The possibility of historical knowledge is a problem that occupied Nietzsche’s thought from beginning to end. Because the meanings of values, customs, and even truth itself are historically contingent phenomena, neither timeless nor unchanging, Nietzsche’s most fundamental statements about the character of the world and our place in it are typically framed within a historical account. Several scholars have recently suggested that his means of expositing history are consistent throughout his career. 1 From his early philological articles to (...) his genealogical method, Nietzsche is said to offer a consistent and sustained way of uncovering and evaluating the past. The studies of James I. Porter and Christian Benne are .. (shrink)

This volume of essays studies the problem of transition in economics from a historical perspective. It uses historical ideas and theories in a modern context to examine economic thought. It aims to show that social and historical context are important when considering economic transitions.

Counterfactual analysis is an interesting feature of thought experiments, because it requires the imagination of alternative states of the world (see also publications by Fearon, Lebow and Stein, Reiss, and Tetlock and Belkin, who suggest the same). In historical analysis, the use of imagination is often the focus of criticisms of such counterfactual analysis. In this article, I consider three strategies for constraining imagination: making limited counterfactual changes, limiting counterfactual changes to the decisions of important figures, and using evidence (...) to restrict the scope for imagination. Given the focus of this special issue, I will relate this discussion to Lewis’s and Woodward’s analyses of counterfactuals in the philosophy of science. I show that counterfactual analysis in historical cases has some resemblance to Lewis’s and Woodward’s analyses, but that what Lewis calls “transition periods” cannot be left entirely vague, as Lewis suggests, nor can counterfactual changes be seen simply as interventions, as Woodward suggests. I propose that efforts to limit imagination in historical counterfactuals are ultimately problematic, but that imagination can nevertheless play a useful role in counterfactual analysis. (shrink)

Collectivisation, as a socio-innovation, is an incremental part of history that has much to teach on questions of asset commoning. Such notions can provide renewed perspectives in understanding today’s peer-to-peer (p2p) economy and its influence on housing ownership models, which are constituting new forms of domesticity. This study understands domesticity as processes of collectivisation and de-collectivisation, and questions its conceptualisation as universal and invariant. It compares the transitioning moments by which a new governing body is instituted within recent-historical Chinese-Asian (...) contexts, including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. These moments were often postcolonial, full of changes, uncertainty, crisis, and anticipation; these contexts were unprecedented in scale, density, and cultural collision; in common, these were junctures of socio-innovation in land distribution that fashioned different forms of citizenry. By looking at these instances of innovation with situated thinking and against their historical–cultural backgrounds, the findings in this study reflect on the design of socio-technological systems, the potential consequences of our design interventions, and what “innovation” may mean given the complexity of transitional challenges. Putting together cosmopolitan and vernacular histories, the historiography presented is a collage of card game narratives, archived posters, news headlines, statistical figures, and literature. This journey through events of socio-innovation from the twentieth century till recent decades reveals how the history of governance has always been a question of cultivating collective actions, one way or another, and today’s p2p economy is simultaneously collectivising and fractionalising such socio-economic exchanges in digital citizenry. (shrink)

Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. (...) Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? -/- Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools. (shrink)

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European investigations into Chinese geography underwent a process of change: firstly, from the wild imagination of the classical era to a natural perspective of modern trade, then historical interpretations of religious missionaries to the scientific mapping conducted by sovereign nation-states. This process not only prompted new production of maps, but also disseminated a large amount of geographical knowledge about China in massive publications. This has enriched the geographical vision of Chinese civilization while providing (...) a new intellectual framework for Europeans to understand China. Concurrently, it has formed another route for the travel of knowledge and intercultural interactions between the East and the West. Those interactions between space and knowledge have been reflected in the production, publication and dissemination of numerous maps of China in early modern Europe. (shrink)

Thirty years after the demise of the Soviet bloc, there still persists a rhetoric of differentiation and a discursive polarisation between the Western and the non-Western educational thinking and practices. This rhetoric overshadows a potential similarity, or homogeneity, between the dominant and several marginalised contexts. Regional, local and personal variations are prematurely attributed to fundamental, if often poorly argued, cultural differences. We seek to introduce and to preliminarily summarise the existing understandings of refraction in education and social research. Sporadically used (...) but seldom defined, the refraction metaphor appears to feature: (a) a multiplicity of viewpoints as an incentive for social research, (b) non-relativistic, scientific progress as an end value for understanding social reality, (c) a balanced approach towards homogeneity and heterogeneity in social research, and (d) a substantially historical orientation towards analysing homogeneity and heterogeneity. Education in the former socialist European countries demonstrates how heterogeneity is rhetorically overstated and how variations can be more adequately addressed by analysing refractions. (shrink)

U clanku se autor usredsredjuje na proces suocavanja s prosloscu koristeci primer ceske demokratske tranzicije nakon 1989. Na pocetku odredjuje sam koncept?suocavanja s prosloscu? da bi definisao ulogu istoriografije i skolskog obrazovanja na simbolickom nivou takvog jednog procesa. Autor se bavi trima osnovnim problemima - kultivacijom istorijske svesti unutar skolskog okruzenja, primenom modernih didaktickih koncepata i, na kraju, koristeci cesko iskustvo s postkomunistickim obrazovanjem iz istorije, u glavnim crtama izlaze problematicne teme koje okruzuju proces suocavanja s prosloscu. Izmedju ostalog, koncentrise (...) se na didakticke aspekte koncepta kulturnog i komunikativnog pamcenja. (shrink)

This paper studies the notion of virtuality in the Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory of 1924. We situate the virtual entities of BKS within the tradition of the correspondence principle and the radiation theory of the Bohr model. We show how, in this context, virtual oscillators emerged as classical substitute radiators and were used to describe the otherwise elusive quantum transitions. They played an effective role in the quantum theory of radiation while remaining categorically distinct and ontologically separated from the quantum world (...) of the Bohr model. The notion of virtuality thus differs markedly from its counterpart in quantum mechanics or QFT. (shrink)

The contemporary human rights movement holds up Nuremberg as a template with which to define responsibility for mass violence. I argue that the negotiations that ended apartheid—the Convention for a Democratic South Africa —provide the raw material for a critique of the “lessons of Nuremberg.” Whereas Nuremberg shaped a notion of justice as criminal justice, CODESA calls on us to think of justice as primarily political. CODESA shed the zero-sum logic of criminal justice for the inclusive nature of political justice. (...) If the former accents victims’ justice, the latter prioritizes survivors’ justice. If Nuremberg has been ideologized as a paradigm, the end of apartheid has been exceptionalized as an improbable outcome produced by the exceptional personality of Nelson Mandela. This essay argues for the core relevance of the South African transition for ending civil wars in the rest of Africa. (shrink)

In Pragmatism as Transition, Colin Koopman argues for a vision of pragmatism that is at once old and new, seeking to overcome the divide between classicopragmatism and neo-pragmatism through a vision of pragmatism whose central feature is “transitionalism.” Transitionalism, for Koopman, is a thoroughly historicist outlook that is present in all forms of pragmatism, even if not as well thematized as it might have been. On his reading, then, “pragmatism’s most important philosophical contribution is that of redescribing the philosophical practices (...) of thought, critique, and inquiry such that these practices take place in time and through history.”1 Adopting such an historicist outlook on the development of pragmatism .. (shrink)

This book is an extended and provocative exercise in describing pragmatism’s past and in attempting to chart a course for its future. This description is not merely a history of philosophy or paean to American thought. It is rather a re-description that draws attention to a neglected and potentially fruitful theme in pragmatism, one that Koopman has termed “transitionalism” for its focus on historicity and temporality. One of the enduring features of pragmatism is its commitment to the revisability of truth (...) claims and even to revising its own methods and aims. If pragmatism encourages philosophers to revise old ways of thinking, then pragmatists are people who expect important ideas and institutions to develop .. (shrink)

Proteins are targeted to plastids by N‐terminal transit peptides, which are recognized by protein import complexes in the organelle membranes. Historically, transit peptide properties have been defined from vascular plant sequences, but recent large‐scale genome sequencing from the many plastid‐containing lineages across the tree of life has provided a much broader representation of targeted proteins. This includes the three lineages containing primary plastids (plants and green algae, rhodophytes and glaucophytes) and also the seven major lineages that contain secondary plastids, “secondhand” (...) plastids derived through eukaryotic endosymbiosis. Despite this extensive spread of plastids throughout Eukaryota, an N‐terminal transit peptide has been maintained as an essential plastid‐targeting motif. This article provides the first global comparison of transit peptide composition and summarizes conservation of some features, the loss of an ancestral motif from the green lineages including plants, and modifications to transit peptides that have occurred in secondary and even tertiary plastids. BioEssays 29:1048–1058, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The paper studies Heidegger's reading of the poet Stefan George (1868-1933), particularly of his poem "Das Wort" (1928), in the context of Heidegger's narrative of the history of metaphysics. Heidegger reads George's poem as expressing certain experiences with language: first, the constitutive role of language, of naming and discursive determination, in granting things stable identities; second, the unnameable and indeterminable character of language itself as a constitutive process and the concomitant insight into the human being's dependency on language and her (...) incapacity to master in subjectively. Heidegger characterizes this experience as "transitional" (übergänglich). It is shown that in Heidegger's historical narrative, this places George's poem in the ongoing transition (Übergang) from the Hegelian and Nietzschean end of metaphysics to a forthcoming "other beginning" of thinking. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there” (2). One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

Transitional eras in thought.--Typical eras of transition.--Science and doubt.--The historical spirit and the theory of evolution.--The relation of thought to social movements.--The appeal to faith.--The close of transitional eras.

This chapter contains sections titled: General Characteristics of the Concept of Natural Life The Path to the Individualization of Matter Chemistry and Individuality: The Appearance and Disappearance of Life Contradiction in Chemicals The Necessary Limits of the Inorganic The Path to the Free Individuality of Life Conclusion References Abbreviations Works Cited.

Historically, there has been little agreement between advocates of radical financial reform and socialist theoreticians. However, in the new circumstances of the twenty-first century, a productive synthesis of these two traditions might be possible. Drawing on the franchise model of credit creation elaborated by Robert C. Hockett and the dysfunctions created by the extreme concentration of private financial institutions, this article outlines a reform agenda that would both democratize finance and facilitate the flow of funds into valuable forms of investment (...) that are currently starved for resources. If the new institutions envisioned in this proposal were able to take root and expand, they could ultimately facilitate a transition to socialism, defined as the subordination of the market to democratic politics. (shrink)

The adaptive reuse of industrial heritage, a critical component in addressing radical climate change-related urban transitions, is increasingly pertinent. This paper distinguishes ‘urban transitions’ from ‘urban transformation,’ emphasizing a more gradual, adaptive approach to urban development under the pressures of climate change. It explores the repurposing of industrial buildings and spaces, maintaining their cultural and historical value while meeting current urban needs. Through a mixed-methods approach, the paper analyses how adaptive reuse contributes to sustainable urban development, examines (...) the scale and impact of such projects from local quarters to city-wide implications, and discusses the potential negative consequences, including gentrif ication. The study spans various global regions, including Europe, the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Australia, using case studies to illustrate the effectiveness of adaptive reuse in promoting sustainability, revitalizing urban areas, and preserving cultural heritage. The paper questions the viability of traditional long-term sustainable urban development strategies in the face of rapid environmental and societal changes, suggesting a potential need for paradigm shifts in urban planning. (shrink)

With the common goal of clarifying some of the theoretical profiles of transitional justice strategies, the study is organized along crucial intersections evaluating aspects connected to the genealogy, the nature, the scope and the most appropriate methodology for the study of transitional justice. The specific transitional instruments of war crime tribunals, truth commissions, administrative purges, reparations, and historical commissions are considered. The book brings together some of the most original writings from established experts as well as from promising young (...) scholars in the field. (shrink)

Historical Justice and Memory highlights the global movement for historical justice—acknowledging and redressing historic wrongs—as one of the most significant moral and social developments of our times. Such historic wrongs include acts of genocide, slavery, systems of apartheid, the systematic persecution of presumed enemies of the state, colonialism, and the oppression of or discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities. The historical justice movement has inspired the spread of truth and reconciliation processes around the world and has pushed (...) governments to make reparations and apologies for past wrongs. It has changed the public understanding of justice and the role of memory. In this book, leading scholars in philosophy, history, political science, and semiotics offer new essays that discuss and assess these momentous global developments. They evaluate the strength and weaknesses of the movement, its accomplishments and failings, its philosophical assumptions and social preconditions, and its prospects for the future. (shrink)

The early nineteenth century was a time between empires in German-speaking lands, following the collapse of the holy Roman empire in 1806. This was also the time at which modern concepts of nations, nationalism, and the state entered theological discourse, bound together with emerging notions of world historical progress. From this time until the First World War, the task of conceptualizing national identity and the nature of the ‘Christian state’ became a pressing theological problem. This essay seeks to locate (...) Schleiermacher’s reflections on the Christian state within this developing problematic. Schleiermacher’s philosophical and theological works closely engaged emerging ideas of the nation, state, and historical progress. However, he departed from the more totalizing affirmations of national spirit and the Christian state of many of his contemporaries, arguing for a more limited conception of the state as a point of transition in the ongoing historical development of the reign of God. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

At the century's end, societies all over the world are throwing off the yoke of authoritarian rule and beginning to build democracies. At any such time of radical change, the question arises: should a society punish its ancien regime or let bygones be bygones? Transitional Justice takes this question to a new level with an interdisciplinary approach that challenges the very terms of the contemporary debate. Ruti Teitel explores the recurring dilemma of how regimes should respond to evil rule, arguing (...) against the prevailing view favoring punishment, yet contending that the law nevertheless plays a profound role in periods of radical change. Pursuing a comparative and historical approach, she presents a compelling analysis of constitutional, legislative, and administrative responses to injustice following political upheaval. She proposes a new normative conception of justice--one that is highly politicized--offering glimmerings of the rule of law that, in her view, have become symbols of liberal transition.Its challenge to the prevailing assumptions about transitional periods makes this timely and provocative book essential reading for policymakers and scholars of revolution and new democracies. (shrink)

All efforts undertaken so far to establish peace between Israel and the Palestinians have failed to seriously address the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. This failure stemmed from a conviction that the question of historical justice in general had to be avoided. Since justice is a subjective construct, it was argued, allowing it to become a subject of negotiation would only perpetuate the conflict. However, the experience of these peace efforts has shown that without solving the problem (...) of the Palestinian refugees an agreement cannot be reached. And the problem cannot possibly be solved without addressing the key Palestinian demand on this issue — the right of return. For both sides, the right of return, more than any other issue, touches on the essence of their history since the beginning of the conflict between them, and on their future. The national narrative of each side thus centers on its version of the history of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, in the course of which the Palestinian refugee problem was created. And each side maintains the fundamental belief that its future national existence hinges on whether, and how, the issue of the right of return is resolved. For the Palestinians, the right of return is an inalienable right that defines their national identity and their struggle for liberation. For Israeli Jews, the right of return is perceived as an existential threat to the Jewish character of their society, if not to its very existence. It is not surprising, therefore, that within each of the two societies a national consensus has been built around this issue and that the position of each society seems to stand in complete opposition to that of the other. However, we argue that a morally and politically sound basis could and should be established for a workable solution and that such a basis can be provided by the notion of "transitional justice." Transitional justice stresses two major steps as necessary for reconciliation between parties involved in an historic conflict: recognition and restitution. Recognition entails revealing the historical truth about the injustices committed and according their victims dignity and respect as rights-bearing human beings. Restitution is meant to alleviate some of the material deprivation suffered by the victims and is also a form of recognition. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, recognition by Israel of the right of return would entail its assumption of responsibility for the uprooting of the majority of Palestinian society in 1948. This would satisfy a demand that has become a fundamental element in Palestinian national identity. Recognition would then enable the two parties to enter negotiations over restitution, in particular the implementation of the right of return. In these negotiations, as many Palestinian political leaders have indicated, the concerns of Israeli Jews with their national identity would be taken into account. Only if the fundamental concerns of the two parties, which center on the issue of the right of return, are met can the road towards reconciliation between them be opened. (shrink)

We are living a historical phase in which phenomena of enormous significance intersect: the digital turn, the “ecological transition”, the pandemic contingency, against the backdrop of a unique event in the history of human civilization and of Earth itself: for the first time behaviours and choices of a living species are among the main causes of a biotic transition.The way of thinking, planning, building cities and houses faces with new scenarios. Human and social sciences are called to a deep (...) and fundamental reflection, in the sign of complexity and of the overcoming of scientisms. This contribution, starting from a radical re-thinking of dwelling, intends to provide a critical review of some concrete perspectives of “urban and housing transition” towards new spatial and relational models. (shrink)

This piece is an essay review of Wang Hui's book China from Empire to Nation-State, which is a translation of the introduction to Wang's four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. According to the reviewer, Wang studies less the modern history of China than its historicity and does so in the context of China's transition from being an empire, inhabiting a cosmos that is the product of its own self-reflection, to being one among a number of nation-states, inhabiting a number of (...) histories of their own, all of which are now simultaneously present. But the Euro-American terms empire and nation-state, which increasingly pervade Chinese perceived realities, lack precise Chinese equivalents. Meanwhile, the terms that the Chinese use in referring to the same historical transition, tianli and gongli, are obscure to the Euro-American mind. The reviewer asks whether the Chinese, now facing a plurality of histories, wonder if there may be a plurality of li, as well, or at least if there can be a li that is “universal” in the sense that it is common to them all. The problem here, the reviewer argues, in part derives from Wang's binaries being Hegelian, while the breakdown of the nation-state in Europe projects a postpolitical order in which human communities are incapable of state-based action or of determining their own li. The review ends by questioning whether China is capable of following this path and, in any case, whether Wang's vocabulary is able to encompass it. (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, transitional justice scholars have grappled with whether, and to what extent, post-conflict societies should foster forgiveness. In response to this question, this article argues that forgiveness is a legitimate goal of transitional justice, but that interpersonal forgiveness cannot be mandated by the government. It will look to the example of Guatemala to demonstrate how the recovery of narrative truth through individual and communal acts of remembrance enabled forgiveness while at the same time affirmed the need (...) for justice. The article proceeds in two parts. First, it explores the praxis of forgiveness and the role of narrative truth and the healing of memory as constitutive elements of forgiveness. Second, it argues that Guatemala’s Recovery of Historical Memory Project (REMHI) is an illustration of this praxis. Finally, this article argues against conceptions of forgiveness that promote forgetting the past and forgoing justice. (shrink)

It may be thirty years since the first multiracial democratic elections signalled an end to Apartheid in South Africa in April 1994 but, argues Joanne Hardman in this interesting volume, the effect...

Hegel’s philosophy of history is fundamentally concerned with how shapes of life collapse and transition into new shapes of life. One of the distinguishing features of Hegel’s concern with how a shape of life falls apart and becomes inadequate is the role that habit plays in the transition. A shape of life is an embodied form of existence for Hegel. The animating concepts of a shape of life are affectively inscribed on subjects through complex cultural processes. This paper examines the (...) argument Hegel puts forward in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History for why civilizations come to atrophy and examines the decisive role habit plays in this process. The paper concludes with a discussion of the way in which the central role of second nature in historical transitions and norm formation conflicts with Brandom’s account of norm formation in Hegel’s thought. (shrink)

This paper assesses the work of Robert Brenner alongside the insights developed within social-reproduction feminism to reassess discussions on the origins of capitalism. The focus on the internal relation between social production and social reproduction allows social-reproduction feminism to theorise the construction of gendered capitalist social relations that previous accounts of the transition to capitalism have thus far been unable to provide. It argues that a revised political Marxism has the potential to set up a non-teleological and historically specific account (...) of the origins of capitalism. This paper seeks to redress the theoretical shortcomings of political Marxism that allow it to fail to account for the differentiated yet internally related process involved in the constitution and reconstitution of gendered capitalist social relations. This critique contributes to a social-reproduction feminism project of exploring processes of social production and social reproduction in their historical development and contemporary particularities. (shrink)