Prying the gates wide open: academic freedom and gender equality at Brown University, 1974–1977
Paedagogica Historica, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-20, Ahead of Print.
Archiv für August 2012
Creating Catholics: catechism and primary education in early modern France, by Karen E. Carter, Notre Dame/IN, University of Notre Dame Press, 2011, 314 pp., US$40.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-268-02304-1
Paedagogica Historica, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-4, Ahead of Print.
Education policy and national security in Brazil in the post-1964 context
Paedagogica Historica, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-20, Ahead of Print.
A call for sobriety: sixteenth-century educationalists and humanist conviviality
Paedagogica Historica, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-13, Ahead of Print.
THE PASTS
This essay offers a reconfiguration of the possibility-space of positions regarding the metaphysics and epistemology associated with historical knowledge. A tradition within analytic philosophy from Danto to Dummett attempts to answer questions about the reality of the past on the basis of two shared assumptions. The first takes individual statements as the relevant unit of semantic and philosophical analysis. The second presumes that variants of realism and antirealism about the past exhaust the metaphysical options (and so shape the epistemology as well). This essay argues that both of these assumptions should be rejected. It develops as an alternative an irrealist account of history, a view based in part on work by Leon Goldstein and Ian Hacking. On an irrealist view, historical claims ought to be treated as subject to the same conditions and caveats that apply to any theory of empirical or scientific knowledge. Irrealism argues for pasts as made and not found. The argument emphasizes the priority of classification over perception in the order of understanding and so verification. Because nothing a priori anchors practices of classification, no sense can be attached to claims that some single structure must or does determine what events take place in human history. Irrealism denies to realism the very intelligibility of any imagined view from nowhere, that is, a determinately configured past subsisting sub specie aeternitatis. A plurality of pasts exists because constituting a past always depends to some degree on socially mediated negotiations of a fit between descriptions and experience.
HAMMER TIME
Espen Hammer’s exceptionally fine book explores modern temporality, its problems and prospects. Hammer claims that how people experience time is a cultural/historical phenomenon, and that there is a peculiarly modern way of experiencing time as a series of present moments each indefinitely leading to the next in an ordered way. Time as measured by the clock is the paradigmatic instance of this sense of time. In this perspective time is quantifiable and forward-looking, and the present is dominated by the future. Hammer argues that this manner of experiencing time provides a way of living that brings with it not only the basis for great successes in technology, but also great costs—specifically, what he calls the problems of transience and of meaning.
Hammer goes about his task by considering the ways some of the great modern philosophers have characterized present-day temporality and have responded to the problems he has identified. Specifically, he considers what Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, (early) Heidegger, Habermas, Bloch, and Adorno provide in response to our peculiarly modern predicaments. The book is remarkable for its clarity and perceptiveness, but in the process in crucial places it simplifies the matters at hand or fails to push its insights as far as it ought, and in the end promises more than it can deliver. In this it betrays a rationalist confidence in the power of reason that founders on what in many ways remains a mystery.
Glänta | 1/2012
Arktis [The Arctic]
Resisting a War Crimes Trial: The Malmedy Massacre, the German Churches, and the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps
War crimes trials roused considerable resistance in Germany. Here the author analyzes opposition to the Malmédy Trial, conducted at Dachau in 1946, citing documents made available under the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act—in particula…
"A Joyful Act of Worship": Survivor Testimony on Czech Culture in the Terezin Ghetto and Postwar Reintegration in Czechoslovakia, 1945-48
This article examines memoirs by three survivors of the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto, and especially their testimony about the cultural life of the ghetto, in the context of postwar reintegration. Czech Jewish survivors of the concentration …
Springerin | 3/2012
Art of Angry