In these fifteen essays, one Of Germany's most distinguished philosophers of history invokes an extraordinary array of witnesses and texts to explore the concept of historical time. The witnesses include politicians, philosophers, theologians, and poets, and the texts range from Renaissance paintings to the dreams of German citizens in the 1930s. Using these remarkable materials, Koselleck investigates the relationship of history to language, and of language to the deeper movements of human understanding.Reinhart Koselleck is Professor of the Theory of (...) History at the University of Bielefeld. (shrink)

Les essais réunis dans Le futur passé proposent des réflexions précieuses et peut-être plus libres que celles d'autres ouvrages de Koselleck, tout du moins en ce qui concerne trois sujets : l'histoire conceptuelle, la théorie de la modernité et la théorie des temps historiques. " Les analyses sémantiques présentées ici ne portent pas essentiellement sur l'histoire de la langue ", précise l'auteur. " Elles s'attachent à la structure linguistique des expériences temporelles, là où celles-ci sont ancrées dans la réalité passée. (...) Ces analyses s'élargissent au champ social et linguistique, tout en essayant de passer de la sémantique des concepts à la dimension historique et anthropologique inhérente à tout acte de langage. " Le livre que l'on présente aujourd'hui est déjà reconnu comme un texte de référence par la communauté internationale des philosophes comme des historiens. (shrink)

In this chapter we focus on Rorty’s core commitments with respect to language, and consider their role in Rorty’s stormy relations to mainstream analytic philosophy. Further, we bring out key features of Rorty’s position by tracing his engagement with WittgensteinWittgenstein, SellarsSellars, QuineQuine, DavidsonDavidson, and KuhnKuhn.

There is a famous puzzle in Rorty scholarship: Did or did Rorty not subscribe to a form of realism and truth when he made concessions regarding objectivity to Bjørn Ramberg in 2000? Relatedly, why did Rorty agree with Ramberg but nevertheless insist upon disagreeing with Brandom, though large parts of the research community hold their two respective requests for shifts in Rorty’s stance to be congruous? The present article takes up the discussion and tries, for the first time, to make (...) sense of Rorty’s insistence that there is a difference between Brandom’s notion of “made true by facts” and Ramberg’s notion of “getting things right” by showing that Ramberg’s appropriateness-conditions are fully compatible with Rorty’s revised interpretation of Davidson’s concept of “triangulation,” whereas Brandom’s inferential “made-true-by-facts”-language game is not. The reason why Rorty agrees with Ramberg but not with Brandom, I argue, is that Brandom’s contemporary concept of objectivity, as developed in his contribution to the debate and in his Making It Explicit, works with a scheme-content distinction, whereas Ramberg’s Davidson-based version does not. As many of his critics suppose, Rorty’s concession to Ramberg entails a substantive revision of Rorty’s position, not just a clarification. However, this new position is not in conflict with Rorty’s most important commitment, namely his anti-authoritarianism. The revised account still does not bind him to the forms of realism and truth that his critics favor. The article explains to which forms of realism and truth Rorty’s concessions to Ramberg commit him instead. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering takes a distinctively normative and reconstructive approach to our conceptual repertoire. This approach is congenial to the ideas defended by philosophers belonging to the multifaceted tradition of American and Cambridge Pragmatism. This special issue is devoted to the investigation and development of these connections. Our introduction maps some of the historical and theoretical entanglements between the two fields and gives a short overview of the contributions to the special issue.

Sediments of time -- Fiction and historical reality -- Space and history -- Historik and hermeneutics -- Goethe's untimely history -- Does history accelerate? -- Constancy and change of all contemporary histories -- History, law, and justice -- Linguistic change and the history of events -- Structures of repetition in language and history -- On the meaning and absurdity in history -- Concepts of the enemy -- Sluices of memory and sediments of experiences -- Behind the deadly line : the (...) age of totality -- Forms and traditions of negative memory -- Histories in the plural and the theory of history : an interview with Carsten Dutt. (shrink)

The article reveals the pragmatic implications of Herman Cappelen’s account of ‘topics’ in his contribution to the conceptual engineering literature. I show that Cappelen’s introduction of the category of ‘topics’ serves the pragmatic goal of having a convenient handle to account for ‘continuity in revision’, and that his general insistence on ‘continuity’ is motivated morally and strategically. In asking what accounts for continuity, Cappelen’s ‘topics’ are not defined by content or any other fixed set of rules or criteria. Topics are (...) metaphysically lightweight and defined pragmatically and as we go: speakers talk about the same topic when we (and they) attribute that they do. But why should we do that? Why should we aim for continuity and why should we think it is possible in general? I contrast Cappelen’s insistence on continuity with Rorty’s appeal for discontinuity, and trace both of their positions back to their respective moral background assumptions and their assumptions about what communication is (and is for) and, in turn, what philosophy is (and is about). Further, I question the role the ‘continuity’ claim plays in the current redefinition of linguistic philosophy after the ‘death of the linguistic turn’. (shrink)

In this way progressive bourgeois philosophy, which seemed to offer the promise of a unified and peaceful world, in fact produced just the opposite.The book ...

This article provides a semantic reading of Tracy Llanera's brilliant book Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. Llanera is reframing the debate of how to react to the malaise of modern nihilism by proposing a change of metaphor: instead of trying to “overcome” nihilism, we should try to “outgrow” nihilism. This article invites Llanera to shed more light on her project with respect to the semantic categories of realism and representationalism, and with respect to the growing field of conceptual engineering. Can (...) Llanera's project be fruitfully understood as engineering the concepts of “transcendence” and “redemption”? How much of the project hangs on the idea that language does not represent but is rather a tool that helps us fulfill our varying needs? How neat is the entanglement of semantic and existential meaning? (shrink)

The chapter reconstructs Rorty’s dismissal of realist positions in epistemology and semantics, his reframing of the realist claim that the world is determinate, material, and independent from our thoughts and descriptions, his position regarding scientific realismrealism, and the comforting role that truth and realism play in metaphysical realism. Further, the chapter addresses the open question of whether Rorty had a realist turn toward the end of his career.

Reinhart Koselleck is among the most original German theorists of history and historiography. His international reputation is due in part to his contributions as theorist and editor of the remarkable lexicon Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (GG). The GG is an exceptional reference work that goes far towards realizing Koselleck's program and distinctive version of Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts, conceptual history). What is presented here is a translation in full of Koselleck's own entry on Krise (crisis). Few articles in the GG (...) demonstrate more successfully Koselleck's theoretical concerns, his method, and innovative use of sources. (shrink)

In a publication of 1831 later seen as a milestone in the development of chemistry, Justus Liebig announced a new apparatus for the analysis of organic compounds and provided analytical results for fifteen substances. In this paper we used the detailed descriptions published by Liebig in 1837 to reconstruct his apparatus and methods for hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen analysis. Our replications of his analyses of racemic acid, cinchonine, narcotine, and urea reveal that his two pieces of apparatus give excellent results (...) for carbon and hydrogen content, but erratic results for nitrogen. The results corroborate the assessments of Liebig and his contemporaries, and show that the analytical method for carbon and hydrogen analysis was remarkably accurate. We offer this case, with its convincing replicability, not only to clarify the nature of Liebig's innovations, but also as a new model for understanding broader contested issues in the philosophy and sociology of science. Our analysis suggests that the great shift in science from gentlemanly avocation to professional vocation was tightly linked to laboratory practice, and not just to social networks and context. It also provides the basis for a critique of H. M. Collins's theory of the 'experimenters' regress'. (shrink)

In the framework of the minimalist program, the assumption that wh-in-situ move covertly to be assigned wide scope is infeasible. Rather, it is assumed that they must be interpretable in situ, and that syntactic conditions like ‘superiority’ are effects of economy, which restricts overt rather than covert movement of a wh-element. The remaining syntactic problem for this line of reasoning is the putative ECP effects of adverbial wh-adjuncts, which were the strongest evidence for covert movement. A serious semantic problem is (...) that the interpretative procedures which have been proposed for wh-in-situ – unselective binding or absorption – fail to capture correctly their interpretation. I will argue first that both problems are solved if the interpretation in situ employs choice functions, and it is the function variable, rather than an individual variable, which is long-distance bound by the question existential operator. Adverbial adjuncts, which cannot be interpreted via choice functions, cannot, therefore, be interpreted in situ. However, the concept of economy underlying the account of overt superiority effects requires both theoretical and empirical clarification (as it leaves some empirical problems unaddressed). I argue, following a proposal by Golan (1993), that in this case the economy considerations apply at the interface (‘interface economy’) and that they consider not only different derivations out of the same numeration, but also their semantic representation. (shrink)

Richard Waller, Fellow and Secretary of the Royal Society, is probably best remembered for editing Robert Hooke’s posthumously published works. Yet, Waller also created numerous drawings, paintings, and engravings for his own work and the Society’s publications. From precisely observed grasses to allegorical frontispieces, Waller’s images not only contained a diverse range of content, they are some of the most beautiful, colorful, and striking from the Society’s early years. This article argues that Waller played a distinctly important role in shaping (...) the visual program of the Royal Society by virtue of his multiple functions as reliable administrator and translator, competent natural philosopher, and skilled image-maker. It analyzes Waller’s visual works in the context of his graphic training—in part influenced by his mother Mary More—and situates them within the context of English image-making traditions and Waller’s own natural philosophical interests. Examined as a functional whole, Waller’s career as a Fellow of the Royal Society emerges as an important case study in the fusion of visual and scientific practices in early-modern England. (shrink)