As it emerged in the late twentieth century, Empire promised a new era of global cooperation and stability through a seamless integration of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy. Premised as an end to history itself, all that was left to accomplish was to tinker at the margins, stimulate corporate enterprise, embrace financialization and technological innovation, and encourage liberal rights and inclusion. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the narrative fictions sustaining Empire have broadly collapsed at the (...) level of symbolic identification and belief. Empire has entered into a period of global emergency and mutation. Engaging with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work, this paper considers what might emerge when we read education into the circuitry of Empire’s decay. First, we locate Empire within foundational tensions in modernity, using Kantian philosophy and colonialism as examples, to foreground the idea of education as immanent to historical processes of creativity, resistance, and innovation. Second, we highlight dead-end responses, from space colonization to neo-fascism, as representations of how modes of education circulate to stabilize and contain Empire’s crises, specifically in relation to capitalism, nationalism, and identity. Lastly, the paper develops a political ontology of education after Empire. (shrink)

To develop this theory, Karl Löwith—beginning with the more accessible philosophies of history in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and working back to the Bible—analyzes the writings of outstanding historians both in antiquity ...

In the paper I try to define some basic ideas and sketch a style of Marek Siemek’s epistemological reflection and its influence on the notion of do called “meaning of history”. I referee some elements of his interpretation of Kant and Hegel as a background to paradox of “meaning of the history”—the paradox of its necessary transcendence and immanence, the contradiction between a history as an eschatology, and history as a “project”, a dialectic of sense and non-sense. The (...) conclusion is following: the “history” for Siemek is the becoming of self-sufficiency of the “modern spirit” and therefore a tragicomedy in the Hegelian sense. It excludes any transcendent point of view or any utopia. (shrink)

The analytical and self-critical bias of modern philosophy lets ideology expand to most significant world-view and value areas. Hence, philosophy of history escapes such problems as meaning of history, course of history, and self-identification in history. Ideology aggressively grasps these ideas and transforms them into its own primitive dogmas that usually serve as symbolical tools for political struggle or for legitimating ruling elites. This paper shows how it is possible for philosophy, in cooperation with the social (...) sciences (especially historical macrosociology), to retrieve these problems of crucial world-view significance. A universal model of historical dynamics and the concept of values of general significance are described and integrated within a general frame for historical meanings: permanent self-test of human communities. (shrink)

The great Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) believed that the dawn of the twentieth century would bring an end to the old atheistic and positivistic worldview and the beginning of a new era of the spirit. His philosophy goes beyond mere rational conceptualization and tries to attain authentic life itself: the profound layers of existence in contact with the divine world. He directed all his efforts-philosophical as well as in his personal and public life-at replacing the kingdom of this (...) world with the kingdom of God. According to him, we can all attempt this by tapping the divine creative powers that constitute our true nature. Our mission is to be collaborators with God in His continuing creation of the world. In The Meaning of History, Nikolai Berdyaev examines the fundamental problems of the philosophy of history. For him, the philosophy of history is a science of the spirit bringing us into communion with the mysteries of spiritual life. The real philosophy of history is that of the triumph of authentic life over death, of man's participation in another reality much deeper and richer than the external reality in which he is immersed. The history of man and the world is rooted in "celestial history," in the deepest interior spiritual life, which can be equated with heavenly life, the life of eternity, the life of God. The source of history lies in the experience of the human spirit in direct communion with the divine spirit.  "Nikolai Berdyaev's writings are always insightful, penetrating, passionate, committed-expressions of the whole person. They are as intensely alive now as when they were first written."-Richard Pevear, translator of War and Peaceand The Brothers Karamazov "Nikolai Berdyaev's writings retain their freshness as vehicles for thinking not just about the future of Russia, but about the spiritual challenges facing the modern world."-Paul Vallier, author of Modern Russian Theology: Bukharev, Soloviev, Bulgakov "Nikolai Berdyaev is one of the few who have found the Christian answer, and yet do not cease to question with those whose lives are still torn asunder by disbelief, doubt, and sufferings; one of the few who dare to be, as thinkers, Christians and, as Christians, thinkers."-Evgeny Lampert, author of The Apocalypse of History Boris Jakim has translated and edited many books in the field of Russian religious thought. His translations include S. L. Frank's The Unknowable, Pavel Florensky's The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, Vladimir Solovyov's Lectures on Divine Humanity, and Sergius Bulgakov's The Bride of the Lamb. (shrink)

The heated and unresolved debate in philosophy of history evoked by Hempel’s suggestion that the deductive-nomological model of explanation is equally applicable to the natural sciences and history, has unintentionally led to a distorted conception of what it is to explain in history. We argue that explanation in history, at its best, is contingent not on general laws, not even on consequentiality, but on labels as frames of meaning. These labels further serve as a basis for eliciting models (...) which help determine the fuller meaning of occurrences and processes in history. (shrink)

Translator's note -- Foreword by Boris Jakim -- On the essence of the historical : the meaning of tradition -- On the nature of the historical : the metaphysical and the historical -- Of celestial history : god and man -- Of celestial history : time and eternity -- The destiny of the Jews -- Christianity and history -- The Renaissance and humanism -- The end of the Renaissance and the crisis of humanism : the advent of the machine (...) -- The end of the Renaissance and the crisis of humanism : the disintegration of the human image -- Spiritual development and the eschatological problem -- The doctrine of progress and the goal of history -- Epilogue: the will to life and the will to culture. (shrink)

Politics presupposes an understanding of meaning in history, according to which it manages the actions that accord with or serve this meaning (as an ultimate good). The aim of this paper is to examine the process by which meaning in history is formed, as well as its character. To do this, I employ suitably modified phenomenological analyses of intentional consciousness to bring them as close as possible to the thematic of the psychoanalytic unconscious. I first try to (...) sketch the basis on which the modern problem of meaning in history arises and the fundamental responses produced by modern philosophy. Then, I delineate two basic understandings of meaning in history as developed by the founders of Phenomenology, Husserl and Heidegger, which are surprisingly close to those of modern metaphysics. Next, I draft the process by which the topic of the unconscious surfaces in the context of difficulties faced by critical epistemology in its effort to penetrate the unperceivable folds of reality, which should be acknowledged as a precondition of experience but also of action and ethics. After this, a brief phenomenological account regarding action and praxis in response to evil is presented as a specific concretization of this philosophy after its vaccination with the thematic of the unconscious. Next, I examine MerleauPonty’s final, although ultimately failed, attempt to construct a phenomenological proof of the possibility of objective knowledge regarding historical meaning. In addition, I consider how persistent maintenance of the ideologically optimistic reading of history simply concocts political action that crucially exposes humanity to the danger of perpetrating what Arendt called “banal evil.” The question, then, is whether Phenomenology can offer a non-nihilistic understanding of existence, action, and events in history. I argue that a cautious non-Marxist and de-Messianized reinterpretation of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in tandem with an Aristotelian analysis of praxis and Kantian-Arendtian “common sense,” offers a sober, perspectivist, realistic understanding of the place of humans in the cosmos and of the historical course we happen to take in it. (shrink)

In this important new book, Paul T. Phillips argues that most professional historians--aside from a relatively small number devoted to theory and methodology--have concerned themselves with particular, specialized areas of research, thereby ignoring the fundamental questions of truth, morality, and meaning. This is less so in the thriving general community of history enthusiasts beyond academia, and may explain, in part at least, history's sharp decline as a subject of choice by students in recent years. Phillips sees great dangers resulting (...) from the thinking of extreme relativists and postmodernists on the futility of attaining historical truth, especially in the age of "post-truth." He also believes that moral judgment and the search for meaning in history should be considered part of the discipline's mandate. In each section of this study, Phillips outlines the nature of individual issues and past efforts to address them, including approaches derived from other disciplines. This book is a call to action for all those engaged in the study of history to direct more attention to the fundamental questions of truth, morality, and meaning. (shrink)

The philosophy of “presence” seeks to challenge current understandings of meaning and understanding. One can trace its origins back to Vico, Dilthey, and Heidegger, though its more immediate exponents include Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and such contemporary philosophers of history as Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia. The theoretical paradigm of presence conveys how the past is literally with us in the present in significant and material ways: Things we cannot touch nonetheless touch us. This makes presence a (...) post-linguistic or post-discursive theory that challenges current understandings of “meaning” and “interpretation.” Presence provides an overview of the concept and surveys both its weaknesses and its possible uses. In this book, Ethan Kleinberg and Ranjan Ghosh bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to explore the possibilities and limitations of presence from a variety of perspectives—history, sociology, literature, cultural theory, media studies, photography, memory, and political theory. The book features critical engagements with the presence paradigm within intellectual history, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. In three original case studies, presence illuminates the relationships among photography, the past, memory, and the Other. What these diverse but overlapping essays have in common is a shared commitment to investigate the attempt to reconnect meaning with something “real” and to push the paradigm of presence beyond its current uses. The volume is thus an important intervention in the most fundamental debates within the humanities today. Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales; Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley; Susan A. Crane, University of Arizona; Ranjan Ghosh, University of North Bengal; Suman Gupta, Open University Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University; John Michael, University of Rochester; Vincent P. Pecora, University of Utah; Roger I. Simon. (shrink)

In this book, originally published in 1967, the author gives his views of history, from reflection on living history as distinct from books about past history. He sees histories as the related histories of individuals and gives an account of the meanings in those individuals' lives and defends the beliefs dominatnly held in relation to them. He challenges professional historians to concern themselves with the fundamentals of history, and philosophers to return to the cnsideration of problems persistent in the previous (...) history of philosophy, occidental and oriental. (shrink)

The paper consists of two parts. In the first one the author analyses the situation of mankind in the last decades of the 20th century, regarding it as tragic; in his reflections he refers mainly to the conceptions of Georg W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx and some Christian thinkers. The second part is a critique of Karl Popper’s conception of history, especially his main claim that history has no meaning.

In joining a discussion of the subject, object, method, and other specifications of culturology, one should first define one's view of the correlation between culture and history, culturological and historical knowledge, the purposiveness of history as a social movement, and its certainty as a science. From the point of view of positivist philosophy and the social science based on it, history a priori lacks any teleology, goal-orientation, or inner meaning and is simply the sum of the collective life (...) of people. I would even risk defining the historical process as a dynamics of people's realization of the collective forms of their life activity and an accumulation of justified models of the corresponding social experience. In that case, historical knowledge can be defined as a special way of describing and systematizing the most socially significant processes and results of people's realization of their sociality, that is, technologies of collective existence. I draw attention to the fact that what we are talking about, first of all, is the way we-the interested people-have chosen to describe past events we had systematized in some way or another on some suitable basis. In itself, history is not a living entity and cannot have any independent goals, meanings, intentions, or other manifestations of free will, which are characteristic of a freely acting human individual. (shrink)

Professor Weiss's book, in which he attempts to lay bare the structures of historical reality and shed new light on methods used by historians in understanding the past, is a closely reasoned, provocative, and seminal work, exhibiting a philosophical vision reminiscent of the speculative and metaphysical profundity of a Hegel or a Spinoza. The reader of History: Written and Lived soon becomes aware that the author understands philosophy to be a serious enterprise and that he is in possession of (...) the necessary conceptual tools to pursue this enterprise with rigor and insight. In this respect the author's present treatise is no exception to his previous writings, and there is a real sense in which his book on history cannot be fully understood except in light of his previous book, Modes of Being. The metaphysical schematization which he formulated in Modes of Being provides the basis for much that he has to say on the subject of history. The connection between the two works is made explicit by the author himself when he writes: "The historic world is one product resulting from an interrelating of the basic realities which make up the universe. On the basis of other inquiries I have come to the conclusion that these basic realities are four in number. I have called them Actuality, Ideality, Existence and God ". What Professor Weiss thus presents is, in the last analysis, not only a philosophy of history but more specifically a metaphysics of history. It is more the cognitive attitude of Hegel than of Burckhardt, more the categorial analysis of Whitehead than of Comte that govern Weiss's reflections on history. (shrink)

Volume 10 of the Routledge History of Philosophy presents a historical survey of the central topics in twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy. It chronicles what has been termed the 'linguistic turn' in analytic philosophy and traces the influence the study of language has had on the main problems of philosophy. Each chapter contains an extensive bibliography of the major writings in the field. All the essays present their large and complex topics in a clear and well organised (...) way. At the end, the reader finds a helpful Chronology of the major political, scientific and philosophical events in the Twentieth Century and an extensive Glossary of technical terms. (shrink)

The twentieth century brought enormous change to subjects such as language, metaphysics, ethics and epistemology. This volume covers the major developments in these areas and more.

The twentieth century brought enormous change to subjects such as language, metaphysics, ethics and epistemology. This volume covers the major developments in these areas and more.

Jean Paul Sartre and Michael Foucault -- Socrates and the Buddha -- Sigmund Freud and Richard Dawkins -- Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh -- Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade -- Charles Darwin and Michael Behe -- Frans de Wall and Barbara King -- Paul Maclean and Michael Persinger -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Francis Collins -- John Hick and the Dalai Lama.

In this article, the relationship between philosophy and history of education is delved into. First, it is noted that both disciplines have diverged from each other over the last few decades to become relatively autonomous subsectors within the pedagogical sciences, each with its own discourses, its own expositional characteristics, its own channels of communication, and its own networks. From the perspective of the history of education, it seems as though more affiliation has been sought with the science of history. (...) The history of education, in any event, has in the past few years become more historicizing and less ‘educationalizing’. According to the author, there are signs that indicate that such an analogous line of reasoning, mutatis mutandis, also applies for the philosophy of education. Does this mean that there are no longer any bridges from the one area to the other or that none are possible? Probably not. In the second portion, it is shown that the modern or even postmodern ‘new cultural history of education’, with its often ironical and demythologizing traits uses or can use a considerable amount of ‘grand theory’. Indeed, the development of an adequate conceptual apparatus that also has to cope with the problem of ‘presentism’ assumes a constant dialogue with the past and for this a philosophical‐interpretative approach is still the best situated. Inversely, the Foucauldian perspective shows that philosophy in general and philosophy of education in particular equally hardly do without history. Within the reflection on pedagogical praxis, the historical and the philosophical thus probably will continue to rely on each other—if only as allies against the dominance of short‐winded empirical‐quantitative research. Still, it would be naive to think that, from this possible alliance, the fragmentation of historically developed knowledge systems with their own sociological and institutional foundation of scientific activities can be rectified in a trice. (shrink)