Bennett Gilbert

The twin concepts in the title will be introduced in the contexts of the philosophy of history and of philosophical personalism, as distinct from (though related to) their uses as logical and metaphysical categories. Overviews of varieties of philosophy of history and of basic principles I employ are foundations of the argument. Concepts, or ideas, in general have, I argue, real existence through the way that personal agents use them in creating the histories of human relations. I introduce a Personalist account, which has a more thoroughly diachronic character. Further remarks on the power of ideas to create relations expands this idea into the key claim: that urgency derived from interdependent human relations links historical and moral considerations. Interdependence and identity are then considered in terms of systems theory, notably biological autopoiesis and panpsychism. The value of all this appears in terms of relationships in moral life and, in conclusion, in an understanding of the connections between moral philosophy and philosophy of history.

Current and recent philosophy of history contemplates a deep change in fundamental notions of the presence of the past. This is called breaking up time. The chief value for this change is enhancing the moral reach of historical research and writing. However, the materialist view of reality that most historians hold cannot support this approach. The origin of the notion in the thought of Walter Benjamin is suggested. I propose a neo-idealist approach called perennialism, centered on recurrent moral dilemmas and choices. This suggests a view of the relations of moral thought and ontology placed in the diachronic context that historians study.

Power and Compassion: On Moral Force Ethics and Historical Change bends philosophy of history and moral philosophy toward each other. The problem of the temporal span of moral life, first noticed and addressed by Kant as a hope and then made the center of philosophy by Hegel, was the center point of the canonical philosophy of history of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Its failure amidst the calamities and changes in culture and theory over during the twentieth century led to new projects in philosophy of history that separated it from may forms of moral consideration. But developments in historiography have returned ethical issues to the center. Moral philosophy over the last fifty years has been turning toward history and description. Power and Compassion takes the consideration of historical span in moral philosophy with the deepest seriousness, stretching it as far as it now can go within the philosophical situation of the present. Reflecting such influences as Walter Benjamin, Borden Bowne, Han-Georg Gadamer, William James, Søren Kierkegaard, Emanuel Levinas, and Simone Weil, and the tradition of philosophical personalism, it develops a fully relational view of personhood and history together along four levels of interdependence. The book also proposes an organization of moral life under the two great moral forces, power and compassion, that person use in building meaningful lives in the large scale of human history. Relations conditioned by the effects of these moral forces are detailed by a unique discussion of moral labors. Compassion has a unique role in these developments. As a result, that personhood is moral force affecting reality becomes the linchpin of a union between philosophy of history and moral philosophy.

Social ontology and the philosophy of history both concern themselves with human collectives. Social ontology is supposed to be theoretical, although the social sciences are supposed to be empirical. Philosophy of history is supposed to be theoretical, although historiography is supposed to be empirical. In fact, the a priori and the a posteriori mix in both theoretical and empirical endeavors in similar ways. Since the two endeavors hold part of their objects of inquiry in common, they should be able to speak to another. In what follows I aim to expose some of the ways their dialogue stresses and can nourish them both. Critical social ontology can enhance the moral purchase of social ontology. Re-conceiving ontology for social ontology must rely on developing an orientation toward diachronesis and history.

I develop the two pairs of ideas about the history of touch. The first concerns haptic events as non- verbal and haptic affect as deeply entangled meaning. We will consider historiographic interpretation in this line through the example of a far- reaching episode of misguided touch in 1781 and the micropolitics that ensued. I will also then develop the second pair of ideas— the anachronic and personhood— to theorize the historiography of touch out of its apparent ephemerality, unrepresentability, intimacy, and power.6 I say apparent ephemerality because touch also lasts in ways that this essay will show and in other ways as well.7 If historians follow out the broad range of the effects of the senses, notably those of touch, along something like the lines I theorize here, the history of the senses can intensify and nourish both the expanding sphere of knowledge of the past and, as well, the ethical purposes of historiographic research and experience. For present purposes I take the notion of touch as an object of historiographic scrutiny to mean the human embodied communicative expression, by means of bodily contact, frequently initiated by the actor’s limbs, of desire for pleasure and for avoidance of fear and pain, of desire as hope and defense against loss, and desire as striving and stress.

To develop the axiology of moral (or ethical) values, phenomenological analysis must look at temporality in a way that is unfamiliar to it. This way is through knowledge and experience of the actual historical past, from which it has been separated by the Heideggerian conception of historicity and its classical Husserlian analysis of time consciousness. The development of historical studies helps to make this possible. A simple sample model of the diachronesis of the awareness of ethical significance, value, and obligation is presented. It moves the analysis from a presentist focus to the field of experience in which subjects develop moral agency. Two concepts, historical phenomenology and interpersonal values-making, are advanced as the bases of a research program. It will amplify the potential of phenomenology to understand ethical goods such as empathy and will also encourage interactions of ethics, philosophy of history, and phenomenology

Using a close reading of a single clause and its context in a section in A Pluralist Universe, we see the moral dangers James saw in traditional ontology, in particular its relation to war and peace. This analysis opens up James’s combining the personalist philosophy of his friend Borden Bowne (and others) with the pluralism he developed late in his career. This leads, further, to reflection of James’s performative philosophizing. Finding in James a theory of “pluralistic personalism” gives us a fresh look at the far-reaching power of his basic concepts of moral philosophy.

Examining the author’s own experiences of narcotics addiction reveals certain aspects of the addicted mentality that have strong ethical valence. In general, this shows that addiction is not a state fundamentally characterized by lack. The rudiments of this position are found in some contemporary philosophy of addiction; also, it is contrasted with a common widely held mistaken view. Addiction should instead be understood in continuity with and as illuminating the nature of human personhood and subjectivity. Under a phenomenology specific to the author’s experience, addiction appears as a mode of experience that has an unmanageable overflow of narratives created as discourses concerning people, events, thoughts, and feelings.

Our cultural situation is to seek a moral form of self-constitution, rather than an ontological or epistemological foundation. Such a moral ground lies in the paradox of willing surrender of the will to do wrong or dysfunctional acts in order to enter temporally-extended processes of moral change. But the paradox of willing surrender of the will requires analysis. The propositional form of it cannot be sustained and must instead give way to willingness as an ongoing choice. The self-reflexivity of the will with which we accomplish this turns out to be a core activity of human activity that seeks openness to moral growth through humility. The paper suggests that self-constitution in this manner this is what freedom is for us and is therefore the source of our hope.

John Foster, an Oxford analytical philosopher, and Borden Parker Bowne, the founder of “Boston Personalism” at the turn of the twentieth century both presented unique arguments for idealism that are deeply different from one another. Because neither is now well known, this paper lays out their reasoning as carefully and as clearly as possible, finding Bowne’s case for personalist idealism to be the stronger of the two in terms of ontology. But the inquiry is framed on the problems of the moral affordances of ontology and of the need of moral philosophy for grounding in ontology. Although this is a very large area, a partial conclusion—the “half argument” of the title—is drawn for further development.

This interdisciplinary volume connects the philosophy of history to moral philosophy with a unique focus on time. Taking in a range of intellectual traditions, cultural, and geographical contexts, the volume provides a rich tapestry of approaches to time, morality, culture, and history. By extending the philosophical discussion on the ethical importance of temporality, the editors disentangle some of the disciplinary tensions between analytical and hermeneutic philosophy of history, cultural theory, meta-ethical theory, and normative ethics. The ethical and existential character of temporality reveals itself within a collection that resists the methodological underpinnings of any one philosophical school. The book's distinctive cross-cultural approach ensures a wide range of perspectives with contributions on life and death in Japanese philosophy, ethics and time in Maori philosophy, non-traditional temporalities and philosophical anthropology, as well as global approaches to ethics. These new directions of study highlight the importance of the ethical in the temporal, inviting further points of departure in this burgeoning field.

John Foster, an Oxford analytical philosopher, and Borden Parker Bowne, the founder of “Boston Personalism” at the turn of the twentieth century both presented unique arguments for idealism that are deeply different from one another. Because neither is now well known, this paper lays out their reasoning as carefully and as clearly as possible, finding Bowne’s case for personalist idealism to be the stronger of the two in terms of ontology. But the inquiry is framed on the problems of the moral affordances of ontology and of the need of moral philosophy for grounding in ontology. Although this is a very large area, a partial conclusion—the “half argument” of the title—is drawn for further development.

Rejecting or reforming anthropocentrism for the sake of human survival is a central moral challenge in our time. The rejection of anthropocentrism relies on the view that anthropocentrism has pervasively constituted the historical character of humankind and must be replaced in the future as understood by historical theory. This critique arises from new realist ontologies, including neo-materialisms and object-oriented ontology. Their rigid rejection of anthropocentrism requires the view of history and sociality proposed by proponents of object-oriented ontology. It is based on a specialized form of the totalized logic of identity, the concept of antitypy; and by careful examination this is found to be inadequate. The consequence is that rigid rejection of anthropocentrism from any ontologically realist point of view must therefore fail because it is necessarily based on a logic that must be rejected. A better approach relies on the necessity of relatedness in moral and social thought.

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Ahead of Print. Neither of the seemingly straightforward approaches of retaining the human at the top of the hierarchy of beings and of flattening human personhood solves the question of non-human personhood. But the concept of personhood does have the resources to address this issue, if we take it as a kind of moral agency. The way that humans develop moral agency through their temporality, historicity and community must be mapped onto the personhood of animals, but this is extremely difficult and must await more scientific knowledge and wiser and more empathetic human understanding. It is in our hands, rather than the commandment of a non-human reality.

Neither of the seemingly straightforward approaches of retaining the human at the top of the hierarchy of beings and of flattening human personhood solves the question of non-human personhood. But the concept of personhood does have the resources to address this issue, if we take it as a kind of moral agency. The way that humans develop moral agency through their temporality, historicity and community must be mapped onto the personhood of animals, but this is extremely difficult and must await more scientific knowledge and wiser and more empathetic human understanding. It is in our hands, rather than the commandment of a non-human reality.

While much of Donald Bloxham's History and Morality is devoted to analyzing the evaluative processes of historians, Bloxham develops and relies on two strong philosophical concepts. The first is his claim that context must be understood as causality because a historical context is one of the causes of actions. Bloxham uses this to argue that historians must ascribe responsibility to past actors rather than blame their cultures. A wide critique of moral relativism emerges from this principle. The second is a distinction between a type of account that explains past events or entities in terms of their internal, unified natures and a type that understands them in terms of their relations to the rest of their world. Here, Bloxham's great concern is the isolation of forces from one another that helps to put them into conflict. The twentieth-century nation-state is the most important example of this. The “internalist” approach was part of what led to the Holocaust, to which Bloxham has dedicated most of his scholarly life. These two concepts anchor and justify historians in morally evaluating the decisions and deeds they study. But these ideas also point to deeper and more fully philosophical conceptions supporting moral evaluation that historians should practice in an exemplary way and that link historical consciousness to the chief issues of moral philosophy.

In this paper we delineate the conditions and features of what we call an existential philosophy of history in relation to customary trends in the field of the philosophy of history. We do this by circumscribing what a transgenerational temporality and what our entanglement in ethical relations with temporal others ask of us as existential and responsive selves and by explicating what attitude we need to have when trying to responsibly respond to other vulnerable beings in our historical world of life.

The question of the moral demands that humans, posthumans, and nonhumans in the Anthropocene put up on persons now living generally takes the form of supererogatory demands—that is, moral obligations with a perfectionist structure leading to obligations “above and beyond the call of duty” and extreme individual and collective sacrifice. David Roden construes this by deontology; Toby Ord, following Derek Parfit, by consequentualism. Such obligations are akin to the martyrdom of saints: but must our expectations of the Anthropocene necessarily lead to this kind of moral obligation? Can it be mitigated and how? Meta-ethically, it is a highly externalist form of motivation with no concurrent rewards. In this respect, the inquiry is to be pursued through understanding how to align horizons of experience and of expectation. Normatively, it very much concerns how we define and regard persons—present and future, human and non-human, organic or artificial, conscious or not, intelligent or otherwise—since personhood and moral obligation are deeply connected concepts. In my conference paper I want to open and provoke discussion of the current and possible views of the supererogatory moral obligations in and toward the Anthropocene.

This paper advances a fresh theorization of historicity. The word and concept of historicity has become so widespread and popular that they have ceased to have definite meaning and are used to stand for unsupported notions of the values inherent in human experience. This paper attempts to repair the concept by re-defining it as the temporal aspect of the interdependence of life; having history is to have a life intertwined with the lives of all others and with the universe. After separating out the looser uses, surveying some of the literature, and defining what needs to be done, the paper examines shortcomings in the very different and widely influential conceptions of historicity of Koselleck and Heidegger. It then advances a new conception and fits it into the theoretical and moral capabilities of the philosophy of history as a core of philosophical anthropology.

In this essay we consider the moral claims of one branch of non-realist theory known as linguistic narrativism theory. By highlighting the moral implications of linguistic narrativism theory, we argue that the “moral vision” expressed by this theory can entail, at worst, undesirable moral agnosticism if not related to a transcendental and supra-personal normativity in our moral life. With its appeal to volitionism and intuitionism, the ethical sensitivity of this theory enters into difficulties brought about by several internal tensions as to what morality and moral judgements involve. We contend that the proponents of linguistic narrativism theory must strongly recognize and take responsibility for the “moral vison” their theory professes, in so far as they want to think of their theory as a morally responsible one.