Plato presents us with two versions of the "third man" argument in the "parmenides": they occur in a tightly-knit passage of reasoning containing four arguments against the theory of forms (130e-133a). The orthodox interpretation is that both versions are attempts to show that certain basic tenets of the theory, including a one-over-many principle, form an inconsistent set. The author argues that this interpretation cannot be correct, since it renders incoherent the train of thought in the wider passage and is unable (...) to explain the occurrence of certain perceptual expressions within the first version of the "third man" argument. The author proposes an alternative reading of this version which avoids these difficulties. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople high in social anxiety experience fear of social situations due to the likelihood of social evaluation. Whereas happy faces are generally processed very quickly, this effect is impaired by high social anxiety. Mouth regions are implicated during emotional face processing, therefore differences in mouth salience might affect how social anxiety relates to emotional face discrimination. We designed an emotional facial expression recognition task to reveal how varying levels of sub-clinical social anxiety related to the discrimination of happy and fearful (...) faces, and of happy and angry faces. We also categorised the facial expressions by the salience of the mouth region. In a sample of 90 participants higher social anxiety was associated with a reduced happy face reaction time advantage. However, this effect was mainly driven by the faces with less salient closed mouths. Our results are... (shrink)

Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential A Theory of Justice, this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective.

Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? In this book, the author argues that the past originates from an experience of rupture separating past and present. Think of the radical rupture with Europe's past that was effected by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Sublime Historical Experience investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge. These experiences of (...) rupture are paradoxical since they involve both the separation of past and present and, at the same time, the effort to overcome this separation in terms of historical knowledge. The experience unites feelings of loss/pain with those of love/satisfaction, and thus is in agreement with how sublime experience is ordinarily defined. The experience is also precognitive since it precedes historical knowledge. As such it is a challenge to traditional conceptions of the relationship between experience and truth or language. It compels us to disconnect the notions of experience and truth. (shrink)

"The chief business of twentieth-century philosophy” is “to reckon with twentieth-century history," claimed R. G. Collingwood. In this remarkable collection of essays, Frank Ankersmit demonstrates the prescience of that remark and goes a long way toward meeting its challenge. Responding to the work of Hayden White, Arthur Danto, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, he examines such issues as the difference between historical representation and artistic expression, the status of metaphor in historical description, and the relation of postmodernism to historicism. Ankersmit's fluent grasp (...) of European thought and his ability to incorporate concepts from literary theory, art history, the philosophy of science, and political thought into his analyses assure that this collection will interest readers throughout the humanities. (shrink)

The vocabulary of representation is better suited to an understanding of historiography than the vocabularies of description and interpretation. Since both art and historiography represent the world, they are closer to science than are criticism and the history of art because the interpretation of meaning is the specialty of the latter two fields. Historiography is less secure in its attempt to represent the world than art is; historiography is more artificial, more an expression of cultural codes than art itself. Historiography (...) is a suitable paradigm for studying certain philosophical problems, particularly epistemology, or codified representation. Representation always requires the presence of two sets of non-referential logical dummies; disturbing the symmetry between these logical dummies gives rise to the position of realism and idealism. Epistemology is strongly inclined to disturb this symmetry. The parallels between recent developments in art and those in historiography demonstrate how much historiography is part of the contemporary cultural world. The deficiencies of modern philosophy of history can largely be explained by its tendency to neglect the cultural significance of the writing of history. (shrink)

We no longer have any texts, any past, but just interpretations of them. The evident multi -interpretability of a text causes it gradually to lose its capacity to function as arbiter in the historical debate. It is necessary to define a new link with the past based on a complete and honest recognition of the position in which we now see ourselves placed as historians. In recent years, many people have observed our changed attitude towards the phenomenon of information. For (...) postmodernism, science and information are independent objects of study which obey their own laws. Language and art are not situated opposite reality but are themselves a pseudo-reality and are therefore situated within reality. Because of the relation between the historiographical view and the language used by the historian to express his view - a relation which nowhere intersects the domain of the past -historiography possesses the same opacity and intensional dimension as art. The essence of postmodernism is precisely that we should avoid pointing out essentialist patterns in the past. There is reason to assume that our relation to the past and our insight into it will in future be of a metaphorical nature rather than a literal one. (shrink)

The narrativist philosophy of history and the epistemological philosophy of history are opposed to each other and have remarkably little in common. Within the epistemological philosophy, the debate between the coveringlaw model advocates and the analytical hermeneutists has always been moving towards synthesis more than towards perpetuation of the disagreement. But the revolution from epistemological to narrativist philosophy of history enacted in Hayden White's work made the philosophy of history finally catch up with the developments in philosophy since the works (...) of Quine, Kuhn, and Rorty. White stresses the "making" or "poetic" function of narrative at the expense of the "matching" function so dear to the mimetic epistemology of positivism. Philosophers of history should shake off this positivistic past and make history narrativist. (shrink)

This book is the 1906 second edition of the Hulsean Lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge between 1901 and 1902. In these four lectures, F. R. Tennant challenges conventional teachings on Original Sin and the story of the Fall, arguing that his contemporaries had misinterpreted the biblical presentation of sin and its manifestations. Tennant aims to redefine the sin of both the race and the individual, and in doing so engages with traducianism and the philosophies of Malebranche, Kant and (...) Hegel. He argues that action predates modern conceptions of right and wrong, and that transgression is only sin if the actor is aware of what is morally right. Of course, these theories were met with great opposition, an opposition which Tennant uses the preface of this second edition to confront. These fascinating lectures and their appendages will be of great interest to scholars of Christian theology and the fin de siècle alike. (shrink)

Este artículo trata de la estancia en Italia del traductor del árabe Diego de Urrea, que pasó los últimos años de su vida en Nápoles. Su relación con círculos eruditos italianos, como el del príncipe Federico Cesi y su Accademia dei Lincei, a la que perteneció Galileo, pone de relieve algunos de los rasgos característicos del «orientalismo» italiano de la época, y sus relaciones y diferencias con lo que ocurría en España a comienzos de s. XVII, cuando el asunto de (...) los Plomos del Sacromonte ejerció un papel fundamental en la definición de la lengua y la historia árabes dentro de la historia de España. (shrink)

Originally published in 1937 as part of the 'Yesterday and Today in Germany' series for Cambridge Contact Readers, this German text describes a fantasy tour around Germany taken by David Hanes, the fictional English schoolchild from the first instalment, now an Oxford undergraduate. David now corresponds with a number of German friends during his trip, and learns more about German traditions and ways of life. The text is illustrated with valuable photographs of inter-war German life, as well as maps, charts (...) and sheet music. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Germany and the history of German teaching in Britain. (shrink)

There are no dictionary meanings or authoritative discussions of "presence" that fix the significance of this word in a way that ought to be accepted by anybody using it. So we are in the welcome possession of great freedom to maneuver when using the term. In fact, the only feasible requirement for its use is that it should maximally contribute to our understanding of the humanities. When trying to satisfy this requirement I shall relate "presence" to representation. Then I focus (...) on a variant of representation in which the past is allowed to travel to the present as a kind of "stowaway" , so that the past is literally "present" in historical representation. I appeal to Runia's notion of so-called "parallel processes" for an analysis of this variant of historical representation. (shrink)

Philosophy of history is the Cinderella of contemporary philosophy. Philosophers rarely believe that the issues dealt with by philosophers of history are matters of any great theoretical interest or urgency. In their view philosophy of history rarely goes beyond the question of how results that have already been achieved elsewhere can or should be applied to the domain of historical writing. Moreover, contemporary philosophers of history have done desperately little to dispel the low opinion that their colleagues have of them. (...) In this essay I argue that Arthur Danto is the exception confirming the rule, for Danto’s philosophy of representation may help us understand how texts relate to what they are about. The main shortcoming of philosophy of language undoubtedly is that it never bothered to investigate the philosophical mysteries of the text. The writing of history is a philosophical goldmine and we must praise Danto for having reminded us of this. (shrink)

Forgetting has rarely been investigated in historical theory. Insofar as it attracted the attention of theorists at all, forgetting has ordinarily been considered to be a defect in our relationship to the past that should be overcome in one way or another. The only exception is Nietzsche who so provocatively sung the praises of forgetting in his On the Use and Abuse of History . But Nietzsche's conception is the easy victim of a consistent historicism and therefore in need of (...) correction. Four types of forgetting are identified in this essay. Central in the essay's argument is the fourth type. This is the kind of forgetting taking place when a civilization "commits suicide" by exchanging a previous identity for a new one. Hegel's moving account of the conflict between Socrates and the Athenian state is presented as the paradigmatic example of this kind of forgetting. Two conclusions follow from an analysis of this type of forgetting. First, we can now understand what should be recognized as a civilization's historical sublime and how the notions of the historical sublime and of collective trauma are related. Second, it follows that myth and history do not exclude each other; on the contrary, history creates myth. This should not be taken to be a defect of history, for this is precisely how it should be. (shrink)

That narrative language has the ontological status of being an object; that it is opaque; that it is self-referential; that it is intentional and, hence, intrinsically aestheticist; that the narrative meaning of an text is undecidable in an important sense of that word and even bears the marks of self-contradiction; that narrative meaning can only be identified in the presence of other meaning ; that as far as narrative meaning is concerned the text refers, but not to a reality outside (...) itself; that criteria of truth and falsity do not apply to historical representations of the past; that we can only properly speak of causes and effects at the level of the statement; that narrative language is metaphorical and as such embodies a proposal for how we should see the past; that narrative representations of the past have a tendency to disintegrate; all these postmodernist claims can be given a formal or even "modernist" justification if we are prepared to develop a philosophical logic suitable for dealing with the narrative substance. (shrink)

Historians rarely agree with Hayden White's account of their discipline. To a certain extent their dissatisfaction can be explained by the fact that historians customarily distrust historical theory and always tend to look at the historical theorist with the greatest suspicion. But historians find an extra argument for their dislike of White's ideas in his alleged cavalier disregard of how historical facts limit what the historian might wish to say about the past. And, admittedly, this criticism is not wholly unfounded.Nevertheless, (...) this essay attempts to show how misguided this traditional criticism of White actually is. For it is historians who too easily take the truth of their accounts of the past for granted, whereas White's theoretical writings can be shown to express a full awareness of the kind of problem encountered in the effort to tell the truth about historical reality. Hence, White's writings-rather than those by historians criticizing White-testify to the respect that we owe to historical reality itself. That this is how we should read White becomes clear if we consider his intellectual evolution as a whole rather than the individual books or essays that he wrote. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Origins of the Contemporary Debate Historiographic Research and Writing Two Variants of Narrativist Philosophy of Historiography The Philosophical Approach The Transcendentalization of Narrativist Philosophy of Historiography Rhetorical Narrativist Philosophy Hayden White Conclusion Bibliography.

There are no dictionary meanings or authoritative discussions of "presence" that fix the significance of this word in a way that ought to be accepted by anybody using it. So we are in the welcome possession of great freedom to maneuver when using the term. In fact, the only feasible requirement for its use is that it should maximally contribute to our understanding of the humanities. When trying to satisfy this requirement I shall relate "presence" to representation. Then I focus (...) on a variant of representation in which the past is allowed to travel to the present as a kind of "stowaway", so that the past is literally "present" in historical representation. I appeal to Runia's notion of so-called "parallel processes" for an analysis of this variant of historical representation. (shrink)