The Philosophy of a Persona

Summary

The essay collects Ian Hunter's central theoretical and methodological arguments from their various interpretative contexts and restates them in order to consider criticisms, real and imagined. Is Hunter's criticism of common forms of philosophical history itself open to such criticism, making its validity dependent upon prior adoption of a philosophical stance? Is his empirical intellectual history a form of ‘social’ reductionism?     

Tibet and the Problem of Radical Reductionism

Abstract:  This article takes issue with a mode of argumentation advanced by a number of left-leaning, radical scholars, including those associated with China's New Left, about the causes of the Tibetan unrest in China in spring 2008. According to this stance, the Tibetan protests were the result of external manipulation by neoconservative, reactionary forces, ranging from the CIA to the Dalai Lama. The unstated premise of this response is that taking a critical stance against western imperialism and neoliberal globalization necessitates a defense of China's policies in Tibet. Such arguments take the form of unfavorable comparisons between Tibetans and Palestinians especially because the former are often romanticized, suggestions that Tibetans are unfortunate ideological victims of US-funded propaganda, and claims that they should be grateful for Chinese state-funded development. This response renders Tibetans incapable of being authentic political subjects. A radical stance on Western imperialism and capitalism should reject such reductionism.     

Love and Marriage Among the Ruins

Abstract

Walker Percy articulated that the American South, liberated by civil rights legislation and economic growth from former strife, was needed in a new quest to save the Union. Percy believed that the troubles facing America were the philosophical and anthropological failures of late-modern thought. Difficult consequences emerged from these failures in the form of failed marriages. The distinctive capacity of the person to intimately love the other for the other's own good is displaced, if not eliminated, by theorists who narrow man to a this-worldly preoccupation while simultaneously denying his unique aspects. One injured element, broached by Percy in his novels The Second Coming and Love in the Ruins, is the shared love of the domestic family that becomes misconceived and misshaped in an age no longer conversant with the sacramental significance of man. Percy's discerning observations in these novels afford a unique purchase on the institution's diminishment in the midst of a humanistic age. The failure of this basic and complex love is one of the most deeply and painfully felt consequences achieved by the intrapersonal splits that have resulted from the age of theorist–consumerism. From man's failures to move beyond ideology and theory emerge his inability to even understand love's connection with his existence.     

Geschichte ohne Kausalität. Abgrenzungsstrategien gegen die Wissenschaftssoziologie in zeitgenössischen Ansätzen historischer Epistemologie

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 science. In the present article I want to analyse this line of criticism in what I consider are two paradigmatic works of contemporary historical epistemology: Lorraine Daston's und Peter Galison's Objectivity and Hans‐Jörg Rheinberger's Toward a History of Epistemic Things. I first present their arguments against the sociological and causal analysis of scientific knowledge and practice and then try to defend sociological work in the history of science against their charges. I will, however, not do so by defending causal explanations directly. Rather, I will show that the arguments against sociological analysis put forward in contemporary historical epistemology, as well as historical epistemology's own models of historical explanation and narration, bear problematic consequences. I argue that Daston, Galison and Rheinberger fail to create productive resonances between macro‐ and microhistorical perspectives, that they reproduce an internalist picture of scientific knowledge, and finally that Rheinberger's attempt to deconstruct the dichotomy between subject and object leads him to neglect questions about the political dimension of scientific research.