The author shows that conceptions of rationality in current theories of science and law can account for neither the legitimacy of paradigm shifts nor the communitarian integrity internal to paradigms generally. He proposes an alternative conception of rationality that does.

(1998). Speculative imagination and the problem of legitimation: On David Ingram's Reason, History, and Politics: The communitarian grounds of Legitimation in the modern age. Social Epistemology: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 117-126.

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

Reason in History provides theoretical clarity and conceptual analysis that is well a propos, considering the potential and actual societal changes we are witnessing. Has there ever been or can there be a structural change that would thereby reveal an internal dynamic in African societies? For us, the elements determining the forms and law of social changes are less interesting than the possibility of change itself. Is change universal of just a property of a certain type of social totality? (...) Hegel's theories seem to do Africa justice or simply match the true reality of traditional African societies. Africa is not and has never been static. The book also fosters a greater appreciation of the grandeur and complexity of Hegel's dialectic: he is still judging our world despite what postmodernist scholars and ethnophilosophers think. (shrink)

This article offers a defense of the theoretical foundations of Conceptual History. While Conceptual History has successfully established itself as an historical discipline, details in the philosophy of language that underpin Conceptual History continue to be opaque. Specifically the definition of what constitutes a “basic concept” remains problematic. Reinhart Koselleck famously claimed that basic concepts are “more than words,” but he never spelled out how these abstract entities relate to words or can be subject to semantic transformation. (...) I argue that to clarify the definition of what constitutes a basic concept we should turn to the functionalist and inferentialist philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. By viewing historical sources as partaking in what Sellars calls the ‘game of giving and asking for reasons,’ Conceptual History can accurately trace the semantic changes of basic concepts and thus offer an important tool to the historical discipline. (shrink)

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

First published in 1962, Reason and Imagination presents collection of fourteen essays dedicated to Marjorie Hope Nicholson and is divided equally between works of her colleagues and of her former students. It contains themes like noble numbers and poetry of devotion, Cromwell as Davidic King, the isolation of the renaissances hero, Milton's dialogue on Astronomy, music, mirth and galenic traditions in England, the Augustan conception of history, Locke and Sterne, and literary criticism and artistic interpretation, to weave a narrative (...) of the history of ideas in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This book will be an essential read for scholars and researchers of literary history, philosophy, comparative literature, and English literature in general. (shrink)

This essay argues that Herder’s conception of history as a form of natural growth is grounded in his claim that humans are a part of nature and develop historically situated forms of reason in communication with the features of their natural and social environments. By stressing this developmental aspect of human reason, Herder not only helps us to correct an overly universalistic conception of reason that ignores the importance of situational contexts in the shaping of cognitive structures; he also (...) allows us to comprehend that the very capacity that has traditionally been seen as distinguishing humans from all other animals—namely human reason—evolves out of a capacity we share with them, namely the capacity to adapt to specific environmental demands. (shrink)

Examines rationality from Aristotle to Foucault, seeking to place reason in a historical context within the Western tradition.

This paper re-examines the relationship between power, reason and history in Horkheimer and Adorno’s "Dialectic of Enlightenment." Contesting Habermas’ highly influential reading of the text, I argue that "Dialectic of Enlightenment," far from being a dead-end for critical theory, opens up important lines of thought in the philosophy of history that contemporary critical theorists would do well to recover. My focus is on the relationship that Horkheimer and Adorno trace between enlightenment rationality and the domination of inner and (...) outer nature. (shrink)

This review-essay examines Martin Jay’s The Eclipse of Reason: On Late Critical Theory with a view toward understanding the stakes of its interpretative approach to intellectual history. I show how Jay's book aims to provide much more than a mere history of reason, for it seeks to legitimate and resuscitate an idea of reason in the face of more than one hundred years of anti-rationalist thought. I contend that Jay offers Habermas’s intersubjective rationality as both an alternative to, (...) but also in some sense a continuation of, the dominant forms of subjectivist and objectivist rationality Jay documents in his book. According to the logic of Jay’s account, then, Habermas represents in some sense the fulfillment of the history of Western rationality. My only critique of an otherwise excellent and fascinating study is that Jay’s Frankfurt School-centric narrative effectively inhibits a larger discussion of Habermas’s relevance to recent and current debates about the direction of philosophy. An elaboration specifically of the post-structuralist critique of reason would have greatly enhanced our understanding of the place of "late Critical Theory" in the intellectual landscape of our time. (shrink)

According to the received view, Charles S. Peirce's theory of diagrammatic reasoning is derived from Kant's philosophy of mathematics. For Kant, only mathematics is constructive/synthetic, logic being instead discursive/analytic, while for Peirce, the entire domain of necessary reasoning, comprising mathematics and deductive logic, is diagrammatic, i.e. constructive in the Kantian sense. This shift was stimulated, as Peirce himself acknowledged, by the doctrines contained in Friedrich Albert Lange's Logische Studien (1877). The present paper reconstructs Peirce's reading of Lange's book, (...) and illustrates what, according to Peirce, was right and what was problematic in Lange's account of reasoning. It further seeks to explain how Peirce's theory of deductive reasoning was a combination of Kant's philosophy of mathematics and Lange's philosophy of logic. (shrink)

Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics also offers a reappraisal of basic political principles and constructs. Barnard argues for bridging differences among a plurality of truths and forming practical judgments through cultivation of a sense of situational appropriateness.

In most areas of medicine, the physician's primary task is to diagnose the patient's presenting problem by correctly identifying the underlying pathology causing that problem. Diagnoses are established through a process of correlating the information obtained from an interview with the patient about his history of illness and circumstances, with additional evidence of the underlying disease derived from physical examination findings and/or the results of laboratory investigations and diagnostic imaging. In contemporary health care, various movements that call for a (...) shift in clinical care away from underlying disease pathology toward understanding people and their experience of disease are receiving growing... (shrink)

It is often suggested that to make progress in consciousness science we need a theory of consciousness—one that tells us what consciousness is and what kinds of systems can have it. But this may be putting the cart before the horse. There are currently a wide range of very different theories all claiming to be theories of consciousness. How are we to decide between them if we do not already know which systems are conscious and what they are conscious of? (...) In this paper I aim to do two things. First, I explain why a theory‐driven approach to consciousness science, even one sensitive to Lakatosian norms and updating in a Bayesian manner, may lead to divergence rather than convergence. Second, I draw on the history of thermometry and natural kind reasoning to sketch a theory‐neutral route towards progress in consciousness science. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the development of geometric cognition. We argue that to understand how geometric cognition has been constituted, one must appreciate not only individual cognitive factors, such as phylogenetically ancient and ontogenetically early core cognitive systems, but also the social history of the spread and use of cognitive artifacts. In particular, we show that the development of Greek mathematics, enshrined in Euclid’s Elements, was driven by the use of two tightly intertwined cognitive artifacts: the use (...) of lettered diagrams; and the creation of linguistic formulae. Together, these artifacts formed the professional language of geometry. In this respect, the case of Greek geometry clearly shows that explanations of geometric reasoning have to go beyond the confines of methodological individualism to account for how the distributed practice of artifact use has stabilized over time. This practice, as we suggest, has also contributed heavily to the understanding of what mathematical proof is; classically, it has been assumed that proofs are not merely deductively correct but also remain invariant over various individuals sharing the same cognitive practice. Cognitive artifacts in Greek geometry constrained the repertoire of admissible inferential operations, which made these proofs inter-subjectively testable and compelling. By focusing on the cognitive operations on artifacts, we also stress that mental mechanisms that contribute to these operations are still poorly understood, in contrast to those mechanisms which drive symbolic logical inference. (shrink)

Philosophers over the course of the last century, including Edmund Husserl, Chaim Perelman, and Jacques Derrida, have attempted to unravel the tangled relationship between the rational and the reasonable in order to understand how the history of thought progresses. Critical political theorists, including Michel Foucault and Ernesto Laclau have also investigated this issue from a range of perspectives, especially as it relates to the relationship between ideational limits and their transgression and the universal and the particular. This essay compares (...) these perspectives to locate the rational dimensions of the reasonable, and to relate that “meta-reason” to the irrational and unreasonable aspects of identity formation and the unfolding of world history. (shrink)

T. A. Cavanaugh defends double-effect reasoning (DER), also known as the principle of double effect. DER plays a role in anti-consequentialist ethics (such as deontology), in hard cases in which one cannot realize a good without also causing a foreseen, but not intended, bad effect (for example, killing non-combatants when bombing a military target). This study is the first book-length account of the history and issues surrounding this controversial approach to hard cases. It will be indispensable in theoretical (...) ethics, applied ethics (especially medical and military), and moral theology. It will also interest legal and public policy scholars. (shrink)

. Reason’s genuine historicity: the establishment of a history of philosophy as a philosophical sub-discipline in Marburg Neo-Kantianism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 29, Special Issue: Historical Thought in German Neo-Kantianism, Guest Editors: Katherina Kinzel and Lydia Patton, pp. 694-717.

Network analysis is increasingly appreciated as a methodology in the social sciences. In recent years, it is also receiving attention among historians of science. History of economics is no exception in that researchers have begun to use network analysis to study a variety of topics, including collaborations and interactions in scientific communities, the spread of economic theories within and across fields, or the formation of new specialties in the discipline of economics. Against this backdrop, a debate is emerging about (...) how network analysis can help address questions that are pertinent to the history of economics. With this paper, we want to push this debate one step forward by offering and discussing five reasons why network analysis should have a future in the history of economics. (shrink)

From sex and music to religion and politics, a history of irrationality and the ways in which it has always been with us—and always will be In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump, Justin Smith argues that irrationality makes up the greater part of human life and history. Ranging across philosophy, politics, and current events, he shows that, throughout history, every triumph of reason has (...) been temporary and reversible, and that rational schemes often result in their polar opposite. Illuminating unreason at a moment when the world appears to have gone mad again, Irrationality is timely, provocative, and fascinating. (shrink)

Mathematics used to be portrayed as a deductive science. Stemming from Polya, however, is a philosophical movement which broadens the concept of mathematical reasoning to include inductive or quasi-empirical methods. Interest in inductive methods is a welcome turn from foundationalism toward a philosophy grounded in mathematical practice. Regrettably, though, the conception of mathematical reasoning embraced by quasi-empiricists is still too narrow to include the sort of thought-experiment which Mueller describes as traditional mathematical proof and which Lakatos examines in (...) Proofs and refutations. This paper extends the concept of mathematical reasoning along two further dimensions to accommodate thought-experiment.Keywords: Thought-experiment; Informal proof; Mathematical reasoning. (shrink)

For most of its history, the psychology of reasoning was dominated by binary extensional logic. The so-called “new paradigm” instead puts subjective degrees of belief center stage, often represented as probabilities. We argue that the “new paradigm” is too vaguely defined and therefore does not allow a clear decision about what falls within its scope and what does not. We also show that there was not one settled theoretical “old” paradigm, before the new developments emerged, and that the (...) alleged new paradigm is less revolutionary as the term suggests. A more veridical view is that current progress is developing in continuities where rival research programs can thrive or fail in the face of new experimental findings. The article closes with some topics where more connections between competing research programs are likely to promote progress in our understanding of human reasoning. (shrink)

The incredible achievements of modern scientific theories lead most of us to embrace scientific realism: the view that our best theories offer us at least roughly accurate descriptions of otherwise inaccessible parts of the world like genes, atoms, and the big bang. In Exceeding Our Grasp, Stanford argues that careful attention to the history of scientific investigation invites a challenge to this view that is not well represented in contemporary debates about the nature of the scientific enterprise. The historical (...) record of scientific inquiry, Stanford suggests, is characterized by what he calls the problem of unconceived alternatives. Past scientists have routinely failed even to conceive of alternatives to their own theories and lines of theoretical investigation, alternatives that were both well-confirmed by the evidence available at the time and sufficiently serious as to be ultimately accepted by later scientific communities. Stanford supports this claim with a detailed investigation of the mid-to-late 19th century theories of inheritance and generation proposed in turn by Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, and August Weismann. He goes on to argue that this historical pattern strongly suggests that there are equally well-confirmed and scientifically serious alternatives to our own best theories that remain currently unconceived. Moreover, this challenge is more serious than those rooted in either the so-called pessimistic induction or the underdetermination of theories by evidence, in part because existing realist responses to these latter challenges offer no relief from the problem of unconceived alternatives itself. Stanford concludes by investigating what positive account of the spectacularly successful edifice of modern theoretical science remains open to us if we accept that our best scientific theories are powerful conceptual tools for accomplishing our practical goals, but abandon the view that the descriptions of the world around us that they offer are therefore even probably or approximately true. (shrink)

In this theological essay, Grant Kaplan revisits the key figures and debates that shape how faith and reason relate. Divided into three parts, Kaplan invites readers into a conversation that has helped to shape Christianity and modern civilization. Readers will encounter the words and arguments of some of Christianity's greatest thinkers, some well-known (Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Newman) and others nearly forgotten. Readings of these fifty figures bring them to life in an accessible manner for a range of audiences: theologians and (...) philosophers, instructors, graduate students, seminarians, lay study groups, and undergraduate theology majors. Rather than simply summarizing their thought, Kaplan traces their arguments through key texts. (shrink)

This paper depicts Ian Hacking’s ‘styles of reasoning’ as conditions of possibility. After distinguishing between possibilities and causes, it articulates the implicit stratigraphical metaphor used to describe the relationship between different conditions of possibility, with ‘lower’ layers being necessary for ‘higher’ ones. It notes the use of this stratigraphical metaphor in the work of multiple scholars in history and in science studies. The paper suggests three ways in which this model can be useful: clarifying the definition and use (...) of ‘context’ in history of science; redefining counterfactuals as ‘possible historical worlds’; and thinking up new forms of ‘big picture’ histories of science. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION TO THE ARGUMENT AND ITS HISTORY PRIOR TO THE AND CENTURIES In the history of ideas, there is an argument that has been used repeatedly, ...

In psychiatry, pharmacological drugs play an important experimental role in attempts to identify the neurobiological causes of mental disorders. Besides being developed in applied contexts as potential treatments for patients with mental disorders, pharmacological drugs play a crucial role in research contexts as experimental instruments that facilitate the formulation and revision of neurobiological theories of psychopathology. This paper examines the various epistemic functions that pharmacological drugs serve in the discovery, refinement, testing, and elaboration of neurobiological theories of mental disorders. I (...) articulate this thesis with reference to the history of antipsychotic drugs and the evolution of the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia in the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that interventions with psychiatric patients through the medium of antipsychotic drugs provide researchers with information and evidence about the neurobiological causes of schizophrenia. This analysis highlights the importance of pharmacological drugs as research tools in the generation of psychiatric knowledge and the dynamic relationship between practical and theoretical contexts in psychiatry. (shrink)

The great age of Russian philosophy spans the century between 1830 and 1930 - from the famous Slavophile-Westernizer controversy of the 1830s and 1840s, through the 'Silver Age' of Russian culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the formation of a Russian 'philosophical emigration' in the wake of the Russian Revolution. This volume is a major history and interpretation of Russian philosophy in this period. Eighteen chapters discuss Russian philosophy's main figures, schools and controversies, while simultaneously pursuing (...) a common central theme: the development of a distinctive Russian tradition of philosophical humanism focused on the defence of human dignity. As this volume shows, the century-long debate over the meaning and grounds of human dignity, freedom and the just society involved thinkers of all backgrounds and positions, transcending easy classification as 'religious' or 'secular'. The debate still resonates strongly today. (shrink)

This paper argues for the superiority of international law’s existing ban on unilateral secession over its reform to include either a primary or remedial right to secession. I begin by defending the claim that secession is an inherently institutional concept, and that therefore we ought to employ institutional moral reasoning to defend or criticize specific proposals regarding a right to secede. I then respond to the objection that at present we lack the empirical evidence necessary to sustain any specific (...) conclusion regarding an international legal right to secession. Specifically, I argue that we ought to adopt a precautionary approach, and that such an approach justifies giving no weight to promoting political self-determination per se when considering whether to reform international law governing secession. I conclude with several reasons to think that even a remedial right to unilateral secession will detract from, not enhance, the international legal order’s ability to promote peace and human rights. (shrink)

This book presents a contribution to the neglected branch of history of morals in a time when virtue has been lost, and moral disorder or vacuum has ensued. The study covers a very long period from Homer and Hesiod until the twelfth century of the Common Era.

I argue that Newtonian-style deduction-from-the-phenomena arguments should only carry conviction when they yield unexpectedly simple conclusions. That in that case they do establish higher rational probabilities for the theories they lead to than for any known or easily constructible rival theories. However I deny that such deductive justifications yield high absolute rational probabilities, and argue that the history of physics suggests that there are always other not-yet-known simpler theories with higher rational probabilities on all the original evidence, and that (...) these later turn out closer to the truth. My analyses rely on the modern Solomonoff-Levin solution to the problem of constructing a mathematically and philosophically acceptable inductive logic. (shrink)

In Pythagorean Women, classical scholar Sarah B. Pomeroy discusses the groundbreaking principles that Pythagoras established for family life in Archaic Greece, such as constituting a single standard of sexual conduct for women and men. Among the Pythagoreans, women played an important role and participated actively in the philosophical life. While Pythagoras encouraged women to be submissive to men, his reasoning was based on the desire to preserve harmony in the home. -/- Pythagorean Women provides English translations of all the (...) earliest extant examples of literary Greek prose by Neopythagorean women, shedding light on their attitudes about marriage, the home, music, and the cosmos. Pomeroy sets the Pythagorean and Neopythagorean women vividly in their historical, ecological, and intellectual contexts, illustrated with original photographs of sites and artifacts known to these women. (shrink)

This paper provides a short summary of Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Logic stands here as a subset of Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as a matter of the grammar of our concepts. It studies the forms of reasoning appropriate to a discipline, rather than the material of that discipline. Hence, the logic of the history of ideas considers the nature of meaning, the way we should justify our knowledge (...) of past meanings, and how we should explain things such as the existence of meanings, the beliefs people held, and conceptual change. (shrink)

The analytical notion of ‘scientific style of reasoning’, introduced by Ian Hacking in the middle of the 1980s, has become widespread in the literature of the history and philosophy of science. However, scholars have rarely made explicit the philosophical assumptions and the research objectives underlying the notion of style: what are its philosophical roots? How does the notion of style fit into the area of research of historical epistemology? What does a comparison between Hacking’s project on styles of (...) thinking and other similar projects suggest? My aim in this paper is to answer these questions. Hacking has denied that his project of styles of thinking falls into the field of historical epistemology. I shall challenge his remark by tracing out the connections of the notion of style with historical epistemology and, more in general, with a tradition of thought born in France in the beginning of twentieth-century. (shrink)