Three eminent scientists analyze the scientific, social, and political roots of biological determinism.

A collection of papers dealing with history as a way of knowing, not a mode of discourse.

Is it possible not to have a sense of the historical? I remember how surprised I was when I first saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and how I had no doubt that the people who lived and worked around it surely must not have such a sense. I now suppose that I could be mistaken about that, and that perhaps what I saw was owing to their not drawing the distinction between the holy and the profane (...) the way we do. Nevertheless, I shall proceed in the direction of my original thought in order to move my discussion along the lines I wish it to take. What I saw when I first saw that church was that it was not set off from the everyday life and work of the people who lived and worked in its vicinity. Shopping stalls were virtually up against its walls, and while it was a place of great importance—both with respect to its holiness and its history—it was in no way separated from the mundane existence which was all around it. Surely, I thought, if the accounts recorded in the Gospels took place not in the Middle East but in what is now the western world—Paris, London or New York—the almost complete interaction of historical site and everyday life would not be what would be witnessed by someone coming upon the Church in its western location. One supposes that it would be separated from the world of everyday—no doubt by a fence of some sort—and rather than be open to anyone who wishes to enter, it is hard to doubt that there would be a booth at the entrance and a charge for admission. That the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the reported site of Jesus’ burial, could be so much a part of the everyday world can only be, I thought to myself, because the people who live and work around it simply lack a sense of history. (shrink)

In this enlightening and original study on the cultivation of a religious understanding of nature, Leon Niemoczynski applies Charles Sanders Peirce's thought on metaphysics to 'ecstatic naturalism,' the philosophical perspective developed by Robert Corrington. Niemoczynski points to Peirce's phenomenological and metaphysical understanding of possibility-the concept of 'Firstness'-as especially critical to understanding how the divine might be meaningfully encountered in religious experience. He goes on to define his own concept of speculative naturalism, offering a new approach to thinking about nature (...) that joins the essence of pragmatism with the heretical boldness of speculative thought. (shrink)

Leon J. Goldstein critically examines the philosophical role of concepts and concept formation in the social sciences. The book undertakes a study of concept formation and change by looking at four critical terms in anthropology , politics , and sociology.

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)

This book introduces Robert Corrington’s “ecstatic naturalism,” a new perspective in understanding “sacred” nature and naturalism, and explores what can be done with this philosophical thought. This is an excellent resource for scholars of Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and American pragmatism.

In a contribution to a symposium on “Causality in the Social Sciences,” Lewis Feuer remarks in passing that “Functionalism, in the form which Malinowski gave it, affirms that culture is an ‘organic unity’; it is the principle that in every culture, each custom, belief, and behavioral form ‘represents an indespensible part within a working whole.’” That culture is an integrated and organic unity is a view found quite often in the writings of Malinowski, though he does not maintain it with (...) full consistency. Sometimes he seems to say that a culture is made up of a number of grand institutions, each of which is an integrated unity, though the totality need not be. But whether affirmed or denied this thesis is not the doctrine, characteristic of almost every attempt made by Malinowski to explain cultural phenomena during the last quarter century of his life, which may be properly called “Malinowskian functionalism.” And that the doctrine cited by Feurer is sometimes formulated in such a way that the term “functional” or some variant is used, as in “culture is a functionally integrated organic unity,” makes no difference to my claim. I am not at all certain that the addition of the word “functionally” does anything for the view in question; it surely makes no difference to its scientific sterility. But that apart, the point I wish to make here is that a good many scholars who make references to Malinowski's functionalism have never bothered to discover just what in the world this is. They have been all too ready to cite the vague programmatic pronouncements in which Malinowski's writings abound, while seemingly oblivious to the fact that with rare exception every major attempt by Malinowski to account systematically for some kind of sociocultural phenomena reveals one and the same pattern of explanation. And it is this pattern alone which may be spoken of as Malinowski's method of functional analysis. (shrink)

Though many would prefer to have nothing to do with teleological explanations, it is evident that the writings of biologists and social scientists abound with them, and it is worth paying attention to the conditions under which they may be made responsibly. It emerges that responsible teleological statements would have to be made about instances of recurrent structures having specifiable characteristics, a situation which is patently the case for biology but still unsettled in, say, anthropology. In the final part of (...) the paper it is shown that satisfying this condition provides a basis for formulating general laws of the more orthodox kind. (shrink)

Collingwood's well-known dicta about history and its practice are not expressions of a perverse idealism but are rooted in reflection on his own work as historian. The problem which informs his writings on history was to make sense of the discipline of history without opening the way to historical skepticism. The early view of his Speculum Mentis, rooted in an external philosophical stance and not in the actual practice of history, was actually skeptical. In his middle years he regarded history (...) as the science of historical evidence, but this view left obscure the interest of history in the historical past. In his most mature view, as expressed in The Idea of History, Collingwood comes to see how the discipline of history, judged in terms of its own procedures and not by external norms imposed upon it from other sources, is able to make responsible knowledge claims and avoid the threat of skepticism. His well-known views about the historian's re-thinking past thought, the autonomy of history and the historical imagination all play roles to that end, and are entirely reasonable when it is understood what Collingwood intends by them. They are part of his theory of historical knowing, not of historical explanation. (shrink)

The first part of the paper distinguishes between a real past which has nothing to do with historical events and an historical past made up of hypothetical events introduced for the purpose of explaining historical evidence. Attention is next paid to those so-called ancillary historical disciplines which study historical evidence, and it is noted that the historical event is brought in to explain the particular constellation of different kinds of historical evidence which are judged to belong together. The problem of (...) explaining events is then taken up, and an attempt is made to defend the view that such explanation must presuppose general laws. And this is followed by a discussion, partly speculative, of social-historical laws. The final section of the paper tries to argue that the subjective intentions of individuals are irrelevant to historical explanation. (shrink)

If history is to be taken seriously as a cognitive - not merely literary - discipline to which considerations of truth or falsity are relevant, it is because of the progress made over the course of centuries in the sharpening of the methodology of the infrastructure of history. By not attending to the way in which the historical past actually emerged in the course of work at the level of the infrastructure, philosophical writers, such as Mandelbaum, Pompa, McCullagh, and Gorman, (...) have tended to perpetuate a myth of historians' selection. This has been the basic impediment to epistemology in philosophy of history. There is no selection from an antecedently established stock of fact-containing statements. The facts and the account are constructed in the course of the same intellectual endeavor, within the framework of an historians' tradition that is shaped by their work. (shrink)

There can be no question that Hans Blumenberg is a very learned scholar and the breadth of his knowledge is visible throughout the lengthy volume before us. Yet, for all that, it is not easy to follow the course of his discussion. One speaks of not being able to see the forest for the trees, but while it literally makes no sense to say it, I frequently thought that, in the end, there is no forest—only a collection of trees. A (...) colleague of mine who knows Blumenberg remarked that his writing is episodic. Perhaps that is the best way to put it. If there is an overarching argument that begins where the book begins and, at last, emerges to a proper conclusion almost six hundred pages later, I must confess that it has passed me by. I incline, however, to suspect that my colleague is right, and that what we have is a series of episodes in the history of European thought, but the episodes do not seem pointed in any obvious way to a determinate end point. (shrink)