'Reply to my critics', in: Historein 2014 (14), nr.1 (original) (raw)
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The current proliferation and heated-discussion of the meaning and use of the expression “historical epistemology” in prevalently Anglophone domains (Feest & Sturm 2011; Hacking 1999) is anything but an ephemeral phenomenon introducing a transitory “brand into the market of ideas” (Gingras 2010). On the contrary, the discussion revolves around enduring difficulties in conceptualizing the correct or most fruitful interaction between history and philosophy of science. As I will argue, this recent questioning of historical epistemology can be retraced to the longstanding and prevalently Anglophone debate over the “marriage” between history and philosophy of science (Giere 1973). This debate arose in the 1960s (inter alia Hanson 1962; Kuhn 1962), picked up momentum at the beginning of the 1990s, and, thanks to renewed interest, continued on into the twenty-first century (Domski & Dickinson 2010; Laudan & Laudan 2016). My suggestion is that this renewed interest can be fruitfully framed within a French philosophical context. In particular, I will contrast the naturalizing trend prevalent in certain areas of the Anglophone debate (Laudan 1977; Giere 1988; Kitcher 2011) with the “normative turn” instantiated by French epistemology and by Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem in particular (Bachelard 1934; Canguilhem 2005). With this comparative study I hope to contribute to the ongoing discussion about the different ways of integrating history and philosophy of science.
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It has recently been argued that the philosophical study of professional history constitutes a subfield of epistemology. Consequently, the philosophy of history is cast as only one particular species of the general study of the relationship between evidence and theory in scientific practice. This view is based upon an absolute separation between substantive and critical philosophy of history. By such a separation, substantive philosophy of history is dismissed as speculative metaphysics, while critical philosophy of history is vindicated as a respectable branch of epistemology. The attempt to delineate a strictly epistemological realm of history was a central part of the programme for analytically styled philosophy of history in the 1950–1970s era. This programme has been resurrected by contemporary empiricist trends. In this essay, I will argue against the basic ideas of this programme through a reassessment of Hayden White’s so-called narrativist philosophy of history. As I will show, criticizing the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology in history is an essential and important feature of White’s contribution to the philosophy of history. This feature has, I claim, been overshadowed by formalist interpretations of White’s ‘narrativism’. In conclusion, I argue that White’s concept of prefiguration will fundamentally question the viability of current attempts to develop a purely epistemological philosophy of history.
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In ´The Primacy of Method in Historical Research: Philosophy of History and the Per- spective of Meaning´, Jonas Ahlskog presents a critical and lucid engagement with con- temporary philosophies of history and makes a sustained case for a return to the ideas of history and social science as developed by R. G. Collingwood and Peter Winch. What philosophy needs again is, first, a recognition of the “primacy of method”—that is, the insight that what one knows about reality depends on how one knows it. Second, philoso- phers need to take “the duality of method” seriously again and to recognize that the modes of explanation in the human sciences and the natural sciences are categorically different from each other—especially now that this difference has been blurred in recent debates about the Anthropocene. Ahlskog’s book is thus also a contribution to the classical debate about causal explanation versus meaningful understanding. On closer analysis, however, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” on “historical method” suffer from an insufficient engagement with counterarguments. A first line of critique challenges the idea that human action cannot be explained causally. A second line of critique challenges the idea that all aspects of human action can be “understood,” because the unintended aspects and consequences of individual actions cannot. These require causal explanation. A third line of critique concerns Ahlskog’s denial of the fundamental plurality of ideas of history and the social sciences. Squeezing this plurality into one philosophical mold comes at a price. Unintentionally, Ahlskog’s “untimely meditations” also show that much. Keywords: philosophies of history, historical method, causal explanation and understand- ing, history and social science, irrelevance of time
Pragmatist Contributions to a New Philosophy of History
Pragmatist Contributions to a New Philosophy of History. This work is written from the perspective of a New Philosophy of History (NFH) and as such it is interested in promoting what has come to be known as linguistic self-awareness for those of us who are interested in the consequences of our linguistic adoptions be it from the perspective of history, of memorys studies or of philosophy of history. During the last forty years NFH has received criticism on diverse fronts on account of its alleged attack on history. This, in turn, is said to be due to its adoption of linguistic idealism and determinism, which would lead to skepticism regarding historical knowledge. Therefore, it is from the perspective of philosophy of history that I encourage a dialogue with the contributions made by a pragmatist approach to language and knowledge, specifically those born from the reflections on social and historical studies, as is the case with George Mead´s Social Behaviorism, and the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge lead by Barry Barnes, David Bloor and, more recently, Martin Kusch, who have not found a conflict between their sociolinguistic approximation to epistemology and their positive appraisal of history as science. Mead´s work has been widely recognized in the sociological research field, and Argentina has been a pioneer at it. Nevertheless, the consequences of his work for philosophy of history remain unexplored to our day, and are worthy not only of a full article, but also of recognizing Mead as a crucial reference in our century´s debates on historical knowledge. On the other hand, the Strong Programme, by pursuing and developing Kuhn´s Wittgenstenian roots, has been immensely prolific in its sociological and historical studies of science, but has encountered resistance in the field of philosophy of natural sciences. Just like the New Philosophy of History, it has been accused of favoring an attack on science: yet another form of obscurantism. In this paper, I shall try to show that this dialogue between pragmatism and NPH is not an attack on science, but on a certain form of philosophy engaged in a form of dualism between mind-world or language-reality, individual-society, an engagement which, in a pragmatist spirit, makes no difference in practice. This dialogue is an invitation to reflect on scientific practice with the same resources with which scientific practice carries its task in creative knowledge.
'Introduction to Explorations between philosophy and history', in: Historein vol.14 (2014), nr.1
Historein vol.14, nr.1 59-70, 2014
This introduction summarizes the basic ideas behind the articles collected in ‘Bordercrsossings’. The first basic idea is the idea that the writing of history has a ‘border crossing’ character, meaning that history writing involves border crossings 1. between history and philosophy, and 2. between history and ‚politics‘ in a broad sense. The second basic idea is that the dialectical mechanism of ‘inversion’ (of ‘negation’ and of ‘the unity of opposites’) is fundamental for our understanding of debates in philosophy of history and in historiography. The third idea is that interesting prejudices and other assumptions in both philosophy and in history are found by contrast, not by analysis (Feyerabend). Analysis of controversies is therefore the most fruitful point of departure in philosophy of history and in historiography. Because all key ideas in the humanities are ‘essentially contested concepts’ (Gallie) controversies are the ‘normal’ discursive condition in the humanities.
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History and philosophy complement and overlap each other in subject matter, but the two disciplines exhibit conflict over methodology. Since Hempel's challenge to historians that they should adopt the covering law model of explanation, the methodological conflict ...
A Pragmatist Critique of Dogmatic Philosophy of History
Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Humanities, 2017
The paper begins by introducing a heuristic distinction between the “dogmatist” and the “pragmatist” approaches to philosophy of history. Dogmatists tend to use history to exemplify and shore up their pre-existing philosophical convictions. Pragmatists, on the other hand, construe philosophy of history as a form of critical reflection on the actual historical practice, with epistemic criteria of proper practice emerging in the course of the research itself, not antecedently deduced from general philosophical considerations. The core of the paper discusses the work of Paul Roth, which is treated both as a specimen of the pragmatist mode of argumentation, and as a philosophical vindication, in the context of history, of the central pragmatist contention that we cannot successfully define knowledge in terms of a relation to reality, where reality is somehow understood independently and in advance of us knowing it. It is argued that Roth’s skillful deployment of arguments emerging from the recent philosophy of science to expose naïve realism in philosophy of history as a vestige of the no-longer-tenable philosophical vision opens a way for thinking productively about history as a complex and evolving form of research practice.