This new book offers a clear and accessible exposition of Hayden White's thought. In an engaging and wide-ranging analysis, Herman Paul discusses White's core ideas and traces the development of these ideas from the mid-1950s to the present. Starting with White's medievalist research and youthful fascination for French existentialism, Paul shows how White became increasingly convinced that historical writing is a moral activity. He goes on to argue that the critical concepts that have secured White's fame – trope, plot, (...) discourse, figural realism – all stem from his desire to explicate the moral claims and perceptions underlying historical writing. White emerges as a passionate thinker, a restless rebel against scientism, and a defender of existentialist humanist values. This innovative introduction will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities, and help develop a critical understanding of an increasingly important thinker. (shrink)

The press environment created by abrupt transitions from government dominance to independence has created difficult ethical dilemmas for editors and publishers. Pursuit of earnings - without which a free marketplace of ideas is impossible - has forced leaders of media enterprises to make painful choices about employment, privacy, career training, distribution, pornography, and subsidy. Winnowing out the weak and inefficient is seen as both healthy and creative. Consensus on ethical guidelines will not come quickly. Political and economic changes occur more (...) rapidly than cultural ones. In all free countries, press management involves a delicate balancing of cultural and economic imperatives. In newly free countries achieving that balance is particularly difficult. (shrink)

When Laszlo Tisza first came to MIT in 1941, he had already made significant contributions to physics. In the years since, he has consolidated his position as one of the most important theoreticians of his time. Tisza's major areas of activity, closely reflected in these twenty-three essays, have included studies of quantum liquids (in particular, the remarkable properties of liquid helium and the nature of superfluidity and superconductivity), irreversible thermodynamics and the statistical thermodynamics of equilibrium, phase transitions and critical phenomena, (...) and the application of group theory to molecular spectroscopy. Tisza has also given long and close attention to the philosophy and history of his science, to a degree rarely attained by an active research physicist. His special contribution has been his insights into the logical and conceptual structure of physics. This aspect of Tisza's work is less well known than his technical contributions, and the book has been structured to right the balance by revealing Tisza the natural philosopher who collaborates with Tisza the physicist. Written by Tisza's colleagues and former students, the essays are grouped under five headings: Foundations of Probability and Thermodynamics; Condensed Matter Physics; Quantum Mechanics and Relativity; Biological Systems; and History and Philosophy of Science. Abner Shimony, Professor of Philosophy and Physics at Boston University, has contributed a closing evaluation of Tisza's philosophy of science, and Herman Feshbach, Head of the Department of Physics at MIT, has contributed an opening recollection of Tisza's scientific style. (shrink)

The archival turn in 19th-century historical scholarship – that is, the growing tendency among 19th-century historians to equate professional historical studies with scholarship based on archival research – not only affected the profession’s epistemological assumptions and day-to-day working manners, but also changed the persona of the historian. Archival research required the cultivation and exercise of such dispositions, virtues, or character traits as carefulness, meticulousness, diligence and industry. This article shows that a growing significance attached to these qualities made the archival (...) turn increasingly contested. As the case of the German-Austrian historian Theodor von Sickel and his critics shows, it was not the necessity of archival research as such on which historians in late 19th-century Europe came to hold different views. Sickel’s critics were rather concerned about the potentially detrimental effects that the increasingly philological ethos of archival studies could have on the historian’s character. What was primarily at stake in late 19th-century debates on the gains and losses of increased commitments to archival study was the persona of the historian – his character traits, his dispositions and the virtues and skills in which he excelled. (shrink)

This text contains contributions from two Kant conferences which took place in Leuven and Cerisy-la-Salle in 1993.

Les lois générales gouvernant la formation des théories sont valable dans la pragmatique comme partout ailleurs où se manifeste l'ambition théorique. La méthodologie adequate, ici come ailleurs, est plutôt celle de la reconstruction et de la découverte que celle de la description et de l'interpretation. Il faut que la noyau théorique, évalué par les critères internes d'adéquation, de cohérence et de simplicité, ait une dynamique reconstructiviste d'expansion. La question à résoudre n'est pas: quel est l'object de ma science, mais bien (...) plutôt: comment est l'object de ma science si ma théorie a de telles propriétés, une telle structure interne? Telle est d'ailleurs le perspective qui oriente le présent volume. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper is on what we understand when we are said to understand semiotic sequences, such as sentences, arguments, proofs, road indications, jokes, and works of art, and on how we can understand them. The theory of understanding defended here is psycho‐pragmatic, and it is anthropologically oriented. The contention is that we always understand significances: users of semiotic systems have an acceptance relation with a significance ≪[]: the conveyed proposition is modified by the universal rationality operator ≪, and by the (...) partial mood‐operator. We can understand significances by the fact that they are descriptively presented to the users of semiotic systems as common values of the community to which they belong and want to belong. (shrink)

My position concerning universald research consists of four theses: universal grammar has as its object empirical linguistic facts; to account for these facts, a linguistic theory in symbiosis with the grammar is needed; this theory reconstructs language in rationalistic terms; universals research in its dependence on a rationalistic theory of language has to be epistemologically motivated, i.e. universal constraints on the grammar as well as on language have to be elaborated without to be directed towards a foundational or ontological explanation (...) of the apriori. (shrink)

ABSTRACTDrawing on the case of Alfred Dove, this article contributes to an emerging line of research on scholarly personae in the history of historiography. It does so by addressing the important but so far neglected question: What exactly does the prism of scholarly personae add to existing historiographical perspectives? The German historian Alfred Dove is an appropriate case study for this exercise, because historical scholarship in Wilhelmine Germany has been relatively well studied, from various angles. Most notably, it has been (...) studied through biographical lenses, from institutional points of view, as the cradle of ‘scientific history’, with special attention to historical methods of the sort codified by Ernst Bernheim, and in relation to religious and political fault lines that divided the German Empire shortly after the Franco-Prussian War and the Kulturkampf. The thesis advanced in this article is that scholarly personae are a missing link between these four dimensions and therefore a theme of key importance for anyone trying to understand German historical studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Parables of Narrative ImaginingDavid Herman (bio)Mark Turner. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.The literary mind? The literary mind? The literary mind? Any which way you parse it, the title of Mark Turner’s provocative, elegantly written study seems to beg important questions, assume things that do not by any means go without saying. First parse: is there in fact a literary (part of the) mind? That is, is (...) there some nondiscrete but semi-autonomous module of cognitive capacities required for using and understanding literary discourse—a module that takes information (as its input) from other modules, operates on that information in some way, then feeds the transformed information (as its output: “literature”) into yet other modules, which in turn take that information as their input? 1 Second parse: assume that there is some module involved in the production and interpretation of literary discourse. Then of what nature, exactly, are the operations performed within that module, and how do they operate on the input in a way that makes the output specifically literary? How precisely is literature born from this process or set of processes? Doesn’t this kind of account suffer from all the disadvantages (inexplicitness, for example) that it inherits from its parent model, the black-box explanation? Third parse: should we even be talking about “minds” at all in connection with literature and the study of literature? Hasn’t “The Intentional Fallacy” and everything that has happened since in the fields of critical and cultural theory—from Marxism and poststructuralism to New Historicism and cultural studies—taught us to center critico-theoretical discourse anywhere but in “the mind”? Hasn’t all this research exposed the mind (of the author, reader, subject, or postsubject, as the case may be) as a construct with more or less noxious political and cultural properties? Are not the discourses of and about the mind so many strategies of interpellation—vehicles by which ideology can work to implant the illusions of inviolable inwardness, unchanging essence, and predetermined identity within a subject that takes such imagined realities to be its real conditions of existence? 2Turner does not directly address any of these questions—at least in the way that I have framed them. That may be grounds for criticism: if you are using a title that can be construed as polemical, then the onus is on you to explain just how the title positions your work in a wider context of argumentation. But at the same time, Turner’s analysis reformulates the underlying problems to which some of my questions point, thus raising [End Page 20] other, equally important issues. Coming to terms with these other issues may change the way we ask questions about things like literature and the mind. Specifically, as part of a larger “cognitive revolution” now unfolding in social-scientific and humanistic disciplines ranging from linguistics to literary and narrative theory, Turner’s book provides ample reasons for not thinking the idea of mind tantamount to an ideology of mind. 3 After all, reducing mind to an ideology of inwardness leaves unexplained any number of basic facts about perception, cognition, and language processing. There is, for example, our ability to use “image schemata” such as motion along a path and bounded interior to make sense of events like milk being poured into a cup, on the one hand, and contained spaces like the ones inside bottles, heads, and houses, on the other hand [Turner 16]. Relying on such schemata, I don’t regularly try to pour wine into a cutting board or to measure, in miles per hour, the speed of an asparagus stalk as it sits on the kitchen counter.There is also—to invoke a slightly different cognitive-scientific vocabulary—our ability to make predictions about emergent situations and sequences of events on the basis of prior, stereotypical situations and sequences stored in the memory as knowledge representations sometimes called frames and scripts [see Schank and Abelson]. For example, the script associated with making a purchase guides me in my interaction with the person at a cash register, such that I can make seemingly effortless predictions about what this person wants me to do... (shrink)