This remarkable history tells the story of the independent city-republic of Basel in the nineteenth century, and of four major thinkers who shaped its intellectual history: the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the philologist and anthropologist Johann Jacob Bachofen, the theologian Franz Overbeck, and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. "Remarkable and exceptionally readable... There is wit, wisdom and an immense erudition on every page."—Jonathan Steinberg, Times Literary Supplement "Gossman's book, a product of many years of active contemplation, is a tour de force. (...) It is at once an intellectual history, a cultural history of Basel and Europe, and an important contribution to the study of nineteenth-century historiography. Written with a grace and elegance that many aspire to, few seldom achieve, this is model scholarship."—John R. Hinde, American Historical Review. (shrink)

Even if its constituent members still define particular positions and pursue at times somewhat independent policies, the EU acts increasingly in important areas as the unified federal state many have long wanted it to be. It may have come into being in response to practical problems, and pragmatic considerations are likely to ensure its continued consolidation, but its most committed champions have also presented it as the realization of an idea, as a longstanding project finally fulfilled. What is the idea (...) that a federal European state can claim to embody or represent or be animated by? How well do the various versions of the idea that have been articulated so far fit the current and emerging reality of the EU? Attention in the article focuses especially on the pan-European movement that emerged after the unprecedented destruction of World War I. (shrink)

Although the term “anecdote” entered the modern European languages fairly recently and remains to this day ill-defined, the short, freestanding accounts of particular events, true or invented, that are usually referred to as anecdotes have been around from time immemorial. They have also always stood in a close relation to the longer, more elaborate narratives of history, sometimes in a supportive role, as examples and illustrations, sometimes in a challenging role, as the repressed of history—“la petite histoire.” Historians’ relation to (...) them, in turn, varied from appreciative to dismissive in accordance with their own objectives in writing history. It appears that highly structured anecdotes of the kind that are remembered and find their way into anecdote collections depend on and tend to confirm established views of history, the world, and human nature. In contrast, loosely structured anecdotes akin to the modern fait divers have usually worked to undermine established views and stimulate new ones, either by presenting material known to few and excluded from officially authorized histories, or by reporting “odd” occurrences for which the established views of history, the world, and human nature do not easily account. (shrink)

For Augustin Thierry, rewriting the story of the past was, until 1830, explicitly a way of making the future, and after 1830, implicitly a way of justifying the present. In subverting traditional historiography perceived as a legitimation of royal authority Thierry did not follow the Enlightenment strategy of opposing history and reason. Writing after 1789, he discovered reason in history. Constant and the Saint-Simonians had already distinguished two ages of history an age of conquest or violence, and an age, just (...) beginning, of commerce and reason but these appeared as discontinuous. Thierry's aim, especially after 1830, was to reveal history as a continuous, providential unfolding of reason, culminating in the bourgeois nation state. The violence of history was thus to be subsumed by reason. Historiographically, narrative and commentary were not to be discontinuous, as in Enlightenment historiography; meaning was to emerge instead from the narrative itself. Correspondingly, the historian's role was to be construed as a mediating, not a constructive one. The historian is the mouthpiece of history, as the bourgeois, the true hero of history, uniting in himself conquered and conqueror, re-presents what in history was divided the nation. In neither case is control to be viewed as a mark of division or violence; historian and hero are alike agents or representatives of totality . Violence reasserts itself thematically, however, in the stark, unresolved opposition of conquered and conqueror, subject and lord, female and male, victim and executioner, which structures Thierry's most successful historical narratives. (shrink)

The topic of this guest column is Beaumarchais's endeavor, as a dramatist, to overcome the irreconcilable polarities of high and low, spirit and body, noble and base, tragedy and comedy that are essential to French classical theater by adapting traditional comedy to the less rigid, more pragmatic and optimistic outlook of the Enlightenment and a new middle class and by experimenting with “bourgeois drama,” notably in the third play of the Figaro trilogy. The bourgeois drama—and the trilogy itself, as it (...) moves the same cast of characters from The Barber of Seville through The Marriage of Figaro to The Guilty Mother—is seen as an attempt to bypass not only the conventional opposition of comedy and tragedy but also the even more fundamental polarity of epic and dramatic through the infusion of elements of the new bourgeois novel into works for the theater. Roles and situations in Beaumarchais are not fixed and eternal but evolve in historical time. Figaro himself emerges as a characteristically modern figure, neither noble nor base but mixed, many-sided, energetic, and enterprising, an individual rather than a type, and thus a more realistic representative of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment humanity than the Scapinos and Frontinos of traditional comedy. (shrink)

The Passion of Max von Oppenheim: Archaeology and Intrigue in the Middle East from Wilhelm II to Hitler. By Lionel Gossman. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2013. Pp. xxvi + 388, illus. £15.95.

This paper aims to call into question the customary division of logically revisionary responses to the truth-theoretic paradoxes into those that are “substructural” and those that are “ structural.” I proceed by examining, as a case study, Beall’s recent proposal based on the paraconsistent logic LP. Beall formulates his response to paradox in terms of a consequence relation that obeys all standard structural rules, though at the price of the language’s lacking a detaching conditional. I argue that the same response (...) to paradox can be given using a consequence relation that preserves detachment rules for a conditional, though at the price of restricting structural rules. The question “Is paradox being blocked by invoking a substructural consequence relation?” is thus ill-posed. The lesson of this example, I conclude, is that there is no useful explication of the idea of a substructural approach to paradox. (shrink)

Locke's claims about the "inadequacy" of substance-ideas can only be understood once it is recognized that the "sort" represented by such an idea is not wholly determined by the idea's descriptive content. The key to his compromise between classificatory conventionalism and essentialism is his injunction to "perfect" the abstract ideas that serve as "nominal essences." This injunction promotes the pursuit of collections of perceptible qualities that approach ever closer to singling out things that possess some shared explanatory-level constitution. (...) It is in view of this norm regulating natural-historical inquiry that a substance-idea represents a sort for which some such constitution serves as the "real essence," i.e. as that on which all the sort's characteristic "properties" depend. (shrink)

Francesco guicciardini rather than niccolo machiavelli was the first significant theorist to consider the role of interest in moral and political life, But the idea of interest rose to normative status because traditional natural law ethics, Which repressed the pursuit of interest in the name of right reason, Was transformed in the early modern period. The transformed version, It is proposed, Legitimized the pursuit of interest by introducing a philosophy of ethical egoism.

This paper compares two ways of holding that logic is special among the sciences in that it has no restricted class of entities as its subject matter, but instead concerns all entities alike. One way is Williamson’s explanation of how inquiry into logical consequence and logical truth only superficially concerns the linguistic or conceptual entities that bear these properties. Williamson draws on ideas familiar from deflationism about truth, and his account has been called “deflationary.” I argue that the analogy (...) is misleading. While there’s a broad sense in which Williamson offers a deflationary account of logical inquiry, his view differs from deflationism about truth in being best understood as a form of instrumentalism. By contrast, I elaborate a deflationism about logical properties modeled on deflationism about truth. I defend this expressive device deflationism as an explanation of our use of logical predicates. (shrink)

It is generally assumed that Descartes invokes “objective being in the intellect” in order to explain or describe an idea’s status as being “of something.” I argue that this assumption is mistaken. As emerges in his discussion of “materially false ideas” in the Fourth Replies, Descartes recognizes two senses of ‘idea of’. One, a theoretical sense, is itself introduced in terms of objective being. Hence Descartes can’t be introducing objective being to explain or describe “ofness” understood in this sense. (...) Descartes also appeals to a pretheoretical sense of ‘idea of’. I will argue that the notion of objective being can’t serve to explain or describe this “ofness” either. I conclude by proposing an alternative explanation of the role of objective being, according to which Descartes introduces this notion to explain the mind’s ability to attain clear and distinct ideas. (shrink)

Each of the three essays constituting the dissertation's body explores a theoretical approach to conceptual content, as well as to particular kinds of concepts. A concluding chapter defends a distinction between two varieties of intentionality. ;Chapter 1 identifies a distinctive model of intentionality in Locke's discussion of our "ideas of the sorts of substances." Properly understood, his doctrine of the "inadequacy" of substance-ideas reveals that the sort represented by such an idea isn't settled by the idea's descriptive content. (...) The key to his compromise between classificatory conventionalism and essentialism is an injunction to "rectify" each substance-idea, one that reflects a norm governing natural-historical inquiry. Interestingly, Locke regards the resulting picture of the natural kinds represented by substance-ideas as compatible with his descriptivist account of how the extensions of substance-names are fixed. ;Chapter 2 examines Gupta and Belnap's theory of "circular concepts," which likewise appeals to a semantic "revision rule." Besides promising to explain semantic paradox when applied to the concept of truth, their theory significantly liberalizes the framework of truth conditional semantics. I criticize the rationale behind that liberalization by investigating the significance attributed to the revision rule, and propose invoking pragmatic ideas to do justice to some of the theory's motivating intuitions. ;Chapter 3 first argues that Brandom's appeal to normatively characterized linguistic practice subserves two approaches to content: one expressivist and the other reductionist. The criterion of adequacy motivating his "inferentialist" reduction of contentfulness, I then argue, is one he should dismiss in view of his deflationism about truth. Moreover, Brandom fails to vindicate the priority of attributions of inferential norms over attributions of propositional content. This criticism doesn't affect the expressivist elucidation of intentional concepts resulting from Brandom's normative-pragmatic description of assertional practice. ;My conclusion draws on this elucidation to defend a distinction prefigured in my construal of Locke as divorcing the aboutness of substance-ideas from assessments of truth. I argue that we should distinguish between a "representational" kind of intentionality whose attribution subserves explanations of successful inductive and explanatory practices, and a "semantic" kind whose attribution makes explicit normative features of the essentially communicative practice of assertion. (shrink)

This article looks at the broadest implications of public acceptance of AI. A distinction is drawn between “conscious” belief in a technology, and “organic” belief where the technology is incorporated into an unconscious world model. The extent to which we feel threatened by AI's apparent denial of “spirit” is considered, along with a discussion of how people react to this threat. It is proposed that organic acceptance of AI models would lead to a rebirth of popular spiritual concepts as paradoxical (...) as the “New Age” ideas that have their roots in the theories of physics. Finally the relevance of this speculation is discussed in terms of how it could impinge upon public acceptability of AI technology. (shrink)

The first two chapters of this book describe an inquiry into whether the elements of human knowledge may be arranged in an order which is not determined by personal opinion and which is capable of being verified independently by different people. It concludes that this is possible and describes a theory which may serve the purpose. The third chapter is a commentary, intended to supply a background to the theory, to compare the authors present views with those of other persons, (...) and to suggest applications of the work to practical problems. (shrink)

This work combines two early pamphlets by F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), the foremost philosopher of the British Idealist movement. The first essay, published in 1874, deals with the nature of professional history, and foreshadows some of Bradley's later ideas in metaphysics. He argues that history cannot be subjected to scientific scrutiny because it is not directly available to the senses, meaning that all history writing is inevitably subjective. Though not widely discussed at the time of publication, the pamphlet was (...) influential on historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood. The second pamphlet is Bradley's critique of Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics. Sidgwick was the first to propose the paradox of hedonism, which is the idea in ethics that pleasure can only be acquired indirectly. Published in 1877, this work is divided into three parts, treating Sidgwick's definitions, arguments, and his view of ethical science. (shrink)

SUMMARYThis essay discusses Hans Aarsleff's long battle to demonstrate the importance of the French and British thinkers of the mid-eighteenth century to the development of modern linguistic thought. Contesting claims that German scholars were the first to develop historicised theories of language, Aarsleff, along with his Princeton colleagues Lionel Gossman and Anthony Grafton, helped pioneer longue durée studies of the history of philology and of historiography that cross national boundaries as well as the so-called Sattelzeit. Although the importance (...) of his work was, for a long time, little appreciated by modern intellectual historians, this essay argues that it is time that we fully learned Aarsleff's lessons. (shrink)

The essays collected together in this volume originated with a symposium which addressed a variety of issues associated with the publications of Professor W.H. Dray in the philosophy of history. In this expanded version of the original symposium, to which Professor Dray has provided a critical response, a group of prominent philosophers and historians address the central questions posed by contemporary philosophy of history - such as, the logic and methodology of historical explanation, the selection and uses of evidence, the (...) fact/value relationship, the nature of historical causation, the question of conflicting interpretations and their possible resolution, the idea of history as a school of practical wisdom, and the question whether history has any discernable pattern or meaning. These issues are approached from the experience of both historians and philosophers and represent an important increment to the long-standing and continuing debates concerning the nature and aims of the practice and philosophy of history. (shrink)

The article is an examination of the 1930 play Brain. A Play of the Whole Earth, by an obscure early twentieth-century British writer, Lionel Britton, in the light of the writings of Polish Jewish physician and philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck and the sociologist Émile Durkheim. A consideration of the notion of collectivity as depicted in the text, its complex representation of a posthuman existence, and the unusual generic characteristics of the play lead to the suggestion that Brain may (...) be regarded as a utopian bildungsroman whose main focus is the life of an idea in society. (shrink)

Until recently, the general judgment of the once admired and influential Nazarene painters of early-nineteenth-century Germany, among those who paid any attention to their work, was that in rejecting everything that came after the young Raphael and seeking inspiration in the Italian “primitives,” they had taken the wrong road and ended up in a cul-de-sac, in contrast to contemporaries such as Géricault and Delacroix, Constable and Turner, who had taken the road that led, without break, to modernity. To the Nazarenes, (...) however, as to the neoclassical artists of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (David, Flaxman, Carstens) and their theorist Winckelmann, going back meant going forward—beyond illusionism. The obscurity into which Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Peter Cornelius, and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld have fallen raises questions about the degree to which the long dominant and ideologically loaded narrative of art history as a “development” toward modernity has determined not only how viewers today respond to works of art but what art they get to see. (shrink)

Wilhelm Vischer's 1877 paper on the limits of historical knowledge expressed clearly, effectively, and with moderation what had become a minority viewpoint in his time. Vischer's deep sense and acceptance of the limits of every human enterprise was characteristic of the historical and philological culture of Basle. To the well-born, deeply conservative citizen, the notion of limits had to be fundamental: not only the property and privileges of his class, and the freedom it required in order to pursue its economic (...) and spiritual interests, but the continued existence of his small homeland as an autonomous polity and the survival of Christian religion and morality in a scientific age depended, in his eyes, on respect for boundaries and frontiers. To the champion of the German Empire, on the other hand, limits, zones of autonomy, and particularisms of every kind were obstacles to be overcome. (shrink)

This essay introduces a cluster of articles titled “Devalued Currency: An Elegiac Symposium on Paradigm Shifts.” Eagleton's piece addresses, from a perspective indebted to Walter Benjamin, the notion of Thomas Kuhn that “shifts” in the controlling paradigms of disciplines and practices are entirely transformative not only of their futures but also of their pasts. Benjamin argued that a work of art is a set of potentials that may or may not be realized in the vicissitudes of its afterlife. The true (...) significance of works might be said, therefore, to emerge only after some as-yet-unexpected event or upheaval makes their significance apparent. In this sense, we might argue that historical events make full sense only in the light of “judgment day”; until then, history remains an incoherent chronicle. But the totality that will one day be revealed cannot be anticipated. The past is open-ended because the present is, and meanwhile, the meaning of history is in our hands to change. Since we have that power, Eagleton suggests that we recycle figures of the past as characters in a comedy rather than tragedy. Still, it is never possible to say which figures of the past and which works are ultimately important and which are not, because we cannot say which mutations will result in major developments to come. No work or person is important or peripheral in itself or himself; it is the critic and historian who render them so. (shrink)

One component in the vote to leave the European Union was a nostalgic image of Empire and the assertion by Brexiteers like Boris Johnson that after Britain had left the EU new trade links would be made with countries who were members of the Commonwealth, countries that Britain had previously governed as colonies. The foundation for this idea was the understanding that Britain’s governing of its colonies had been benign and, indeed, that British control had brought with it the benefits (...) of civilisation. This view of the British empire was pervasive in the UK. This article focuses on the sitcom As Time Goes By in which the male protagonist, Lionel, is writing a book about his time in Kenya in the 1950s and 1960s. Everybody who reads the ms considers it boring. Yet Kenya during those decades was subject to a grass-roots uprising against the British colonists known as Mau Mau and Kenya was granted independence in 1963 by which time large numbers of white settlers had left the country. The portrayal of Lionel’s book as boring elides this history and reinforces the perception that British colonialism was well received by the indigenous population. (shrink)