In Defense of Abstraction: A Reply to William Schweiker

The objective of this talk is to think through two topics: the way abstraction figures in historical discourse and the kind of approach to history that could address the problems posed by abstraction.

Mormon studies review, 2002

Edito r's Introd uction HI STOR ICAL CONCRETENESS, OR SPECULATI VE ABS T RACTION? T he rema rks below were ori gina ll y p rese nted on 17 November 2001 at a debate o rga nized under the auspices of the Society of Evangelical Philosophers, who were gathered in Denver, Colorado, in conjunction with the joint a nnual national meeting of the America n Academy of Religi o n ~l n d the Soc iety of Bibl ical Litenllure (the AA R1S BL). O n the cV(l ngci ica l side were Fr(lncis J. Beckwit h (Trinit y Inte rnatio nal Unive rsity), Paul Copa n (Ravi Z.1charias International Ministries and Trini ty Intern ational Uni versit y), William Lane Crai g (Talbot Sc hool of Theology, Bio la University), Ca rl Mosser (Un iversity o f S1. Andrews), and Paul Owen (Mont rea t Co llege). The Lalterday Sai nI part ici pants wcrc David L. Pau lsen, Daniel C. Peterson, and Stephen D. Ricks (Bri gham Young Uni versit y), Blake T. Ost ler (Salt Lake City), and Holl is T. Jo hnso n (I nd iana Unive rsity). Th e moderato r of th e debate was Ri cha rd J. MOllW, president of Pull er Th eological Semi nary, of Pa sadena, Califo rn ia. The debate had been timed to coi ncide with the release of a new volume entitled rlre New Mormall ClwllclIge: Rcspollding to th e tmest DefclIScs of (I Fast-Growil/g Mowmellf. 1 However, the book ho ld not actually appeared by the time of the meeting. The major poin t of my remarks was to indi cate that , in my opi nio n, the very cho ice of "theology'" as a focus of debate grant s to that l.

2018

Chapter 3: Schleiermacher's Historical Hermeneutics Dilthey traces the origins of modern hermeneutics to the Renaissance and the Reformation, that is, to the recovery of classical texts which could not be regarded as transparent, and to the breakdown of clerical authority and the consequent democratization of reading practices. On the one hand the sheer remoteness of Graeco-Roman texts from the (then) present called for new and more self-conscious interpretative methodologies. On the other, the pluralism of the Protestant revolution which generated a new kind of reader of biblical texts required a spelling out of interpretative principles so as to create a degree of order in a potentially chaotic cultural and political situation. But I would like to take the argument further by focussing on the immense historical changes taking place from the later eighteenth century onwards, changes which in a startlingly short time generated the technological, economic and cultural face of European modernity. In the first decade of the twenty-first century these changes are still in train, only operating still faster with the e-revolution. The contemporary term for the process, theorized by Ihab Hassan, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, David Harvey and others, is postmodernity. But, as the German theorist Jürgen Habermas has argued, the "post" simply represents a further phase of the larger project of modernization. In short, we are still living out the massive historical transition initiated, let's say, two to three hundred years ago. My interest here is in one aspect only of modernity: its capacity to generate crisis, what has been termed the shock of the new. Modernization, change accelerating much too fast, creates an unprecedented historical, that is, cultural rupture. It means all too suddenly losing touch with your past, something Europeans had perhaps never before experienced on the same scale. When you lose touch with your past, that is, when settled traditions collapse, you become specifically aware of the past as something in its own right, i.e. as different from the present-and from you in the present. This produces, in the nineteenth century, theories of "alienation" which would have been incomprehensible a little earlier-because alienation from one's own past, which amounts to a self-alienation, is a strange and deeply disturbing phenomenon, psychologically and socially unsettling, requiring a complete revision of systems of belief, ways of behaving and so on. In this situation it becomes necessary to thematize the past, to foreground the idea of the past. In short, to become conscious of something called "history". The birth of historical consciousness by the beginning of the nineteenth century goes hand in hand with industrialization, the gradual failure of church authority, the rapid decline of feudal aristocracy following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars which spread the principles of the revolution throughout Europe and, finally, the coming to dominance

Central European History, 2013

In some ways it is a scandal that it has taken until now for an English-language book on the thought of Reinhard Koselleck to appear. Then again, as Olsen writes in the introduction to this work, Koselleck has always been somewhat of an outsider visa -vis the historical profession. The project he is best known for, the seven volumes of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, is still to be translated into English, although a couple of collections of his essays have appeared in English translation. The title of the book refers to Koselleck's aim to deconstruct all utopian and relativist notions of history in the singular, with a view to putting forward the notion of history in the plural. Koselleck was born in Germany in 1923, and was drafted into the war effort in 1941. In 1945 he was captured by the Russians, and was made to carry out working duties at Auschwitz before spending 15 months in a POW camp in what is now Kazakhstan. Koselleck was thus part of the generation of postwar German academics who 'in various ways defined their identities, interests and beliefs with reference to their experiences of National Socialism, war and captivity' (p. 14). After his release Koselleck attended the University of Heidelberg, where he studied history, philosophy and sociology. Olsen argues that five scholars had a key influence on the intellectual development of Koselleck. His doctoral supervisor was Johannes Kuhn, and from him Koselleck learned his trade as a historian, as well as developing Kuhn's theme of the historical problem of tolerance. From Karl Löwith's Meaning & History-which Koselleck helped to translate-he took the idea of secularized eschatology, as well as scepticism towards the idea of history as a single progressive project. Carl Schmitt became an informal mentor to Koselleck while he worked on his dissertation, and Koselleck developed Schmitt's reflections on Germany's defeat into a theory of how the 'vanquished' in history are those who develop new methodological tools and insights into history in their attempt to understand their negative experiences. Hans George-Gadamer arrived at Heidelberg in 1949, and his hermeneutical approach to history influenced Koselleck's view of how humans understand and act within the world. Finally, the work of Martin Heidegger inspired two of Koselleck's most important scholarly projects: an anthropologically based assumption of how history is created/understood and a theory of historical time conceived through understanding the historical actor's conceptions of time.

l. In the analysis of the mythical conceptual structuration, the notion of totality is important where nature and culture, and, men, animals, plants and planets are in a continuous dialectical relationship. As a matter of fact, nothing that is human or related to human beings in one form or another, asserts Levi-Strauss, is foreign to the mythical thought, and as such, the dialectical reason finds in it its true application. Levi-Strauss opposes the differentiation that Jean-Paul Sartre makes between the analytical reason and the dialectical reason. At times, Sartre considers the former as an error, and the latter as a verity, and at others, he thinks that both lead to the same truth.

Radical philosophy, 2004

Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2023

Explaining the persistence of multiple interpretations of the same historical event has been an ongoing question in the philosophy of history. In this paper I illustrate two possible answers and argue that neither offers a satisfactory resolution. First of all, the realist view, which holds a metaphysical commitment to the past that precludes it from fully recognizing the legitimacy of variability of historical interpretations. Second, Ankersmit’s representationalism which seeks to overcome the realist view by introducing the notion of aspects. Nevertheless, I contend that this latter position ultimately proves indistinguishable from the sort of realist commitments it claims to avoid. In order to overcome these views, I argue that a new conception of historical aspects is needed. By developing a Wittgensteinian notion of aspect seeing, I provide a novel account of historical explanation. Wittgenstein’s insights allow us not only to explain the multiplicity of historical accounts but also to recognize the epistemic activity that goes into historiographical construction.

PMLA, 2015