigned rhetoric with the study of argumentation after its apparent reduction, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to innocuous matters of form and taste by the elocutionist and belletristic movements. Consequently, the aesthetic capacities of rhetoric have received scant attention from modern rhetoricians, who resign considerations of style largely to supposedly regrettable episodes in the history of the discipline. For better or worse, then, modern rhetorical theory lacks a contemporary rationale and methodology for the study of style. 1Beyond unfortunate equations of rhetoric with grandiloquence, this scarcity in recent rhetorical scholarship corresponds to general humanistic and social scientific prejudices against the topic of style. Robert Hariman posits, "Established academic conceptions of style hardly prepare one to take seriously the aesthetic dimension of political experience" (7). As evidence for this claim, he cites Stuart Ewen's reflections on the "frustration" peculiar to research on style: "It seemed to be a universal category," Ewen writes, "transcending topical boundaries, an accolade applied to people, places, attitudes and things... a subject that was, at best, amorphous" (quoted in Hariman, 7-8). Yet the social ubiquity of style—"[o]n news magazines, sports magazines, music-oriented magazines, magazines about [End Page 223] fashion, architecture and interior design, automobiles, and sex"—indicates that it offers "a key to understanding the contours of contemporary culture" (qtd. in Hariman, 7-8). Hence, the paradox of style as a scholarly topic: that which exhibits its cultural importance makes it seem intellectually vacuous.Hariman's treatise on political style offers the most noteworthy attempt in rhetorical studies to remedy these trends; brief consideration of his insights will suggest further objectives for the study of rhetoric and style. 2 In Hariman's estimation, "style ultimately is a significant dimension of every human experience" because "relations of control and autonomy are negotiated through the artful composition of speech, gesture, ornament, decor, and any other means for modulating perception and shaping response. In a word, our political experience is styled" (3, 2). The distinctive contribution of rhetorical inquiry into political style involves "understanding the dynamics of our social experience or the relationship between rhetorical appeals and political decisions" rather than merely "cataloging discursive forms in the artistic text alone" (Hariman, 8).Accordingly, Hariman acknowledges that one must recognize the substantive social and political influences of style apart from its traditional connotations of individual artistic performance. "In this context," he explains, "although style still highlights aesthetic reactions it no longer enforces artistic autonomy. Style becomes an analytic category for understanding a social reality; in order to understand the social reality of politics, we can consider how political action involves acting according to a particular political style" (9). Thus, for Hariman, rhetorical choices in political style need not amount to a valorization of "artistic autonomy": "each political style draws on universal elements of the human condition and symbolic repertoire but organizes them into a limited, customary set of communicative designs... Each is thoroughly conventional, yet the means for personal improvisation and intelligent, innovate responses to unique problems" (11-12). His treatise therefore appears to dissociate style from its outmoded definitions while recommending the utility of rhetorical principles to the study of political culture.What Hariman calls the "cautious postmodernism" (6) of his project, however, hinders its innovative aspirations. The postmodern portion of his work endorses the study of style according to the aesthetic dimensions of social relations rather than "artistic autonomy" alone; but its... (shrink)

The development of art marketing as a new field of management occurs in a context of great confusion as to what constitutes the very definition of art, one aspect of this confusion being nothing else but the confusion between art and marketing itself. This confusion leads to conflicts between those who consider that art should be defined by a clear aesthetic criterion and those who accept the absence of such a criterion as a legitimate consequence of the principle (...) of freedom which applies both to the creation of the artist and to the taste of the public. This state of confusion does not seem to be experienced in the same way in France where it has tended to be considered as a symptom of crisis in the world of art and in the United States where it has raised as a dominant force in contemporary art. Hence the confusion of art and marketing varies as a function of time (as shown by the emergence of a new field of management) and of space (as shown by the comparison of the French and American cases). It will be proposed that it is possible to account for these historical fluctuation thanks to an institutional approach based on the notion of system of legitimacy. We shall propose the essentially dynamic institutional foundations of modernity leading to the proliferation of innovations which consequences are ever more difficult to anticipate as a reason why, in America, philosophers coming from the analytic tradition found it meaningful to address questions such as “What is art” (Arthur Danto) or “When is there art” (Nelson Goodman”) expressing the need to go beyond pragmatism as expressed by John Dewey’s Art as Experience to promote a positive attitude towards contemporary art, while, in France confusion between art and marketing has been commonly considered negatively as the sign of the triumph of the most radical form of rhetoric, i.e. sophism. (shrink)

W. H. Walsh argued that historians used colligatory terms to describe historical change, and defined such terms as those which relate a group of events by a common idea or value. The colligatory term identifies a general relationship among singular events. Events give concrete expression to the ideas shared by the people who initiated them. Thus, colligatory terms, such as "French Revolution," are always singular proper nouns, rather than general classifications. However, in addition to common ideas, colligatory terms are (...) used to describe the form of the historical change. Terms like "revolution" and "renaissance" do convey meaning when applied generally. Colligatory terms, then, can relate formal structures as well as dispositional. attitudes, and can function both as general classifications and as singular entities. (shrink)

I do not want to be misunderstood as saying that the cultural situation I describe here caused Reagan, or that it typifies Reaganism, or that everything about it can be ascribed or referred back to the personality of Ronald Reagan. What I argue is that a particular situation within the field we call "criticism" is not merely related to but is an integral part of the currents of thought and practice that play a role within the Reagan era. Moreover, I (...) think, "criticism" and the traditional academic humanities have gone through a series of developments over time whose beneficiary and culmination is Reaganism. Those are the gross claims that I make for my argument.A number of miscellaneous points need to be made here. I am fully aware that any effort to characterize the present cultural moment is very likely to seem quixotic at best, unprofessional at worst. But that, I submit, is an aspect of the present cultural moment, in which the social and historical setting of critical activity is a totality felt to be benign , uncharacterizable as a whole and somehow outside history. Thus it seems to me that one thing to be tried–out of sheer critical obstinacy–is precisely that kind of generalization, that kind of political portrayal, that kind of overview condemned by the present dominant culture to appear inappropriate and doomed from the start.It is my conviction that culture works very effectively to make invisible and even "impossible" the actual affiliations that exist between the world of ideas and scholarship on the one hand, and the world of brute politics, corporate and state power, and military force, on the other. The cult of expertise and professionalism, for example, has so restricted our scope of vision that a positive doctrine of noninterference among fields has set in. This doctrine has it that the general public is best left ignorant, and the most crucial policy questions affecting human existence are best left to "experts," specialists who talk about their specialty only, and–to use the word first given wide social approbation by Walter Lippman in Public Opinion and The Phantom Public–"insiders," people who are endowed with the special privilege of knowing how things really work and, more important, of being close to power1.1. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century , pp. 180-85 and 212-6. (shrink)

One of the central tenets of mainstream economics is Adam Smith's proposition that, given certain conditions, self-interested behavior by individuals leads them to the social good, almost as if orchestrated by an invisible hand. This deep insight has, over the past two centuries, been taken out of context, contorted, and used as the cornerstone of free-market orthodoxy. In Beyond the Invisible Hand, Kaushik Basu argues that mainstream economics and its conservative popularizers have misrepresented Smith's insight and hampered our (...) understanding of how economies function, why some economies fail and some succeed, and what the nature and role of state intervention might be. Comparing this view of the invisible hand with the vision described by Kafka--in which individuals pursuing their atomistic interests, devoid of moral compunction, end up creating a world that is mean and miserable--Basu argues for collective action and the need to shift our focus from the efficient society to one that is also fair. Using analytic tools from mainstream economics, the book challenges some of the precepts and propositions of mainstream economics. It maintains that, by ignoring the role of culture and custom, traditional economics promotes the view that the current system is the only viable one, thereby serving the interests of those who do well by this system. Beyond the Invisible Hand challenges readers to fundamentally rethink the assumptions underlying modern economic thought and proves that a more equitable society is both possible and sustainable, and hence worth striving for. By scrutinizing Adam Smith's theory, this impassioned critique of contemporary mainstream economics debunks traditional beliefs regarding best economic practices, self-interest, and the social good. (shrink)

During the past century and a half historians and sociologists have often shown signs of considerable simplicity of mind when assessing the motivating forces behind the men whose deeds they are studying, and those attaining the most flattering notoriety in the intellectual world have been among the simplest. From the early nineteenth century, beginning with the fall of Napoleon, there is a tendency to present the historical disciplines as sciences: the re-creative anecdote is greeted with increasing disdain, and sociology (...) undergoes its act of baptism. The Revolution of 1789 and the epic of imperial France are events of such dimension that it is difficult to associate them with the conscious designs of a few individuals. No longer a muse, Clio becomes a goddess. In War and Peace Tolstoi ironically treats historians of the old school who pretend to offer the key to the Revolution “in exposing the deeds and gestures of a few dozen men in one building in the city of Paris.” The French emperor's gallop into Russia and the stubborn but apparently passive resistance offered by Kutuzov—these are facts in which Tolstoi sees the manifestation of forces far surpassing the play of a few human wills. Tolstoi's manner in extolling Kutuzov is typical: Kutuzov is not a visionary; he shows no signs of genius, but with humble and patient fervor he turns aside all obstacles which might stifle the voice of popular instinct. Thirty years before Tolstoi, in a letter to his fiancée, Georg Büchner stated the case in another good example of this type of thinking: “I have studied the history of the Revolution. … I find in human nature a frightening equality, in the condition of man an ineluctable power conferred at once upon all and upon no one. The individual is but a fleck of foam upon the wave, greatness merely the result of chance, the power of genius a puppet show, a ridiculous struggle against a law of iron.” Men are interesting insofar as they are representative. Saint-Simon, mentor of Auguste Comte and father of sociology, declares that the great men of the world merely play the role assigned to them in historical evolution. According to Saint-Simon, the sixteenth century, an age of theology, gave birth to theologian-kings: Charles V and Henry VIII. Because he is a theologian, Henry VIII easily prevails over gallant and witty Francis I. The eighteenth century, a siècle of philosophy, “counts but two great names among its sovereigns: Catherine and Frederick the Great, friends of philosophers and patrons of philosophy.” Seen in this light, the features of the individual become blurred and shadowy. History is admired instead— history which, often with material of mediocre quality, builds solid edifices. But, faced with the astonishing drama played out by Napoleon himself, Tolstoi merely shrugs his shoulders, while following step by step simple men like Tostopchin or Kutuzov, who are obviously the mere instruments of history. Heine, who went through a Saint-Simonian phase, is amazed that Luther, that rough, gross monk whose brain was clouded by anxiety and superstition, so easily wielded the battering ram that shattered the old medieval world. In the 1830’s Auguste Comte foresees a “history without proper names,” a definition which is of prime importance in the analysis we are undertaking here. But, a hundred years later, Maxime Leroy, nourished on both Comte and Sainte-Beuve, draws more subtly shaded definitions: history becomes a “sociology containing proper names.”. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a prehistory of the recent metaphilosophical research and provide an overview of its most important areas. I review the ways of understanding of philosophy by the authors of the Early Modernity and contemporary continental philosophers and outline a trajectory of metaphilosophical discussions in analytic philosophy of 20th century. I try to show that the recent surge of metaphilosophy research in it could be explained by a search for a new identity of analytic philosophy after wide (...) disappointment in the “linguistic turn,” as well as after criticism of Quine and his followers of various aspects of the common method of conceptual analysis, and expansion of the field of inquiry. I argue that contemporary analytic philosophy is much closer to the classical and modern tradition than to the early analytic philosophy. And the most important question for contemporary metaphilosophers seems to be a question about possible substitutes of an old-fashioned conceptual analysis. Some authors propose to get rid of armchair methods at all and follow experimental line of research. This, however, could be destructive to the philosophy as a separate discipline. That’s why it is important to pay utmost attention to those philosophers who try to save armchair philosophy. As Timothy Williamson is one of the most interesting authors working in this vein, I asses his role in the recent metaphilosophical research. I give a brief review of his book “Doing Philosophy” (2018) and draw attention to the fact that its main ideas are briefly expressed in his paper “Armchair Philosophy”, published in this issue of the journal. I claim that the importance of Timothy Williamson’s work is best explained by its role in realizing that philosophers now have to make a hard choice between dissolving philosophical methodology in methods of experimental sciences and trying to find way of justification of armchair philosophy. (shrink)