Tommy J. Curry’s Another white Man’s Burden presents a rigorous intellectual history of Josiah Royce’s essays on race. Curry explains the several arguments that Royce made on this topic between 1900 and 1908, and he situates these within Royce’s social philosophy and some contemporaneous literatures on racism. The result is a comprehensive theory of cultural assimilation informed by an idealist metaphysics. Royce, namely, disdained segregation and rejected biological accounts of racial difference. But Royce scholars have wrongly taken these observations, Curry (...) argues, as evidence that their hero held progressive views on race. Royce rather began from the premise of Anglo-American cultural superiority, and... (shrink)

in early 2019, the josiah royce society arranged two Author Meets Critics sessions on Tommy J. Curry’s Another white Man’s Burden: Josiah Royce’s Quest for a Philosophy of white Racial Empire. The first was held in New York City, at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting. The second was at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, in Columbus, Ohio. The sessions were vibrant and well-attended. With the exception of a few tendentious questions at (...) the close of the second meeting, however, our sessions lacked the element of controversy that is customary in discussions of racism in the history of philosophy. The panelists and the audience alike rather... (shrink)

Robert Brandom’s notion of historical rationality seeks to supplement his inferentialism thesis by providing an account for the validity of conceptual contents. This account, in the shape of a historical process, involves the same self-integration of Brandom’s earlier inferentialism and is similarly restricted by reciprocal recognition of others. This article argues that in applying the synchronic social model of normative discourse to the diachronic axis of engaging the past, Brandom premises a false analogy between present community and past tradition, which (...) obscures the important differences between the two axes. This is explored by looking closely at how Brandom’s own engagements with the past exemplify his historical rationality. Taking its cue from Brandom’s critics, the article shows that Brandom’s own discourse with tradition is not, and cannot be, dialogical and, in accordance, that historical rationality is not, and cannot be, governed by the same social structure of inferentialism. The article concludes with the implications of such a claim on Brandom’s thesis as a whole and on the role of tradition in the process of normative change, in light of it. (shrink)

Resumo: Mesmo que neguemos qualquer tipo de excepcionalismo à filosofia como empreendimento intelectual (ver Williamson, 2007), parece fácil conceder que, pelo menos no que diz respeito às relações com sua própria história, a filosofia é diferente de outros campos do conhecimento (ver Williamson, 2018). No entanto, questões relacionadas ao escopo, papel e validade da história da filosofia para a atividade filosófica são tão antigas quanto a própria filosofia, além de se tornarem relevantes no chamado parting of ways entre as tendências (...) analítica e hermenêutico-fenomenológica. No entanto, é possível dizer que, pelo menos desde a segunda metade do último século, temos visto uma inflexão importante sobre o lugar e a importância da história da filosofia na filosofia contemporânea: tanto por causa da “virada histórica” na filosofia analítica, com obras de Strawson, Sellars e, mais recentemente, Brandom, servindo como bons exemplos desse movimento, quanto pelo interesse recentemente renovado em questões de metafilosofia. Um exemplo desse segundo movimento é o debate entre os chamados apropriacionistas e os contextualistas. Portanto, este artigo tem como objetivo analisar os dois principais argumentos contra as reconstruções racionais - o GTRC e a acusação de anacronismo - e oferecer uma defesa de uma abordagem inferencialista para a história da filosofia, com base no trabalho de Robert Brandom, que é simultaneamente aberto a certo contextualismo, bem como estabelece parâmetros para as reconstruções racionais. (shrink)