Abstract
Once Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Maine, as representative figures of the 19th century, proffered a historical analysis of Enlightenment era concepts, the question of history itself became, at least potentially, either silent and opaque to the historian or open to explicit philosophical investigation. Thus, when we use historical analysis, we do better to make more transparent what we think the meaning and purpose of historical analysis is.
“The constellation [of life and history] really has been altered — by science, by the demand that history should be a science.” (the italics are in the original)
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life”*
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Notes
* Friedrich Nietzsche, (1997) “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” in Untimely Meditations, Ed. Daniel Breazeale, Trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 77.
Cornel West, (1989) The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press) p. 183.
Martin Packer, (2011) The Science of Qualitative Research, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) p. 26.
Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, (1973), “Royce and Husserl: Some Parallels and Food for Thought,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 14(3), p. 187.
Hans Georg Gadamer, (2004) Truth and Method, (London: Continuum) p. 215.
W.V.O Quine, (1963), “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View, (New York: Harper) p. 43.
Richard Rorty, (1985) “Texts and Lumps,” New Literary History, 17(1), p. 3.
Richard Rorty, (1989) Irony, Contingency, and Solidarity, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) p. 85.
Friedrich Nietzsche, (1997) “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, Trans. R. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) p. 95.
Richard A. Posner, (2001) Frontiers of Legal Theory, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) p. 147.
Larry A. Hickman, (2007) Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey, (New York: Fordham University Press) p. 51. Postmodernist and relativist history, in its most excessive incarnations, results only in “expressions of an infinitely self-reflexive nexus of literary descriptions and redescriptions which are tantamount to interminable discursive flights that do not offer the possibility of firm, behavioral, referential perches,” as Larry Hickman put it (51). Rorty raises the relativism of infinite interpretability and redescription to an absolute of its own, the same way Nietzsche raised anti-reason to one.
Thomas C. Grey, (1991) “What Good Is Legal Pragmatism?” in Pragmatism in Law and Society, Ed. Brint and Weaver , (Boulder: Westview Press) p. 9, p. 12.
Martin Heidegger, (1962) Being and Time, Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (San Francisco: Harper).
Jean Francois Lyotard, (1979) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Seth Vannatta, (2012) “Between Science and Fiction: Pragmatism and Conservatism in History and Law,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, 4(1), pp. 159–160.
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© 2014 Seth Vannatta
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Vannatta, S. (2014). The Problem of History. In: Conservatism and Pragmatism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466839_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137466839_5
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