Debates on the contingency of history have largely focused on the history of life. This article targets the supposed contingency of human history. It does not defend a global claim about the overall contingency of history. Rather, it aims to identify and explain the difference between robust and fragile historical trajectories. It does so by considering a set of contrasting cases and identifying critical differences among the cases. The analysis shows that one important (...) source of contingency is the historical emergence of command-and-control institutions; one important source of robustness is the existence of population-level processes structured by relatively stable institutions. (shrink)

In this study John Bowlin argues that Aquinas's moral theology receives much of its character and content from an assumption about our common lot: the good we desire is difficult to know and to will, in particular because of contingencies of various kinds - within ourselves, in the ends and objects we pursue, and in the circumstances of choice. Since contingencies are fortune's effects, Aquinas insists that it is fortune that makes good choice difficult. Bowlin then explicates Aquinas's treatment of (...) a number of topics in light of this difficulty: the moral and theological virtues, the first precepts of the natural law, the voluntariness of virtuous action, and the happiness available to us in this life. By noting that Aquinas proceeds with an eye on fortune's threats to virtue, agency, and happiness, Bowlin places him more precisely in the history of ethics, among Aristotle, Augustine, and the Stoics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Rights, China, and Cross-Cultural Inquiry:Philosophy, History, and Power PoliticsRandall PeerenboomStephen Angle's Human Rights and Chinese Thought: A Cross-Cultural Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) is a wonderful book that combines philosophically sophisticated discussions of controversial human-rights issues with a detailed intellectual history of the evolution of human-rights discourse in China over the last several hundred years. I will use Angle's book as a platform for (...) consideration of a number of issues regarding the role of philosophy, history, and power politics in relation to human rights in China and elsewhere.Angle focuses his discussion on two claims: first, that countries have different concepts of human rights, and second, that we ought not demand that countries comply with human-rights concepts different from their own.1 These two claims (or something similar) are central to China's official position on rights and to humanrights debates more generally, including the debate about values in Asia.2Angle's response, in short, is that there are distinctive concepts of human rights in China, and that "there have been both continuities and changes in the ways that rights have been conceptualized over the course of China's rich and distinctive rights discourse" (p. 250). However, the only way a community can unilaterally declare its values and practices immune from the scrutiny of others is through "parochialism," which, according to Angle, cuts off that community from making legitimate demands on others. Rather, he suggests, we "should seek an accommodation of differences with one another in the spirit of toleration, and on that basis engage one another on as many levels as possible" (pp. 250-251).One of the many great strengths of this book is that Angle grounds his responses in an interesting and insightful discussion of contemporary philosophers, assessing along the way the contributions and limits of MacIntrye, Rawls, Dworkin, Raz, Walzer, and especially Brandom, among others, to this cross-cultural inquiry of human rights. It might seem, given this list of luminaries, Angle's own training in Western analytic philosophy, and his position in the philosophy department of an American university, that Western philosophy is driving the debate and dictating the fundamental terms and parameters of the inquiry.3 This, of course, is precisely one of the complaints of non-Westerners such as Liu Huaqiu, who argue that they are being measured by Western standards, that rights are concepts grounded in historically contingent modern Western philosophical traditions, and that the rights movement is biased in favor of secular liberalism, which is at odds with and may preclude states based on religious worldviews and communitarian or collectivist [End Page 283] points of view that do not privilege autonomy, choice, and individual interests to the extent that liberals do.Angle's response is twofold. First, he argues, sensibly enough, that we cannot and need not set aside or escape our traditions and value systems. Cross-cultural inquiry must begin from somewhere. But we must remain open-minded and willing to continue the conversation, at least for a considerable while and in most cases indefinitely, even if in some cases we simultaneously must rely on coercion and repression.4 As discussed below, Angle endorses a limited moral pluralism that tolerates some differences while not providing an excuse for appeasing dictators or turning a blind eye to genocide and other atrocities.Second, Angle is not out simply to measure China by the standards of contemporary Western philosophers. Rather, he wants to show that China has its own distinctive discourse on rights, and that this discourse is multifaceted and constantly evolving. According to Angle, "Chinese rights discourse should be seen as an ongoing creative achievement, rather than a reaction to or misunderstanding of Western ideas and institutions" (p. 2).5 He shows this by providing a detailed intellectual history of Chinese rights discourse, another great strength of the book. His primary focus is on several prominent Neo-Confucians and pre-1949 debates, although he also considers some contemporary debates.6 Angle is clearly successful at demonstrating that Chinese thinkers have advanced a number of different views and that rights discourse over the last century and a half has been... (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 51 - 75 History occupies a somewhat awkward position in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Although they often criticise history as a practice and advance alternatives that are explicitly anti-historical, such as ‘nomadology’ and ‘geophilosophy’, their scholarship is nevertheless littered with historical encounters and deeply influenced by historians such as Fernand Braudel. One of Deleuze and Guattari’s more significant engagements with history occurs through their reading and theory (...) of universal history. In this paper I will explicate and critically analyse the nature of this universal history vis-à-vis its most pertinent counterpoint: Hegel’s philosophy of world history. In contrast to Hegel’s form of historicism, which universalizes by virtue of a unitary and totalizing force, Deleuze and Guattari develop a universalizing mechanism that is strictly devoid of any privileged essence. Following, Deleuze and Guattari’s form of universal history is marked above all by contingency as opposed to necessity. In this paper I will show precisely how. I will also go on to demonstrate how Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history offers the promise of an historical ontology commensurate with the processes of creativity and becoming, provided that appropriate steps are taken to reaffirm the radical contingency at its heart. (shrink)

How ought the historian to reconcile themselves philosophically with the fact of evental contingency and of its relationship to structural determination? Does the existence of contingent causation undermine the very concept of historical necessity, or do the two instead in dialectical entanglement? In this essay, I engage with the problem of historical contingency from a transcendental-materialist perspective informed by the work of Slavoj Žižek, tendering a philosophically serious response to the famous Pascalian conundrum of Cleopatra’s nose and its (...) challenge to structuralist accounts of historical causation. The position associated with Laplace – that is to say, that the course of history would be entirely predictable were one provided with a complete account of initial conditions – is firmly rejected. Instead, I revive Althusser’s attempt to craft a theory of ‘aleatory materialism’, in which the determinative power of structural forces nevertheless leave space for the radical and unpredictable transformation of a situation by the chance crystallisation of events and encounters. In this effort, I recruit conceptual architecture not only from the fields of historiography and philosophy, but also quantum physics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. (shrink)

Objections to the use of historical case studies for philosophical ends fall into two categories. Methodological objections claim that historical accounts and their uses by philosophers are subject to various biases. We argue that these challenges are not special; they also apply to other epistemic practices. Metaphysical objections, on the other hand, claim that historical case studies are intrinsically unsuited to serve as evidence for philosophical claims, even when carefully constructed and used, and so constitute a distinct class of challenge. (...) We show that attention to what makes for a canonical case can address these problems. A case study is canonical with respect to a particular philosophical aim when the features relevant to that aim provide a reasonably complete causal account of the results of the historical process under investigation. We show how to establish canonicity by evaluating relevant contingencies using two prominent examples from the history of science: Eddington’s confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity using his data from the 1919 eclipse and Watson and Crick’s determination of the structure of DNA. (shrink)

Illness -- Loneliness -- Violation -- Love.

This paper develops Bernard Williams’s suggestion that for philosophy to ignore its history is for it to assume that its history is vindicatory. The paper aims to offer a fruitful line of inquiry into the question whether philosophy has a vindicatory history by providing a map of possible answers to it. It first distinguishes three types of history: the history of discovery, the history of progress, and the history of change. It (...) then suggests that much of philosophy lacks a vindicatory history, for reasons that reflect philosophy’s character as a humanistic discipline. On this basis, the paper reconstructs Williams’s conception of what it means for philosophy to engage with its own history. The paper concludes that it is a mistake to think that a vindicatory history is what we would really like to have, and that in fact, the resulting picture gives philosophy several reasons to engage with its own history. (shrink)

I have frequently mentioned objective problems and topics in the preceding sections. But what exactly is the force of ‘objective’ here? As my remarks should have made clear I have been using ‘objective’ to contrast with ‘purely historical’. A ‘purely historical’ approach never gets beyond reproduction, commentary, and interpretation. I call an approach ‘objective’ when it involves a philosopher who advances his own theses and claims. This minimal understanding of ‘objectivity’ (in the context of my remarks in this paper) by (...) no means implies that there are problems and topics, systems of concepts, methods, and similar factors that are ‘eternal’, completely independent of the contingencies of history (of philosophy, of the sciences), that are not relative to a language, to a logic, to a model, etc. Indeed whether there are problems, etc., in just this absolute, atemporal sense is itself a question for systematic philosophy. It seems clear that the formulation of a problem can only take place against a cognitive background of some sort and within some ‘conceptual scheme’. 34 Such an assumption is made by most if not all analytic philosophers. But the fact that a philosophical tradition recognizes ‘conceptual schemes’ does not make it a ‘purely historical’, non-objective philosophy, in the sense already introduced and described. A philosopher who explicitly accepts a certain ‘conceptual scheme’ proceeds in an entirely objective and systematic (and not purely historical) manner when, within this framework, he formulates his own theses. (shrink)

This book is about the influence of varying theological conceptions of contingency and necessity on two versions of the mechanical philosophy in the seventeenth century. Pierre Gassendi and René Descartes both believed that all natural phenomena could be explained in terms of matter and motion alone. They disagreed about the details of their mechanical accounts of the world, in particular about their theories of matter and their approaches to scientific method. This book traces their differences back to theological (...) presuppositions they inherited from the Middle Ages. Theological ideas were transformed into philosophical and scientific ideas which led to the emergence of different styles of science in the second half of the seventeenth century. (shrink)

Recent authors hold that the role of historical scholarship within contemporary philosophical practice is to question current assumptions, to expose vestiges or to calibrate intuitions. On these views, historical scholarship is dispensable, since these roles can be achieved by nonhistorical methods. And the value of historical scholarship is contingent, since the need for the role depends on the presence of questionable assumptions, vestiges or comparable intuitions. In this paper I draw an analogy between scientific and philosophical practice, in order to (...) float one role for historical scholarship that is nonreplicable and noncontingent. It has long been acknowledged that cognitive values – features of theories that facilitate understanding, such as ontological parsimony, ideological simplicity, computational ease and fecundity – play a key role within science. The role of some of these values within philosophy also has received attention but left understudied are the values of novelty and conservativeness. These values influence theory choice, the selection of methodology, the setting of research agenda, and the presentation of results; and are best assessed with a historically informed evaluation. This role for historical scholarship is not replicable by nonhistorical methods, and is not contingent on the presence of questionable assumptions, vestiges or comparable intuitions. (shrink)

Philosophy of History is in crisis. This crisis has a structural origin in separating a finitude of the one (fate, destiny, nation, people, identity) from an infinitude of the many (individuals, biographies, contingencies, banalities). This difference seems to produce an aporia. Where could history be that would talk of both?

This thesis argues that the concept of contingency plays a central role in Althusser's recasting of Marxist philosophy and in his attempt to free the Marxist conception of history from concepts such as teleology, necessity and origin. It is critically placed both against those readings that see the emergence of the problematic of contingency only in the late Althusserm and to the most recent attempts to establish a straightforward continuity in Althusser's work. Drawing on published and (...) unplublished material and covering the entirety of Althusser's philosophical itinerary, the thesis seeks both to unearth the latent presence of this problematic, and its various implications, at each stage in the development of his work. It seeks to clarify, in a systematic way, the conceptual consequences of Althusser's commitment to contingency to the received understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology and political action. In particular, it argues that the standpoint of contingency allows us to locate in Althusser's 'Structural Marxism' the emergence of a 'logic of irruption' and structurally under-determined development of becoming. By emphasising this logic of contingency, it then seeks to produce a more nuanced assessment of his theory of ideology through the introduction of the concept of 'overinterpellation'. It finally attempts to distinguish two moments in the emergence of a materialism of contingency, first political and then philosophical; the problematic coexistence of these two aspects helps to account for the unstable charactoer of Althusser's late philosophical project. (shrink)

Contingent transcranialists claim that the physical mechanisms of mind are not exclusively intracranial and that genuine cognitive systems can extend into cognizers' physical and socio-cultural environments. They further claim that extended cognitive systems must include the deep functional integration of external environmental resources with internal neural resources. They have found it difficult, however, to explicate the precise nature of such deep functional integration and provide compelling examples of it. Contingent intracranialists deny that extracranial resources can be components of genuine extended (...) cognitive systems. They claim that transcranialists fallaciously conflate coupling with constitution and construe cognition as extending always from brains into world rather than world into brains. By using insights from recent research in developmental psychology and by explicating the nature of one form that deep functional integration can take, I argue that (i) transcranialists do not fallaciously conflate coupling wth constitution, and (ii) human emotional ontogenesis is a world-to-brain transcranial achievement. Jennifer Greenwood is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics, University of Queensland. (shrink)

Hester Goodenough Gelber is Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Stanford University.

John Burbidge shows that, far from incorporating everything into an all-consuming necessity, Hegel's philosophy requires the novelty of unexpected contingencies to maintain its systematic pretensions. To know without fear of failure is to expect that experience will confound our confident claims to knowledge. And the universal character of all life involves acting, discovering what happens as a result, and incorporating both intention and result into a new comprehensive understanding. Burbidge explores how Hegel applied this approach when he turned from (...) his logic to chemistry, biology, psychology and history, and suggests how a Hegelian might function within the changed circumstances of contemporary science. (shrink)

History of philosophy is embedded into the theory of history. Two different philosophies, but we still have similar basic connections between different parts of each philosophy and a closer similarity of these two relativist thinkers. Gadamer, as a disciple of Heidegger, worked out the philosophical hermeneutics (Truth and Method, 1960) established by Heidegger in the early 20s. He embedded his approach of the history of philosophy in his hermeneutics, particularly in his description of (...) class='Hi'>history grasped as a chain of historically effected events. Rorty, as a neopragmatist thinker, classified first the philosophers as systematic and edifying in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), but later, in his Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), he already speeks about history of philosophy as the history of metaphors. Despite their differences, it may be proved, on the one hand, that some part of their philosophies is primus inter pares; on the other hand, they both are relativists in some sense, and claim that we can have only narratives about the history of philosophy. (shrink)

This book assumes an interdisciplinary character, providing a window into the subtle relationship between faith and reason in early patristic thought and its relevance for forging the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. In so doing, it highlights the extent to which early Christian thinkers found a common ground with the Greek philosophical tradition.

From the late 1970s, and particularly in the last years of his life, Michel Foucault repeatedly returned to the status of philosophical reflection as an ontology of the present, of actualité, or an ontology of ourselves. However, the impact of these famous theoretical syntagms around a philosophy of the present or of actualité – one of Foucault's most precious legacies 40 years after his death – is not fully intelligible without considering that they were already at the heart of (...) Foucault's reflections on the status of philosophy from the mid-1960s onwards. Today, with the recent publication of the essay Le Discours philosophique, we can better understand how the concept of actualité shaped, within an archaeological framework of analysis, the highly complex elaboration of the status of philosophy as a discourse aimed at providing a diagnosis of our actualité. The theoretical density of this latter term reveals a rich panorama of philosophical references (sometimes explicit, sometimes more implicit) that are essential for grasping both the historical-conceptual stakes of this term and the way in which it is, for the first time, inscribed at the heart of the status of philosophy, giving rise also to the very possibility of making it an object of historicization that at the time was still only archaeological. The aim of this contribution is to show how Le Discours philosophique broadens our understanding of what Foucault would later take up in a wider horizon of analysis, in which actualité would mark a renewed space of historical analysis of the contingent relationship between philosophy and its present, by redefining philosophical reflection as a practico-reflexive mode that Foucault will designate as “attitude” (and “critical attitude”). (shrink)

Unsatisfied with an intellectual history that divides the philosophy of technology into classical and empirical approaches, the following paper suggests a renewed attention to dialectical philosophies of technology. Drawing on the work of Andrew Feenberg, I argue that dialectical philosophies of technology are not essentialist holdovers from the past, but are empirically grounded approaches that direct researchers to ask why we have the technologies we do. From this, dialectical philosophies of technology open up ways to think about technology (...) that prioritize the tension between the sociotechnical world as it is and concrete potentials of what it could be. Contrasting this against postphenomenology, I argue that avoiding these moments of potential can lead to a conservative and paternalistic philosophy of technology that fixes sociotechnical agency to a professional class of designers, engineers, and policy makers. I conclude by suggesting that Feenberg's dialectical philosophy of technology presents a modest alternative to the design imperatives that now guide the trajectory of postphenomenology. (shrink)

In 1874, the French philosopher Émile Boutroux wrote a dissertationon the contingency of the laws of nature that highly influenced academic philosophy during the French Third Republic and led to a more hypothetical view of the natural sciences and mathematics. Boutroux took over the concept of contingency from the neo-Kantian philosopher Eduard Zeller who had insisted against Hegel on the role of contingency in history, and carried it over to nature. From this he tried to (...) show that the sciences are hierarchically structured such that each layer is irreducible to its more basic predecessor. He also distinguished between two kinds of natural laws in a way very similar to Nancy Cartwright in the1980s. It is finally shown that Boutroux’s view on the nature of mathematics as a hypothetical science had a strong impact on Poincaré. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue for a revival of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical philosophy of history on account of the fact that their construction articulates both the necessity of various aspects of our current socio-political conditions given the past tendencies of rationality and domination, and the contingency of the present miseries by problematizing the continuous historical narratives that justify a certain version of the present. After demonstrating that the accomplishment of critical philosophy of history has (...) to be located in the dialectic of the necessary as well as the contingent elements of historical developments, I turn to the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a particular constellation that exemplifies this accomplishment. I show that in this book we find a critical philosophy of history that narrates a story that both makes fascism the necessary corollary and conclusion of instrumental rationality and shows its contingent entanglement with domination. In this way, the initial question of how reason and rationality can lead to domination is now transformed into one that asks how we can we reinterpret and re-animate them such that they are no longer complicit with domination. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Kierkegaard's theory of change is motivated by a robust notion of contingency. His view of contingency is sharply juxtaposed with a strong notion of absolute necessity. I show that how he understands these notions explains certain of his claims about causation. I end by suggesting a compatibilist interpretation of Kierkegaard's philosophy.

In the final lines of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel makes the complex claim that the contingency of history and the science of knowing in the sphere of appearance together constitute a “conceptual history” (begriffene Geschichte, a ‘conceptually comprehended’ history). What is this suggestive but frustratingly obscure formula meant to convey? The question is vexing, not least because the Phenomenology itself is neither a philosophy of history nor a philosophical history in any traditional (...) sense; it rather takes the form of a quasi-historical narrative that picks up on the difficult problem of philosophy’s relation to history. For this reason, the attempt to understand what Hegel might mean by the term may be helped along by a critical analysis of selected aspects of his philosophy of history. The limits of the question therefore go beyond the specific project of the Phenomenology, though answering the question will involve returning to one of the central themes of that book, namely, the concept of experience (Erfahrung). The aim here is not so much to evaluate Hegel’s theory of world history as it is to gain a better understanding of how in general he understands historical knowledge in relation to philosophical knowledge of the absolute—a central concern throughout his career. (shrink)

1. Modern science in historical perspective -- On the origins of modern science -- The post-Renaissance revolution : the New Science -- Frank Sherwood Taylor : the man who was converted by Galileo -- The limits of science -- Proofs and demonstrations -- On the intelligibility of Quantum Mechanics -- Uncertainty, incompleteness, chance, and design -- A Finite, Open and Contingent Universe -- 2. On the origin and development of life -- A brief history of evolutionary thought -- Life's (...) intelligible design -- What are the contributions of Genetics to the understanding of life? -- On the Human Genome in contrast to the Great Apes Genome -- On The Evolution Controversy -- Scientific critiques of Darwinism -- 3. Beyond nature and history -- The religion of Darwinism -- On the riddle of man's origin -- On science, history and free will -- Science and Faith -- Concluding remarks. (shrink)

Although time was a predominate theme in Continental philosophy for the first half of the twentieth century, philosophical attention has increasingly shifted to space. This paper contributes to the phenomenology of space through Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology. Blumenberg elucidates the significance of phenomenological distance for the contingent existence of humans. Spanning from the experience of early human ancestors to history and epistemology, Blumenberg’s work reveals how contingency pervades human existence. Blumenberg understands names, myths, rhetoric, and metaphors as (...) cultural techniques that function as means of self-preservation by distancing an overwhelming and disorienting reality and managing the felt contingency of human existence. Developing upon Blumenberg’s insights into human contingency and distance, the paper argues that detours offer a way to address the contemporary, existential issues posed by the increasing rate of technological change and environmental problems. (shrink)

This book offers the first in-depth treatment in English language of Habermas’s long-awaited work on religion, Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, published in 2019. Charting the contingent origins and turning points of occidental thinking through to the current "postmetaphysical" stage, the two volumes provide striking insights into the intellectual streams and conflicts in which core components of modern self-understanding have been forged. The encounter of Greek metaphysics with biblical monotheism has led to a theology of history as salvation, expanding (...) in bold arcs from Adam’s Fall to Christ and the Last Judgement. The reconstruction of key turns in the relationship between faith and knowledge ends, however, with locating the uniqueness of religion in "ritual" and defining reason as inherently secular. The book exposes the sources and trajectories, analysed by Habermas with great erudition, to different assessments in biblical studies, theology, and philosophy of subjectivity. Apart from Paul and Augustine, key lines of continuity are identified in the Gospels, early patristic theology, Duns Scotus and Schleiermacher that retain the internal connection of faith to autonomous freedom. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is an extension of the idealizational theory of science in order to explicate intuitions of historians and philosophers of history about unpredictability and contingency of history. The author identifies two types of essential structures: the first kind dominated by the main factor and the second kind which is dominated by a class of secondary factors. In an essential structure dominated by the main factor, the power of influence it exerts is greater than (...) the sum of the power of influence of secondary factors. In an essential structure dominated by secondary factors, their total influence is greater than the influence exerted by the main factor, although the power of the latter influence is greater than the power of influence of each secondary factor taken separately. In the latter kind of essential structure the so-called cascade effect can occur which means that at certain moment the power of influence of secondary factors can be greater than influence of main factor. In the further part of this paper, the author examines consequences of cascade effect for construction of scientific theory and historical narrative. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 444 - 464 Are genealogies of our beliefs relevant to the truth of these beliefs? Drawing on Bernard Williams’s _Truth and Truthfulness_, I argue that genealogies, or historical narratives showing how a set of beliefs came about, can be either critical or vindicatory of these beliefs. They can be critical by denaturalizing beliefs, showing their continued inability to solve explanatory problems, revealing the origins of these beliefs in assumptions that we no longer accept, (...) and exposing unwelcome practical applications of these beliefs. Genealogies can be vindicatory by showing that the framework of beliefs has the ability to innovate itself and has led to acceptable practical applications of the beliefs in question. However, if contingency creates the space for genealogies in philosophical arguments, it also limits their effectiveness. In most cases, genealogies do not offer conclusive arguments for or against the beliefs they narrate. They either point out a contradiction that needs to be resolved, or show that the framework of beliefs has been successful so far, with no guarantees for such success in the future. (shrink)

This essay deals with a Leibnizian version of the argument from the contingent existence of the world to the necessary existence of God, especially with the statements of the argument presented by Father Copleston in his famous B.B.C. debate with Bertrand Russell and, more recently, by Richard Taylor, in his Metaphysics. The essay is divided into two parts. In the first part, I am chiefly concerned with showing how the principle of sufficient reason, together with the claim that something contingent (...) exists, will allow us to conclude, without any appeal to the impossibility of an infinite series of contingent causes, that there exists a necessary being distinct from the world of contingent beings. In the second part of the essay, I try to show that, in a form strong enough to support the argument, the principle of sufficient reason has the implication—undesirable to many, but not all theists— that nothing could be logically contingent. (shrink)

Provides a brief account of trans philosophy organizing in the 2010s and argues for the importance of building spaces for trans philosophers.

History plays an important role in the philosophy of human rights, more so than in philosophical discussions on related concepts, such as justice. History tends to be used in order to make it credible that there is a tradition of rights as a moral idea, or an ethical ideal, that transcends national boundaries. In the example that I investigate in this chapter, this moral idea is tightly spun around the moral dignity of the human person. There has (...) been a shift in conceptions of human rights during the twentieth century, from ‘politics of the state to the morality of the globe’. Rather than figuring in, or as, constitutional principles of the political life of a polity and the relation between a state and its members, the notion of rights has come to serve as the name of a state- and politics-transcending ethical position on the status of the human person, and the relations between human persons. Given that this move from politics of the state to morality of the globe is a recent one, it goes without saying that trying to ground a state-transcending morality of human rights with the help of early modern history is problematic. Still, philosophers of this kind of morality of human rights are prone to claiming, for their accounts, a long-standing human rights tradition that, frankly, is not there, at least not in that form. One example is James Griffin, whose reliance on what he refers to as a historical notion of human rights is the focus of my critical discussion here. Griffin claims that ‘our’ concept of human rights is a product of eighteenth century Enlightenment thought. If ‘our’ concept of human rights is Griffin’s concept, then his claim is false – as I show. I agree, however, that the eighteenth century is a pivotal moment, but if we wish to understand natural rights in eighteenth century thought, we need to grasp the fact that power over others, and the capacity of those who hold that power to also abuse it, was not a contingent concern, or merely part of the extension of a concept defined prior to, or independently of, any such concern. It was built into the concept itself; it was its very point. (shrink)

Patrick Todd argues for a modified Peircean view on which all future contingents are false. According to Todd, this is the only view that makes sense if we fully embrace an open future, rejecting the idea of actual future history. I argue that supervaluational accounts, on which future contingents are neither true nor false, are fully consistent with the metaphysics of an open future. I suggest that it is Todd's failure to distinguish semantic and postsemantic levels that leads him (...) to suppose otherwise. I also show how one can resist Todd's argument (with Brian Rabern) that the conceptual possibility of omniscience requires us to reject Retro‐closure (). (shrink)

The central theme of this book concerns the structure of narratives and the analysis of a special class of narrative sentences. This seemingly specialized technical job has surprisingly broad and fruitful application. In the course of a single connected argument the author manages to throw light on a wide range of problems that have puzzled philosophical students of history including the relation between speculative philosophy of history and history proper, the verification of statements about the past, (...) the alleged relativism of historical interpretation, the distinction between "history" and "chronicle," the nature of historical explanation, and the debate about methodological individualism. The argument also draws upon and contributes to discussions dealing with some broader issues generally carried on outside the context of the philosophy of history such as the logic of temporal language and the problem of future contingencies. The approach is fresh and exciting, the style both clear and lively.—R. C. S. (shrink)

Although Hegel's philosophy of history is recognized as a great intellectual achievement, it is also widely regarded as a complete failure. Taking his cue from the third century Greek historian Polybius, who argued that the rapid domination of the Mediterranean world by Rome had instituted a new phase of world history, Hegel wondered what the rise of European modernity meant for the rest of the world. In his account of the contingent paths of world history, he (...) argued that at work behind it is an eternal human struggle over justice, and that it had led to a new conception of justice in which nobody by nature had authority to rule over anybody else. Moving away from the ancient conception of justice as ordered through a cosmic system, the modern conception is based instead on freedom. This is, so Hegel argues, not an accident of history but part of the necessary development of the institutions and practices through which humans establish and maintain their changing shapes of agency. Behind it is an infinite end, justice, which as infinite is neither something which can ever be finally achieved nor a goal to which we are getting closer but which requires an infinite effort at sustaining.--. (shrink)

This book is not a generalized essay on Hegel’s philosophy of history as the title seems to promise. It is rather an excellent exposition and interpretation of some of the main doctrines and assumptions of Hegel about the varieties of historical writing, mechanism and teleology, contingency and necessity. It also contains a discussion of the relation of Hegel to the covering law model of explanation. The first chapter is primarily an exposition and exegesis of Hegel’s discernment of (...) the varieties of historical writing in the long introduction to the Lectures. Although this section is generally successful, one of the burdens of Wilkins’ argument is that Hegel is not an a priori thinker, yet Hegel argues that the state is a necessary precondition to people having a history. Groups without a state lie "outside his plan." That such groups may be beyond his plan is appropriate, but that they can have no history needs to be critically evaluated in light of anthropological studies. A second difficulty with the exegesis centers around the almost complete neglect by Wilkins of the idea of providence in the Lectures and the notion of Christian religion. One can wonder whether a proper understanding of Hegel’s philosophy of history is complete without due consideration of both aspects. (shrink)

Big History expands the scope of historiography to study all the past, from the Big Bang to the present. Big History is decidedly non-anthropocentric, recognising that humans appeared only very recently from a much deeper past. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Big History brings together an international cast of leading and emerging scholars from a range of disciplines to provide the first comprehensive and balanced exploration of this new and increasingly significant field. -/- The handbook considers the ways (...) in which Big History broadens the scope of evidence historians use. It reveals how Big History allows for the use of information signals from the past, such as material remains, languages, ancient DNA, and fossils, using recently discovered techniques such as carbon-dating, the extraction of ancient DNA, and the analysis of background radiation from the origin of the universe. -/- Understanding Big History requires an examination of the ontology and epistemology of the past and its scientific inference and representation; chapters on the ontology of the past, historical information, historiographic experiments and predictions, the origin and the end of history, historical counterfactuals, contingency, necessity, and determination and under-determination of the past are included to facilitate this understanding. The handbook also provides a sustained analysis of the theoretical assumptions associated with synthetic historical science: the syntheses of genetics, linguistics, and archaeology to infer human prehistory, quantum physics and cosmology to infer the origin of the universe, and environmental science and biology to infer the history of life; as well as the distinct historical sciences and their methods: cosmology, evolutionary biology, geology, archaeology, historical linguistics, and human historiography. -/- This ground-breaking volume is vital reading for all historians, philosophers and historical scientists interested in becoming more scientifically self-conscious when adopting philosophical, theoretical, and methodological approaches to the past. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are two distinct senses of contingency operative within Hegel’s philosophy, and that the failure to sufficiently distinguish between them can lead to a misrepresentation of Hegel’s idealism. The first sense of contingency is the categorical one explicated in the Science of Logic, in which contingency carries the meaning of dependence and conditionality, while the second sense of contingency, predominantly found within the Philosophy of Nature, means irrationality and (...) chance. Not only does Hegel acknowledge a systematic place for the necessity of contingency within his ontological logic, but he also admits the existence of real chance and multiplicity in nature. However, I claim that these two acknowledgements should not be collapsed since they involve different senses of contingency. (shrink)

Of the generation of post-1960s artists who looked to photography for a new set of conceptual tools, Gerhard Richter stands apart because he has uniquely professed a desire to “use painting as a means to photography,” that is, to bring painting to the structure and sensibility of the photograph.2 To ascribe sensibility or perceptive acuity to a process so mechanical as photography may strike the reader as either romantically fey or even offensively anthropomorphizing, given that the aesthetic questions at stake (...) have exactly to do with philosophy's “mind-independent” designation of the medium. But the metaphor has pedigree among historians of photography, having been articulated by Walter Benjamin in his “Little History of Photography,” where he characterizes photography as a medium possessed of an “optical unconscious,” a nature specifically “other” in its ability to present the “spark of contingency, of the here and now, with which reality has seared the subject.”3 It is precisely on the basis of this picture making outside of human agency, Benjamin insists, that “the dubious project of authenticating photography in terms of painting” fails, for it is an attempt to “legitimize the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of overturning.”4 Certainly, it is from this premise of photography's revolutionary capacity that the first critical assessments of the work of “artists using photography” proceeded in the 1970s and continued through the 1980s into the present decade.5 This is particularly important to keep in mind when assessing what has been called the recent turn to the pictorial in photographic practices because this move has been accompanied by, on one hand, a general pulling away from easily legible, unambivalent documentary content in photographic practices—a tendency that may itself be considered part of a quietly growing, renewed interest in the critical capacity of painting among a new generation of artists—and, on the other, a nuanced exploration of the appropriative lessons of postmodernism, manifested in recent interest in the repurposing of found, or what Benjamin might call “other-determined,” imagery.6. (shrink)