Critique Of Historical Reason Research Articles

Recommence the Defeats: Bensaïd’s Péguy

From the late 1980s onward, Daniel Bensaïd developed an extensive theoretical oeuvre marked by the influence of Walter Benjamin intertwined with Bensaïd’s own classical Marxist background. Through Benjamin, Bensaïd came to the work of Charles Péguy, whose role in his thought has yet to be fully analyzed. Bensaïd does not ignore Péguy’s contradictions and limits but reads them selectively to better understand history, politics, and temporality. The starting point of Bensaïd’s analysis of Péguy is the triad formed by the critique of historical reason, modern temporality, and progress. Péguy was also a source of inspiration for his reflection on politics, victory, and defeat and for his framing of political commitment as a melancholic wager.

Paul Ricœur: Horizons of Critical Philosophy of History

The article examines P. Ricœur’s approach to the task of creating a critical philosophy of history. Ну turned to this issue as he felt it necessary, to highlight the different aspects of hermeneutic reflection on the process of comprehending history. According to Ricœur, identifying the features of research procedures on various levels, from archiving historical sources, analyzing and explaining, in order to build a consistent narrative, should be complemented by deeper hermeneutic reflection, to enable an ontological basis for comprehending history and judging its integrity and meaning in a global perspective. Accepting M. Heidegger’s “metaphysics of finitude” as a basis for interpreting the historicity of Dasein, which in its final instance gives birth to the basic aporias of a narrative description of events occurring in time, Ricœur discovered the importance of meta-historical reflection, helping to understand the transformation of categorical foundations of viewing history as a universal process consisting of specific events and their strings, and constantly initiating the search for the renewal of its meaning. Thus, far from rejecting the results of the “critique of historical reason,” which led to the discrediting of the substantialist historiosophical schemes in the post-classical Western thought, he comes to a partial rehabilitation of speculative theorizing within the boundaries of critical assumptions. Borrowing from R. Aron the term “critical philosophy of history,” Ricœur interpreted it in the spirit of H.-G. Gadamer’s “effective history” platform and R.D. Collingwood’s strategy of thought, as well as R. Koselleck’s historical semantics. Ricrœr’s critical philosophy is based on reflexive understanding of the categorical possibilities (extant since the 18th century) for considering history as universal and produced by the creative efforts of man, who is capable to judge the events through the confluence of the horizons of the past and “our present.” This implies the philosophical assumption that history is characterized by an open horizon of meanings and gives historians a right to make judgment of past events in the cognitive and moral perspectives, “beyond time limits.”

Wilhelm Dilthey’s Views on Autobiography

ABSTRACTThe paper examines the role of autobiographical literature in Dilthey’s ‘critique of historical reason.’ The purpose of the essay is (1) to offer an in-depth analysis of Dilthey’s concept of autobiography, (2) to place it into the larger framework of his lifelong epistemological project, and (3) to investigate the influence of Dilthey’s ideas on an early study of autobiography, Georg Misch’s History of Autobiography in Antiquity. The key argument is that Dilthey’s choice of the genre of autobiography to model his theory of understanding was not only a symptom of his misguided epistemological attempts, as many have suggested, but a potential cause of them. The article concludes that the inconsistencies of Dilthey’s argument regarding the value of autobiographical self-reflection for historical knowledge are most pronounced in the work of those who applied Dilthey’s concepts to the interpretation of actual autobiographical material, such as Georg Misch.

Becoming a philosopher: What Heidegger learned from Dilthey, 1919–25

Wilhelm Dilthey is, famously, an epistemological pioneer for a second, ‘human’ kind of science that ‘understands’ life as we live it, instead of ‘explaining’ things as we observe them. Even today, he is usually cited for his role in the Erklären–Verstehen debate. My article, however, follows Heidegger's suggestion that we make the existence of the debate itself the problem. Whether there are different sorts of entity, different reasons for studying them and different means for doing so – such issues raise questions about science itself, not just about how to do it better. Moreover, what sort of philosopher is competent to address such questions? Heidegger argues that Dilthey's later writings intimate that it must be one who thinks from the ‘standpoint of (historical) life itself.’ This issue, says Heidegger, is ‘alive’ in Dilthey but is continually short-circuited by his very traditional plan for a ‘Critique of Historical Reason.’ Dilthey's unsuccessful struggles to produce this Critique are his gift to us, however. They encourage us to explicitly reconsider, as Heidegger does not only in Being and Time but throughout his life, what Dilthey cannot: If philosophy, like all human practices, is historical to the core, what is it to ‘be’ philosophical, about science or anything else?

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination

René Girard's Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason: Limiting Politics to Make Way for Faith

René Girard's Apocalyptic Critique of Historical Reason: Limiting Politics to Make Way for Faith

Reflections from a damaged discipline: Adorno, religious radio, and the critique of historical reason

The Psychological Techniques of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses (Adorno, 2000) echoes Adorno's analogous critique of the culture industry by detecting an ideological effect, prior to any given content, intrinsic to the form of radio religion. Notwithstanding the text's narrowness, I argue that Adorno's analysis of Thomas' ‘fait accompli technique’—presenting claims as previously established certainties—was both typical of his work and insightful for issues in cultural criticism. First, it refused subjectivist reductions of sociological effects to false consciousness. Second, it warned that historicism runs the risk of repeating the fait accompli when it treats what exists empirically as the only possible reality, or when it treats empirical givens as representatives of a future redemption. I argue that Adorno's dismissal of religious radio was consistent with his critique of positivism, and that the Thomas study models an historicist methodology that refuses, against its own logic, to reduce otherness to its own categories.

An Epistemology of the Clinic: Ludwig Binswanger’s Phenomenology of the Other

160 The writing of this paper was made possible by the support of an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in Science and Technology Studies based at Boston University’s Center for Philosophy and History of Science. I am indebted to Dr. Dieter Binswanger for giving me access to Bellevue’s patient records and the University Archive in Tubingen, especially Irmela Bauer-Kloden, for help locating source material. I am also grateful for critical commentary from Arnold Davidson, the members of the editorial board at Critical Inquiry, and to Anne Harrington, Peter Galison, Alfred Tauber, Bettina Bergo, Debbie Weinstein, and Bruce Fischl. All translations, unless otherwise cited, are my own. 1. The passage continues, “For the mental datum present to the individualmust not only be identifiable throughout a multiplicity of acts on his own part, but by many other people as well” (Max Scheler,The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath [NewHaven, Conn., 1954], p. 221). See also Scheler, “Die Idole der Selbsterkenntnis,”Abhandlungen und Aufsatze, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1915), 2: 3–168. 2. WilhelmDilthey and those in the hermeneutic traditionmade a concerted effort to formulate a methodological basis for the human sciences based in great part on a psychology of understanding (Verstehen).Dilthey’s classic work on a descriptive psychology that employed the method ofVerstehen in distinction to an analytic psychology utilizing explanationwas originally published in 1894; seeWilhelmDilthey, “Ideen uber eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,”Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Karlfried Grunder and Frithjof Rodi, 23 vols. to date (Stuttgart, 1961–), 5:139–240. See alsoMichael Ermarth,WilhelmDilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago, 1978), pp. 171–76. An Epistemology of the Clinic: Ludwig Binswanger’s Phenomenology of the Other

I. Kantas, T. Parsonsas ir postpozityvizmas socialinėje teorijoje

Straipsnyje ieškoma atsakymo į klausimą, kodėl sociologijos teorija vadinama dviem skirtingais pavadinimais – „socialine teorija“ ir „sociologine teorija“. Grindžiama tezė, kad ši dvivardystė yra dviejų iki galo neišspręstų sociologijos episteminio statuso problemų (sociologijos santykio su kitais socialiniais mokslais ir jos santykio su filosofija) semantinis simptomas. Minimalistiškai save suprantanti sociologija yra mokslas apie visuomenės socialinę bendruomenę. Maksimalistinė sociologijos samprata teigia, kad sociologijos objektas yra visa visuomenė: sociologija tampa socialine teorija ir neišvengia sociologinio proto antinomijų dialektikos, kuri reiškiasi alternatyvių „visuomenės esmės“ sampratų konfliktais. Socialinė teorija ir istorijos filosofija straipsnyje traktuojamos kaip alternatyvios tradicinei metafizikai „modernybės metafizikos“. Postpozityvistinė socialinė teorija traktuojama kaip forumas, kuriame svarstomos turiningos ontologinės sociologinių teorijų darybos problemos.

The Contemporary Debate in International Relations Theory and Raymond Aron's Epistemology and Ontology

This article is a contribution to recent Anglo-American metatheoretical discussions in international politics. Its topic of research is Raymond Aron's Aristotelian theory and its relation to Kenneth Waltz's Galilean ideal of science. The study departs from the assumption that Aron's theory can be better understood if interpreted from the point of view of his epistemological thought. This starting-point leads to Wilhelm Dilthey's critique of historical reason, which first appeared in Aron's doctoral dissertation in the 1930s where he used it as a working name for his own project. Later, Aron very seldom referred to this period of his life. As very few explicit references in Aron's texts on international politics to Dilthey's hermeneutics can be found, I have constructed some of the main topics of critique of historical reason and tried to analyse their meaning for Aron's theory. Concepts like Erlebnis, objective spirit, bifurcation and teleological causality are important keys to Aron's epistemology, which seems to have an antinomic relationship with Kenneth Waltz's structural systems theory.

Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason. Michael Ermarth

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsWilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason. Michael Ermarth William CameronWilliam Cameron Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Education Volume 88, Number 3May, 1980 Sponsored by the Penn State College of Education Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/443534 Views: 2Total views on this site Copyright 1980 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Book Review: History, Method and Theology: A Dialectical Comparison of Wilhelm Dilthey's Critique of Historical Reason and Bernard Lonergan's Meta-Methodology

Book Review: History, Method and Theology: A Dialectical Comparison of Wilhelm Dilthey's Critique of Historical Reason and Bernard Lonergan's Meta-Methodology