Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s notion of ‘queer use,’ I present and extend a neo-Aristotelian theory of artifacts to capture what I call ‘counter-use.’ The theory of artifacts is based on the idea that what they are, how they come to be, and what their functions are cannot be understood independently from each other. They come to exist when a maker imposes the concept of their substantial kind onto some matter by working on the matter to make an artifact of that (...) kind out of it. The extensions to this core theory that I describe are two. First, I show how using can be a kind of making and how disparate users may form what Benedict Anderson calls an imagined community. Second, I describe what I call an artifact’s historicity and suggest that, like its substantial kind, an artifact’s historicity is essential to it. On this basis, I characterize counter-use as use of an artifact by an imagined community that re-arranges an object’s historicity and hence brings into existence a numerically distinct object. Thus, politically motivated counter-use has genuine ontological implications. (shrink)

Biologists in the last 50 years have increasingly emphasized the role of historical contingency in explaining the distribution and dynamics of biological systems. However, recent work in philosophy of biology has shown that historical contingency carries various interpretations and that we are still lacking a general understanding of historicity, i.e., a framework from which to interpret why and to what extent history matters in biological processes. Building from examples and analyses of the long-term experimental evolution (LTEE) project, this paper (...) argues that historicity possess three essential conditions: (1) multiple possible pasts, (2) multiple possible outcomes at a given instant, and (3) a relationship of causal dependence between these two sets. These criteria can be further specified in two general forms of historicity: dependence on initial conditions and path dependence. More attention is devoted to developing a rigorous account of the latter, which captures the type of historicity displayed by stochastic processes. This paper also highlights that it is often more productive to adopt an instant-relative approach and think in terms of degree of historicity instead of trying to maintain a rigid and absolute dichotomy between historical and ahistorical (completely convergent) processes. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the emergence of the concept of the “historical a priori” at the origin of Foucault’s archeology. I emphasize the methodological function of this concept within Foucault’s archaeology, and I maintain that despite the different thesis it entails as compared to its philosophical sources, it pertains to one of the main issues of phenomenology, that is, the problematization of the relation between reality as it appears in its historicity, and transcendentality. I start from the (...) interest of the young Foucault in existential psychiatry, and I focus on the French philosophical context in which Foucault’s Introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s “Dream and Existence” (1954) was conceived. My aim is to show that the first “phenomenological” phase of Foucault’s work is coherent, from a methodological point of view, with the development of archaeology intended as “historical epistemology.” I conclude by arguing that Foucault’s archaeology is methodologically linked to Canguilhem’s epistemology, in that the latter presents itself as an important attempt at linking together historicity and transcendentality. (shrink)

The classification of the sciences is one of the most discussed and analysed aspects of Peirce’s corpus of work. I propose that Peirce’s attempt at systematising the sciences is characterised by a distinctive historicity, which I construe in two complementary senses. First, I investigate Peirce’s classification as part of a broader nineteenth-century move toward classifying the sciences, a move that was at the same time motivated by social and epistemological goals. I claim that this re-contextualisation adds an entirely new (...) layer to the otherwise distinctively internalist readings of Peirce’s classification. I then look at how Peirce’s scheme, especially in the form it displayed in the early 1890s, relates to his own historical writings, particularly his history of science. Looking at Peirce as a historical actor in his own right through the lens of his classification, I claim, is indispensable to understand the contemporary relevance of his contributions to the history and historiography of the sciences. (shrink)

Husserl’s conception of theology and God is a lesser noticed aspect in his phenomenological system. This paper is devoted to a return to Husserl’s text, reconstructing the implicit threads and essential features of his phenomenological theology. First, I will outline the general features of a phenomenology of religion and theology, arguing that it is not without historicity, which is not in conflict with the essentialism that phenomenology has always pursued. Then, Sec. 2 focuses on the analysis of teleology, considering (...) which is the true teleology leading to God, pointing out that it ultimately resorts to an ethical approach. Sec. 3 and 4 provide an in-depth textual analysis mainly based on the Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie, concluding that they are all fundamentally ethical-relevant and capable of being in harmony with each other. Last, I will respond to some criticisms of Husserl’s conception of God, the most major of which are Mall’s and Held’s. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that Husserl has perfectly integrated his project of theology and God into the phenomenology program—it is precisely these criticisms that motivate us to reconstruct Husserl’s fragmented narrative into a self-consistent system. (shrink)

This paper explores the potential for enriching Jeffery Alexander's ‘aesthetics of iconicity’ within cultural sociology by further developing its engagement with embodiment and historicity. Cultural sociology, concerned with the meanings inherent in social life, distinguishes itself from approaches focused solely on functional unity or linguistic signification, emphasising instead the hermeneutical dimensions of understanding and the lived experiences of those who comprehend meanings. Alexander's description of the perceiving subject's immersion in the object of experience suggests a conception of the subject (...) as a living being, possessing and being a living body. This paper proposes that a more nuanced understanding of iconic experience can be achieved by integrating a deeper exploration of how this embodied subject engages with icons within specific historical contexts. By attending to the lived dimensions of embodiment, we can further illuminate the complex interplay between iconic meaning and the human experience of social life. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the major critics of (...) modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers—Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe—demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics. Moreover, this quartet illustrates how the main operative concepts and strategies of the avant-garde underpinned the practices of canonical writers. A profound philosophical meditation on language, modernity, and the everyday, The Historicity of Experience offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the avant-garde in relation to experience. (shrink)

J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and John Dunn try to introduce historicity into the study of political thought. Believing that meaning is relational, they attempt to build cognitive contexts in which to fit events. Yet, their structural focus is often either ill-defined or overly simplified. They claim that if any statement is fixed into its proper context, the context will help to explain it. But the historical context is not always clearly understood itself; this is acting under the (...) "illusion of historical solidity and substance." They see language as the limitation of action, while actually it is a tool for inventiveness of thought. (shrink)

The idea of Geistesgeschichte was an idealistic program. The critique of this program, however, leaves us with the task of thinking the historicity of spirit: There is no history without spirit. This thesis requires a materialist explanation.

Scholars who seek in Plato’s early dialogues an accurate account of the philosophy of the historical Socrates place special weight on the Apology as a source of historical information about him. Even scholars like Charles Kahn, who generally reject this historicist approach to the early dialogues, accept the Apology as a ‘quasi-historical’ document. In this paper I attempt to raise doubts about the historical reliability of the Apology. I argue that the claims used to support the historicity of the (...) Apology fall far short of establishing the Apology as an historically accurate record of the trial, and that this conclusion is affirmed even in the words of those scholars who defend the historicity of the dialogue. I urge an interpretation that treats the Apology primarily as a philosophical, not as an historical, document. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider how it would be possible to think about the historicity of music through Hegel’s thought. I will compare Hegel’s idea with a historical event that is considered relevant in the history of music: Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music, taken here also as a model of immanent negation and Aufhebung of tonal system in music. Furthermore, I will take Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music as an instance and wonder about the role of music and its history in the sociocultural (...) formation (or, in Hegelian words, in the absolute Geist). I divide the exposition into four parts, namely: (1) the position of art before the absolute Geist; (2) a general exposition of art in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, placing music as a singular form of art; (3) an analysis of the characteristics of music in Hegel and (4) the comparison with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music. I conclude that music, as an artistic form, brings the form of an internal feeling of a social subjectivity – a way to feel and understand sounds that transforms itself through history; in turn, both music and the form of an internal feeling of social subjectivity, have a historicity that can be understood as developed dialectically. Along these lines, the beginning of the Twentieth Century in music reveals, through Schoenberg and other composers, new intuitive configurations of this social subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper urges a reconsideration of Hume’s role in the philosophy of history. It begins by challenging the common perception of Hume as a proto-positivist hoping to draw from history a mechanical causal account of the unchanging human nature. It draws attention instead to his grasp of historical contingency, the sui generis nature of the social world, and the complexity of the relationships of recognition and identity-formation which structure its operation. The paper goes on to examine Hume’s position in the (...) light of the idea of the historicity of human nature. It is argued that Hume could be perfectly comfortable with the idea of changes in human nature as well as with the contextual dependence of terms in which human nature comes to define and redefine itself over time. What Hume cannot countenance is the prospect of a radical discontinuity within human nature, the potential significance of which is downplayed by his methodological reliance, qua a historian, on critical common sense and the moralistic vocabulary of folk psychology associated with it. (shrink)

Touraine's critique of the sociological tradition has gradually come to focus on the very notion of society and the basic assumptions associated with it: the interpretation of social life as organized around central principles that are embodied in institutions and internalized by individuals, the tendency to subsume social structure and social change under the same determinants, and the rejection or minimization of the distinction between state and society. In the light of this critique, his earlier attempts to construct a systematic (...) theory seem premature. In particular, the key notion of historicity was overshadowed by the more restrictive concept of the “self-production of society” and the model of a “historical system of action”. But on the other hand, the open questions and unresolved problems of the earlier work underline the need for a further radicalization of the critique of the dominant image of society. This would lead to a conceptualization of social life in terms of interrelations and tensions between structures of culture and structures of power, both of which transcend the social field. A more Weberian perspective would thus replace the residual Durkheimianism of Touraine's earlier writings. (shrink)

Analysis of the state and possible options for the development of modern humanities gives the grounds to assert the growing importance of the idea of historicity in culture and philosophy during the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this regard, both the disclosure of the concept of historicity and the substantiation of the significance of the principle of historicity, both for the methodology of historical and philosophical knowledge and for humanitarian knowledge in general become relevant. The author (...) of this article carries out historical and philosophical reconstruction of historical issues in the philosophy of M. Heidegger and reveals the process of converting the idea of historicity into the principle of German existentialism. It is concluded that with the help of historicity M. Heidegger was able to present his own version of phenomenology on an existential basis. Seeing an existential achievement in historicity, M. Heidegger understood by it the direction of existence to the source, tradition, on the basis of this, the intentionality of consciousness was revealed as an essential property of existence: the direction of man as a finite being to its source, which allowed the German philosopher to interpret historicity as a tradition, the existential source of man, and how the temporality of human existence. The author of this article concludes that in the philosophy of M. Heidegger historicity was transformed from an idea into a principle on the basis of which the German philosopher revealed not only the historicity of Dasein, building a fundamental ontology and hermeneutics of factuality, but also tried to solve the problem of the history of being, going beyond the existential philosophy. (shrink)

The infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke pose in an acute form the question of the historical value of the Gospels. Raymond Brown suggests that redaction criticism can bypass this question by spelling out the theological message intended by the evangelists. But his own exegesis suggests this is to misunderstand the genre of this literature. Brown’s indifference to historicity would be justified only if the evangelists were writing something resembling allegory, a form of narrative in which the literal sense (...) of the story is the clothing of a spiritual message. But Brown’s exegesis suggests that the evangelists do not regard the literal sense of these stories as dispensable; they regard their theological message as resting on a foundation of historical fact. It follows that if interpreters focus on the intention of the evangelists, they cannot avoid addressing the question of historicity. (shrink)

In his early Freiburg lectures on the phenomenology of religious life, published as his Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger sought to interpret the Christian life in phenomenological terms, while also discussing the question of whether Christianity should be construed as historically defined. Heidegger thus connected the philosophical discussion of religion as a phenomenon with the character of the religious life taken in the context of factical life. According to Heidegger, every philosophical question originates from the latter, which determines such questions (...) pre-theoretically, while the tradition of early Christianity can also only be understood historically in such terms. More specifically, he holds that the historical phenomenon of religious life as it relates to early Christianity, inasmuch as it undergirds our conception of the religious phenomenon per se, reveals the essential connection between factical life and religious life. In this way, the conception of religion that Heidegger establishes through his analyses of Paul’s Epistles takes on both theological and philosophical ramifications. Moreover, the historicity of factical life finds its fulfillment in our comprehension of the primordial form of Christianity as our very own historical a priori, determined by our own factical situation. Hence, historicity and factical life belong together within the situation that makes up the foundation of the religious life. (shrink)

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of Contributors -- Introduction -- 1 The Concepts of Physics: Rational Contents and Constructions in History -- 2 Theory-change and the Logic of Enquiry: New Bearings in Philosophy of Science -- 3 Science, History and Philosophy in Kant and Hegel -- 4 Historicity, Social Psychology and Change -- 5 The Reality of History -- 6 The Social Location of Scientific Practices -- 7 Kuhn, (...) Different Worlds and Science as Historical -- 8 Incommensurability Modestly Recovered -- Index. (shrink)

This piece is an essay review of Wang Hui's book China from Empire to Nation-State, which is a translation of the introduction to Wang's four-volume Rise of Modern Chinese Thought. According to the reviewer, Wang studies less the modern history of China than its historicity and does so in the context of China's transition from being an empire, inhabiting a cosmos that is the product of its own self-reflection, to being one among a number of nation-states, inhabiting a number (...) of histories of their own, all of which are now simultaneously present. But the Euro-American terms empire and nation-state, which increasingly pervade Chinese perceived realities, lack precise Chinese equivalents. Meanwhile, the terms that the Chinese use in referring to the same historical transition, tianli and gongli, are obscure to the Euro-American mind. The reviewer asks whether the Chinese, now facing a plurality of histories, wonder if there may be a plurality of li, as well, or at least if there can be a li that is “universal” in the sense that it is common to them all. The problem here, the reviewer argues, in part derives from Wang's binaries being Hegelian, while the breakdown of the nation-state in Europe projects a postpolitical order in which human communities are incapable of state-based action or of determining their own li. The review ends by questioning whether China is capable of following this path and, in any case, whether Wang's vocabulary is able to encompass it. (shrink)

In this article I propose to discuss some recent theological contributions to the problem of the historicity of the Gospels, and I wish to suggest that philosophical issues may ultimately be relevant to its solution.

Following in Joan Scott's anti-foundationalist footsteps, Linda Zerilli argues for a theory of feminist political judgement not framed in terms of epistemological certainty but assimilated to aesthetic judgement. Tani Barlow criticises Zerilli for not taking adequate account of history in her theory. I analyse the implications of Zerilli's ‘abyssal’ approach to political judgement and Barlow's critique of it. Despite their shared concerns, Zerilli's, Barlow's, and Scott's abyssal approaches struggle to effectively ground the validity of historical analysis and political judgement within (...) a context of plurality and historical difference. All three thinkers focus extensively on discursive and imaginative potential for change while marginalising the role of materiality in the creation of new horizons for women. Incorporating a dynamic account of the materiality of human life into their work would allow them to tie politics and history to an explanation of the role material life plays in constituting plurality, factuality, and historicity. (shrink)

Presentism : stopgap or new state? -- Introduction : orders of time and regimes of historicity -- Making history : Sahlins's Islands -- From Odysseus's tears to Augustine's meditations -- Chateaubriand, between the old and the new regime of historicity -- Memory, history, and the present -- Heritage and the present.

At the beginning of the present century, a series of paradoxes were discovered within mathematics which suggested a fundamental unclarity in traditional mathemati­cal methods. These methods rested on the assumption of a realm of mathematical idealities existing independently of our thinking activity, and in order to arrive at a firmly grounded mathematics different attempts were made to formulate a conception of mathematical objects as purely human constructions. It was, however, realised that such formulations necessarily result in a mathematics which lacks (...) the richness and power of the old ‘platonistic’ methods, and the latter are still defended, in various modified forms, as embodying truths about self-existent mathematical entities. Thus there is an idealism-realism dispute in the philosophy of mathematics in some respects parallel to the controversy over the existence of the experiential world to the settle­ment of which lngarden devoted his life. The present paper is an attempt to apply Ingarden’s methods to the sphere of mathematical existence. This exercise will reveal new modes of being applicable to non-real objects, and we shall put forward arguments to suggest that these modes of being have an importance outside mathematics, especially in the areas of value theory and the ontology of art. (shrink)

Axel Honneth and Hans Joas claim that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is problematically ‘solipsistic’ insofar as it fails to appreciate the ways in which human persons or selves are brought into being and given their characteristic powers of reflection and action by social processes. Here I review the main argument of Plessner’s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie with this criticism in mind, giving special attention to Plessner’s accounts of organic being, personhood, language, sociality, (...) and historicity in that text. I argue that Honneth and Joas’s criticisms understate the extent to which Plessner takes sociality to be a constitutive condition of human forms of life within the structure he calls ‘ex-centric positionality’. This reading of Plessner also provides resources for answering a more common criticism of his philosophical anthropology – namely, that it is problematically ‘essentialist’, paying insufficient heed t.. (shrink)

The author of this paper contends that Kathleen Wallace’s model of the self is a highly original contribution to contemporary thought. He, however, highlights important respects in which Wallace is adumbrating themes highlighted by Justus Buchler’s scattered insights into human selfhood. In addition, the author identifies two possible lines of inquiry rooted in Wallace’s project calling for further pursuit. Questions regarding self‐division, ones importantly bearing upon the topic of autonomy, and also questions regarding the somatic mechanisms, processes, and practices by (...) which embodied selves maintain themselves as cumulative networks are ones that, above all else, he tries to throw into sharp relief through the defining features of Wallace’s network model and to underscore the inherent power of Wallace’s nuanced approach to a highly contested and intricately complex topic. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s account of historicity is significant both as a phenomenological account and as an existential account of our historical situation. Of course, these aspects of his work are not mutually exclusive, but intertwined. And each aspect contributes to the sense of crisis of human historicity. We will first consider the phenomenological crisis of historicity—which is to say, we will consider the crisis of historicity phenomenologically. This is the attempt to reveal the conditions of the possibility of (...) history from within history or the structure of our historical situation—where Merleau-Ponty’s position departs from Husserlian phenomenology. Next, we will consider the existential crisis of historicity—which is to say, we will consider the crisis of historicity existentially. This is the attempt to understand the imperative that things matter to us historically. Finally, we will briefly indicate the importance of these aspects of our historicity as a critical intertwining. This critical intertwining reveals the mutual encroachment of the “how” and the “why” of our historicity, which Merleau-Ponty describes at the end of his career as chiasmic existence within the flesh of the world. The critical intertwining as interrogation of our historical being provides the "who" "what" "when" and "where" of our historicity. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 45, Issue 2, pp 191 - 213 With the recent publication of Jacques Derrida’s seminar of 1964–65, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, it has become abundantly clear that when the full history of Derrida’s half-century-long engagement with Heidegger is finally written a special place will have to be reserved for the question of history itself, and especially the question of history or historicity in its irreducible relationship to language and to violence. In this essay, (...) I look at just a few key passages from “Violence and Metaphysics,” first published in 1964, and Derrida’s seminar on Heidegger from that same year in order to try to isolate what appears to be an important transitional moment in Derrida’s rethinking of the questions of language, violence, and history, in large part, it seems, thanks to, or accompanied by, Heidegger. Indeed, while Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger over the next four decades will go on to include questions of technology, the animal, species difference, sexual difference, and so on, the relationship between language, history, and violence that came to draw his attention in the early 1960s and that would be crucial to what Derrida will go on to call deconstruction will continue to haunt him, as I will suggest in conclusion, right up to his very last seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign, in 2002–2003. (shrink)

The article examines the inter-implication between Foucault's and Derrida's representations of one another's work in the debate over Histoire de la folie and discovers a chiasmic structure between them, an inverted mirroring of each in the other, in which philosophy and historicity alternately encompass and exceed one another. At the heart of this is a problem of language (and the reason that accompanies it), which defines the limitations of the historian's work.

Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. (...) Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? -/- Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools. (shrink)

This paper deals with the question of historical facticity in the phenomenological tradition. I argue that taking historicity into consideration in its factical constitution means transgressing the realm of the primordial or existential temporality. Following Ricoeur’s discussion of the idea of the “referential status of the past,” the question of the material foundation of historical meaning-formation, i.e., relation between temporality and materiality will be brought into the forefront of phenomenological investigations. It is with this context in mind that I (...) argue that exploring the conditions of historicity with regard to its factical and material determinations should assume a realist position in phenomenology. (shrink)

. Reason’s genuine historicity: the establishment of a history of philosophy as a philosophical sub-discipline in Marburg Neo-Kantianism. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 29, Special Issue: Historical Thought in German Neo-Kantianism, Guest Editors: Katherina Kinzel and Lydia Patton, pp. 694-717.

Are mathematical objects affected by their historicity? Do they simply lose their identity and their validity in the course of history? If not, how can they always be accessible in their ideality regardless of their transmission in the course of time? Husserl and Foucault have raised this question and offered accounts, both of which, albeit different in their originality, are equally provocative. Both acknowledge that a scientific object like a geometrical theorem or a chemical equation has a history because (...) it is only constituted in and transmitted through history. But they see that history as a part of its ideality, so that, although historical, a scientific object retains its identity as one and the same object. (shrink)

In this scholarly but non-technical book, Campbell elucidates the concept of truth by tracing its history, from the ancient Greek idea that truth is timeless, unchanging, and free from all relativism, through the seventeenth-century crisis which led to the collapse of that idea, and then on through the emergence of historical consciousness to the existentialist, sociological, and linguistic approaches of our own time. He gives a scholarly but vivid and economical exposition of the views of a remarkably wide range of (...) thinkers, always showing how their ideas engage with our contemporary concerns. He argues that current problems with truth arise from the way differing past conceptions continue to resound in our contemporary use of the word, and suggests that we must formulate a new conception of truth that is compatible with awareness that human existence is finite and contingent--with awareness of our own historicity. (shrink)

In Objectivity, Daston and Galison argue that scientific objectivity has a history. Objectivity emerged as a distinct nineteenth-century “epistemic virtue,” flanked in time by other epistemic virtues. The authors trace the origins of scientific objectivity by identifying changes in images from scientific atlases from different periods, but they emphasize that the same history could be narrated using different sorts of scientific objects. One could, for example, focus on the changing uses of “type specimens” in biological taxonomy. Daston :153–182, 2004) indeed (...) provides a detailed account of the history of the type specimen which purports to show this. I argue that this attempt hinges on a conceptual confusion and therefore fails. I show that the actual history of the type specimen does not reinforce the account of epistemic virtues from Objectivity, but rather threatens to subvert it. (shrink)