BSHP Conference Spring 2006 Abstracts 2
BSHP Conference Spring 2006
Philosophy and Historiography: Abstracts
Monday 3 April
14.00 Opening Address (Umney Theatre)
Quentin Skinner (Cambridge), ‘The post-modern challenge and the interpretation of texts’
For some time we have been warned not to talk about intentions in relation to interpretation on the grounds that the yardstick of intentionality is simply not available as a means of trying to elucidate the meanings of texts. One might wonder if this thesis has been overstated. But even if the thesis is accepted, one might still wonder if it follows that the recovery of intentions is irrelevant to the understanding of texts. To understand any utterance, one needs to grasp not merely what has been said but what has been done. But if we are to appreciate the performativity of texts, it is arguable that we shall have to find means to recover the intentions embodied in them. Can we hope to do so? The lecture ends on a practical and optimistic note.
15.00 Session 1: Collingwood and Gadamer (Umney Theatre)
Dale Jacquette (Pennsylvania), ‘Collingwood on historical authority and historical imagination’
R.G. Collingwood is a unique figure in early twentieth-century philosophy. While aspiring to rigor and exactness in all his thought, Collingwood was influenced primarily in his philosophy by concerns for history and aesthetics, which were fully integrated in his conception of metaphysics. I consider Collingwood’s philosophy from the standpoint of his view of history, particularly in his insightful work, The Idea of History. The integration of these themes in Collingwood’s lifework is exemplified by his Essay on Metaphysics. In response to positivist assaults on the intelligibility of metaphysics, Collingwood reconceives this philosophical subdiscipline as an uncovering of the ‘absolute presuppositions’ of the sciences and of other subjects of study and human activities generally. Collingwood insists that metaphysics is to be descriptive rather than critical or speculative, which is to say that it is in many ways as much an historical as it is a conceptual inquiry. The uncovering of presuppositions provides the framework for Collingwood’s philosophy of history and philosophy of art, which is as much metaphysical as his metaphysics is historical and aesthetic. The integration of these commitments in Collingwood is also demonstrated by his passionate work as a practicing archaeologist, and in such writings as Roman Britain, and research on Roman inscriptions in Great Britain. Collingwood argues that the past does not exist independently of the present, but informs and lives on in the present. He holds that historical events and movements may be re-enacted (or reconstructed), through a disciplined dialectic of question and answer. He denies that there are historical authorities, even in the form of documents and monuments, that can stand on their own as contributing to the idea of history. Instead, he maintains that history involves a process of what he calls ‘the historical imagination’ in recreating and reconstructing events and their significance. The significance of historical events, in the meantime, as an activity for the historian, requires that the historical imagination try to project a meaningful context for the chronology of past occurrences as they would have taken shape for the original participants, and for ourselves insofar as the events of the past continue to influence the present to which they are not only causally related, but in which they literally and physically inhere. Historical inquiry on his model seeks to recreate the presuppositions of agents in re-enacting, not only the thoughts and actions of those agents, but the problems, and hence the purposes, to which those actions were intended as a solution. We can only successfully undertake historical investigations in Collingwood’s philosophy of history if we exercise the historical imagination in hypothesizing the purposes and problems, and ultimately the presuppositions, of those individuals involved in historical events that we are trying to understand. I offer a detailed exposition, criticism, and qualified defense of Collingwood’s concept of historiography, and consider its implications for understanding important moments in the history of philosophy.
Nick Jardine (Cambridge), ‘Gadamer’s “merely historical understanding” of dead philosophical questions’
In Truth and Method Gadamer insists that questions that are no longer real for us can form no part of the “effective history” of philosophy. Unlike the authentic understanding of past issues that remain live for us, our vicarious “merely historical” understanding of the coming-into-being and passing-away of dead questions cannot contribute to our critical reflections on current philosophical positions and practices. I shall argue that Gadamer’s dismissive attitude towards the interpretation of dead philosophical questions is directly at odds with his own claims about the power of historical critique. In fact, Gadamer’s own account of “merely historical” understanding provides precisely the materials needed to validate radically critical uses of philosophy's history, and hence for a proper response to Habermas, Apel, and others who have charged Gadamer’s hermeneutics with undue subservience to tradition.
20.15 Session 2: Postanalytic and sociological approaches to history of philosophy (Umney Theatre)
Mark Bevir (Berkeley), ‘Philosophical historiography: a postanalytic perspective’
This paper looks at the relation of philosophical and historical arguments. It suggests that post-analytic philosophy ascribes a role to analysis but only up to the point where our concepts become vague. In addition, analysis can not ground itself. Instead it must be embedded with narrative or historical explications. Equally, however, these historical arguments always will presuppose various philosophical positions. Philosophical historiography is thus about elucidating and defending a web of beliefs.
Martin Kusch (Cambridge), ‘Sociological approaches to the history of philosophy’
A number of philosophers (Frede, Gracia, Normore ...) have argued that the sociology of philosophical knowledge is (a) of little philosophical interest, and (b) based upon indefensible philosophical views regarding the causes of beliefs, the relationship between act and content of judgements, the nature of reasons and logic, and the structure of explanation. I shall try to rebut these arguments and suggest that many arguments against the sociology of philosophical knowledge are themselves relying on questionable philosophical premises.
Tuesday 4 April
9.00 Session 3A: Early modern philosophy and science (Umney Theatre)
Sarah Hutton (Middlesex), ‘Books, history and philosophy: libraries and the history of early modern philosophy’
This is a paper concerning sources in the history of philosophy: the relevance of book-collections. The main focus will be two major seventeenth-century book collections with significant holdings of philosophical books: the library of Edward, second Viscount Conway (1594-1655) (father in law of Anne Conway) and the library of Locke’s Quaker friend, Benjamin Furly (1636-1714). I shall discuss some of the methodological issues involved in interpreting book-lists, and what we can learn about the nature and development of philosophy from the holdings of these libraries.
M. A. Stewart (Aberdeen), ‘Placing Hume historically’
Hume was equally significant both as a philosopher and as a historian. This suggests an obvious but under-explored pair of questions: (1) what sense (if any) did he have of the history of philosophy, and (2) how did he see his own philosophy historically? The latter question I want to connect with how others in the 18th century and after saw it, in order to assess whether Hume was as much an architect as a victim of the notion of a ‘British empiricist’ tradition in philosophy.
With regard to (1), we should distinguish Hume’s theoretical stance from his practice. His theoretical stance is to wave the flag for the moderns in a fairly stereotypical ancient-moderns division. But he does it in a way that re-enacts the tensions between Stoicism and Scepticism that he found early in his career in reading Cicero and other classical sources. His History of England includes a certain amount of cultural history, particularly the history of literature. But philosophy is absent from his picture of the medieval world and the Renaissance. With regard to (2) he places himself within a strictly recent British tradition, and yet his practice shows him to be deeply imbued with French thought.
Philosophy in Hume’s day was still a comprehensive and unitary discipline for which ‘natural’ philosophy, albeit much altered, provided the guiding methodology. He was to some extent heading out of philosophy as we conceive it, towards psychology and the social sciences, and yet it is the philosophers in the narrower sense who have now reclaimed him. The roles of Reid, Brown, Kant and others in moulding his posthumous reputation are interesting but confusing. The interpretations they created have led to fluctuations in his reputation according to fluctuations in other philosophical fashions than his own.
Richard W. Serjeantson (Cambridge), ‘Problems in the historiography of early modern philosophy and science: the case of human understanding’
No scholar of the period can be ignorant that the natural sciences were conceived of in the early modern period as part of the larger discipline of ‘philosophy’. And yet, with certain notable exceptions (and the Cunningham thesis above all), there has been a persistent failure on the part of historians of philosophy on the one hand, and of historians of the sciences on the other, to engage with the implications of the early modern unity of their subjects. This paper explores some of these implications, taking as its focus the treatment of the idea of ‘human understanding’ in the seventeenth century. The understanding in this period served as a fulcrum between the different philosophical disciplines; its treatment in modern historiography exposes some confusions that can arise if this is not recognised. More generally, the paper is a contribution to the recent and growing dissatisfaction with the rationalist/empiricist divide in the historiography of early modern philosophy. It concludes with a proposal for a new direction in the history of early modern knowledge.
Session 3B: Historiography of the sciences (Music Room)
Christopher Minkowski (Oxford), ‘Sanskrit knowledge and the world history of science’
Study of the philosophies and sciences communicated in Sanskrit has taken a markedly historicist turn in the group project that analyzes the “Sanskrit Knowledge Systems on the Eve of Colonialism”. The project has proposed a meaningful periodization of learned communication in Sanskrit, from ca. 1500 to 1750 C.E. During this period, it is argued, there was a remarkable efflorescence of literary activity, in which something distinctively and self-consciously new appeared. The history of Jyotisha, the Sanskritic discipline that combined astronomy, mathematics, and divination, presents special problems for the historiographical program, however, because of that discipline’s separate intellectual trajectory, social status, and practical niche. In considering what historiographical practices can serve the “Knowledge Systems” project as a whole, we have encountered both particular difficulties and general problems. The particular difficulties have to do both with the kind of evidence that is available – vast amounts of textual material, very little social historical or institutional-archival information – and with the applicability of the models of intellectual historiography that have been evolved for the study of early modern Europe. Here the viability of the proposals of the “Cambridge School” deserves special consideration. Is there a way to capture, for example, in analytically powerful terms, forms of intellectual dynamism that ordinarily are labelled “traditional”, while retaining methodological proposals concerning illocutionary intent? The general problems have to do with writing an intellectual history of a grouping of knowledge systems that operated for most of their life outside the European sphere, without predetermining that comparison should be the prevailing mode of engagement with them, much less what the terms of that comparison should be. To put it too simply, what is the value of the “area” as an analytic category in the narrative of the world’s scientific history? If the grand narrative of European exceptionalism in the history of science – the “Plato to NATO” formulation – has lately been refused by historians of science, or at least avoided by recourse to micro-history, does that guarantee that the narrative has lost its pervasive structuring role, or that a world history has become possible?
Teresa Castelão-Lawless (Grand Valley University), ‘Does science have the history of philosophy it deserves?’
In Le Materialisme rationnel (1953), French epistemologist Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) noted that “science does not have the philosophy it deserves”. In this paper I explore the scientific and cultural contexts in which this asserion was made, the epistemological model that Bachelard constructed as an alternative to the philosophical models of science available in his time. Finally, I will show how Bachelardianism opens avenues of research for philosophy of science and technology, cognitive science, and the social studies of science.
Theodore Arabatzis (Athens), ‘The historiography and the philosophy of science: towards a two-way traffic’
The significance of the philosophy of science for understanding historically scientific practice has been underrated. Even though the relationship between the history of science and the philosophy of science has been discussed extensively, the focus of the discussion has been on the importance of history of science for the philosophical understanding of science. Most commentators on this relationship have viewed the history of science as a repository of empirical material for testing philosophical theories of scientific rationality or scientific change. On the other hand, there has been very little discussion of the ways in which the philosophy of science can enrich historiographical practice. Some authors have even denied that the philosophy of science has anything to offer to the historiography of science. Thomas Kuhn’s words are characteristic: "I do not think current philosophy of science has much relevance for the historian of science". Kuhn made that statement in the 1970s, but it captures the attitude of many historians ever since. The historians' scepticism towards the historiographical value of the philosophy of science may have been justified, in view of some crude attempts to "apply" philosophical theories of scientific change to historical case studies. As I will attempt to show in this paper, however, the philosophy of science has a significant historiographical function: to provide a meta-historical analysis of conceptual issues in the historiography of science and, in particular, to examine the philosophical presuppositions of historiographical categories (e.g., of the notion of scientific discovery) and choices (e.g., of the subject of a historical narrative). I will argue that the study of scientific discoveries requires an integrated historical-cum-philosophical approach. The satisfactory understanding of scientific discoveries is not just an empirical task. When we examine the philosophical presuppositions of the, apparently innocent, question "when and by whom was something discovered?" it turns out that it has an evaluative dimension and is not merely a request for factual information. The putative factual statement “X discovered Y” embodies an evaluative judgment, namely that the evidence presented by X demonstrated the existence of Y. The confluence of the descriptive and the evaluative aspects of scientific discovery renders philosophy of science indispensable to historiographical practice. Furthermore, I will discuss the relevance of the philosophical issue of conceptual change to the choice of the subject of a historical narrative. In view of the ubiquitous presence of conceptual change in science, one could argue that historians of science should avoid framing their narratives around concepts, because it would be impossible to identify an evolving concept over time and, thus, make it the subject of a meaningful and coherent narrative. A similar point has been forcefully made by Quentin Skinner in the context of the history of ideas. Against this view, I will show how to make sense of the identity of evolving scientific concepts and thereby reinstate them as potential subjects of historical narratives.