The ArgumentThis paper argues that the development of the history of science as a discipline should be seen in the context of the bitter nineteenth-century conflict between religion and secular culture in Catholic countries. In this context, neo-Thomist theologians were interested in formulating a Catholic strategy of accommodation to modern science and to modern social systems that would also permit rejection of both modern social theory and the positivist theory of science. While theologians such as Cornoldi and Mercier worked with (...) the positivist image of science common in their day, Duhem opted to reformulate the conception of scientific theory. His religiously motivated assignment of a central place to the history of science – as the only way of hinting at the prospective rapprochement between the conventionalist sphere of scientific theory and the metaphysics of the real world – played a formative role in its development. Duhem's conception of the function of the history of science directed the attention of scholars in the field to medieval science as a point of origin for modern science. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis book assumes that basic ways of thinking about history are hard‐wired in the brain. Since different styles of discourse with which we talk about the past are hardwired, Blum infers that a protohistorical consciousness is necessary for the existence of language. Historical logics reflect some preconceived part–whole relation. Blum discerns four kinds of part‐whole structure, which he terms continuity, quantum, continuum, and dialectic. Blum believes that these part–whole relations rest on universal, prereflective intuitions. He concludes that humans have different (...) prelinguistic intuitions of time.Blum claims that people's variable innate temporality is expressed in their historical style. It follows that historical style antedates history as a genre. Hence we are not talking about historical style, but about how individuals apply their sense of the relation between parts and wholes to the problem of time. Our study of historical context becomes secondary to the assumptions we make about the interface between part–whole relations and time. The temporality of history is derivative of a phenomenon that is not historical.Certain conclusions are suggestive. First, modality precedes tense in evolution. Second, we ourselves are continuing to evolve. Blum believes that we are moving “towards a selection of abstract thinkers ruled by pure reason.” Instead of viewing cultures as organisms, it is more profitable to think of the evolution of structures of thinking, and to show that some are more prominent at present than they have been in the past.For Blum, historical thinking is a dependent variable. It depends on tense and modality, which are given before language and culture. Historical thinking reflects a primary experience, but it is not such a primary experience itself. (shrink)

Modern philosophy is based on the presupposition of the certainty of the ego’s experience. Both Descartes and Kant assume this certitude as the basis for certain knowledge. Here the argument is developed that this ego has its sources not only in Scholastic philosophy, but also in the narrative of the emotional self as developed by both the troubadours and the medieval mystics. This narrative self has three moments: salvation, self-irony, and nostalgia. While salvation is rooted in the Christian tradition, self-irony (...) and nostalgia are first addressed in twelfth-century troubadour poetry in Occitania. Their integration into a narrative self was developed in late medieval mysticism, and reached its fullest articulation in St. Teresa of Avila, whom Descartes read. (shrink)

There are two competing loci for our interchange with the past, and two positions that we adopt vis-à-vis that past. These loci are history and memory, the one being the sum of what has happened up to now and the other comprising the sum of what we remember about all that has happened. Seen in this way, the set of historical events is much greater than the set of memorial events. Yet the set of all events often appears to be (...) smaller than that of all remembered events because this latter always seems to be full, or certainly much fuller than the set of all events. So little of the sum total of what has happened is accessible that there seem to be far fewer members of the set of all past events than there are members of the set of all remembered events. Nonetheless, both positions are formally possible. The question is whether we begin our discussion of the relation between history and memory from the position of history or from the position of memory. If we commence from the first position, we seek to know all that happened and then ask what do we remember about what happened, whereas if we start from the latter position, we seek to know what we remember about what happened and ask about what happened only as we have gained access to it from what we remember about it. (shrink)

I Three Duals There are two competing loci for our interchange with the past, and two positions that we adopt vis-à-vis that past. These loci are history and memory, the one being the sum of what has happened up to now and the other comprising the sum of what we remember about all that has happened. Seen in this way, the set of historical events is much greater than the set of memorial events. Yet the set of all events often (...) appears to be smaller than that of all remembered events because this latter always seems to be full, or certainly much fuller than the set of all events. So little of the sum total of what has happened is accessible that there seem to be far fewer members of the set of all past events than there are members of the set of all remembered events. Nonetheless, both positions are formally possible. The question is whether we begin our discussion of the relation between history and memory from the position of history or from the position of memory. If we commence from the first position, we seek to know all that happened and then ask what do we remember about what happened, whereas if we start from the latter position, we seek to know what we remember about what happened and ask about what happened only as we have gained access to it from what we remember about it. (shrink)

The ArgumentAgainst the idea that modern historiography developed in the eighteenth century as a completely new way of looking at the past, this paper argues that modern historical science borrowed its sense of experience from seventeenth-century memoirs. However, seventeenth-century rnemorialists made very different as sumptions than modern historians about the relations between time, memory, and history. One consequence of their introduction of lived subjectivity into the depiction of the past was a debate in early eighteenth-century France about the relations between (...) history and fiction, some arguing that fiction is a better way of grasping the subjective truth of the past. These debates about the relations between history and memory and between history and fiction have resurfaced recently. The historical moods that are one context for paradigm shifts share common motifs, such as a sense of defeat, of distance between the present and the immediate past, and a need for consolation through the elaboration of a new mode of experiencing the past. (shrink)

Time and Transcendence provides a new theory of secularization in the Catholic context, a new interpretation of the origins of modern historical science, and a new reading of Heidegger's theories of time and history. The author shows how a secular sense of the past evolved in early modern French memoirs. Memoirs uncovered a level of personal experience that was then applied as an intuitive framework for the study of history. Modern history's scientific study of sources is embedded in the imaginative (...) sense of a personal past. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis article compares the corresponding effects in science and art of a change in the intuition of time at the beginning of this century. McTaggart's distinction between linear time and tense time is applied to the question of whether linear perspective requires a notion of time as succession. It is argued that the problem of self-representation is a basic problem for this kind of uniform space-time because of the contradiction between this model's need for a privileged point of view (...) and its simultaneous denial of such a possibility. (shrink)