God, at least as an active agent, is excluded from today’s scientific worldview -- including the worldview of the humanities. This creates a gulf between a godless science and believers in God’s active presence in the world, a gulf that I argue is unbridgeable. I resist four temptations to take easy ways out of a real dilemma: whether to accept or dismiss this and similar miracle accounts. The first is to explain evidence and refuse to consider the events about which (...) the evidence reports; the second, to deny that reports of miracles represent a problem since biblical actors and authors lacked Hume’s concept of inviolable laws of nature; the third, to become resigned to a putative epistemological gap that renders impossible any dialogue on religion with actors from the early modern period; the fourth, to restrict our studies to asking what the events meant to the historical actors without passing judgment on the truth value of their beliefs. I suggest that when doing historical researc. (shrink)

This reply aims both to respond to Gregory and to move forward the debate about God’s place in historiography. The first section is devoted to the nature of science and God. Whereas Gregory thinks science is based on metaphysical naturalism with a methodological corollary of critical-realist empiricism, I see critical, empiricist methodology as basic, and naturalism as a consequence. Gregory’s exposition of his apophatic theology, in which univocity is eschewed, illustrates the fissure between religious and scientific worldviews—no matter which basic (...) scientific theory one subscribes to. The second section is allotted to miracles. As I do, Gregory thinks no miracle occurred on Fox Lakes in 1652, but he restricts himself to understanding the actors and explaining change over time, and refuses to explain past or contemporary actions and events. Marc Bloch, in his book The Royal Touch: Sacred Monarchy and Scrofula in England and France, is willing to go much further than Gregory. Using his superior medical knowledge to substitute his own explanation of the phenomenon for that of the actors, Bloch dismisses the actors’ beliefs that they or others had been miraculously cured, and explains that they believed they saw miraculous healing because they were expecting to see it. In the third section, on historical explanation, I rephrase the question whether historians can accommodate both believers in God and naturalist scientists, asking whether God, acting miraculously or not, can be part of the ideal explanatory text. I reply in the negative, and explicate how the concept of a plural subject suggests how scientists can also be believers. This approach may be compatible with two options presented by Peter Lipton for resolving the tension between religion and science. The first is to see the truth claims of religious texts as untranslatable into scientific language ; the other is to immerse oneself in religious texts by accepting them as a guide but not believing in their truth claims when these contradict science. (shrink)

This paper probes the explanatory value of mentality as a social emergent in general and of the Zeitgeist in particular. Durkheim’s contention that social facts have emergent properties is open to the charge that it implies logically inconsistent “downward causation.” On the basis of an analogy with the brain–mind dilemma and mental emergentism, the first part of the essay discusses and dismisses the notion of social emergent properties that cannot be reduced to the properties of their component parts—individuals—and their internal (...) relations. However, ontological individualism need not compel us to methodological individualism. The second part introduces two challenges to methodological individualism. The most radical is Rajeev Bhargava’s assertion that the meaning of a belief is determined not by the individual holding the belief but by the entire linguistic community. Bhargava’s “contextualism” is closely related to the structural demand that we focus on discourse as a communal entity instead of continuing a delusive quest for the intentions of individual speakers. A more modest alternative is Margaret Gilbert’s plea for using “plural subjects”—social groups in which “participant agents” act jointly or have a jointly accepted view—in the practical syllogisms that are central to rationalizing action explanation. The notion of plural subjects lends credence to, and is reinforced by, “situationist” social psychology, which shows how people conform to peer groups, authorities, and roles. Building on Wesley Salmon’s and Peter Railton’s ecumenical accounts of explanation, the essay argues that both individual rationalizing action explanations and explanations based on plural agents can give explanatory information: we need not choose one or the other. The third part discusses how the Zeitgeist can provide added explanatory value in an analysis of the New Left. This is possible if the “spirit of the sixties” is seen as representing the values and worldviews of the “sixties generation” as a social group in Gilbert’s terms. Radical youth would suspend judgment and pool their wills to conform to what they perceived were the views of the imagined “sixties community” or—rendering more explanatory force—to smaller parts of it in the guise of peer groups and organizations. (shrink)

Philosophy of history is currently dominated by postmodernist anti-realists who claim that historiography can never provide true accounts of the past. The Poverty of Anti-realism exposes the faulty premises and reasoning behind such assertions and shows that anti-realism has political implications unforeseen and unwanted by its adherents.