ABSTRACTIn his discussion of David Hume and historical distance, Mark Salber Phillips points out that in the process of distance‐creation there is a distinction between something occurring “within the text” and “outside the text.” In this paper I draw on this distinction and introduce a semantic mechanism that allows a certain distance to be designed within a historical text. This mechanism is highlighted in a view of reference that sees it as indirect . According to the indirect reference view, meaning (...) opens up a space for what might be called historical distance. However, this is not to say that everything with regard to the immediacy and remoteness of this historical distance is analyzable solely in terms of what is happening at the level of the text. In fact, I argue that distance‐effects can be understood only if we also take into account contexts of the writing and reading of history. The semantics of indirect reference allows for distance‐construction, but its span depends on the circumstances governing the creation and reception of historical representation. I conclude with the observation that the view presented here should not be interpreted as disconnecting historical work from past reality. (shrink)

This paper tries to show how the Fregean semantic framework, especially the notions of sense and tone, can be used to explain certain features of history. Following Michael Dummett's interpretation of Gottlob Frege's notion of meaning, it is possible to conceive of historical works as proposing particular modes of presentation of past events. In fact, alternative historical works about the same past events could be viewed as differing in what sense and tone they express. In this paper, I first outline (...) some of the points and distinctions made by Frege. Second, I examine how the notions of sense, reference, and tone can be applied in semantic analysis of historical work. Finally, I point to a certain similarity between the Fregean framework and some of the views presented in the recent philosophy of history. My account suggests how to make use of some of the classical insights of Frege when dealing with the semantic issues of historical work. (shrink)

A convincing argument can change a discussant’s commitment regarding the acceptability of a claim, but the same effect can be achieved by examining evidence. Observing objects or events that count as evidence for or against the acceptability of a statement can change one’s commitment regarding that statement. If we speak of fallacies in the realm of convincing through argumentation, can we speak of fallacies in the realm of convincing through evidence? In this paper, we defend an affirmative answer. We introduce (...) and discuss the conceptual implications of evidentiary fallacies as fallacies committed when evidence is fabricated or suppressed during an attempt to resolve disagreement using proof. We then apply the notion of evidentiary fallacy to two real-life examples of mis-executed evidentiary procedures. We conclude that the notion of evidentiary fallacy can contribute to a more comprehensive fallacy theory and can foster new and broadly applicable critical skills. (shrink)

The purpose of the paper is to introduce a recursive model of ecological discursive sustainability, as it applies to and emerges from the history of an after-school program partnership between the School of Education at the University of Delaware, USA and the Latin American Community Center in Wilmington, Delaware, USA. This model is characterized by the development of shared ownership and collaboration between the institutional partners, the co-evolution and crossfertilization of the partners’ practices and the negotiation of institutional boundaries and (...) structures. This model was developed by analyzing dialogic discourses across six diverse ecological domains of the partnership. The purpose of the paper is to introduce a recursive model of ecological discursive sustainability, as it applies to and emerges from the history of an after-school program partnership between the School of Education at the University of Delaware and the Latin American Community Center in Wilmington, Delaware. This model is characterized by the development of shared ownership and collaboration between the institutional partners, the co-evolution and cross-fertilization of the partners' practices and the negotiation of institutional boundaries and structures. This model was developed by analyzing dialogic discourses across six diverse ecological domains of the partnership. (shrink)

Several authors argue that historical works should be viewed as relatively complex and autonomous constructions that are of interest in their own right. In the paper I follow this general approach to history and provide an analysis of historical representation inspired mainly by Nelson Goodman’s observations about symbols. In Languages of Art, Goodman makes a number of interesting claims regarding pictorial representation, exemplification and expression, which could be employed to clarify certain semantic questions of history. He convincingly shows that there (...) are two important questions about any representation: What is the representation about and what kind of representation is it? In the paper I make use of this two-questions point in order to explore the semantics of historical representation. In particular, this point helps to emphasize that historical works are not simple reports about past events but rather symbols revealing what kinds of representations they are, i.e. what they exemplify or express. (shrink)

The existence of differing historical interpretations of the same happenings and the consequences of this phenomenon have attracted scholarly attention and deserve to be studied in the future by philosophers of history. Plurality repeatedly surfaces in historical discussions and relativism seems to be one of the obvious conclusions drawn from the existence of competing historical accounts. In my paper, I begin with plurality in history to examine further the issue of relativism. I focus on the dualism of scheme and content (...) as being at the root of relativity and subsequently argue that abandoning this type of dualism is one way how to avoid relativism even within a broadly constructivist view of history. The discussion is, moreover, linked to the issue of how historians present their accounts: Do they offer representations of the past or should we think about their outcomes in a different way? (shrink)

At the turn of the twentieth century, William James was America's most widely read philosopher. In addition to being one of the founders of pragmatism, however, he was also a leading psychologist and author of the seminal work, The Principles of Psychology. While scholars argue that James withdrew from the study of psychology after 1890, Eugene Taylor demonstrates convincingly that James remained preeminently a psychologist until his death in 1910.Taylor details James's contributions to experimental psychopathology, psychical research, and the psychology (...) of religion. Moreover, Taylor's work shows that out of his scientific study of consciousness, James formulated a sophisticated metaphysics of radical empiricism. In light of historical developments in psychology, as well as the current philosophic implications of the neuroscience revolution related to the biology of consciousness, Taylor argues that both the subject matter of James's investigations and his metaphysics of radical empiricism are just as important for psychology today as James believed they were in his own time.This book represents a major new contribution both to James scholarship and to the history of American psychology. Although philosophers have analyzed radical empiricism, this book is the first to trace the development of radical empiricism as a metaphysics addressed to psychologists. It is also the first to show James's involvement in depth-psychology and psychotherapeutics and to trace historical continuity between James's work on consciousness and subsequent developments in psychoanalysis, personality theory, and humanistic psychology. (shrink)

Revelation tells of a creating and redeeming God, whose Son has come among us in our flesh, and enters into each individual's personal history and also into human history itself, becoming its Center. Therefore, Jesus Christ is the Lord of History, of concern to every Christian in all the Churches.

In his latest book, Frank Ankersmit proposes an original theory of historical representation. In this review I focus on what I take to be his most important semantic points with respect to representation, meaning, truth, and reference. First, I provide a short summary of the book. Second, I explore his semantics in terms of aspects and compare it with a different account inspired by the Fregean notion of mode of presentation. As my examination shows, Ankersmit’s analysis faces the problem of (...) “loosing indirectness” and, moreover, there seems to exist an alternative and plausible view that does not suffer from this problem. Finally, I conclude with a couple of comments on the Copernican Revolution advocated in the book. (shrink)

An odd, but persistent question. In _Guns, Steel and Germs, Jared Diamond's answer is that history is or should be a science. Like sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, he wants to extend the methods of the natural sciences to the social sciences and the humanities. My answer is an emphatic 'no!' E. H. Carr's _What is History? made an extended case for scientific history. The main burden of my essay is a dismantling of Carr's argument. Concerned with objective truth (_pace the (...) radical skeptics), history writing may have science in its tool kit. But it is essentially an interpretive, narrative art. (shrink)

The materialist interpretation of history dogmatically resolves all histories into one. Marx and Engels themselves thought philosophy progresses toward the ultimate truth of Marxism, and implicitly held all historical positions interesting since their development reveals contradictions generated by inadequacies. Bolshevik Marxism's official ideology does not include philosophy's dissolution. Marxist definitions of philosophy emphasizing correct conclusions neglect distinctively philosophical argument and method. The recent Soviet view of philosophy's history has changed from the history of superstructure to the history of conflicting materialist (...) and idealist theories, thereby conceding the centrality of philosophical ideas rather than trying to reduce them to class or economic interests. (shrink)

Tales of “disenchantment” dominate modern intellectual life, and especially accounts of the cultural history of capitalism. Yet Weberian sociology, and especially Marxist notions of “commodity fetishism”, point to the persistence of “enchantment” in the capitalist imagination. If we reformulate these notions of “enchantment” and “disenchantment” in theological terms of sacrament, then we can write new histories of capitalism, as well as articulate new forms of political and cultural criticism. Borrowing from “radical orthodoxy”, the author takes a Cook's Tour of “disenchantment”, (...) explores the possibilities afforded by “sacramental” conceptions of materialism, and gestures toward an account of American cultural history shaped by a sacramental materialism. (shrink)

When worldviews clash, the world reverberates. Now a distinguished scholar who has written widely on thinkers ranging from Samuel Beckett to Eric Voegelin inquires into the sources of religious conflict—and into ways of being religious that might diminish that conflict. _Worldview and Mind_ covers a wide range of thinkers and movements to explore the relation between religion and modernity in all its complexity. Eugene Webb invokes a number of topical issues, including religious terrorism, as he unfolds the phenomenon of religion (...) in all its complications, from the difference between faith and belief to the diversities among—and within—religions. Building on Karl Jaspers’s psychology of worldviews and Jean Piaget’s developmental psychology, Webb looks at a broad spectrum of religions—especially the history of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in their various forms—to explore the subjective factors that sometimes render religions conflictual and aggressive and to consider conditions that might foster more helpful and reconciling forms of religiousness. He explores what psychological analysis reveals about the relationship between stages of psychological development and ways of being religious—ways that range from closed-minded literalism to open-minded tolerance. He also identifies unconscious and developmental obstacles to religious maturity and depicts the mature person as one who participates in the mystery of self-transcending love. Webb argues that authentic religion need not succumb to dogmatism, or support fanaticism, or be consigned to the stages of immature culture. Responding to critics of religion, from Sigmund Freud to Daniel Dennett, he demonstrates that religious traditions have more spiritual depth than these critics have granted and a greater potential for development than they believe, along lines they might even favor. His insightful book proposes that, if religious people can step back from their traditions and consider them as partial ways of relating to transcendent ultimacy, the world’s religions might manage to develop a way of living together with mutual appreciation and respect. (shrink)

Originally published in 1920 as part of a series of handbooks for teachers, this book of advice to history teachers is still full of practical information on the use of historical sources and possible classroom exercises designed to engage children with the study of the past. This book will be useful to anyone with an interest in the history of education, historical education in particular.

Taking the formal analogies between black holes and classical thermodynamics seriously seems to first require that classical thermodynamics applies in relativistic regimes. Yet, by scrutinizing how classical temperature is extended into special relativity, I argue that the concept falls apart. I examine four consilient procedures for establishing the classical temperature: the Carnot process, the thermometer, kinetic theory, and black-body radiation. I argue that their relativistic counterparts demonstrate no such consilience in defining the relativistic temperature. As such, classical temperature doesn’t appear (...) to survive a relativistic extension. I suggest two interpretations for this situation: eliminativism akin to simultaneity, or pluralism akin to rotation. (shrink)

Abstract Eric Hobsbawm's Nations and Nationalism since 1780 effectively describes the novelty and artificiality of the modern nation and nation?state, emphasizing the role that cultural and political elites have played in constructing nations, especially through nationally homogeneous schools and partly invented national traditions and histories. By defining nationalism as the congruence between nation and state, however, Hobsbawm gives insufficient attention to the sense in which nationalism goes beyond national patriotism to express chauvinism, xenophobia, and paranoia. He is also too sanguine (...) about the ethnic conflicts that will inevitably arise in the multilingual societies he endorses. (shrink)

We blame faulty brakes for a car crash, or rain for our bad mood. This “merely causal” blame is usually seen as uninteresting. I argue that it is crucial for understanding the interpersonal blame with which we target ourselves and each other. The two are often difficult to distinguish, in a way that plagues philosophical discussions of blame. And interpersonal blame is distinctive, I argue, partly in its causal focus: its attention to a person as cause. I argue that this (...) causal focus helps explain several central characteristics of interpersonal blame: its tendency to exaggerate a person’s causal role, its weakening through attention to personal history or thoughts about determinism, its characteristic ‘force’ or ‘sting’, and our sense that blame is often harmful or unfair. I conclude by drawing out one implication of blame's causal focus: in a certain range of cases, blame is partly under our voluntary control. (shrink)

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are arguably the most important period in philosophy’s history, given that they set a new and broad foundation for subsequent philosophical thought. Over the last decade, however, discontent among instructors has grown with coursebooks’ unwavering focus on the era’s seven most well-known philosophers—all of them white and male—and on their exclusively metaphysical and epistemological concerns. While few dispute the centrality of these figures and the questions they raised, the modern era also included essential contributions from (...) women—like Margaret Cavendish, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Émilie Du Châtelet—as well as important non-white thinkers, such as Anton Wilhelm Amo, Julien Raimond, and Ottobah Cugoano. At the same time, there has been increasing recognition that moral and political philosophy, philosophy of the natural world, and philosophy of race—also vibrant areas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—need to be better integrated with the standard coverage of metaphysics and epistemology. -/- A New Modern Philosophy: The Inclusive Anthology of Primary Sources addresses—in one volume—these valid criticisms. Weaving together multiple voices and all of the era’s vibrant areas of debate, this volume sets a new agenda for studying modern philosophy. It includes a wide range of readings from 34 thinkers, integrating essential works from all of the canonical writers along with the previously neglected philosophers. Arranged chronologically, editors Eugene Marshall and Susanne Sreedhar provide an introduction for each author that sets the thinker in his or her time period as well as in the longer debates to which the thinker contributed. Study questions and suggestions for further reading conclude each chapter. At the end of the volume, in addition to a comprehensive subject index, the book includes 13 Syllabus Modules, which will help instructors use the book to easily set up different topically structured courses, such as "The Citizen and the State," "Mind and Matter," "Education," "Theories of Perception," or "Metaphysics of Causation." -/- And an eresource offers a wide range of supplemental online resources, including essay assignments, exams, quizzes, student handouts, reading questions, and scholarly articles on teaching the history of philosophy. (shrink)

The paper deals with one of the central topics of the philosophy of history – the narrative. Two different views of narrative and consequently of narrative explanation are distinguished. According to the first position , reality itself does not have a narrative structure, but since we are familiar with the narrative form, we can explain events if we present them as a story of a particular kind. According to the second position , in order to explain, we need to capture (...) real connections between events. That is, our narratives should depict structures already present in reality. The paper outlines these two general views and points out to the fact that they are based on different ontological presuppositions and different views of the nature of the explanatory power of narrative. (shrink)

THE PURPOSE OF HISTORY i FROM HISTORY TO PHILOSOPHY The serious study of history is characteristic of a certain maturity of mind. ...

Until recently, experimental philosophy has been associated with the questionnaire-based study of intuitions; however, experimental philosophers now adapt a wide range of empirical methods for new philosophical purposes. New methods include paradigms for behavioural experiments from across the social sciences as well as computational methods from the digital humanities that can process large bodies of text and evidence. This book offers an accessible overview of these exciting innovations. The volume brings together established and emerging research leaders from several areas of (...) experimental philosophy to explore how new empirical methods can contribute to philosophical debates. Each chapter presents one or several methods new to experimental philosophy, demonstrating their application in a key area of philosophy and discussing their strengths and limitations. Methods covered include eye tracking, virtual reality technology, neuroimaging, statistical learning, and experimental economics as well as corpus linguistics, visualisation techniques and data and text mining. The volume explores their use in moral philosophy and moral psychology, epistemology, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the history of ideas. Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy is essential reading for undergraduates, graduate students and researchers working in experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Insufficient attention has been paid to the ethics of distributing costs of insurance risk. Seven approaches are articulated: the egalitarian model, the needs/ability model, the loss history model, the statistical model, the causality model, the moral fault model (avoidability interpretation and worldview interpretation), and eclectic models. The ethical dimensions of each model are explored. Although some reasons are given for preferring the eclectic model, the main purpose of the paper is to provide an ethical framework for further discussion of an (...) oft-neglected issue. (shrink)

In book 10 of City of God, Augustine appeals to the notion of true sacrifice in order to counteract the attraction of pagan worship. This appeal to the concept of sacrifice gives a distinct shape to the Christology and ecclesiology he develops in this book. Set against this polemical horizon, and within the context of his wider thought, it becomes clear that sacrifice is itself soteriological motif for Augustine. The work it does in this context is to serve as another (...) way of describing the return of humanity to God through the Incarnate Christ. The cross, the Eucharist, the moral life, and the church itself are all identified as instances of the one true sacrifice of Christ. In this way, sacrifice provides an integrative motif for discussing Augustinian Christology, ecclesiology, sacramental theology, and soteriology. (shrink)

This letter explores the intricate historical and contemporary links between large language models (LLMs) and cognitive science through the lens of information theory, statistical language models, and socioanthropological linguistic theories. The emergence of LLMs highlights the enduring significance of information‐based and statistical learning theories in understanding human communication. These theories, initially proposed in the mid‐20th century, offered a visionary framework for integrating computational science, social sciences, and humanities, which nonetheless was not fully fulfilled at that time. The subsequent development of (...) sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, especially since the 1970s, provided critical perspectives and empirical methods that both challenged and enriched this framework. This letter proposes that two pivotal concepts derived from this development, metapragmatic function and indexicality, offer a fruitful theoretical perspective for integrating the semantic, textual, and pragmatic, contextual dimensions of communication, an amalgamation that contemporary LLMs have yet to fully achieve. The author believes that contemporary cognitive science is at a crucial crossroads, where fostering interdisciplinary dialogues among computational linguistics, social linguistics and linguistic anthropology, and cognitive and social psychology is in particular imperative. Such collaboration is vital to bridge the computational, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects of human communication and human−AI interaction, especially in the era of large language and multimodal models and human‐centric Artificial Intelligence (AI). (shrink)

This essay presents the challenges facing those preparing to teach the history of modern philosophy and proposes some solutions. I first discuss the goals for such a course, as well as the particular methodological challenges of teaching a history of modern philosophy course. Next a standard set of thinkers, readings, and themes is presented, followed by some alternatives. I then argue that one ought to diversify one’s syllabus beyond the canoni­cal set of six or seven white men. As a first (...) step toward that goal, I propose several ways to include women philosophers in the syllabus. I then lay out assignments and in-class activities that aid students toward the course goals. I conclude with a consideration of the challenges and rewards of teaching modern philosophy. (shrink)