Epistemology, as generally understood by philosophers of science, is rather remote from the history of science and from historical concerns in general. Rheinberger shows that, from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, a parallel, alternative discourse sought to come to terms with the rather fundamental experience of the thoroughgoing scientific changes brought on by the revolution in physics. Philosophers of science and historians of science alike contributed their share to what this essay describes as an ongoing quest to (...) historicize epistemology. Historical epistemology, in this sense, is not so concerned with the knowing subject and its mental capacities. Rather, it envisages science as an ongoing cultural endeavor and tries to assess the conditions under which the sciences in all their diversity take shape and change over time. (shrink)

The Histories of Anthropology Annual presents diverse perspectives on the discipline’s history within a global context, with a goal of increasing awareness and use of historical approaches in teaching, learning, and conducting anthropology. The series includes critical, comparative, analytical, and narrative studies involving all aspects and subfields of anthropology. Volume 11, Historicizing Theories, Identities, and Nations, examines the work and influence of scholars, including Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, John Dewey, Randolph Bourne, A. Irving Hallowell, and Edward Westermarck, and anthropological practices (...) and theories in Vietnam and Ukraine as well as the United States. Contributions also focus on the influence of Western thought and practice on anthropological traditions, as well as issues of relativism, physical anthropology, language, epistemology, ethnography, and social synergy. (shrink)

The modern slavery literature engages with history in an extremely limited fashion. Our paper demonstrates to the utility of historical research to modern slavery researchers by explaining the rise and fall of the ethics-driven market category of “free-grown sugar” in nineteenth-century Britain. In the first decades of the century, the market category of “free-grown sugar” enabled consumers who were opposed to slavery to pay a premium for a more ethical product. After circa 1840, this market category disappeared, even though considerable (...) quantities of slave-grown sugar continued to arrive into the UK. We explain the disappearance of the market category. Our paper contributes to the on-going debates about slavery in management by historicizing and thus problematizing the concept of “slavery”. The paper challenges those modern slavery scholars who argue that lack of consumer knowledge about product provenance is the main barrier to the elimination of slavery from today’s international supply chains. The historical research presented in this paper suggests that consumer indifference, rather than simply ignorance, may be the more fundamental problem. The paper challenges the optimistic historical metanarrative that pervades much of the research on ethical consumption. It highlights the fragility of ethics-driven market categories, offering lessons for researchers and practitioners seeking to tackle modern slavery. (shrink)

The Chinese tianrenheyi thesis bespeaks a correlative cosmology irreducible to the Western metaphysics. This article historicizes tianrenheyi for new implications to help rethink the given concepts of ‘person/thing,’ ‘environment/nature,’ and ‘relationality’ in contemporary ethical and environmental education in three steps. First, it turns to Yu Ying-Shih’s writing for a historical and ethical picture of tianrenheyi as an ‘Axial breakthrough’ in Confucius' time and with direct relevance to Confucian person-making education. Second, it moves on to Roger Ames’ unpacking of tianrenheyi as (...) hospitalized in a ‘correlative cosmology’ and ‘Confucian relational personhood’ to help us re-understand Confucian ‘person’ as being relational. Finally, it shows how these re-invoked philosophical–ethical–cosmological theses expose a ‘foundational individualism’ which grounds and confines current educational thinking to an anthropocentric ordering. As an alternative, this article calls for a productive symbiotic conjoining between humans and their cultural–natural environs toward nurturing today’s youth into ecologically literate, responsible, and responsive co-beings. (shrink)

This chapter is organized around two central questions. First, if art is political, in what ways is it political? Most theorists who identify themselves in some way with feminist aesthetics agree that art is political, but differ in how they think it is political. The second question is, if we assert that art is political in some way—although we need to clarify in exactly what ways it is political—is there anything to be learned from those philosophers such as Immanuel Kant (...) who have argued for the universality of aesthetics? Feminists have produced a variety of answers to this question. In order to appreciate why and how the question has been answered so variously, we will need to understand something about the arguments that Kant put forward for the universality of aesthetics, and the relation between his view of aesthetic judgment and the other two domains of his critical philosophy, i.e. the metaphysical and the practical. We will also need to understand how and why, despite the severely problematic sexist, classist, and racist claims that Kant makes, his philosophy—in particular his aesthetics—remains a source of inspiration for some feminists and social-political philosophers. (shrink)

A flurry of discussions about plagiarism and predatory publications in recent times has brought the issue of scientific misconduct in India to the fore. The debate has framed scientific misconduct in India as a recent phenomenon. This article questions that framing, which rests on the current tendency to define and police scientific misconduct as a matter of individual behavior. Without ignoring the role of individuals, this article contextualizes their actions by calling attention to the conduct of the institutions, as well (...) as social and political structures that are historically responsible for governing the practice of science in India since the colonial period. Scientific conduct, in other words, is here examined as a historical phenomenon borne of the interaction between individuals’ aspirations and the systems that impose, measure, and reward scientific output in particular ways. Importantly, historicizing scientific misconduct in this way also underscores scientist-driven initiatives and regulatory interventions that have placed India at the leading edge of reform. With the formal establishment of the Society for Scientific Values in 1986, Indian scientists became the first national community worldwide to monitor research integrity in an institutionally organized way. (shrink)

Following some remarks of Jacques Taminiaux on Gadamer, I examine the permeating presence of history and alterity in interpretation by contrasting Gadamer’s views with Davidson’s notion of “radical interpretation.” I start by examining the debate they held with each other on several occasions. I then analyze Gadamer’s understanding of interpretation as a “hermeneutic experience” and Davidson’s method of “triangulation.” They both agree that interpretation should be free from the psychological turmoil of either divining an author’s intent or projecting the reader’s (...) expectations. The fundamental difference is that, for Davidson, interpretation is an ahistorical process taking place in the synchrony of interpreter and observed subjects, whereas for Gadamer interpretation is a historical “event,” in which something “happens” and contributes to the making of history. (shrink)

Following some remarks of Jacques Taminiaux on Gadamer, I examine the permeating presence of history and alterity in interpretation by contrasting Gadamer’s views with Davidson’s notion of “radical interpretation.” I start by examining the debate they held with each other on several occasions. I then analyze Gadamer’s understanding of interpretation as a “hermeneutic experience” and Davidson’s method of “triangulation.” They both agree that interpretation should be free from the psychological turmoil of either divining an author’s intent or projecting the reader’s (...) expectations. The fundamental difference is that, for Davidson, interpretation is an ahistorical process taking place in the synchrony of interpreter and observed subjects, whereas for Gadamer interpretation is a historical “event,” in which something “happens” and contributes to the making of history. (shrink)

At the end of the 19th century, the vocabulary of sexuality - perversion - became one of the primary means by which people began to articulate and think about their individuality, their sense of self. Joining authors like Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson, I suggest the importance of a ‘style of reasoning’ to the creation of sexual kinds at the end of the 19th century, a kind of reasoning that might be styled as historical. For the invert to become possible (...) as a human kind, the conceptual space for an understanding of inverts as specific kinds needed to be cleared. In France, this was accomplished by conceiving individuals as elaborated historically, as the product of prior generations, and by differentiating them from other kinds of people via notions of heredity and degeneration. The invert was plotted within the meta-récit of French progress (and national degeneration). This logic of ‘historicization’ also entailed the scrutiny of the patient’s past in order to reveal his or her ‘nature’ as pathological. Understanding the conceptualization of inversion as including, in part, a ‘pursuit of memory’ provides a window onto the vexing question of how people come to take up their classifications; that is, how discourses interact with the subjects they purport to describe. Through the ‘pursuit of memory’, persons were encouraged to (re)describe their pasts in terms of the present diagnosis. An essential attribute of the literature on ‘inversion’ was precisely such an historically formed understanding of pathological individuals; an understanding that ushered in the transformation from acts to natures, from individuals to kinds, from sodomites to homosexuals. (shrink)

Knafo and Teschke’s provocative essay ‘Political Marxism and the Rules of Reproduction of Capitalism’ has prompted considerable debate. From a position of critical support, the present article intervenes in this debate by making three interrelated points. First, the structuralist–historicist divide that Knafo and Teschke identify is misleading and should be reformulated. Though the duality is real, this divide is best understood as a continuum between two kinds of historicism: a structural and an institutional historicism. Second, the article contextualises Knafo and (...) Teschke’s intervention against the backdrop of their own intellectual development. Rather than returning to the tradition’s historicist origins, they have in fact stretched Political Marxism’s institutional tendencies to new limits. Third, the article concludes with a revision of their critique of the concept of market dependence. It is argued that the concept can be salvaged for the purposes of institutional historicism provided that it is rearticulated. (shrink)

Liao and Carbonell point out that much of the danger embedded in “materialized oppression” derives from the fact that the essence of that marginalized oppression may not be overt. It can often rece...

In this article, the relationship between philosophy and history of education is delved into. First, it is noted that both disciplines have diverged from each other over the last few decades to become relatively autonomous subsectors within the pedagogical sciences, each with its own discourses, its own expositional characteristics, its own channels of communication, and its own networks. From the perspective of the history of education, it seems as though more affiliation has been sought with the science of history. The (...) history of education, in any event, has in the past few years become more historicizing and less ‘educationalizing’. According to the author, there are signs that indicate that such an analogous line of reasoning, mutatis mutandis, also applies for the philosophy of education. Does this mean that there are no longer any bridges from the one area to the other or that none are possible? Probably not. In the second portion, it is shown that the modern or even postmodern ‘new cultural history of education’, with its often ironical and demythologizing traits uses or can use a considerable amount of ‘grand theory’. Indeed, the development of an adequate conceptual apparatus that also has to cope with the problem of ‘presentism’ assumes a constant dialogue with the past and for this a philosophical‐interpretative approach is still the best situated. Inversely, the Foucauldian perspective shows that philosophy in general and philosophy of education in particular equally hardly do without history. Within the reflection on pedagogical praxis, the historical and the philosophical thus probably will continue to rely on each other—if only as allies against the dominance of short‐winded empirical‐quantitative research. Still, it would be naive to think that, from this possible alliance, the fragmentation of historically developed knowledge systems with their own sociological and institutional foundation of scientific activities can be rectified in a trice. (shrink)

If ever there were scientific procedures that seemed immune to history, induction and deduction would be them. Their validity seemingly unimpinged by the vicissitudes of history, they appear a proper subject of discussion for philosophers and scientists, but not for historians. Historians pride themselves on demonstrating that the internal logic of theory is historical — a response to particular conditions. Breakdowns in logic present historians with opportune moments for historicization, for showing how theoreticians’ efforts to respond to their situation made (...) them move inconsistently. When it comes to induction and deduction, however, they seem so universal and basic — the logic and methodology of science unthinkable without them — that any effort to demonstrate their historically bound character risks relativizing science and, some would argue, undermine rational exchange. Can the historian participate, qua historian, in the conversation on induction and deduction without unraveling science and undermining rational exchange? (shrink)

Nineteenth-century scientist Hermann von Helmholtz’s peculiar wavering between empiricism and transcendentalism in his philosophy of science in general, and in his theory of perception in particular, is a much debated and well-documented topic in the history and philosophy of science. This contribution aims at providing a fresh angle on this classical issue, by considering Helmholtz’s account of differential consciousness against the background of a centuries-old philosophical debate between the empiricist tradition and the tradition of transcendental idealism. By placing Helmholtz’s psychology (...) against the background of a historical narrative stretching from Hume to Fichte, one can gain insight into the possible merits of his empirico-transcendentalism with regard to the problem of differentiation. More particularly, it is argued that Helmholtz’s psychology tilted towards transcendentalism when met with the classical theoretical problems of strict empiricism in dealing with the foundation of consciousness, most notably circularity and infinite regress. Without claiming that Helmholtz’s theorizing presented a self-conscious attempt to overcome the latter issues, his well-known wavering between perspectives in general, and his appropriation of the a priori in particular, might have served him well in avoiding the deadlocks of empiricism. As noted at the end, however, Helmholtz’s account produced complex philosophical problems of its own. (shrink)

The generic notion of “religion” and its conceptual demarcation from “the secular” have been critically examined by a number of scholars from the “critical religion” perspective. The interrogation of the term “religion,” and other related terms, questions modern formations of knowledge and power in general. This paper constitutes part of the project which examines norms and imperatives which govern sociological discourse on religion. Max Weber and Emile Durkheim are particularly significant figures in sociology of religion. The aim of this paper (...) is to historicize the category “religion” employed by Weber and Durkheim, in the specific social context of Germany and France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It hopes to contribute to a greater understanding of the ideological foundation of sociological theories of religion. (shrink)

This article expands Patchen Markell’s seminal problematization of The Human Condition by examining the impact that the modern developments in science and technology had on Arendt’s signature categories. Whereas Markell is interested in the systematic “architecture” of the book, I attempt to historicize Arendt’s distinctions in light of the story she tells about science and technology. From the invention of the telescope to the splitting of the atom, technoscience has provoked shifts in the hierarchies within the vita activa; spawned new (...) varieties of “labor,” “work,” and “action”; and blurred the traditional boundaries between “nature” and the “human world.” These reconfigurations draw the contours of a new, “modern world” that is different from the world whose story and conceptual tradition Arendt set out to articulate. Largely as a result of the activities of science and technology, the experiences that informed the categories of the “Western tradition” correspond to a world that is no longer our own. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 327 - 346 This paper explores the place of historicism in Anglophone and especially analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy arose as part of a general modernist revolt against the developmental historicisms of the nineteenth century with their faith in progress. Modernism inspired more formal approaches to knowledge, philosophy, and the human sciences. It is, however, a mistake to assume the rise of modernism and analytic philosophy left no space for historicism. Three main traditions of (...) historicism continued to persist in Anglophone philosophy through the twentieth century. First, the lingering presence of idealism continued to inspire the historicism of philosophers such as R. G. Collingwood and later Charles Taylor. Second, modernist historians, such as Quentin Skinner, sometimes grabbed at arguments from analytic philosophy to defend their methodological agendas. Third, the rise of holistic themes in analytic philosophy opened the way to historicist moments and themes in philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, and Richard Rorty. (shrink)

Epistemology, as generally understood by philosophers of science, is rather remote from the history of science and from historical concerns in general. Rheinberger shows that, from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, a parallel, alternative discourse sought to come to terms with the rather fundamental experience of the thoroughgoing scientific changes brought on by the revolution in physics. Philosophers of science and historians of science alike contributed their share to what this essay describes as an ongoing quest to (...) historicize epistemology. Historical epistemology, in this sense, is not so concerned with the knowing subject and its mental capacities. Rather, it envisages science as an ongoing cultural endeavor and tries to assess the conditions under which the sciences in all their diversity take shape and change over time. (shrink)

It is no longer necessary to defend current historiography of psychology against the strictures aimed at its early text book incarnations in the 1960s and 1970s. At that time, Robert Young and others denigrated then standard textbook histories of psychology for their amateurism and their justifications propaganda for specific standpoints in current psychology, disguised as history. Since then, at least some textbooks writers and working historians of psychology have made such criticisms their own. The demand for textbook histories continues nonetheless. (...) Psychology, at least in the United States, remains the only discipline that makes historical representations of itself in the form of “history and systems” courses an official part of its pedagogical canon, required, interestingly enough, for the license in clinical practice.1In the meantime, the professionalization of scholarship in history of psychology has proceeded apace. All of the trends visible in historical and social studies of other sciences, as well as in general cultural and intellectual history, are noe present in the historical study of psychology. Yet despite the visibility and social importance of psychology's various applications, and the prominence of certain schools of psychological thought such as behaviorism and psychoanalysis in contemporary cultural and political debate, the historiography of psychology has continued to hold a marginal position in history and social studies of science. (shrink)

ArgumentThe Comparative Survey of Freedom, first published by Freedom House in 1973, is now the most widely used indicator of democracy by both academics and the U.S. government alike. However, literature examining the Survey’s origins is virtually nonexistent. In this article, I use archival records to challenge Freedom House’s retrospective account of the indicator’s creation. Rather than the outcome of a scientific methodology by multiple social scientists, the Survey was produced by a single political scientist, Raymond Gastil, according to his (...) own hunches and impressions. How, then, did this indicator rise to such prominence? I argue that the Survey’s notoriety can be attributed to its early promotion in both political science and American foreign policy decision-making, as well as the fact that it fit the dominant scientific and political paradigms of the time. (shrink)

Following the standard view, scientific theories are formal systems, which receive empirical content by way of certain correspondence rules. The task of philosophy of science is then to make explicit the structure of such systems. In contrast to this view, one can point to the French tradition in philosophy of science. What characterizes this tradition is recourse to historical study, which has evolved from an attempt to bridge the fields of philosophy of science and history of science by a closer (...) integration of conceptual and historical methods. My aim in this paper is to explore the emergence of historical epistemology in France and its later revival at an international level. Attention is directed at the presuppositions and motivations underlying such an approach. (shrink)

The implications of the persona theory pose a problem for the interpretation of Juvenal's early satires, because it presents the satirist as intent on nullifying his didactic stances. This leaves us with an unsatisfactory conclusion that excises Juvenal's persistent treatment of themes consistent with contemporaneous authors who were similarly engaged in blackening the reputations of the famous dead. This article argues that a strict application of persona theory isolates Juvenal's satirist from his volatile contemporary climate by excluding him from the (...) reality that these authors—similarly directing their works to the past—were unabashedly writing only after the tyrant was safely dead. Tacitus and Pliny had lamented the servility and silence that predominated during Domitian's reign, in which the Roman world endured fifteen years of terror without uttering a word. Into this literary milieu Juvenal announces his satirist, who begins with an echo of that silence: semper ego auditor tantum? With the death of Domitian and a new atmosphere that permitted the defamation of the deceased, Juvenal injects his venomous voice into the mix, taking advantage of contemporary literary appetites that allowed for the punishment, no matter how belated, if not of the person then of the guilty one's memory. Any evaluation of Juvenal's satiric project must be firmly rooted in this, his most immediate, context. (shrink)

The debate between metaphor theorists and conceptual historians has been intensifying in recent years. This article takes this debate beyond the bias toward Blumenberg's metaphorology, and starts from the interaction view of metaphor as formulated by Max Black. The article opens with a theoretical framework that reformulates Black's notions of metaphorical resonance and emphasis. It adapts them to the requirements of Conceptual History, and adds a third, historical criterion for metaphoricity. It then applies these suggestions to the history of the (...) metaphor play/game/Spiel/jeu within twentieth-century political thought. Here, the focus lies on the role this metaphor plays in the conceptual relations between the ideas of political order, conflict, and immanence. (shrink)

In the winter of 1859, the Boston poet Julia Ward Howe sailed for Cuba; and in the winter of 1860, Ticknor and Fields published an account of her travel. A Trip to Cuba appeared only months after the same firm had published Richard Henry Dana's story of his ???vacation voyage,??? To Cuba and Back . These two narratives responded to a burgeoning American interest in the Caribbean island that promised recuperation to American invalids and adventure for military ???filibusters.??? Howe's narrative (...) demonstrated a self-conscious familiarity with antebellum travel writing more broadly, however, as she playfully resisted yet ultimately upheld various conventions of a genre that had become a staple of the American literary marketplace. ???I do not know why all celebrated people who write books of travel begin by describing their days of seasickness,??? she noted, before discussing her own shipboard illness. She followed similar cues as she blended elements of autobiography, the social sketch, nature writing, and political and social commentary. Across 250 ???sprightly??? pages, readers were offered a familiar melange of humorous portraits, detailed descriptions of ???foreign??? institutions, and extensive commentary on local customs and social mores. (shrink)

This paper traces the evolution of a coherent feminist genre in written historical texts during and after slavery, and in relation to contemporary feminist writing in the West Indies. The paper problematizes the category ‘woman’ during slavery, arguing that femininity was itself deeply differentiated by class and race, thus leading to historical disunity in the notion of feminine identity during slavery. This gender neutrality has not been sufficiently appreciated in contemporary feminist thought leading to liberal feminist politics in the region. (...) This has proved counter productive in the attempts of Caribbean feminist theorizing to provide alternative understandings of the construction of the nation-state as it emerged out of slavery and the role of women themselves in the shaping of modern Caribbean society. (shrink)

In light of increasing white supremacist violence in the United States, calls to identify such violence as terrorism have surged in public discourse. Federal and state agencies have taken up these demands and included white supremacy in counterterrorism and national security policy. While this classification appears to remove the racist double standard in applications of the terrorism label, it has come under criticism for obscuring the history and distinctly U.S. American roots of white supremacy, on the one hand, and expanding (...) the harmful and typically racially coercive consequences of U.S. counterterrorism, on the other hand. There is, however, a robust yet neglected tradition in U.S. racial justice activism that uses the language of terrorism to make sense of white supremacy. By examining this tradition, this essay offers a more nuanced assessment of the dangers and possibilities of classifying white supremacy as terrorism. Specifically, I look at Ida B. Wells’s analysis of lynching as racial terrorism to recover an alternative narrative of white supremacist terrorism. I argue that the understanding of white supremacy as terrorism in her writings not only exposes the partisan use of these terms and their complicity in constructing a narrowly circumscribed and biased public knowledge about racial domination, but also reveals some mistaken assumptions of the current debate. This essay thus sheds new light on a neglected discourse of white supremacist terrorism and makes it relevant for contemporary purposes. (shrink)

This chapter offers an account of the aspect of nineteenth‐century naturalism, by focusing on the work of J. S. Mill and Auguste Comte. Both philosophers have high ambitions for naturalism, aiming to offer a sweeping account of all of human knowledge in naturalistic terms. Mill argued that the metaphysical thinking must already have started to exert an influence in order for monotheistic approaches to take hold, and that Comte's account of the theological stage overstated the extent to which fetishistic or (...) polytheistic understanding of phenomena could exist independently of one another. But these are minor disagreements, framed in terms of a narrative that Mill basically accepts. Mill thought Comte's three stage theory important for understanding the rise our way of conceptualizing the world, and consistent with his own account of the rise of scientific induction. (shrink)