The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular, possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States, though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian Proletkult of the 1930s. Post-Heideggerian (...) "deconstructivism" though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness: psychoanalysis—not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and, perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event .For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and "revolutionaries"—in all cases, jealous guardians of their academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way:1. There are political implications inherent in the act of interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning. This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning.2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to become our modern religion: the final explanation.3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an example of political delirium in avant-garde writing.Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art and About Chinese Women.Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du langage poétique. (shrink)

Auguste Comte! Ce nom ne dit plus rien à personne. Ceux qui le connaissent encore parlent de lui comme d'un grand philosophe : concepteur de la sociologie, du positivisme et de la théorie des trois états. On oublie cependant qu'il fut aussi à l'origine d'une religion personnelle, un culte des morts destiné à relier et rallier l'Humanité tout entière. Mais au fond, que reste-t-il de son oeuvre? Un vestige lointain d'un cours de philosophie? Une rue connue des seuls Parisiens du (...) Quartier latin?... Voilà un bien maigre héritage pour ce curieux prophète de l'ère contemporaine! Si l'influence quasi mondiale de la philosophie positive n'est plus à démontrer, comment expliquer l'échec de sa religion? Cette question, longtemps boudée par l'historiographie, trouve ici sa réponse, notamment grâce aux diverses références que l'auteur convoque tout au long de son enquête. Parmi elles : Régis Debray, Don Quichotte, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth, Dante, Marcel Jousse, Salvador Dali, Joseph Campbell, Homère, saint Paul, Michel Onfray, Marcel Proust, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Anatole France ou encore Star Wars... (shrink)

Ils s’embrassaient tous les deux pour le moment et pour toujours mais le cavalier n’avait plus sa tête, rien qu’une ouverture au-dessus du cou, avec du sang dedans qui mijotait en glouglous comme de la confiture dans la marmite.Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Folio », 2008, p. 17. Embarras du discours Je souhaite interroger la notion de barbarie en l’illustrant par des cas concrets empruntés au théâtre occidental, en particulier au spectacle (...) vivant... (shrink)

Differences in the work philosophy does and the work art does need not be slighted if it turns out that they cross paths, even to some extent share paths—for example, where they contest the ground on which the life of another is to be examined, call it the ground of therapy.The battlefields of war are often described as a separate world, planet, or universe, far removed from ordinary life. Literary examples of this perception can be seen in several modern works (...) of postwar writing: Kurt Vonnegut calling post-bombing Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five as being "like the moon,"2 while Louis-Ferdinand Céline describes war as "the apocalypse."3 As James Winn comments, war is a "world apart, a very ancient world, which... (shrink)

Les auteurs développent une réflexion sur la clinique de l’agir dans l’institution en charge de protéger l’enfance. Ils soutiennent l’idée que le professionnel se trouve acteur malgré lui engagé par l’agir dans la relation dite d’accompagnement. Ainsi est envisagé le déploiement de mouvements transférentiels au sein de la prise en charge dont l’analyse constitue un support privilégié à la restitution du sens de l’agir. L’agir est appréhendé, au-delà de sa dimension économique, comme signifiant d’une impasse psychique. L’idée centrale se situe (...) dans l’exploitation de cette symbolique de l’agir ; possible à travers un travail d’analyse spécifique qui permet la restauration de la dimension thérapeutique de l’institution. (shrink)

La brève correspondance entre Ferdinand Tönnies et Carl Schmitt (1924-1930), dont nous présentons dans ce numéro des Cahiers de philosophie de l’université de Caen la première traduction en français, est étonnante à plusieurs égards. On y voit le vieux Tönnies, l’un des pères de la sociologie allemande, engager un dialogue avec le jeune Schmitt, figure montante de la science du droit. On le voit s’adresser à lui avec respect, en dépit de la différence d’âge, de renommée, et surtout, d’orientation (...) politique. Pour bref qu’il soit, cet échange est néanmoins précieux car il porte sur la crise du parlementarisme au moment où celle-ci s’intensifie, sous la République de Weimar. L’intérêt principal de cette correspondance réside dans la question insistante que le jeune Schmitt pose à Tönnies : agréera-t-il l’interprétation qu’il propose de Hegel et de Gierke, laquelle traverse ses textes sur le parlementarisme, et qu’il qualifie d’interprétation « sociologique »? L’acceptera-t-il, alors qu’elle revient, sous la plume du juriste, à opposer le républicanisme « vrai » et le pluralisme? (shrink)

Cette étude nous offre une analyse de l’attitude des écrivains français contemporains au point de vue social. L’auteur esquisse à grands traits le développement de cette attitude en commençant par Maurice Barrés et décrit les nombreux essais tentés par des écrivains de valeur qui ont voulu s’inspirer de la pensée bourgeoise et représenter cette classe par le moyen de la littérature. La doctrine politique du radical-socialisme d’Alain y est comparée avec le traditionalisme de Barrés. Les efforts de Charles Péguy et (...) de Julien Benda vers une conception normative de la notion du „clerc“, de „l’être intellectuel“ sont décrits quand à leur essence et à leurs limitatons. Une digression sur quelques aspects de belles-lettres : Roman populaire, Ferdinand Céline, Julien Green, fait suite. L’antagonisme entre le poète et l’écrivain sert de trame à une étude de l’oeuvre de Paul Valéry, dans lequel cet antagonisme apparaît le plus nettement. L’orientation sociale actuelle de l’écrivain français se conçoit le mieux lorsqu’on étudie l’oeuvre d’André Gide ; son attitude significative, à un tournant de l’histoire, puise toute sa valeur dans son influence si considérable sur la jeune génération, dont les représentants les plus avancés ont passé par le surréalisme.The object of the following exposition is to determine the attitude of modern French literature, and to trace the main features of its development since Maurice Barrés. We are given the manifold attempts of important authors to inspire themselves with the ideology of the middle class, and to come out on behalf of this class in their writings. Alain’s political doctrine of Radical Socialism is confronted with the reactionary traditionalism of Barrés. Charles Péguy’s and Julien Benda’s exertions to give a normative setting to their concepts of „clerk“ and „intellectual“ are examined both as regards content and definition. We are then presented with some aspects of present-day Belles Lettres : of the „popular novel“, Ferdinand Céline, Julien Green. The antagonism between poet and author is considered in connection with Paul Valéry’s work which shows this most clearly and fruitfully. The present social standpoint of French litterateurs appears in a concentrated form in the life-work of André Gide. His representative position at a turning-point in development is evidenced by his influence on the younger generation, the most advanced of whom have gone beyond and away from Surrealism. (shrink)

What is an event? From a philosophical perspective, events are irregular occurrences--moments of change and interruption--categorized by human perception, language, and thought. While philosophers have pored over this subject extensively in recent years, The Event: Literature and Theory seeks to ground it: What is literature's approach to the event? How does literature produce and give testimony to events? Ilai Rowner's study not only revisits some of the most important thinkers of our time, including Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and (...) Martin Heidegger, it also develops a critical approach to literature that questions the meaning of the literary event through examinations of literary works by Marcel Proust, Louis-Ferdinand Ce;line, and T. S. Eliot. Rowner offers a new method of thinking about the particular characteristics of the event within literary works and defines the creative value of literature as the aspiration toward the un-happening within the happening. In this study the experience of literature--as an act of both writing and reading--becomes the struggle to capture the excessive movement of the event while yet revealing the creative energy within the work of literature. (shrink)

The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, thus enabling the development of French feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism. Based on Saussure's lectures, _Course in General Linguistics_ (1916) traces the rise and fall of the historical linguistics in which Saussure was trained, the synchronic or structural linguistics with which he replaced it, and the new look of diachronic (...) linguistics that followed this change. Most important, Saussure presents the principles of a new linguistic science that includes the invention of semiology, or the theory of the "signifier," the "signified," and the "sign" that they combine to produce. This is the first critical edition of _Course in General Linguistics_ to appear in English and restores Wade Baskin's original translation of 1959, in which the terms "signifier" and "signified" are introduced into English in this precise way. Baskin renders Saussure clearly and accessibly, allowing readers to experience his shift of the theory of reference from mimesis to performance and his expansion of poetics to include all media, including the life sciences and environmentalism. An introduction situates Saussure within the history of ideas and describes the history of scholarship that made _Course in General Linguistics_ legendary. New endnotes enlarge Saussure's contexts to include literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy. (shrink)

Poststructuralism--as a name for a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, a kind of writing--has exercised a profound influence upon contemporary Western thought and the institution of the university. As a French and predominantly Parisian affair, poststructuralism is inseparable from the intellectual milieu of postwar France, a world dominated by Alexandre Kojève's and Jean Hyppolite's interpretations of Hegel, Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud, Gaston Bachelard's epistemology, George Canguilhem's studies of science, and Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. It is also inseparable from (...) the structuralist tradition of linguistics based upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jacobson, and the structuralist interpretations of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, and the early Michel Foucault. Poststructuralism, considered in terms of contemporary cultural history, can be understood as belonging to the broad movement of European formalism, with explicit historical links to both Formalist and Futurist linguistics and poetics, and with aspects of the European avant-garde, especially André Breton's surrealism. Each essay in this unique collection by and for educators is devoted to the work and educational significance of one of ten major poststructuralist philosophers. (shrink)

On received philosophical doctrine, history is simply methodologically immature. History's autonomy can be established not by showing scientific explanations impossible for "history," but by coupling a demonstration that hypothetico-deductive explanation cannot exhaustively analyze historical knowledge with a critique of the proto-science view's assumption that legitimate modes of understanding must be analyzable by an explicit methodology. Certain views historians accept, e.g., that events are unique, while inadequate as a general theory of events, reveal historical understanding's distinctive feature: synoptic judgment, which, irreducible (...) to analytic techniques, interprets a complex process as a function of component events, their interrelationships, importance, and context. (shrink)

Recently, some authors have claimed that, from a republican perspective, market relations are dominating. However, _prima facie_, this idea does not fit within the (neo-)republican conceptualization of domination, which models domination on the master-slave relation. The aim of this article is to twofold. First, I try to argue that market relations can be seen as dominating. Second, I attempt to show that this can be done through an extension of the (neo-)republican conceptualization of domination. I try to achieve this by (...) comparing the master-slave relation with the accounts of those authors who maintain that market relations entail domination. This comparison reveals that there are fundamental similarities between the master-slave relation and the dynamics within market relations that are identified as dominating. What they have in common is the specific harm of domination, which I call the ‘logic of domination’. However, where the master-slave relation and market relations diverge is in the characteristics of the relation that causes the logic of domination to materialize. I argue that Pettit’s concept of discursive control allows us to extend his account of domination in such a way that we can conceive of market relations as dominating. (shrink)

Historien de la philosophie, Jean-Luc Marion est l'un des philosophes français contemporains les plus discutés, les plus commentés et les plus traduits aujourd'hui. La rigueur d'une oeuvre aussi riche que dense rend ainsi très précieuse cette conversation. Le philosophe y revient sur quelques grandes figures qui ont marqué sa vie (Ferdinand Alquié, Louis Bouyer, Emmanuel Levinas qu'il a remplacé à la Sorbonne, Jean-Marie Lustiger dont il a pris la place à l'Académie française...). Il évoque également les grandes étapes (...) de son travail, et rend compte de la dynamique d'une quête philosophique jamais éteinte. Philosophe-phare du catholicisme français, il offre enfin un éclairage neuf et très original sur l'état de l'Eglise et le dialogue judéo-chrétien. (shrink)

We contribute to the exploration of diversity in interdisciplinary science by elaborating the notion of epistemic commitments to address researchers’ different views of knowledge that matters and how these views are embedded in research practices and networks. Based on previous science and technology studies and science-policy literature, we define epistemic commitments as reflexive commitments to regimes of relevant research. Drawing on an in-depth enquiry in the case of biodiversity studies in France, we describe four regimes of research, each of them (...) bringing together certain disciplinary approaches and technologies, certain scenarios about environmental changes and certain contributions to decision making and management. We distinguish between an environmentalist regime, a management-oriented regime, a function-based regime, and an ecoengineering regime. We give insights into how researchers’ commitments to these regimes are shaped, stabilized, and maintained over time, suggesting the coevolution of research practices, practical contributions, and environmental scenarios. We emphasize pluralism rather than hegemony of a type of knowledge over the others. Our results show that environmental research’s diversity does not result only from the complexity of reality itself but is also embedded in various views of scientific advancement, future scenarios, and useful contributions to environmental governance. (shrink)

Introduction. French traditions -- Reception of phenomenology at the turn of the thirties -- Note on metaphysics -- The metaphysics of perpetual presence: Louis Lavelle -- Negative metaphysics: Ferdinand Alquié -- Ineffable metaphysics: Jean Wahl -- Metaphysics of inter-corporality: Maurice Merleau-Ponty -- Metaphysics beyond ontology: Emmanuel Lévinas -- Conclusions, continuations.

“In its less dramatic versions,” writes author Dan Palmer, “structuralism is just a method of studying language, society, and the works of artists and novelists. But in its most exuberant form, it is a philosophy, an overall worldview that provides an account of reality and knowledge.” Poststructuralism is a loosely knit intellectual movement, comprised mainly of ex-structuralists who either became dissatisfied with the theory or felt they could improve it. Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners is an illustrated tour through the (...) mysterious landscape of these two theories. The book’s starting point is the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. The book moves on to the anthropologist and literary critic Claude Levi-Strauss; the semiologist and literary critic Roland Barthes; the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser; the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. The book concludes by examining the postmodern obsession with language and with the radical claim of the disappearance of the individual–obsessions that unite the work of all of these theorists. (shrink)

The founding premise of this book is that the nimbus of prestige which once surrounded the idea of justice has now been dimmed to such a degree that it is no longer sufficient to secure the possibility of a good conscience for those who undertake, in good faith, to make the world a better place in the spheres of politics and law. The many decent human beings who have noticed and experienced this diminishment of justice’s prestige find themselves in a (...) thoroughly disenchanted_ _existential situation. For them the attempt to do justice without the illusion of being grounded in something beyond the sheer facticity of their own performances is a distinctly ethical theme which cries out to be investigated in its own right. Heeding the cry, this book asks and attempts to answer the following fundamental ethical question_: Is a life in the law – even one spent in the pursuit of justice – worth living, and if so, how can a disenchanted person come to bear the living of it without constantly having to engage in self-deception?_ If Nietzsche is right that living without illusions is impossible for human beings, then the most important ethical implication of this essentially anthropological fact goes far beyond the question of what illusions we ought to choose. It must also include the question whether we should succumb to that most seductive and pernicious of all illusions: namely, the belief that exercising great care and responsibility in choosing our illusions – which we might then call our ‘principles of justice’ – excuses us ethically for what we do to others in their name. The culmination of a 10 year legal-philosophical project, this book will appeal to graduate students, scholars and curious non-academic intellectuals interested in continental philosophy, critical legal theory, postmodern theology, the philosophy of human rights, and the study of individual ethics in the context of law. (shrink)

The association between New York City’s all-over structure and the play that unfolds within it relative to difference and identity is very pertinent but is not specific enough, in my opinion. On the one hand, all of Mondrian’s neoplastic works are constituted by an opposition between the variable and the invariable . On the other hand, the type of identity produced in New York City relies on repetition, a principle which, we know, explicitly governs a whole range of paintings predating (...) neoplasticism. New York City differs from the “classic” neoplastic works, as well as from the 1918-19 modular paintings with which it seems to have a good deal in common. It is, in part, because he never discusses this last point that Masheck doesn’t entirely grasp the amplitude of the reversal that Mondrian effected in his New York works.In fact, as James Johnson Sweeney realized quite early, one must go back o the 1917 works, which gave rise to modular grids for the two years that followed, in order to understand what happens not only in New York City but also in the two Boogie-Woogie paintings.3Everyone is aware of the extraordinarily rapid evolution of Mondrian’s work during the years immediately preceding the foundation of neoplasticism: under the influence of Bart van der Leck, he dopted the colored plane and the black dash on a white background as elements of his composition for the two Compositions in Color, A and B . Mondrian, who had not yet found a means of perspicuously relating these diverse elements , tied both plane and dashes together by way of an optical dynamism, based largely on their superimposition. The immediate consequence was to make the background recede optically. The next step was the five Compositions , all entitled “With Colored Planes” . Here all superimposition was eliminated, as well as all “line.” In the last two of these canvases, the background itself is divided without remainder in to planes of different shades of white. The colored rectangles are on the way to alignment. In spite of this, the rectangles fluctuate and, consequently, the background is hollowed out behind them. 3. See James Johnson Sweeney, “Mondrian, the Dutch and De Stijl,” Art News 50 : 63. Meyer Schapiro made a similar remark, at about the same time, in his courses. 4. When I refer to a number accompanied by “Seuphor,” it refers to the “catalog by group” included in Michel Seuphor’s book on the artist. See Seuphor [Ferdinand Louis Berckelaers], Piet Mondrian; sa vie, son oeuvre, 2d ed. . Yve-Alain Bois is associate professor of art history at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published a number of essays on twentieth-century art, architecture, and criticism and is currently working on Mondrian’s neoplastic years and on a history of axonometric perspective. Amy Reiter-McIntosh is a lecturer at the University of Chicago. Her previous contribution to Critical Inquiry was a translation of Ernesto Laclau’s “Psychanalyse et marxisme”. (shrink)

Nous entendons réexaminer tout un pan de l’histoire de la philosophie des sciences en France entre le milieu des années 1930 et l’immédiat après-guerre en nous appuyant sur les activités d’un réseau de scientifiques-philosophes qui s’est constitué autour de Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Louis Destouches et Ferdinand Gonseth après le congrès parisien de philosophie scientifique de septembre 1935. Ce réseau officialise sa rupture avec les positivismes logiques en organisant un colloque à Morgat en septembre 1938. Les activités de ce réseau (...) se concrétisent sous l’Occupation avec la publication en 1942 puis en 1944 de deux fascicules qui offrent une large place aux réflexions de Louis de Broglie, Jean-Louis Destouches et Paulette Destouches-Février en physique théorique, tout en traitant d’autres thématiques telles que le langage et le finalisme. Ces deux fascicules reflètent ponctuellement les engagements de l’un de ses membres, à savoir Jean Mariani, en faveur de la Révolution nationale. Si ce dernier est durement sanctionné à l’automne 1946, l’essentiel de ce réseau continue à jouer un rôle structurant en philosophie des sciences après la guerre et il gagne même en visibilité sur la scène philosophique internationale, grâce au soutien de Ferdinand Gonseth et de Stanislas Dockx. (shrink)

L’article de Hans Vaihinger que nous traduisons possède à nos yeux l’intérêt historique suivant : il montre, à travers une controverse qui a opposé Ferdinand Brunetière à Louis Couturat sur le statut de la guerre chez Kant, la variété de la réception de Kant en France au tout début du xxe siècle, et le croisement de cette réception avec les enjeux politiques de l’époque. Nous allons découvrir, à travers...

We define ethical system infrastructure as being composed of three major factors – means, motivation, and opportunity. Means are defined as organizational rules, policies, and procedures. Motivation focuses upon the values and the interests being pursued by the position occupant and the organizational value system, while opportunity is discussed in terms of the environment in which the dilemma occurs, proposing that position in the hierarchy presents its own unique set of ethical dilemmas. Ethical breeches are discussed in terms of the (...) interactional processes among means, motivation, and opportunity. Finally, a sequential process is suggested to use the infrastructural components to institutionalize organizational ethics training and subsequent behavior. (shrink)

Several recent philosophical projects, notably Bruno Latour's empirical meta-physics, Tristan Garcia's formal ontology, Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy, and Markus Gabriel's new realism, have insisted there is a need for an “egalitarian” or “flat” ontology that would grant an equal ontological status to entities of every kind, whether actual, abstract, material, or fictional. This article groups all of these projects under the heading of “ontological liberalism” and argues that they are inherently problematic, as they sacrifice conceptual coherence and explanatory usefulness in (...) the name of indefinite inclusion. Focusing on Gabriel's recent books Why the World Does Not Exist and Fields of Sense, and with continual reference to Peter Wolfendale's work on the topic, this essay offers a broad but detailed critique of ontological liberalism, with an eye to alternatives emerging from the discipline of anthropology. (shrink)

What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us in an age of rapidly evolving, hard-to-categorize ideas of sexuality and the self? Should we abandon Freud's theories completely or adapt them to new findings and the new relationships taking shape in modern liberal societies? In a remarkably prescient series of lectures delivered in the early 1960s, the French philosopher Louis Althusser anticipated the challenges that psychoanalytic theory would face as politics moved away from structuralist (...) frameworks and toward the elastic possibilities of anthropological and sociological thought. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences translates Althusser's remarkable seminars into English for the first time, making available to a wider audience the origins and potential future of radical political theory. Althusser takes the important step in these lectures of distinguishing psychoanalysis from psychology and especially psychiatry, which long resisted Freud's analytical concepts of the unconscious and overdetermination. By freeing psychoanalysis from this bind, Althusser can then apply these analytical concepts to the social and the political, integrated with Marxist theory. The result is an enlivened methodology for comprehending social organization and change that had a profound influence on the Frankfurt School and scholars who continue to work at the forefront of radical thought today: Judith Butler, Étienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou. (shrink)

Collingwood shows that history is the science of mind that gives selfknowledge by asking how historical knowledge is possible. Critics claim he over-intellectualizes the subject matter of history and the historian's process of thinking. The dialectical theory of mind, the theory of absolute presuppositions, and the logic of question and answer-all developed in Collingwood's works other than The Idea of History -show these objections to be mistaken. In his theory of mind, the "thought" reenacted by historians includes feelings, desires, perceptions, (...) and imagination. History differs from current practice, and counter-examples from what are chronicles, not history, do not discredit Collingwood's theories. History provides necessary and complete answers only to specific questions as they reflect a set of absolute presuppositions ; it is re-enactment, not representation, of the past. (shrink)