Giuseppina D'Oro

One of the important questions which has faced philosophy since the rise of modern science concerns the relation between scientific knowledge and humanistic understanding. The growth and success of natural science has given rise to a view known as “scientism”, a philosophical conviction in the epistemic superiority of science and its right to impose its methods onto the territory of the humanities. This in turn has caused a backlash against the alleged epistemic superiority of scientific method, a backlash aiming to expose scientific enquiry as a historical enquiry embedded in human practices, thereby purportedly showing that the reality scientific method uncovers is a historical construct, akin to the cultural norms by which human beings have led their lives in different periods of time. In this debate between proponents of the right of science to extend its methods onto the territory of the humanities, and denigrators of science who deny it is a sui generis mode of inquiry, Bernard Williams and Robin George Collingwood occupy the sensible and much neglected middle ground. They teach us that ‘scientism’ should not be understood merely as the view that the methods of science can be extended to answer the questions addressed by the humanities or as “a matter of putting too high a value on science in comparison with other branches of learning or culture.” (Sorell 1991: x) This is the most common use of the term, but scientism should also be understood more broadly as the attempt of any form of knowledge to impose its methods onto the subject matter of any another. On this broader understanding of “scientism”, historicism, understood as the claim that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is historical, is a topsy-turvy form of epistemic imperialism which denies the sui generis nature of scientific knowledge. In so doing it reverses the power relations between the humanities and science, without challenging the epistemic power structures as such. As critics of scientism in both the narrow and the broader sense, Williams and Collingwood challenge the idea that it is possible to understand scientific reality through the lens of the humanities (as if nature were a social/historical construct); such attempts are just as misguided as the proposal to understand culture through the lens of scientific method.

The advance of science is often depicted as the onward march of an army onto land that was previously farmed by the humanities. If this analogy were to be taken literally it would imply that scientism, understood as the view that there is no corner of reality that is beyond the reach of scientific knowledge, is the inevitable outcome of scientific progress. This paper argues that the analogy of territorial expansionism can be misleading insofar as it suggests that the domain of inquiry of the humanities shrinks as science progresses. It argues that the progress of science poses no threat to humanistic understanding because more scientific knowledge is simply more knowledge of the same kind. Scientific and humanistic inquiries address and seek to answer not different questions, but different kinds of questions, and therefore do not compete with one another. It is not the progress of science that poses a threat to humanistic understanding, but the mistaken philosophical assumption that scientific and humanistic inquiries seek to answer the same kinds of questions. Having established that humanistic and scientific inquiry address and answer different kinds of questions, the paper proceeds to fend off the objection that the attempt to place limits onto what science can know (by claiming that there are questions science cannot answer) must be motivated by the attempt to make room for transcendent entities or for dubious alternative forms of knowledge of the kind that Karl Popper criticised as pseudoscientific. The paper argues that claiming that humanistic inquiry is concerned with different kinds of questions, questions which call for distinctive explanations, explanations which relieve one’s curiosity by bringing to light the point of what happened, is not the same as defending folk beliefs in the face of scientific evidence. One cannot, as a result, dismiss the idea that humanistic understanding addresses questions that are different in kind from those which science seeks to answer as an attempt to rehabilitate impostor sciences of the sort Popper critiqued. Key words: pseudoscience, scientism; humanistic understanding; territorialism

The philosophy of historiography has been mostly preoccupied with addressing the question “how can the past be known?”, either by describing historiographical practice or by prescribing what it ought to be. This paper argues that there is a more fundamental question that needs to be answered before turning to examine the methodology of historical inquiry. This question concerns the nature of historians’ concern with the past. The past, I argue, is an ambiguous expression which has different meanings in different explanatory contexts. The past that is relevant to the genetic palaeontologist, for example, is not the same as that which is of concern to the cultural historian, for they have different explanatory goals. These are reflected in the kind of questions they ask and the methodology they adopt to answer them. If there are different senses of the past, then there cannot be a single epistemology of historical inquiry. The project of disambiguation therefore casts a different light on the primary task of the philosophy of historiography. It entails that the primary task of the philosophy of historiography should be to engage in a conceptual inquiry aimed at establishing the sense of the past that is at play in different kinds of history before turning to answer any methodological questions as to how the past can be known. In pursuing the project of disambiguation, this paper draws inspiration from the kind of presuppositional analysis found in the work of late British idealists R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott and their defence of a distinctive, humanistic concern with the past. But this paper is an homage to their way of philosophising rather than a step-by-step reconstruction of their arguments. It claims that there is a distinctive sense of the past that corresponds to a humanistic conception of reality that is sui generis and irreducible, and that failing to acknowledge the different senses of the past only leads to conceptual confusion. Section 2 shows that the kind of evidence that is relevant to one explanatory context may be irrelevant to another and thus that it is possible to know a great deal about the past under one description and very little or nothing about it under another. Since the kind of evidence that is valuable in one explanatory context may not be so in another, there cannot be a single epistemology of historical knowledge since the methods suited to recover one kind of past may not yield any results if applied to a different sense of the past. The primary task of a philosophy of historiography should be to disambiguate the explanandum of different forms of history. Section 3 argues that the primary reason why the distinctive sense of the past that belongs to history as a humanistic pursuit is often overlooked is due to a blindness to the distinction between rules or norms and laws or regularities, and section 4 shows that the relation between different kinds of history corresponds to the relationship between different forms of knowledge, which are governed by different presuppositions. The project of disambiguation, as discussed in Section 5, shows that the sense of the past which belongs to history as a humanistic pursuit is not that of a mere segment of time, one that is infinitesimal small when compared to geological time, but that of reality understood under a different set of assumptions. An important upshot of rethinking the task of a philosophy of historiography along these lines is that it reconnects it to mainstream debates in philosophy. For a long time, the philosophy of historiography has operated in relative isolation from the philosophical mainstream. This paper shows that the issues which face philosophers of historiography bear important affinities to the challenges posed by the attempts to make sense of the relation between the manifest and the scientific image in contemporary analytic metaphysics and that the philosophy of historiography need not be seen as a philosophical backwater whose concerns have little relevance to what goes on elsewhere in mainstream philosophical discussion.

This paper is published Open Access courtesy of the University of Oulu. This paper examines a recent call to locate the human past in deep geological time and to undo the distinction between nature and culture. It argues that the concept of the past is a heterogeneous concept that means different things in different explanatory contexts and that the call to undo or abolish the disciplinary boundaries between history as a humanistic discipline and naturalistic histories rests on a failure to acknowledge the distinction between laws and norms.

Reductionism is no longer fashionable in philosophy of mind – the days when the idea that mental states are reducible to physical states was a given are over, and non-reductionism is the new orthodoxy. Yet, while many philosophers of mind would consider themselves card carrying non-reductionists, they also tend to think of psychology as a natural science of the mind. As a result, the defence of the autonomy of the mental one finds in most textbooks operates within a naturalistic framework which fails to acknowledge that humanistic explanations differ in kind from scientific ones.

How should one respond to scepticism? Should one seek to refute it? Or should scepticism be ignored? This paper argues that descriptive metaphysics occupies an intermediate logical space between truth-directed transcendental arguments aimed at refuting the sceptic and the quietist stance of the Humean naturalist who declines to take up the sceptical challenge. Descriptive metaphysics is neither quietist nor confrontational. It seeks to show, rather, that the sceptic is not a genuine partner in conversation.

R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943) was an English philosopher, historian and practicing archaeologist. His work, particularly in the philosophy of action and history, has been profoundly influential in the 20th and 21st century. Although the importance of his work is indisputable, this is the first book to consider how and why it actually matters. Giussepina D'oro considers the importance of Collingwood as a thinker who thinks kaleidoscopically and, unlike lots of contemporary philosophers, refuses to focus on narrow, technical interests but instead, observes the whole world of thought. Why Collingwood Matters revives Collingwood's conception of the role and character of philosophical analysis and shows how it informs his understanding of the mind, what it means to act, and what it means to understand the past historically. It also argues for the relevance of his metaphilosophical approach to the challenge posed by the Anthropocene and the global environmental crisis. Both an elucidation of Collingwood's thought and a lively exploration of it's contemporary relevance, Why Collingwood Matters provides a much-needed examination of a 20th-century polymath.

This chapter identifies some themes in British idealism, especially those which resonate in contemporary debates, through an examination of T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley and J.M.E. McTaggart. It focuses primarily on metaphysics and epistemology, supplemented by discussion of the ethics of Green and Bradley. In characterizing British idealism in more detail, it is important to start with T.H. Green, whose importance lay both in his philosophical thought, and also in his active engagement with Oxford local politics, educational standards and school reform, and issues of social justice, the common good and the recognition theory of rights. Green's major philosophical monograph, published posthumously in 1883, was Prolegomena to Ethics. This can be seen as a broadly Kantian account of the presuppositions of knowledge. The two main claims that concern us here are, first, that the real consists in relations and, secondly, that the related whole constitutes an “eternal consciousness”.

The philosophy of history is undergoing something of a revival. Much has happened since its heyday in the 1960s when methodological discussions concerning the structure of explanation in history and the natural sciences were central to the philosophical agenda. This introduction revisits Collingwood’s contribution to the philosophy of history, his views on the relation between science and history, and the possibility of historical knowledge suggesting his work is of enduring relevance to contemporary debates. It locates his contribution in the context of the hermeneutic tradition and locates his defence of the methodological autonomy of history in the context of recent debates concerning the relation between science and the history of the philosophy of science.

Ivan Boh: Epistemic Logic in the Later Middle Ages Routledge: London and New York, 1993. pp. 189 hb. £37.50. ISBN 0–415–05726–4 Causation in Early Modern Philosophy Edited by Steven M. Nadler. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. Pp. 219, ISBN 0–271–00863–6. $32.50. Locke's Philosophy: Content and Context G. A. J. Rogers, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. xiii, 257 pp. ISBN 0–19–824076–7. $30.00. Simone Goyard‐Fabre, Montesquieu: La Nature, les Lois, la Liberté Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993, collection Fondements de la Politique, III+ 360 pp. bibliographic, FF. 272 Wayne Waxman, Hume's Theory of Consciousness Cambridge: University Press, 1994, xvi, 347 pp., £35.00 ISBN 521–45381‐X Paolo Parrini (ed.): Kant and Contemporary Epistemology Kluwer, Amsterdam, 1994. University of Western Ontario Series in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 54. Pp. xi + 367. H. Tristam Engelhardt Jr. and Terry Pinkard, Eds., Hegel Reconsidered Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994. 257 pp., £99.00 hb., ISBN 0792326296. Mary Pickering: Auguste Comte, An Intellectual Biography, Volume I Cambridge University Press, 1993. xi + 776 pp. £45.00. ISBN 0–521–43405‐X.

This chapter identifies some themes in British idealism, especially those which resonate in contemporary debates, through an examination of T.H. Green, F.H. Bradley and J.M.E. McTaggart. It focuses primarily on metaphysics and epistemology, supplemented by discussion of the ethics of Green and Bradley. In characterizing British idealism in more detail, it is important to start with T.H. Green, whose importance lay both in his philosophical thought, and also in his active engagement with Oxford local politics, educational standards and school reform, and issues of social justice, the common good and the recognition theory of rights. Green's major philosophical monograph, published posthumously in 1883, was Prolegomena to Ethics. This can be seen as a broadly Kantian account of the presuppositions of knowledge. The two main claims that concern us here are, first, that the real consists in relations and, secondly, that the related whole constitutes an “eternal consciousness”.

This paper sets out to undermine the view that a commitment to the early modern conception of the mind as immortalized in Ryle’s metaphor of the (Cartesian) ghost in the machine and in Quine’s metaphor of the (Lockean) myth of the museum is required to articulate a defence of the sui generis character of humanistic explanations. These powerful metaphors have not only contributed to undermining the claim for methodological pluralism by caricaturizing the arguments for disunity in the sciences; they have also, and more worryingly, planted red herrings that have diverted attention away from the genuine issues at stake. This paper is an exercise in removing these false clues to reveal what the claim for the autonomy of humanistic explanations really amounts to.

In this contribution we explore revisionists and anti-revisionists conceptions of the historical imagination. The focus will be on how these conceptions of the historical imagination determine how one ought to answer the question of whether or not it is in principle possible to know the past in its own terms rather than from the perspective of the present. The contrast that we are seeking to draw is that between a conception of the historical imagination which is revisionist in the sense that it is committed to the claim that knowledge of the past is in principle impossible, and one which is anti-revisionist in the sense that it regards knowledge of the past in its own terms to be in principle possible. Revisionism, as we understand it here, is not the contingent claim that in some cases (where, for example, new evidence which was previously unavailable comes to light) the historical understanding of the past may be revised; rather, it represents an a priori claim about the impossibility of knowing the past in its own terms in all cases, and not just in some. Likewise, anti-revisionism, as we understand it here, is the view that historical knowledge is in principle possible; it is not the claim that it is always achieved as a matter of fact. The debate between revisionist and anti-revisionist conceptions of the historical imagination is therefore a second-order debate about the nature of historical knowing, about whether it is possible, and if so, about what its conditions of possibility are. It is not a first order debate about whether or not such knowledge has been achieved in any given case.

Is philosophy continuous with science or does it have a distinctive domain of inquiry that differs from that of the special sciences? Collingwood claimed that philosophy has a distinctive subject matter and a distinctive method. Its distinctive subject matter is what he called the “absolute presuppositions” that govern the special sciences and its method consists in making these presuppositions explicit by showing that they are entailed by the questions asked in the special sciences. In this chapter the editors seek to provide a guide to the diverging interpretations of Collingwood’s claim that metaphysics is not the study of pure being but of the presuppositions that govern knowledge of reality. They argue that a reassessment of his contribution to philosophical methodology is timely in the light of the recent revival of interest in second-order questions concerning the role and character of philosophical analysis.

A legacy of Enlightenment thought was to see the human as separate from nature. Human history was neatly distinguished from natural history. The age of Anthropocene has now put all that into question. This human exceptionalism is seen by some as responsible for the devastating impact humans have had on the planet. But if we give up on the nature / culture distinction and see human activity as just another type of natural process, we risk losing our ability to attribute moral agency and responsibility to humanity for the environmental crisis, argues Giuseppina D’Oro.

This paper discusses the metaphilosophical assumptions that have dominated analytic philosophy of mind, and how they gave rise to the central question that the best-known forms of non-reductivism available have sought to answer, namely: how can mind fit within nature? Its goal is to make room for forms of non-reductivism that have challenged the fruitfulness of this question, and which have taken a different approach to the so-called “placement” problem. Rather than trying to solve the placement problem, the forms of non-reductivism discussed in this paper have put pressure on the metaphilosophical assumptions that have given rise to the question of the place of mind in nature in the first instance.