•  1199
    State of the field: Are the results of science contingent or inevitable?
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 52 55-66. 2015.
    This paper presents a survey of the literature on the problem of contingency in science. The survey is structured around three challenges faced by current attempts at understanding the conflict between “contingentist” and “inevitabilist” interpretations of scientific knowledge and practice. First, the challenge of definition: it proves hard to define the positions that are at stake in a way that is both conceptually rigorous and does justice to the plethora of views on the issue. Second, the cha…Read more
  •  987
    Wilhelm Windelband and the problem of relativism
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (1): 84-107. 2017.
    This paper analyzes the shifts in Wilhelm Windelband’s ‘critical philosophy of values’ as it developed hand in hand with his understanding of relativism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by analyzing the role that relativism played in his philosophical project, it seeks to contribute to a better understanding of Windelband's intellectual development in the context of historicism and Neo-Kantianism. On the other hand, by highlighting Windelband’s contribution to the understanding of rela…Read more
  •  790
    In this paper I revisit nineteenth-century debates over historical objectivity and the political functions of historiography. I focus on two central contributors to these debates: Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen. In their takes on objectivity and subjectivity, impartiality and political engagement I reveal diametrically opposed solutions to shared concerns: how can historians reveal history to be meaningful without taking recourse to speculative philosophy? And how can they produce a…Read more
  •  609
    Narrative and evidence. How can case studies from the history of science support claims in the philosophy of science?
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 49 (C): 48-57. 2015.
    A common method for warranting the historical adequacy of philosophical claims is that of relying on historical case studies. This paper addresses the question as to what evidential support historical case studies can provide to philosophical claims and doctrines. It argues that in order to assess the evidential functions of historical case studies, we first need to understand the methodology involved in producing them. To this end, an account of historical reconstruction that emphasizes the nar…Read more
  •  476
    Inner Experience and Articulation: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Foundational Project and the Charge of Psychologism
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (2): 347-375. 2018.
    This paper seeks to re-assess Dilthey’s descriptive psychology in light of the charge of “psychologism”. The paper has two goals. First, I seek to give a fine-grained reconstruction of Dilthey’s foundational project. I provide a systematic account of how Dilthey sought to ground the knowledge claims of the human sciences in inner experience. I place special emphasis on Dilthey’s concept of “articulation” which mediates between inner experience and psychological knowledge, as well as between indi…Read more
  •  435
    This chapter traces the development of relativist ideas in nineteenth-century debates about history and historical knowledge. It distinguishes between two contexts in which these ideas first emerged. First, the early-to-mid nineteenth-century encounter between speculative German idealism and professional historiography. Second, the late nineteenth-century debate between hermeneutic philosophy and orthodox Neo-Kantianism. The paper summarizes key differences between these two contexts: in the for…Read more
  •  402
    The professionalization of the study of history in the Nineteenth Century made possible a new way of thinking about the history of philosophy: the thought emerged that philosophy itself might be relative to time, historical culture, and nationality. The simultaneous demise of speculative metaphysics scattered philosophers’ confidence that the historical variance of philosophical systems could be viewed in terms of the teleological self-realization of reason. Towards the late Nineteenth Century, …Read more
  •  313
    Historische Kontinuität und affirmative Genealogie: Johann Gustav Droysens politische Historik
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 67 (3): 418-428. 2019.
    This paper analyses the methodological writings of the nineteenth century historian Johann Gustav Droysen. It explores how Droysen integrates the political and methodological aspects of historiography. The paper shows that Droysen relies on a procedure of “affirmative genealogy” which, in turn, is based on a concept of historical continuity. On Droysen’s account, historical continuity enables “historical understanding”. And the understanding of historical continuities provides the statesman – th…Read more
  •  239
    Scientific Realism, Approximate Truth and Contingency in Science
    In Kinzel Katherina (ed.), Realism, Relativism, Constructivism, Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. pp. 154-156. 2015.
  •  153
    Introduction: History
    In Martin Kusch, Johannes Steizinger, Katherina Kinzel & Niels Jacob Wildschut (eds.), The Emergence of Relativism: German Thought from the Enlightenment to National Socialism, Routledge. 2019.
  •  138
    De-idealizing Disagreement, Rethinking Relativism
    Humana Mente 26 (1): 40-71. 2018.
    Relativism is often motivated in terms of certain types of disagreement. In this paper, we survey the philosophical debates over two such types: faultless disagreement in the case of gustatory conflict, and fundamental disagreement in the case of epistemic conflict. Each of the two discussions makes use of a implicit conception of judgement: brute judgement in the case of faultless disagreement, and rule-governed judgement in the case of fundamental disagreement. We show that the prevalent accou…Read more
  •  79
    Debates over relativism are as old as philosophy itself. Since the late nineteenth century, relativism has also been a controversial topic in many of the social and cultural sciences. And yet, relativism has not been a central topic of research in the history of philosophy or the history of the social sciences. This collection seeks to remedy this situation by studying the emergence of modern forms of relativism as they unfolded in the German lands during the "long nineteenth century"—from the E…Read more
  •  74
    Values and Worldviews. Windelband and Dilthey on the Historicity of Philosophy
    In Martin Kusch, Johannes Steizinger, Katherina Kinzel & Niels Jacob Wildschut (eds.), The Emergence of Relativism: German Thought from the Enlightenment to National Socialism, Routledge. pp. 26-42. 2019.
    The professionalization of the study of history in the Nineteenth Century made possible a new way of thinking about the history of philosophy: the thought emerged that philosophy itself might be relative to time, historical culture, and nationality. The simultaneous demise of speculative metaphysics scattered philosophers’ confidence that the historical variance of philosophical systems could be viewed in terms of the teleological self-realization of reason. Towards the late Nineteenth Century, …Read more
  •  59
    Neo-Kantianism as hermeneutics? Heinrich Rickert on psychology, historical method, and understanding
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (4): 614-632. 2020.
    This paper explores the Baden Neo-Kantian attempt to integrate hermeneutic ‘understanding’ into the formal philosophy of the historical sciences. It focuses primarily on Heinrich Ricker...
  •  38
    Fallgeschichten werden seit dem 18. Jahrhundert zunehmend genutzt, um juristisches, psychologisches und medizinisches Wissen einer grösseren Öffentlichkeit zu vermitteln. In den letzten zehn Jahren haben sie auch in den Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften mehr Aufmerksamkeit erfahren. Die Diskussion über paradigmatische Fälle in diesem Band zielt darauf ab, Fallgeschichten in ihrer Funktion als besonders anschauliche oder lehrreiche Beispiele in verschiedenen historischen Kontexten zu untersuchen …Read more
  •  35
    Between Pluralism and Objectivism: Reconsidering Ernst Cassirer's Teleology of Culture
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 62 (1): 125-147. 2024.
    Abstractabstract:This paper revisits debates on a tension in Cassirer's philosophy of culture. On the one hand, Cassirer describes a plurality of symbolic forms and claims that each needs to be assessed by its own internal standards of validity. On the other hand, he ranks the symbolic forms in terms of a developmental hierarchy and states that one form, mathematical natural science, constitutes the highest achievement of culture. In my paper, I do not seek to resolve this tension. Rather, I aim…Read more
  •  33
    Neo-Kantian conceptualism: between scientific experience and everyday perception
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (6): 1350-1373. 2024.
    This paper reconstructs the major transformations in the Marburg neo-Kantian account of experience. By focusing on the problem of ‘conceptualism’, it traces connections between four issues that are central to the transcendental projects of the Marburg philosophers: the interpretation of Kant, the critique of experiential givenness, the account of objective cognition in science, and the relation between scientific and pre-scientific experience. My historical narrative identifies two shifts. The f…Read more
  •  33
    Historicism
    Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020.
  •  31
    Wilhelm Windelband
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019.
  •  31
    Historical thought in German neo-Kantianism
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (4): 579-589. 2021.
    Two books inaugurated the revival of Kantianism in German universities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both works were exercises in the history of philosophy. And both took to the his...
  •  28
    History Without Causality. How Contemporary Historical Epistemology Demarcates Itself From the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. Contemporary proponents of historical epistemology often try to delimit their enterprise by demarcating it from the sociology of scientific knowledge and other sociologically oriented approaches in the history of science. Their criticism is directed against the use of causal explanations which are deemed to invite reductionism and lead to a totalizing perspective on s…Read more
  •  25
    Unifying themes and irresolvable tensions in Cassirer's system of symbolic forms
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 32 (5): 1173-1181. 2023.
    1. Samatha Matherne’s reading of Ernst Cassirer’s complex and multifaceted oeuvre demonstrates a remarkably strong systematic grasp.1 By identifying the themes, ideas, and working concepts that are...
  •  23
    Counterfactuals, Causes and Contingency in the History of Science
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 60 92-96. 2016.
  • Realism, Relativism, Constructivism
    Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. 2015.