scholarly journals On Breaking Up Time, or, Perennialism as Philosophy of History

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Bennett Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Moral Dilemmas ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Moral Thought ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Philosophy

Abstract Current and recent philosophy of history contemplates a deep change in fundamental notions of the presence of the past. This is called breaking up time. The chief value for this change is enhancing the moral reach of historical research and writing. However, the materialist view of reality that most historians hold cannot support this approach. The origin of the notion in the thought of Walter Benjamin is suggested. I propose a neo-idealist approach called perennialism, centered on recurrent moral dilemmas and choices. This suggests a view of the relations of moral thought and ontology placed in the diachronic context that historians study.

scholarly journals ФІЛОСОФІЯ ІСТОРІЇ В КОНТЕКСТІ ЛІНГВІСТИЧНОЇ (НАРАТИВНОЇ) ФІЛОСОФСЬКОЇ ТРАДИЦІЇ

2018 ◽  
pp. 5-12
Author(s):  
Н. І. Моісєєва ◽  
С. С. Романова
Keyword(s):  
Historical Development ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Classical Philosophy

The authors consider the problem of the disciplinary status of linguistic (narrative) philosophy of history. The problem is examined in the context of analysis of its basic assumptions, which have been described in the works of A. Danto and F. R. Ankersmit. This philosophical tradition mainly developed in the first half of the twentieth century as a reaction to the impossibility of empirical verification of the scientific adequacy of the theoretical concepts of the regularities of historical development, which were established within the classic philosophy of history. Rejection of the gnosiological problematics lies on the basis of linguistic (narrative) philosophy of history. Also the notion of a fact is replaced by the notion of interpretation of a fact on the basis of narrative. The study of meanings and values of these narratives is based on language as the ontological Foundation of consciousness.According to A. Danto the scientific failure of the theory (concept) of the historical process lies in the impossibility of assessment by the researcher of the entire length of the process, especially of the stage of completion (the «end of history»). The observer does not know the final result of the whole process. Therefore, the observer can not estimate the value and meaning both of a process as a whole and its individual stages. Thus, the conclusion is that the history as a series of past events cannot be the subject of the philosophy of history. Only the interpretation of history in the philosophical studies and narrative representations can be the subject of the philosophy of history.According to F. G. Ankersmit «past» and «history» by themselves do not have narrative structure. The researcher also doesn’t have a set of rules of language translation of the past into the language of modernity. These rules would allow to compare the historical narrative with the «past».Thus, in the context of linguistic tradition the «philosophy of history» transforms into the «theory of historical narrative». This theory only logically analyzes the existing historiographical narrative. In fact, this position does not replace the basic methodological approach of classical philosophy of history to the study of reality (a theory based on the uncertainty of the outcome of the process). Only the subject of study is changed: the historical process is replaced by a historical narrative (not the source of the study of history but its interpretation).This approach can be used for the formation of historical consciousness, but it is unsuitable for real historical research. At the same time in the frames of classical philosophy of history a series of methodologies have been recently created. These methodologies allow to use empirical research methods and build it on the basis of concepts. These concepts find a complete confirmation with the help of an independent group of historical sources. So, today, as a result of repeated empirical evidence the concepts of cliometrics, revolutionary crises, and historical development as a result of adaptation of society to changing conditions of existence are finally created. These concepts were developed on the basis of the methodology of historical materialism. At the same time a linguistic (narrative) philosophical tradition only explains the basic foundation of own methodology and criticizes the methods of the opponents. Predictive capability of the methodology of narrative philosophy of history doesn’t enable to adequately use it in a real historical research, although this methodology has been successfully used for the formation of a historical consciousness, including professional surrounding. Therefore, at the present stage of development of the philosophy of history, linguistic tradition as the methodology of the research is much less promising than the methods developed on the basis of classical historical materialism.

Historia y filosofía de la historia en el Benjamin tardío

1998 ◽  
pp. 10-15
Author(s):  
José Sazbón
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Philosophical Style ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Compare And Contrast

This paper deals with Walter Benjamin’s text largely known as "Theses on the Philosophy of History," and disputes its classification under that rubric. The circumstances of the elaboration and, more important, the explicit destination assigned to the reflections of the "Theses," require a consideration of its content and its relation to the historical studies the author was engaged in concerning the "prehistory" of modernity, especially of the remnants of the Parisian nineteenth century: the commonly known work "The Arcades Project." The relevance of a sameness in the language used in the two writings, particularly the resort to images, metaphors and the technique of montage, is stressed. It is argued that Benjamin’s philosophical style was always imagistic and that this fact is particularly relevant to the reflections on the concept of history. Philosophers and historians are both concerned by the historical research and concept construction of a thinker like the late Walter Benjamin. It is therefore desirable to compare and contrast their views.

scholarly journals Blasting the past: A rereading of Walter Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 384-398
Author(s):  
Zarko Cvejic
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Significant Degree ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Representative Democracy ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Populist Movements

The text offers a reappraisal of Walter Benjamin?s Theses on the Philosophy of History (?ber den Begriff der Geschichte; ?On the Concept of History?) from the perspective of global politics today and its similarities with the socio-economic and political situation in Europe and the Americas during the 1920s and 30s; more specifically, the impact of crises on the erosion of trust in liberal representative democracy and the concomitant rise of mostly rightwing populist movements and their strongmen leaders, aided to a significant degree by the media, ?old? and ?new? alike. The purpose of the text is to draw lessons from Benjamin?s vision of materialist historiography for our current political predicament.

In a Parallel World: An Introduction to Frank Ankersmit’s Philosophy of History

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-344 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marek Tamm ◽  
Eugen Zeleňák
Keyword(s):  
Academic Career ◽  
Critical Discussion ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Historical Representation ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Existentialist Philosophy ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis article proposes to identify the conceptual structure guiding Frank Ankersmit’s philosophy of history. We argue that philosophical analysis of history consists in Ankersmit’s approach of three different levels: 1) the level of the past itself which is the subject of ontology, 2) the level of description of the past that is studied by epistemology, and 3) the level of representation of the past which should be analysed primarily by means of aesthetics. In other words, the realm of history is constituted of three aspects: 1) historical experience, 2) historical research, and 3) historical representation. During his whole academic career, Ankersmit has been interested in the first and the third aspects and has tried deliberately to avoid any serious engagement in epistemology (historical research). Ankersmit’s philosophy of history is built on a few fundamental dichotomies that can be considered as a kind of axioms of his thinking: 1) the distinction between historical research and historical writing, and 2) the distinction between description and historical representation. The article offers a critical discussion of Ankersmit’s two different approaches to the philosophy of history: cognitivist philosophy of history (analysis of historical representation) and existentialist philosophy of history (analysis of historical experience), and concludes by a short overview of the impact and significance of his historical-philosophical work and of his idea of the uniqueness of history.

scholarly journals A alegoria como poética do (ex)combro em Manoel de Barros: uma visada benjaminiana

eLyra ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 95-115
Author(s):  
Paulo Eduardo Benites de Moraes ◽  
Rosana Cristina Zanelatto Santos
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Paul Klee ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Present Experience ◽  
Tragic Drama

Walter Benjamin was one of the philosophers who most appropriately discussed the dialectics of history as a movement of extremes, that is, as an impoverished present experience before the glories of the past, which conceals, ironically, another formulation, exposed in the 9th thesis “On the concept of history”: which presents the interpretation of the allegory (ex)put in The Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee, as the “hippocratic facies of history” (Benjamin 1984), thinking this image as “the core of allegorical vision” (ibidem). Manoel de Barros, in his time, dialogues with both Klee and Benjamin, in a movement of (ex)position of episodic scenes/fragments of a nature always in a state of violence, suffering, tedium and death, despite an appearance of exuberance and abundance. In this essay, we propose to discuss/read in Barros’ poetry these poetic-allegorical constructions of nature, especially in the light of The Origin of German Tragic Drama and the thesis IX of Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin (1984 and 1986, respectively), as well as texts by Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (2013) and Michel Löwy (2005) on allegory in the Benjamin’s perspective.

scholarly journals Interrupção e montagem nas teses “Sobre o conceito de história” / Interruption and Assemblage in the Theses “On the Concept of History”

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 135
Author(s):  
Tomaz Amorim Izabel
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

Resumo: O artigo se pretende um ensaio a partir das teses “Sobre o conceito de história”, focando nos aspectos disruptivos de sua proposição sobre um contar histórico crítico à ideologia do progresso utilizando a técnica da montagem como uma de suas estratégias. Além disso, seguindo o gesto benjamininano de pensar o passado em um encontro com o tempo de agora – o jetztzeit –, sempre em risco de ser cooptado pela história dos vencedores, o artigo busca atualizar os perigos abordados por Benjamin na década de quarenta em nosso presente mergulhado em crises sociais, políticas e ecológicas. Trata-se menos de um panorama bibliográfico sobre este texto seminal do que uma tentativa de tornar efetivas suas potencialidades a partir de questões urgentes do agora.Palavras-chave: filosofia da história; modernidade; Walter Benjamin.Abstract: The article intends to be an essay about the thesis “On the concept of history”, focusing on the disruptive aspects of its proposition about a historical telling critical to the ideology of progress using the montage technique as one of its strategies. Moreover, following the Benjaminean gesture of thinking the past in a meeting with the present time – the jetztzeit – always in danger of being co-opted by the history of the winners, the article seeks to update the dangers that Benjamin addressed in the 1940s in our present steeped in social, political and ecological crises. It is less a bibliographical overview of this seminal text than an attempt to make its potentials effective on the urgent issues of the present.Keywords: philosophy of history; modernity; Walter Benjamin.

scholarly journals THE ANGEL OF HISTORY AND THE RUINS OF PARIS: WALTER BENJAMIN IN FRANCE OR THE PROGRESS AS CATASTROPHE

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Barrett Fiedler
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
World War ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Past ◽  
Arcades Project ◽  
Second World ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

If Walter Benjamin's writings have been mostly interpreted in the fields of art and literature critique, we would like here to take his philosophy of history more seriously, despite its acknowledged lack of unity (Habermas 1988: 32) and systematicity (Arendt 1960: 248). Drawing from the well-known allegory of the “Angel” developed in his theses on the concept of history written at the beginning of the Second World War and just before his death in Port-Bou, we will further analyze his genealogical critique of Parisian modernity contained in the Arcades Project, a work undertook more than a decade before, during his exile in France. In echo with the imagination of prospective ruins which florished during the modernization of the French capital after the 1850's, Benjamin's conception of progress, understood as a catastrophe submitting industrial capitalist societies to a permanent “state of emergency”, is thus combined with the theorization of a “Copernician revolution in the field of historical method” (Benjamin 1999: 348). Beyond Benjamin's phenomenological enterprise of a physiognomy of material modernity, and the romantic and surrealistic sensibility of his “anthropological materialism”, his philosophy of progress inscribes itself in a radical paradigm rendering its centrality to the idea of catastrophe (Anders 1972; Dupuy 2004; Stengers 2009), against the accidental role it holds in the principles of precaution and “responsibility” (Jonas 1979) and in the nowadays dominant paradigm of “risk” (Beck 1986); furthermore, “our” catastrophes would have in a Benjaminian perspective to be diagnosed in the past and the present rather than anticipated for the future. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0793/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Acta Fluens – Generatives Handeln und Improvisation im Jazz

2014 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-60
Author(s):  
Davide Sparti
Keyword(s):  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of

Obwohl jede menschliche Handlung mit einem gewissen Grad an Improvisation erfolgt, gibt es kulturelle Praktiken, bei denen Improvisation eine überwiegende Rolle spielt. Um das Risiko zu vermeiden, einen zu breiten Begriff von Improvisation zu übernehmen, konzentriere ich mich im vorliegenden Beitrag auf den Jazz. Meine zentrale Frage lautet, wie Improvisation verstanden werden muss. Mein Vorgehen ist folgendes: Ich beginne mit einem Vergleich von Improvisation und Komposition, damit die Spezifizität der Improvisation erklärt werden kann. Danach wende ich mich dem Thema der Originalität als Merkmal der Improvisation zu. Zum Schluss führe ich den Begriff affordance ein, um die kollektive und zirkuläre Logik eines Solos zu analysieren. Paradigmatisch wird der Jazzmusiker mit dem Engel der Geschichte verglichen, der nur auf das Vergangene blickt, während er der Zukunft den Rücken zugekehrt hat, und lediglich ihr zugetrieben wird. Weder kann der Improvisierende das Material der Vergangenheit vernachlässigen noch seine genuine Tätigkeit, das Improvisieren in der Gegenwart und für die Zukunft, aufgeben: Er visiert die Zukunft trotz ihrer Unvorhersehbarkeit über die Vermittlung der Vergangenheit an.<br><br>While improvised behavior is so much a part of human existence as to be one of its fundamental realities, in order to avoid the risk of defining the act of improvising too broadly, my focus here will be upon one of the activities most explicitly centered around improvisation – that is, upon jazz. My contribution, as Wittgenstein would say, has a »grammatical« design to it: it proposes to clarify the significance of the term »improvisation.« The task of clarifying the cases in which one may legitimately speak of improvisation consists first of all in reflecting upon the conditions that make the practice possible. This does not consist of calling forth mysterious, esoteric processes that take place in the unconscious, or in the minds of musicians, but rather in paying attention to the criteria that are satisfied when one ascribes to an act the concept of improvisation. In the second part of my contribution, I reflect upon the logic that governs the construction of an improvised performance. As I argue, in playing upon that which has already emerged in the music, in discovering the future as they go on (as a consequence of what they do), jazz players call to mind the angel in the famous painting by Klee that Walter Benjamin analyzed in his Theses on the History of Philosophy: while pulled towards the future, its eyes are turned back towards the past.

Trail-Blazer Dependency – A Roadmap for the Sustainability Revolution

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-337
Author(s):  
Jan Kunnas
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Environmental Problems ◽  
Pulp And Paper ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Past ◽  
Success Stories ◽  
Electric Car ◽  
Major Benefit ◽  
Quality Movement

While geologists are still considering whether the Anthropocene should be accepted as a formal geological epoch, it is up to us humanists to search for ways making this human era a good one. In this article, I will examine how we can use historical research to provide such tracks based on past regularities or similarities. Positive success stories from the past can at least provide faith that we can do something about our current environmental problems. This investigation is based on two case studies: the Tesla Model S electric car, and the Swedish pulp and paper industry's transition to chlorine-free bleaching. It argues that the sustainability revolution doesn't just share similarities with the quality movement of the 1970s and 1980s, but is essentially a continuation of it. In concordance with previous megatrends, the major benefit of the sustainability revolution will be reaped by countries and companies running ahead of the curve. A new term, 'trail-blazer dependency' is introduced; by setting an example, the first-movers are opening a trail for late-comers to follow.

INFORMING HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN ACCOUNTING AND MANAGEMENT: TRADITIONS, PHILOSOPHIES, AND OPPORTUNITIES

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee D. Parker
Keyword(s):  
Historical Research ◽  
Business History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
The Past ◽  
Field Of Inquiry ◽  
Historical Thought ◽  
The Way

Historical research in accounting and management, hitherto largely neglected as a field of inquiry by many management and accounting researchers, has experienced a resurgence of interest and activity in research conferences and journals over the past decade. The potential lessons of the past for contemporary issues have been rediscovered, but the way forward is littered with antiquarian narratives, methodologically naive analyses, ideologically driven interpretation and ignorance of the traditions, schools and philosophy of the craft by accounting and management researchers as well as traditional and critical historians themselves. This paper offers an introduction to contributions made to the philosophies and methods of history by significant historians in the past, a review of some of the influential schools of historical thought, insights into philosophies of historical knowledge and explanation and a brief introduction to oral and business history. On this basis the case is made for the philosophically and methodologically informed approach to the investigation of our past heritage in accounting and management

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