This chapter describes the potential far‐reaching consequences of contemplative higher education for the fields of science and medicine.

Why are we interested in history at all? Why do we feel the need to distinguish between past and present? In this book, the author argues that the past originates from an experience of rupture separating past and present. Think of the radical rupture with Europe's past that was effected by the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Sublime Historical Experience investigates how the notion of sublime historical experience complicates and challenges existing conceptions of language, truth, and knowledge. These experiences of (...) rupture are paradoxical since they involve both the separation of past and present and, at the same time, the effort to overcome this separation in terms of historical knowledge. The experience unites feelings of loss/pain with those of love/satisfaction, and thus is in agreement with how sublime experience is ordinarily defined. The experience is also precognitive since it precedes historical knowledge. As such it is a challenge to traditional conceptions of the relationship between experience and truth or language. It compels us to disconnect the notions of experience and truth. (shrink)

This essay deals, mainly, with the notion of representation. Representation is associated with texts and, as such, is contrasted to the true singular statement. It is argued that the relationship between the text and what the text represents can never be modeled on the relationship between a true singular statement and what the statement is true of, and, furthermore, that the former relationship is aesthetic while the latter is epistemological in nature. This aesthetic relationship between the represented and its representation (...) is investigated from the perspective of historical writing. This offers an interesting perspective because historical texts are representations, but they also aim at giving us “the truth” about the past. Historical representation, therefore, is the kind of representation coming closest to the cognitive claims traditionally investigated by epistemology. The notion of aesthetic and historical experience is explored in order to define the relationship between historical representation and what it represents. (shrink)

Forgetting has rarely been investigated in historical theory. Insofar as it attracted the attention of theorists at all, forgetting has ordinarily been considered to be a defect in our relationship to the past that should be overcome in one way or another. The only exception is Nietzsche who so provocatively sung the praises of forgetting in his On the Use and Abuse of History . But Nietzsche's conception is the easy victim of a consistent historicism and therefore in need of (...) correction. Four types of forgetting are identified in this essay. Central in the essay's argument is the fourth type. This is the kind of forgetting taking place when a civilization "commits suicide" by exchanging a previous identity for a new one. Hegel's moving account of the conflict between Socrates and the Athenian state is presented as the paradigmatic example of this kind of forgetting. Two conclusions follow from an analysis of this type of forgetting. First, we can now understand what should be recognized as a civilization's historical sublime and how the notions of the historical sublime and of collective trauma are related. Second, it follows that myth and history do not exclude each other; on the contrary, history creates myth. This should not be taken to be a defect of history, for this is precisely how it should be. (shrink)

The amplitude and the diversity of Ricoeur’s philosophical production is astonishing. Three factors shed light upon this fact. First, his philosophical career covers seventy years wherein he witnessed the rise and the decline of tlve philosophical -isms. Further, he is a typical dialogical thinker: in conversation with the great classical and modern philosophers, and eager to listen to the methods and results of human an linguistics sciences. A third reason, particularly of differentiation, stems from his double conviction and commitment. On (...) the one hand, he wants to be a rigorous philosopher, even keeping on a methodic agnosticism. On the other hand, however, he is a convinced Christian, and so he also likes to think critically – a rigorous philosophizing here is inappropriate – on religion, belief, and biblical language and topics. Nevertheless, it is only since 2000 that he is getting fully aware of the disintegrated impression many readers have from his publications. In his opinion, this impression is perfectly understandable: a reading public and myself are on completely different wavelengths. From reading my books people spontaneously nurture their own expectation with regard to coming publications, whereas my concern always was: am I answering your questions? So, in four recent articles Ricoeur speaks of his technical philosophy composed of eleven books: from The voluntary and the Involontary to the Course of Recognition . He argues that the continuity of his basic philosophical writings is, each time, determined by a residue, a question the preceding publication left open. But, where to situate then his twenty-two other books into a global and consistent picture? All these other works are explorations of specific philosophical issues, and reflections and topics as prophecy, tragedy and religion bordering philosophy. For this matter, a fully rigorous philosophical discourse is not always possible. These writings, however, find their setting around the hard core of his philosophy. Ricoeur himself only mentions two genres: volumes of articles for a larger audience as History and Truth and university lectures as Lectures on Ideology and Utopia . But other headings need to be added to umbrella other publications: historical and autobiographic writings, collection of articles on political topics, on the sacred and biblical language, on philosophy of law, and on medical ethical issues. On a more remote distance from the heart of his philosophy are located hundred of articles and interviews on philosophical topics, reflections on actual themes, an even some homilies. To amazement of many, two eminent Ricoeur commentators recently characterized his philosophy as “An Ontology of Life”. This is not as strange as it looks! Already in The voluntary and the Involontary. Ricoeur offers a phenomenology of “life, to be in life and birth”. To him, life also is a lived and hard-won value. In fact, belief in life is related to his main category of “originative affirmation” and of “hope”. Hope, however, is never a knowledge but only the regulative idea of my metaphysical thinking, and it remains inextricably bound up with the anguish for a senseless totality. “Nothing is closer to the anguish of nonsense than timid hope.”. (shrink)

W. F. R. Hardie; X—Aristotle's Doctrine that Virtue is a “Mean”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 183–204, https.

We no longer have any texts, any past, but just interpretations of them. The evident multi -interpretability of a text causes it gradually to lose its capacity to function as arbiter in the historical debate. It is necessary to define a new link with the past based on a complete and honest recognition of the position in which we now see ourselves placed as historians. In recent years, many people have observed our changed attitude towards the phenomenon of information. For (...) postmodernism, science and information are independent objects of study which obey their own laws. Language and art are not situated opposite reality but are themselves a pseudo-reality and are therefore situated within reality. Because of the relation between the historiographical view and the language used by the historian to express his view - a relation which nowhere intersects the domain of the past -historiography possesses the same opacity and intensional dimension as art. The essence of postmodernism is precisely that we should avoid pointing out essentialist patterns in the past. There is reason to assume that our relation to the past and our insight into it will in future be of a metaphorical nature rather than a literal one. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Origins of the Contemporary Debate Historiographic Research and Writing Two Variants of Narrativist Philosophy of Historiography The Philosophical Approach The Transcendentalization of Narrativist Philosophy of Historiography Rhetorical Narrativist Philosophy Hayden White Conclusion Bibliography.