Conceptual Engineering for Historians

Conceptual Engineering for Historians Jonathan Gorman Preliminary confusions Consider time, ethics, philosophy, history, culture. That may seem to be everything at once. To consider these, put on your philosopher’s hat. Or your historian’s hat. Or the hat that covers (if there is more than one area of concern here) all relevant subjects or disciplines at the same time. Reflect particularly on ethics. And add reflection on time. Mix. And add reflection on the philosophy of history, if that is not already covered. If not already included in your approach, use as many different cultural approaches as you can think of. Mix the result. On the face of it, all these are the problem areas that need to be dealt with when reviewing for the Journal of Philosophy of History a collection of sixteen essays edited by Natan Elgabsi and Bennett Gilbert called Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History: A CrossCultural Approach.1 Has any concern been left out? It would seem to depend on one’s approach to such matters, but then the devil would be in the detail. A first look at the Editors’ introductory essay suggested a clear approach and total mastery of the details, but, as I began an attempt to think it through, I was reminded of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney’s considering an invitation to translate the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, “it was labour-intensive work, scriptorium slow.2 I proceeded dutifully…”.3 I thought I knew what he meant. Can we consider all these things at once? Is there any real unity here? One needs a philosophically appropriate overview, and Elgabsi’s and Gilbert’s introduction is entitled “Temporal humanity: Involvement with Ethics and Time across Cultures” (322). Here they observe that ethics and time are “central to any vision of life and to every cultural worldview” and “form a world in which a person is born and into which that person is existentially drawn”. “This life within is where thoughts belong” (3), with a nod to Wilhelm Dilthey. True, one agrees. However, “thinking from where we stand in our own lives about ethics and time beyond the particularity of cultural traditions is a ravaging task”. “We lose sight of how our concepts steer us and how they can lock us into certain positions” (3). For ethics especially, attempting to “reach beyond what is culturally particular”, Elgabsi and Gilbert refer to Simon Critchley’s “vast question” (3), “can ethics be both generalizable and 1 Natan Elgabsi and Bennett Gilbert (eds.), Ethics and Time in the Philosophy of History: A Cross-Cultural Approach, London: Bloomsbury, 2023. If you don’t have a feel for “scriptorium slow”, I do recommend Christoper de Hamel, Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (UK etc, Allen Lane, 2016). 3 Seamus Heaney, Beowulf (Faber & Faber, 1999), xxii. 2 1 subjectively felt, both universalizable and rooted in moral selfhood, or are these two halves of a dialectic that cannot be reconciled?” This is an important and relevant issue, and we may observe that, while ethical concepts have histories and much can be learnt from relevant cultural specificities, ethical demands are commonly understood (at a theoretical level) from two rival points of view: first, they are sometimes seen as universal, perennial or eternal, so best understood with the kind of philosophical approach that thinks, like Kant, in terms of absolutes, that is, thinks in terms of such certainties as make sense of the supposed universal “demandingness” of ethical standards, at least some of which may seem to have the status of what Kant called “categorical imperatives”. On the other hand, and second, ethical demands are also sometimes seen as culturally relative and changeable, so best understood as contingencies – perhaps Kant’s “hypothetical imperatives” – using a stance appropriate to that understanding, where historiography is one of the approaches available. Dealing with Critchley’s “vast question”, the Editors say that “The hazards of a dialectical engagement between universality and ethical selfhood are ever tangible”, for example, in Aotearoa (New Zealand) “certain universalizing ideas are directly congruent with historical oppression” (4). I note that this absolute/contingent issue is one initially presented in the introductory chapter as an issue for ethics especially, just as Critchley has it, but I note too that it is wider than that: the Editors refer to the Indian philosopher A. Raghuramaraju, not a contributor to the collection,4 and an idea or challenge of his is summarised as the need “to understand better where we ourselves stand in our inquiries when we say ‘we’ and ‘they’” (4), a point that hermeneutical, analytical and pragmatically minded philosophers are well able to accept, “points of view” being a feature of western philosophical discussion at least since the works of Isaiah Berlin and, later, Paul Ricoeur, Thomas Nagel and Richard Rorty. “The ‘we’ that we thought was uniform, perhaps never was so” (4). Indeed. And this affects our grasp of both ethics and time. We can, I think, follow this lead so far. The Editors’ introduction builds on Paul Ricoeur’s position: “part of our selfunderstanding concerns our implication in temporal structures that are internal to the practical ‘language of “doing something”’” (4). “We grasp … human activity under temporal conditions” (4). “Ethics and time are thus directly bound together” (4). Quoting from Ricoeur, the Editors say that temporal existence requires us to “recognize in action temporal structures that call for narration” (4).5 A conclusion ascribed to Ricoeur is also presented: the temporal narrativized self, with the ethical 4 An endnote refers to Douglas L. Berger, Hans-Georg Moeller, A. Raghuramaraju, and Paul A. Roth, “Symposium: Does cross-cultural philosophy stand in need of a hermeneutic expansion?”, Journal of World Philosophies 2 (1), 2017, 132-4. 5 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. I, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, 59. 2 integrity that gives, “is universalized to a philosophy of action” (5), although “many of the contributors to this volume stress those dimensions of the relationship between ethics and time that differ (sometimes quite radically) from this agentive vision of the capability of an ‘I’, extended onto ‘historical time’” (5). One can see two problematic gaps here: first, it is one thing to hold that the self is to be understood in temporal terms so that the self is narrativizable, but quite another to hold that the integrity of that self as a narrative unity is, or grounds, or indeed has anything to do with, ethical integrity. Similarly, it is not obvious that it is appropriate to treat “ethics” as if it were reducible to personal ethical integrity at all, regardless of any temporal considerations or reference to a narrativizable self. Second, it is one thing to say that a person acts (whether contingently or essentially) under temporal conditions, and that those conditions are narrativizable because that is how time is understood, so that a person’s self (ethically integrated or otherwise) is also narrativizable; quite another to suppose that historical time, while also narrativizable, is to be built from personal time or reduced to it, as if it were no more than a collection of individual personal times. Our conceptions of historical time are not plausibly to be treated in this reductionist way. Ethics and time are both far more complex. Still, I note that Ricoeur’s is just “one way of explicating the relationships between temporality and ethics” (5). Just as well, one thinks, and the contributors to the volume may be understood to explore different ways, drawn from different cultural experiences. The Editors tell us about these. Following the Introduction, the fifteen contributions are presented in five Sections, stimulated by a conference at the Centre for Philosophical Studies of History at the University of Oulu in 2017, with much outside help acknowledged. All seems organised, at first sight. The Contents page presents the following Sections: I, History as ethics; II, Agency, relativity and affect; III, Mortality and personal identity; IV, Reconsidering ontology; V, Concluding reflections from existential anthropology. However, before taking the Contents page too seriously, we find the Editors very briefly summarising the contributions in a wholly different order and a wholly different way. Thus, from page 4, the brief reference is to Georgina Tuari Stewart from Section IV, then (5) to Rafael Pérez Baquero, from Section I; then (5) to Megan Fritts, from Section III; then (5) to Takeshi Morisato, from Section III; then (6) to Anne Sophie Meinke, from Section III; then (6) to Ethan Kleinberg, from Section I, followed in the introductory chapter by a diversion on Kant, Herder, Hegel, and a link to a concept of the “philosophy of history”; then (6-7) to Knud Ejler Løgstrup, 3 although he is not a contributor;6 then (7) to Benda Hofmeyr, from Section IV; then (7) to Jan-Ivar Lindén, from Section IV; then (7-8) to Hans Ruin, from Section I; then (8) to Ruth Behar, from Section V (the concluding essay); then (8) to Nora Hämäläinen, from Section II; then (8) to Réal Fillion, from Section I; then (8) to Roberto Wu, from Section II, followed (8-9) by a diversion on Gadamer; then (9) to Jeffrey Andrew Barash, from Section IV; then (9) to Chiel van den Akker, from Section II. It is apparent, if confusing, that the Editors go through the various contributors’ positions in an order that matches neither the order of contributors nor the order of Sections (quite apart from the presentation being interrupted in the main text by digressions on Kant, Herder, Hegel, Gadamer and Løgstrup). It gets worse: we have on the Contents page, apart from the Editors’ introduction, a list of five Sections, each with its own title as above, and each containing a selection (from one to four individuals) of the fifteen other contributors, with names and paper titles given in a specific order (v-vi). The Editors then (11ff) proceed to summarise the contributed material Section by Section, with all Section titles identified by their numbers but not by their titles, for these are explicitly replaced by questions. Thus, Section I is not called “History as Ethics” (as it is on the Contents page) but is newly named “What is the ethical structure of historical discourse and experience?”, and here we have the contributions from Fillion, Kleinberg, Ruin, and Baquero; similarly, Section II is “How does an ethical-temporal consciousness affect our agency?”, with contributions from Hämäläinen, van den Akker, and Wu; III is “how do we think about finitude and mortality in relation to ethics?”, with contributions from Morisato, Fritts, and Meinke; IV is “What is the ontology of the transgenerational reality called history”?”, with contributions from Tuari Stewart, Hofmeyr, Barash, and Lindén; while Section V, from Behar, is left to speak for itself as to any question it is attempting to answer, since no question is offered, although her paper title is “The death of the angel: In search of a tango of temporal humanity”. Readers may perhaps share my view that all these different organisations of the essays using rival titles to the five Sections has led to a wholly opaque result. Perhaps agreement was not available. I felt ploughed to a standstill by this introductory chapter. My confusion was not helped by the Editors’ concluding claim that “what we have brought forward in this introduction is our view that ethical deliberation and life essentially [my emphasis] involves temporal understanding and self-knowledge”... “The contributors of this volume… take our existential situation as the sole possibility [my emphasis] for ethical and temporal reflection” (10). Yet the Editors’ 6 Knud Ejler Løgstrup, The Ethical Demand, trans. Theodor I. Jensen, intro. Hans Fink and Alasdair Macintyre, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, [101] 4 earlier assertion was that Ricoeur’s is merely “one way [my emphasis] of explicating the relationships between temporality and ethics” (5), and that seems inconsistent with holding that ethical deliberation “essentially” involves temporal understanding. Starting from scratch As a philosopher, particularly where such “vast questions” as Critchley’s are concerned, I would like to dispel confusions by starting from scratch. But where is “scratch”? A quick if philosophically risky answer is to try (and fail) to ignore the dilemma posed by Critchley and locate “scratch” where I am now, using the matters I was educated in, matters I have for a number of years attempted to develop and amend as appropriate for what I judge to be a better understanding of philosophy (including ethics), history, and philosophy of history. However, to locate “scratch” here, now, is, at least on one traditional philosophical approach, as arbitrary or contingent a choice as imaginable. I might have been born in a different place, at a different time, and educated in a different way. The outcome could have been wholly different. Yet, wearing a hat that covers the history of philosophy, one might as well say that I could have been (for example) Kant, and suggestions like this seem limited only by the limits of one’s imagination, if one’s imagination can have limits (I can’t imagine its limits). The wholly counterfactual idea, that I might have been Kant (despite his gloriously systematic presentations on ethics, time and philosophy of history), seems so counterfactual that some might conclude that I am essentially who I am now, that is, a product of my actual background, socially, historically, educationally. I couldn’t have been Kant, although maybe his certainties could be mine, perhaps must be? “Differences and similarities between people often reside in the ways in which each person imagines her own and other’s particular lives related to the temporality of a greater, interconnected whole” (3). Are such things “facts”? Are there any “facts”? Can we adequately think of “counterfactuals” without thinking about “facts”? Or indeed of “facts” without thinking of “counterfactuals”? And even if we can, how can we tell (to modify a hoary example) which of the following counterfactuals is true, supposing that I only speak English: “If I had been born in Germany, I would have spoken German”; or “If I had been born in Germany, the Germans would have spoken English”? Perhaps neither. While counterfactual speculation is sometimes helpful, I don’t know when, exactly. And I do know I want to be exact, so far as the subject permits. Even that might be an anachronistic or irrelevant nod to Aristotle. “Scratch” here has perhaps to be understood in two modes, in no particular order: one, as specifying whatever assumptions one thinks appropriate to address the subject(s) of the collection now being reviewed; two, as outlining the philosophical 5 basics of the approach or assumptions being used for that review, given the subject(s) involved. There is, unsurprisingly, some interplay between these two. There are elementary, if traditional, objections to the apparent implication of the book’s title that one might “mix” ethics, time and philosophy of history, even if Kant attempted to do it: for example, some have insisted that we must adhere to a fundamental (or merely Humean) distinction between fact and value, and that such a demarcation forces the avoidance of a philosophical “mix” involving both ethics and non-ethical philosophical issues; again, some have insisted that we must adhere to fundamental distinctions between disciplines, so that (among other suggestions) we must accept that there are firm demarcations between philosophy and science, between history and philosophy. “Time”, many have supposed, is not a problem for philosophy but for science, so thinking about it should not be muddled with straightforwardly philosophical considerations (Kant left the science of time to Newton, carving a special place for it outside the rest of his system as an “a priori intuition” epistemologically preceding the categorizations of the senses). Thinking in an elementary yet traditional analytical way, the philosophy of history is often characterised as an exercise in epistemology and, perhaps, metaphysics. Even if it shades into philosophy of science, it does not, some have said, shade into science. Nor should it be muddled with ethics, unless it is seen as a contribution to political theory, but eliding such distinctions has commonly resulted in some speculative and unacceptable totalitarian approaches.7 No mixing please! I will use here my best understanding of philosophy of history. The selection of this approach only looks risky if one accepts the above suggestion, that “my best understanding” is alarmingly localised to me and is, sub specie aeternitatis, arbitrary. However, seeking to understand things sub specie aeternitatis is to seek what Thomas Nagel called a “view from nowhere”,8 which is arguably no more than an extreme of both the philosophical and historical imagination of something absolute, universal and eternal, standing outside the contingencies of our real world. To this extent at least, I do not follow Kant by reasoning within such assumptions. Armed with the thought that such rationalism is not a plausible alternative, I adopt a different approach. A brief outline should suffice, since I am not alone in a broadbrush understanding of it, while it seemed to me that Elgabsi and Bennett share this position in broad terms. The approach is pragmatic.9 While, in autobiographical fact, I adopted a pragmatic position after (and perhaps unknowingly before) long study of W.V. Quine’s philosophy, I was intrigued to find after 1973, as I studied Hayden White’s Metahistory and subsequent writings, that, while White drew on 7 See, for example, Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 197). Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. 9 Jonathan Gorman, “The need for Quinean pragmatism in the theory of history”, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy VIII (2), December 2016, 223-247. My own PhD supervisor from 1970-73 was W.B. Gallie, author of Peirce and Pragmatism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952. 8 6 many influences, he saw his own approach as accepting the relevant views of the founder of pragmatism, C.S. Peirce.10 With very different results, Arthur Danto11 and Morton White12 had been in the same pragmatic tradition. So, as I understand them, are Paul A. Roth13 and Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, distinct as they are.14 As pragmatists, we do not accept philosophical approaches that require us to insist on metaphysically fundamental distinctions between fact and value or, indeed, on metaphysically fundamental distinctions at all, hence the refusal to seek a “view from nowhere”. Similarly, I do not regard it as appropriate to accept philosophical approaches that require fundamental demarcations between different disciplines, whether between philosophy and science, philosophy and history, history and science, or between any of these and ethics. Allowably, they may shade into one another on occasion. Neuroscience Given this, it is also allowable for me to draw, from the entire body of our present understanding of any of these matters, material relevant to my choice of “scratch”, that is, where I judge the argument should now begin. I turn to neuroscience, and note the result of research that holds that the part of our brains that is, as one might metaphorically say, the seat of imagination, is at the very same time the part of our brains that is, as one might metaphorically say, the seat of memory.15 I do not wish to claim that history is no more nor less than memory or vice-versa, but they share a central feature: they have as the object of their consideration a passage of time, however brief or long. The philosophy of history is similarly placed: as I have remarked elsewhere, “Understanding change over time – gradual or otherwise – is and has always been an essential part of both history and the philosophy of history, and requires that we see things within (at least) a temporal frame. Historians do little else”.16 And the important link is not just between history and philosophy of history, or that between history and memory, or even that between memory and imagination, but that between history and imagination. 10 White, Hayden V. 2001, at 227, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” In The History and Narrative Reader, edited Geoffrey Roberts, 221-236. London and New York: Routledge. 11 A.C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History, London: Cambridge University Press, 1965. 12 Morton G. White, Foundations of Historical Knowledge, New York: Harper and Row, 1965. 13 Jonathan Gorman, “Required: A theory of allowable gaps [review essay on The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, by Paul A. Roth]”, History and Theory 60(2), June 2021, 466-477. 14 Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography, Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. Quine: one “of the finest philosophers of the twentieth-century”, 79. 15 Jonathan Gorman, “Where neuroscience gets things wrong (and right)”, History and Theory 58 (3), September 2019, 483-495. 16 Jonathan Gorman, “Required: A theory of allowable gaps [review essay on The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, by Paul A. Roth]”, History and Theory 60(2), June 2021, 376-387 at 378. 7 Today I am looking through a diamond-paned window to the countryside beyond. While typing the last sentence I stopped looking through the window and looked instead at my computer screen, then raised my eyes again. As expected, I experienced continuity between the images over this brief period of interrupted attention. Yet how sure can I be of that continuity? Learning from the neuroscientific research about the relevant part of my brain, I feel entitled to say that I remember, and so imagined, the earlier image, and later remembered, and so imagined, the later one. I am imagining what I can now see, and that present-tense experience is food for memory as the present slips into the past, although there is much more to seeing than just imagining. Nevertheless, over the relevant period I am working with the same imagined material. It is crucial to distinguish, of course, what is “imagined” from what is merely “imaginary”,17 and there is nothing imaginary about either the window or the countryside beyond. I know that pragmatic criteria are available for marking the imagined/imaginary distinction, should it become problematic, an issue that does arise on occasion, as Hume pointed out.18 Again, I can imagine, for example, passages of time involving the Cathars, or the murder of Julius Caesar, or the General Election in the United Kingdom that brought Margaret Thatcher first to Prime Ministerial power, or the biography of Bismarck, or Mao Zedong’s long march, or the series of arguments in chapter 13 of Hobbes’s Leviathan, or what would happen if I threw a brick at a window. Present, past and future are imaginable here, some fitting into my personal memory (such as the 1979 General Election or Hobbes’s arguments), others not. Again, pragmatic criteria are available, not just for warranting the distinction between being imagined and being imaginary, but also for warranting that what I may imagine in the non-remembered examples is not imaginary, criteria that are a feature of the practice of historiography in addition to the practice of other sciences. Indeed, such historiographical and scientific practices may often be used to correct what I think I remember: in general, science trumps memory, although it does not trump imagination. Like Kant, I can accept the outcomes of historiographical and scientific practices, although if I choose I can, like him, ask the transcendental question how such outcomes are possible. Like Kant, pragmatists do not accept a Cartesian universal scepticism. The reference to pragmatic “criteria” takes us at once to the social situations in which we live. My reference to neuroscience, and its attention to individual brains, may suggest that we are at risk of assuming an unavoidable Cartesian solipsism. How am I to create what I imagine to be a “shared” external world on the basis of what I individually imagine? How can I know whether my brain is the same as 17 Jonathan Gorman, “History as fiction: the pragmatic truth”, in The Fiction of History, ed. Alexander Macfie (Routledge Approaches to History Series), Abingdon, Oxon. & New York, NY: Routledge, 2014, 13-30. 18 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, (ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888, 2. 8 yours? Yet that is a Cartesian worry, and we are free of it in one pragmatic bound: we know full well that we can and often do share what we imagine or remember, and we can and often do distinguish what we imagine from what is merely imaginary. We can leave the Kantians and neuroscientists among us to investigate how such things are possible. However, we do need to examine what is involved in such sharing. We may infer from, among others, Quine’s19 and Wittgenstein’s20 works on meaning and existence that “criteria” are not specifiable or characterisable in terms of individual or “unique” personal experiences but involve something like public rule-governed linguistic processes and practices. Fortunately, we share much in so far as we share language. Our shared imagination of our shared world is structured for us by our shared languages, although sharing, in fact, only goes so far, and often changes over time in its details. An important contribution to the collection is Jeffrey Andrew Barash’s chapter “Historical time, collective memory, and the finitude of historical understanding” (225-238) for its useful account of “collective memory”. It refers to the “constant, if mostly tacit variability in symbolic structures that reach to the deepest passive levels of human experience” (234). I incline to recommending that one reads Barash first. When we are asked what exists, we all agree, Quine remarks, that “everything” exists, but “there remains room for disagreement over cases”.21 The devil is indeed in the detail here. Half a century’s work in philosophy of history has made a major contribution to our understanding of this. We have come to understand that there is not merely disagreement over “cases”, and that the problems that arise are not merely “details” with the limitations that word implies. Languages characteristically involve “conceptualising”, understandable in Kantian terms as part of the “categorizations of the senses”, but Kant distinguished those from the “a priori intuitions” of space and time, an approach which saved from revisionism the Newtonian physics that Kant thought certain. Yet we know that space and time have themselves to be conceptualised like anything else, and conceptualisation is not “fixed”. However, we are not starting from scratch here, for we have inherited the conceptual schemes with respect to which we may judge that amendment and modification may be required. In practice, Quine claimed, such re-evaluation is limited, since we have a “natural tendency to disturb the total system as little as possible”.22 Like Reinhart Koselleck, Quine had a fascination with etymology, but he barely took seriously the shared thought that conceptual schemes can have a philosophically – indeed, politically – important history. For Koselleck, by contrast, it is a central feature of our understanding. 19 Relevant work since 1948 is collected in W.V.O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View: Logico-Philosophical Essays, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953. 20 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. 21 “On what there is”, in his collection From a Logical Point of View, 1. 22 “Two dogmas of empiricism”, in his collection From a Logical Point of View, 44. 9 Quine’s assertion here about our natural conservatism is a cursory and overconfident historical one, and matters are not so easy. Using the history of science, Kuhn showed that very revolutionary changes to conceptual schemes have occurred more than once and may do so again.23 Others, sometimes on the back of a supposed moral requirement for “freedom of speech”, have extended this beyond the merely methodological24 and have proposed or asserted serious speech changes in everyday concepts. What the more conservative of us may see as extremes of this suggest that each person is allowed to be their own conspiracy theorist and mean what they like, as Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty claimed to do. However, in practice we do seem naturally able to avoid extremes of relativism such as this much of the time, perhaps because we recognise that all our imaginations would be disrupted by the wild changes permitted and we would resist them, by coming together out of fear, much as Thomas Hobbes argued in his Leviathan.25 I heard the distinguished philosopher of science Imre Lakatos say, when presented with such a hypothetical extreme, “I would take my machine gun to such a man”.26 Conceptual engineering Moving on from Koselleck’s and others’ works on conceptual history, some philosophers perceive themselves as engaging in “conceptual engineering”. Steffen Koch and Jakob Ohlhorst offer a convenient presentation of the position: “Conceptual engineering is the process of assessing and improving our conceptual repertoire. Some authors have claimed that introducing or revising concepts through conceptual engineering can go as far as expanding the realm of thinkable thoughts and thus enable us to form beliefs, hypotheses, wishes, or desires that we are currently unable to form”27. “Better concepts should allow us to develop better theories (Fischer 2020), overcome hermeneutic injustices (Fricker 2007), and help us navigate our social world (Machery 2017)”.28 Without necessarily adopting the terminology, many analytical philosophers today think of themselves as engaged in conceptual engineering, although this approach is not limited to philosophers, while some past philosophers may also be interpreted as having engaged in it. Thus, we may learn from Kuhn and others, the advance of science has shown that scientists themselves have engaged in developing and revising the conceptual schemes that 23 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. I have in mind P.K. Feyerabend, Against Method, London: Verso (New Left Books), 1975. 25 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (many editions, 1651), chap. 13. 26 at a History and Philosophy of Science Seminar, Cambridge, 27th May, 1971. 27 “On the possibility of heavy duty conceptual engineering”, Steffen Koch and Jakob Ohlhorst, manuscript, https://philpapers.org/rec/KOCOTP2?ref=mail, accessed 5 November 2023. 28 With thanks to Krzysztof Sękowski’s call for workshop papers on Conceptual Engineering and its Place in the History of Philosophy, via PHILOS-L list, accessed 21 November 2023; details of references not given. 24 10 they see as essential to their modes of expression of theory. Psychologists and psychoanalysts similarly engage in conceptual engineering. One was told, decades ago, that, unlike the various scientists, historians have no theoretical language, but just use our everyday commonplace notions. If and when such notions warrant reconceptualising, that is in general not done by historians but occurs in normal everyday cultural development. However, this betrays a very limited understanding of what a “concept” is and what it can cover. It is traditional among many analytical philosophers to hold to what is called “compositionality”: that matters are best understood in terms of those smaller elements of meaning that larger schemes of meaning entirely comprise and to which they are reducible. Thus we might analyse concepts like “cat”, “mat” and “sitting on”, and so claim to fully understand the familiar sentence that puts these concepts together, so conceptualising that reality of which “the cat sat on the mat” is a true expression. Quine accepted this, and even Koselleck is sometimes seen as doing so, for Wikipedia presents his “conceptual history” as working with “key words” and the “historical semantics of terms”.29 “Terms” are very brief units of meaning. It is true that such brief commonplace notions are rarely subject to historians’ conceptual engineering or revision, but, in terms of what language in general can express, such notions lie at one extreme of the range of relevant conceptualising on the part of historians. That commonplace extreme is also largely irrelevant to conceptual work in history and the philosophy of history. As philosophers of history, we know that historians see things within a temporal frame, often involving passages of time far beyond the everyday. When historians imagine and make intelligible swathes of time, in other words, when they conceptualise swathes of time, they characteristically think in terms of and write narratives, although their works can be structured in other ways too.30 It is important that we recognise that these large linguistic structures are themselves the very modes – although not the only modes – in terms of which historians conceptualise swathes of time. We should not limit in an a priori way the referential possibilities of what Quine called a “unit of empirical significance” (Quine, 1951, 42), which, as he said, are indeed not limited to “the impossible term-by-term empiricism of Locke and Hume” (42) nor even limited to the short sentences beloved of believers in compositionality. Yet we also do not need here as a “unit of empirical significance” Quine’s “whole of science” (84), only that part of the whole passage of time which the historian seeks to relate, to offer a reference to. It is then a pragmatic question how large a “unit of empirical significance” is to be taken 29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_history, accessed 12 November 2023, my emphasis. Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), displays a range of appropriate structures. 30 11 to be. Narratives and other modes of structuring swathes of time are the units of empirical significance that matter for historians and for philosophers of history, and, in a brief aside on a “metaphysical” point, I fully accept Roth’s position that such narratives constitute what they explain.31 Such historical narratives – such conceptualisations – are constantly open to revision and refiguration, sometimes in a revolutionary way, sometimes not, and we should understand historians’ conceptual schemes (beyond their commonplace everyday notions) in these large conceptualising modes,32 with historical revisions often causing significant cultural changes, while cultural changes can bring about revisions in historical understanding.33 Narratives and similar structures of meaning, now understood as very large scale conceptualisations, are not reducible to the low-level commonplace conceptual schemes used in their constituent sentences taken individually, and they are not, relative to their constituent sentences, “truthfunctional”, although narratives can nevertheless bear classical logical relations with other narratives, such as consistency or inconsistency.34 Historiographical writings thus display a wide range of differing ways of conceptualising and reconceptualising the temporal frames in terms of which the world is understood, ways that everyday speakers of the language used can understand, without entering any special modes of historical expression at the level of individual words. People naturally understand stories, however revisionist, so long as they are “followable”.35 The most revisionist of historical works can be followable, even if they are not thought believable. Although much is “established” and not thought open to revision, historians continually develop new narratives and evaluate and re-evaluate old ones, and all this is best understood as engaging in the conceptual engineering of stretches of time, for “narratives” are in themselves “conceptualisings” of what Hayden White called the ”historical field”.36 Understanding the role of “time” is crucial for understanding both history and ethics. By analogy with the historical field, there is an “ethical field”, initially recognisable as the subject matter commonly conceptualised and referenced in some way by the appropriate range of “ethical” concepts. Here are a few, by no means exhaustive and in no particular order: virtue, good, ethical, lawful, duty, fair, just, right (both 31 Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgment: The Limits of Historiographical Choice (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); Paul A. Roth, “Reviving Philosophy of History,” in Towards a Revival of Analytical Philosophy of History: Around Paul A. Roth’s Vision of Historical Science, ed. Krzysztof Brzechczyn (Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers, 2018), 15, 20; Jonathan Gorman, “Required: A theory of allowable gaps [review essay on The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, by Paul A. Roth]”, History and Theory 60(2), June 2021, 466-477. Note also some similarity between the view that “narratives constitute what they explain” to Giambattista Vico’s “verum-factum” principle, although this is not the place to discuss that suggestion. 32 Jonathan Gorman, “The commonplaces of ‘revision’ and their implications for historiographical understanding”, History and Theory, Theme Issue 46 on “Revision in History”, December 2007, 20-44. 33 A similar interplay occurs between law and morality, where the influence can operate in both directions. 34 Jonathan Gorman, “Objectivity and truth in history”, Inquiry 17, 1974, 373-397. 35 As W.B. Gallie argued in his Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, London: Chatto & Windus, 1964. 36 Hayden White, Metahistory, 4-5ff and passim. 12 noun and adjective), obligation, toleration, sin, freedom, autonomy, God, value, liability, honesty, immunity, ought, remorse, many with obvious “opposites” such as vice, bad, wrong and so forth, all offering ways of conceptualising the relevant complexities of life. There are many more just as important, and different ethical concepts commonly have different histories.37 Some ethical theorists have sought to pick out one of these as foundational of all the others, but that is problematic.38 Some analyse one in terms of another, such as John Rawls in his claim of “justice as fairness”.39 I am not aware that any of these concepts have been adequately, let alone definitively, analysed, although I will explain why in a moment. Moreover, and importantly, we should not think of the “Ethical field” as something clearly distinct from the “Historical field”.40 Notice, first, that, just as, in history, large scale conceptualisations such as narratives are not reducible to low-level concepts, so characteristic ethical concepts are not always low level ones, such as appear in the above brief list. In the history of ethics we might recall the Ten Commandments, which have a simple conceptual organisation in terms of command or law. That may be contrasted with New Testament teachings, where, although “love” might be a relevant low level everyday concept in the sense already explained, much ethical teaching is in the form of parables or fables or stories that conceptualise actions over comparatively extended periods of time. Moreover, for much of the history of historiography, historical narratives have themselves been used as sources of moral instruction. This was not in order to learn how moral expressions are used, but rather to learn from and about time-extended moral lives. The lives of the great ethical/religious teachers of the past have taught people much by way of time-extended examples, and for centuries in Europe the lives of the saints have also been morally authoritative. In addition, there have over millennia been attempts to “codify” or simplify these many thousands of stories, often attempting to reduce them to single low-level concepts such as those in the above list, but these attempts have never been sufficient to remove entirely the need, for proper ethical understanding, to grasp the stories that lie behind the lowlevel concepts. Similarly, legal theorists know there is always room for “interpretation” of what may seem to be clear and simple “black letter” expressions of positive law, and judges know that they may be called upon to “look behind” these, often to “the intention of Parliament” and the like,41 but – as moral 37 See, for example, J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 38 I will address this issue further later, when I examine Rafael Pérez Baquero’s contribution to the collection. 39 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. 40 Or from the legal field, as many of these words appear in both legal and moral contexts, between which there is no clear foundational distinction. 41 “The intention of Parliament” itself has time extended narrative sources, but “It was a public mischief, [Gladstone] said, to look beyond the walls of Parliament for the influences that were to determine legislation” (John Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party 1857-68, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, 260 (letter from Gladstone to Russell)); Parliament alone is to specify meaning. 13 philosophers know – often to the narratives or other time-extended expressions that they presuppose. Notice, second, that “ethical” concepts inform historical concepts. Think of low-level concepts like “dictator”, “slaveowner”, “invasion”, “democratic”, “Holocaust denier”, or “bureaucrat”, examples from the wide range of concepts that historians might use and perhaps think of as “fact-describing”, some perhaps being “essentially contested”.42 “A historian, or a court of law, might have to evaluate whether someone was a Holocaust denier or, for that matter, a murderer or a drunkard or a saint”,43 because evaluating the appropriate everyday concept to use is, in addition to narrative construction, also a characteristic mode of historians’ conceptualisings, or judgements.44 The pragmatic approach adopted in the present essay does not permit the view that there is some fundamental demarcation between ethics and non-ethical matters, between matters of value and matters of fact: as remarked above, “allowably, they may shade into one another on occasion”, and we see here examples of that at the level of low-level everyday terms. In addition, very large scale conceptualisations of historical time such as narratives have the same features. As historian of the ancient world Paul Cartledge remarks, “‘Archaic’ … is the label conventionally applied to a period of past Greek time, but the decision as to how to circumscribe that (or any) chunk of the past as a ‘period’ always bears in itself an evaluative load.”45 As many historians recognise, whether at the level of the individual concept or of an entire narrative, what may look like purely descriptive expressions are never just that, but carry varying amounts of evaluative baggage, sometimes unnoticed because so established, sometimes using concepts or points of view that relate directly and obviously to traditional yet criticisable standards of morality, sometimes revolutionary. The upshot is that language terms are not to be clearly demarcated into the “descriptive” as opposed to the “prescriptive”, but that all, however “factual”, are suffused to varying degrees with evaluation and evaluative practices. A “chunk of the past” requires many concepts to describe, connected with each other in narratives which, as a whole, create the world they describe, as already observed.46 Yet, many narratives are perhaps themselves “essentially contested concepts” or at least “contested”, and some will 42 W.B. Gallie (another philosopher of history working within the tradition of pragmatism), “Essentially contested concepts”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 56, Issue 1, 1 June 1956, 167–198. It is not clear to me that concepts, while sometimes contested in their application, can be “essentially” contested, at least from a pragmatic point of view. 43 Jonathan Gorman, “Ethics: Or sharing history”, The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory, ed. Chiel van den Akker (London, Routledge, 2022), 347-363 at p. 357. 44 The allusion is to Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgement: The Limits of Historiographical Choice (Montreal & Kingston/Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). 45 Cartledge, Democracy: a Life, 49, see also 13. 46 Jonathan Gorman, Historical Judgment: The Limits of Historiographical Choice (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008); Paul A. Roth, “Reviving Philosophy of History,” in Towards a Revival of Analytical Philosophy of History: Around Paul A. Roth’s Vision of Historical Science, ed. Krzysztof Brzechczyn (Leiden and Boston: Brill Publishers, 2018), 15, 20. 14 value the possibility of alternative narratives for they think that a narrative is the external imposition of a unifying conceptual order, something that in itself can be repressive, or regarded as such. “Georgina Tuari Stewart shows in this volume that totalizing concepts not sensitive to cultural differences can very easily be oppressive” (4).47 “The politics of time – dominated by modern concepts aligned with an often dehumanizing ideology of productivity – is a social reality involving the stakes of oppression and recognition of the values of indigenous peoples, who wish to continue living a life in a traditional way” (4). Such a point applies to both whole narratives and small-scale concepts. Cultural sources We look to the varying cultural sources to expand our understanding of the various ways that time and ethics might be conceptualised, but, given our pragmatic approach, we do not anticipate that there should be any philosophical constraints upon what we might find. However, that makes the Editors’ organisation of material problematic, since the Sections are organised in terms of questions, some of which are in accord with the pragmatic approach now explained, and which the Editors seemed to share, but others are not. We can see this if we examine the Sections in turn. Section I, “History as Ethics”, is summarised by the Editors as answering the question “What is the ethical structure of historical discourse and experience?” (11). The first paper here is by Réal Fillion, “Past deeds and the on-going work of history” (25-39), which the Editors describe as written with the attitude that “realizing both temporal embeddedness and its ethical pressure on us often arises from personal, existential predicaments in our lives or in our scholarly practices… We are drawn into responding to the past” (11). Fillion recounts his experience of living in a bilingual part of Canada and of writing about its past with its acts of violence still embedded in the languages which people use, languages that sometimes engender conflict. The paper itself reads as autobiographical, anecdotal even; “my own father had been singled out by the parish priest for his scholarly potential” (25), and Fillion describes his “historical consciousness” of his surroundings (27), noting the “murmur” of the past (28), apparent even in street names: “it seems to me there is a particular haunting character to those [languages] that accompany the desire to ‘settle’ already inhabited lands” (27); he is thinking of the development and creation of the Canadian province of Manitoba. Moreover, “the most important questions for me,…, the ones that come closest to addressing the ‘murmur’ of the voices of the 47 Georgina Tuari Stewart, “‘When the time is right…’ in the Māori world”, 195-209 . 15 past implicit in the very language(s) we use to express (and even to reflect upon) ourselves, are ethical” (28). The character of Fillion’s experiences is readily recognisable, although it is not clear to me how generalisable it is to different locations or to more distant historical periods. I can appreciate the “murmur” of the diamond-paned window I mentioned earlier, which dates from about 1840 (with initials, in a style of handwriting no longer much used, scratched in the glass), but my house was built on far more ancient dwellings, going back a thousand years to the Viking invaders of Ireland. I don’t sense any “murmur” from that, but then I am more philosopher than historian. On the other hand, I have no difficulty in regarding Fillion’s contribution as an illustration of one historian’s sense of the pull of the past, and his sense of an ethical content to the detail, obviously contingent though that is, involves a contingent situatedness that I accepted on pragmatic grounds at the beginning of this review essay. I am not a stranger to eastern bilingual Canada, and I felt “murmurs” of a different kind (fleurs-de-lys in Québec! Pre-revolutionary France!) and I would not feel the particular “pull” Fillion describes; such experiences are not in practice widely shared. Nor need we seek to share them, although it might sometimes be “educational” if we did so. Fillion’s is not an account of “the” ethical structure of historical discourse and experience, or indeed an account of the structure of historical discourse at all, but only one person’s experience of “history”, although it is worth reading. The second chapter is Ethan Kleinberg’s “The time of ghosts and the ghosts of time” (40-52), introduced by the Editors as “the personal and societal memories that compel Fillion to responsibility toward past others are like the ghosts that, according to Ethan Kleinberg in his paper, command us to come to terms with past and future in a sustained but never-finished way” (11). Kleinberg writes with the familiar charm and expertise that we know from his Haunting History,48 and emphasises the contingency that I have just mentioned: “I am sufficiently constructivist and Nietzschean to operate with an unbound and historically contingent understanding of ethics and ethical action” (47). All these matters are contingent features of the structure of historical imagining. They are not universally shared, and many philosophers will happily leave it to historians to inform us of contingencies. However, the third chapter in Section I is Hans Ruin’s “Gifts from the dead: heritage and the ligatures of history”. It is not just that “being-with the dead is manifested through different cultural practices” (53), but that, following Derrida,49 when we examine such notions as “heritage”, “inheritance”, 48 49 Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting History: For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Particularly Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuff (New York: Routledge, 1994). 16 “heir” (with their normative implications), and recognise that “every person is situated in a generational chain” (54) and is limited in temporal terms by death, we see that “the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not” (57). “It points in the direction of a philosophy of history as a question of what it means to be situated within a sequence of predecessors” (57), a “transgenerational entanglement we cannot escape from” (12, my emphasis) However, contingencies we cannot escape from are not contingencies. So, must our imagination of time be framed in such a manner? It seems clear to me that it is not necessary at all, even though it may be helpful to be reminded of the possibility, and I agree that we might well “inherit our heritage” (63). Maybe it is like death and taxes, in practice unavoidable, but nevertheless it is not always a good idea – it may well be rather unhealthy – to dwell on them or frame our temporal understanding in terms of them, and, while there are sure to be normative considerations on occasion deriving from a sequence of predecessors, surely it is not a moral requirement to give those considerations priority when we are considering how to act. The final chapter in Section I is Rafael Pérez Baquero’s “Multilayered temporalities underlying transitional justice: rethinking resentment and melancholia from Jean Améry and Walter Benjamin” (69-85). Where “Ruin anatomizes the responsibilities that having a past imposes on a society”, “Rafael Pérez Baquero shows an excruciatingly hard but real aspect of these responsibilities” (12). As in the postSecond World War period or after the “Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, the Apartheid, or colonial warfare” (69), there is “a sense of working through a traumatic past” (12), seeking transitional justice that might permit reconciliation. Such transitional justice, characteristically seeking “to restore victims’ rights” (71), is sometimes blocked by those people seen by others “negatively” (73) as victims “stranded in the past” (12) by their resentment and melancholy, so that transitional justice has to recognise that “there are wounds that time cannot heal” (12). Following Berber Bevernage,50 there is a “temporal antagonism between justice and history” (70), between justice and forgetfulness, and the search for transitional justice is described here as a “political project”,51 where there is a “confrontation between different and multilayered temporalities that frame how the past is conceived” (70). Baquero quotes from Jill Stauffer,52 that transitional justice revisits past wrongdoings “with the hope of opening up a future not fully determined by the past” (70-71). I will not here summarise Rafael Pérez Baquero’s own summary of Jean Améry’s and Walter Benjamin’s positions (which is well done), but will comment on any attempt 50 Berber Bevernage, History, Memory, and State-Sponsored Violence: Time and Justice (New York: Routledge, 2012), 45. A point fully recognised by many here in Northern Ireland, following the end of the so-called “Troubles” with the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement. Its very name is contested. 52 Jill Stauffer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 113. 51 17 to think of transitional justice as an attempt to “restore victims’ rights” (71). Earlier I remarked that some ethical theorists have sought to pick out one ethical notion as somehow foundational of all the others, and we might recall Kant’s placing “duty” as foundational, or the Utilitarians seeking to make “desire satisfaction” foundational. In the twentieth century many have thought of “human rights” as foundational; as Ronald Dworkin argued,53 such rights are available to individuals to “trump” other moral or legal considerations. However, it is plain that the temporal considerations that Baquero mentions show the ethical centrality of, for example, forgetfulness or forgiveness, past-referring as they are, while “human rights” are commonly understood as time-independent notions of universal application.54 Plainly, when we use them as simple “trumps” over rival ethical considerations, we are riding roughshod over many people’s lives where different ethical conceptualisations may be involved. “And yet”, say the Editors (13), “human ethical judgment is a universal practice and also seems to have an inner logic driving it to universal dimensions”. However, a universal practice of ethical judging does not mean that that the criteria used are universal. On the contrary, and in practice, there is variation over both time and place, much as we know that there is in legal systems. Section II, “Agency, Relativity, and Affect”, is summarised by the Editors as answering the question “How does an ethical-temporal consciousness affect our agency?” (13). Here the first paper comes from Nora Hämäläinen, “The relativism of historical distance and the contextual constitution of agency,” summarised by the Editors as an argument that historical distance “can be philosophically and ethically helpful in order to understand persons who live their lives in different circumstances from our own” (13) rather than, as Michele Moody-Adams (not a contributor) has it, “a consistently applied universalism enhances our commitment to central (universal) moral values” (90). As Hämäläinen has it, such “relativism” is not harmful and it is “methodologically helpful” (90) to understand “what people are facing” (13). Hämäläinen is right to say that “part of the problems with Moody-Adams’s account is due to her description of relativism” (91), although part of the problem with Hämäläinen’s chapter is the unnecessary amount of attention given to MoodyAdams’s position here, which seems to involve an issue not uncommon among nonphilosophers of using a technical term of epistemology – “relativism” – as if they had fully grasped the philosophical issues behind it. Moody-Adams’s contribution to ethical theorising, as summarised, did not impress me. Fortunately, Hämäläinen gives up on Moody-Adams (91), recognising that “a significant part of our imaginary moral engagement with historical figures revolves around moral complexities related to historical difference” (92). This is argued partly from cases of fiction and partly 53 Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), xi. Mea culpa; in my Rights and Reason: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Rights (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), I gave no attention whatever to temporal considerations. 54 18 from cases in anthropological fieldwork: “moral life in these stories is not a quest for universal justice, the application of ready principles, but rather the day-to-day weaving of the fabric of everyday life” (98). True, I think; and readers of this review will no doubt recognise that, with a pragmatic approach, universalism in ethics is not the way to proceed, while the plurality of available ethical conceptualisations requires some degree of toleration of historical differences: “seeing difference and taking it seriously” (99), where that requires attention to material conditions, social relations, and historical trajectories, since “communities have a past and a future and undergo change, but change is premised on the affordances of the past” (100), where, we might add, their conceptualisings of both their past and relevant ethical considerations may be important for our judgement of them. However, I read this acceptable conclusion as old news: “Much of the benefit which is supposed to result from the whole practice [of historians’ ethical judgements of past figures] is nullified by the deplorable fact that the moral judgments of historians are so often taken at a low level”.55 Here, Herbert Butterfield (not a contributor!) is not just complaining about the poor quality of historians’ moral judgements, a point he might seem to share with Hämäläinen’s position, but he also thinks it wrong in itself: “since moral indignation corrupts the agent who possesses it and is not calculated to reform the man who is the object of it, the demand for it – in the politician and in the historian for example – is really a demand for an illegitimate form of power”.56 I observe that complicating and explaining such moral judgements, as Hämäläinen plausibly does, does not quite address an important point about ethical understanding, which surely has to recognise a moral sense like the following: “I feel less angry about the [Maryland, 2002] snipers than I did a year ago, much less upset about O.J. Simpson [died 2024] than I did ten years ago. And I feel positively benign about Bluebeard the Pirate”.57 Here the Editors’ Section question “How does an ethical-temporal consciousness affect our agency?” (13) seems highly relevant: awareness of the effluxion of time alone seems sufficient to affect us directly, even naturally, without any need to argue for such distancing or to characterise it. Why would our ethical judgement be limited in its application merely by our recognition of temporal distance? It may have to do with a natural limit to how far we can go in 55 Herbert Butterfield, “Moral judgments in history”, in History and Human Relations, London: Collins, 1951, 114. Herbert Butterfield, “Moral judgments in history”, in History and Human Relations, London: Collins, 1951, 110. We can all see now that “man” here leaps out for us as problematic, but this would not have occurred to Butterfield (Master of a sometime male-only Cambridge college, Peterhouse, 1955-1968). However, Cambridge had “me-too” issues in sight in 1970, when I arrived. We, including Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Hesse, earnestly discussed why there had been no women philosophers. However, this historical assumption turned out to be false, once intellectual historians (I think now of Lisa Jardine) had led the way. 57 F.H. Buckley, “Are emotions moral?,” The New Criterion 22, January 2004, printed from http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/22/jan04/emotion.htm. I used this quotation in Jonathan Gorman, “Ethics and the writing of historiography”, A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, ed. Aviezer Tucker, Oxford, etc.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008, 253-261. 56 19 our capacity to imagine faraway cases. However that may be, in many cases it is just a “fact” of the matter that ethical-temporal consciousness affects our ethical understanding and so our agency, although no facts are beyond possible dispute, as a pragmatic approach tells us. I might not feel quite so benign about Bluebeard the Pirate if I’d read a sound historical account of him. On the other hand, “once upon a time”, with its clear commitment to temporal distance, often introduces stories used to conceptualise ethical matters for the young and intended for use in their future world, not just today’s. The second paper in Section II, characterised by the Editors under the heading “How does an ethical-temporal consciousness affect our agency?” (13), is Chiel van den Akker’s “Heroism, self-determination, and magnanimity: Hegel and Brandom on selfconscious agency”. Brandom is a pragmatist. While Hegel is rarely seen as such, there are philosophical features of Hegel’s idealism that are also characteristic of Peirce’s pragmatism, and we see this in the works of those who acknowledge Hegel and Peirce as philosophical predecessors; I have in mind F.H. Bradley and Quine, respectively, but I will not elaborate that here.58 “To Hegel becoming modern is the most important event in human history” (106), and for the purpose of this Section we may think of the premodern/modern distinction as a distinction between two different ways of temporally conceptualising the past. As the Editors express it, van den Akker claims that “the distinction between the premodern and the modern is to be understood solely with regard to the question of self-consciousness and conscience” (13), by contrast with Hegel’s position, as understood by Robert Brandom, that the distinction between the premodern and the modern resides in “the distinction between heroic deed and intentional action” (13). This contrast confused me, but van den Akker clarified well. A heroic deed (think of Oedipus) is typically one where the agent takes responsibility for a tragic outcome despite not intending it, while intentional actions usually involve taking responsibility for intended outcomes, although lawyers and moral philosophers recognise that there is rather more to it. Van den Akker sees Brandom as confused about this, conflating the premodern/modern distinction with the heroic/intentional distinction (117, note 6). Summarising more accurately, and as van den Akker puts it, “the heroic conception of agency is not a premodern conception and the intentional conception of agency is not a modern conception” (106). “The ancient Greek conception of agency and responsibility is not that different from our own” (109). While Brandom does not accurately interpret Hegel 58 See, for example, Kevin Morris and Consuelo Preti (eds.), Early Analytic Philosophy: An Inclusive Reader with Commentary, London: Bloomsbury, 2023. 20 here, van den Akker shows that we can see from Hegel’s third historical state of Spirit that we can understand premodern/modern/postmodern periods in terms of our adopting in later time a “magnanimous” sense: “Brandom emphasizes that, next to a premodern and modern stage, Hegel envisaged a third, postmodern stage of selfconscious Spirit, where ‘individuals acknowledge and are attributed responsibility for their whole deed, under all its specifications’” (116). This chapter is an excellent piece of scholarship and interpretation of Hegel and Brandom, but it did not seem to me to be an obvious choice for inclusion in this collection. The Section question “How does an ethical-temporal consciousness affect our agency?” would be better expressed, for this contribution, as, “How does our agency affect ethical-temporal consciousness?” Ethical conceptions, I have already argued, often involve important temporal considerations, but culturally variable conceptions of agency do not seem to me to permit some solid and clear assertion of an important difference between the premodern and the modern, however important that might have been for Hegel. (I think I prefer Koselleck’s suggestion that modernity is marked by the “disappearance of the primary role of the horse”, from Barash, 229.) The final chapter in Section II, “How does an ethical-temporal consciousness affect our agency?”, comes from Roberto Wu, entitled “Fairness and immemorial time: an ontology of vestiges”. Wu analyses “vestiges”, “considering them as phenomena capable of engendering a different temporality”, although it is clear, a priori as one might say, that a vestige is already conceived as implying some temporality much as Kleinberg’s hauntings or ghosts do, or indeed as a very great many of our conceptualisings do. It needs no new argument. In particular, vestiges “necessarily entail some dimension of immemorial time” (122) and they are not “simply the fragments present-at-hand that result from finished events” but have the “potentiality of evoking events” (124). But what is “immemorial time”? The “experience of the immemorial time is … the openness to a diverse and infinite realm of expressions”. Apart from “immemorial” having a technical rather than everyday meaning here,59 much of this seems to me right, and it is acceptable on the approach I have suggested in this review because the world, importantly including the historical world, is contained in our shared imaginings (asserting again the distinction between “imagined” and “imaginary”). It did seem to me that Wu took as an imagined opponent in his discussion some long discredited view – perhaps David Hume’s – that time is to be conceived as “a “flow of sequential moments” (123), and supposes that thinking of vestiges “avoids the path that leads to a privilege of presence” (123). 59 It is a term from Emmanuel Levinas (14). “Immemorial” normally means “longer than anyone can remember”; “since time immemorial” in Scots Law means “since 1189”. 21 Yet I do not think the understanding of the role of imagination that I have outlined above involves any commitment whatever to a presentist ontology. Or any ontology. “Vestiges are essentially disruptive, for they engender insurmountable intervals between the present and the past” (127). However, that won’t do, for it presupposes that time is indeed to be conceived as something like a “flow of sequential moments” which is “disrupted”, and what, otherwise, gets disrupted? The point is half-recognised: “I avoid discussing temporality in terms of diachrony and synchrony, as they still echo linear metaphors” (127). Wu is very much not alone in finding linear metaphors close to unavoidable in explaining thinking about time, and there is no practical doubt that we often speak of time using linear metaphors. A proper denial of “presentism” makes the present/past distinction just one of many modes of temporal organisation that we might choose to make, and there is nothing about time that is there to be disrupted, except dead theorising; the metaphors themselves have not yet died. It did not seem to me that “vestiges” have any special or privileged status among the many time-structuring or past-invoking concepts that we ordinarily use. A separate difficulty is that this chapter seems to be in the wrong place, for it is difficult to interpret it as a contribution to the question “How does an ethical-temporal consciousness affect our agency?” It has nothing to do with agency. It is half-relevant to a question on the structure of historical discourse, but the Section I question is on the ethical structure of historical discourse, and this chapter also has nothing obvious to say about any ethical implications. The Editors give Section III the question title “How do we think about finitude and mortality in relation to ethics?” (14), and the first two of the three chapters included here fit squarely under the Section title given. Takeshi Morisato’s chapter title is “Neither to be, nor not to be: the interrelation of life and death in Tanabe’s later philosophy of death” (141). “Tanabe [Hajime] held that death is an ‘indispensable moment’ in constituting existence” (14). This is a learned and scholarly article where “Morisato shows us the rich line of thought” (14) from Zen principles and post Second World War concerns that led Tanabe to his conclusions. The Editors’ summary does not do it full justice and I will not attempt here to do so; I can only recommend it. The second chapter comes from Megan Fritts, “Arresting time’s arrow: death, loss, and the preservation of real union” (158). She argues that “the Union Theory of love best explains why the distortion of our memories of deceased loved ones is a bad thing”. “If the Union Theory is correct, then the death of a beloved whom I have formed a unified ‘we’ also entails the loss of that ‘we’ – a loss of my self”. “Our well-being depends upon our being able to retain our unions with the deceased”. “Such a retention may be possible, especially given a rather plausible picture of time that has (in various versions) been accepted by philosophers for 22 millennia” (170). As with Morisato, I will not be able here to do justice to this wellargued paper and I can only recommend it. The third paper, from Anne Sophie Meincke, is called “Heidegger’s process of personhood” (173), and it is primarily on personal identity rather than finitude or mortality (the topics in the Section question). “Identity is better understood through its processual continuity than through empirical data based on the puzzles of change that arise from the traditional ontology of substance and events” (15). However, rather as Wu does, we have here as an imagined opponent a position about ontology long discredited among philosophers of history. One difficulty is that Heidegger himself builds his position in terms of opposition to this (174-5). It may well be that the world is to be understood entirely in terms of “processes” in so far as our best physics necessitates such an ontology, with “substances” long gone, but that is of little interest in our present context. Theorising about personhood has also long moved on. Thus I have a problem with the explanation in this chapter. It may well be that “Heidegger’s early theory of Dasein offers resources for resolving the dilemma of personal identity” (173), but Meinke proceeds with a grounding distinction, defining a “thing” as an entity that “need not change in order to exist” (173), its identity is “a primitive given”. By contrast, a “process” is “an entity for whom identity change is essential. A process must change in order to exist and be what it is; its identity is brought about by change” (174). A philosopher can, of course, define terms as she wishes, but, in the light of the approach adopted in much of this collection and also in this review of it, the “thing”/“process” distinction is unhelpful. Basic for us (and our own personhood) is our linguistic understanding of “time-extended” matters, conceptualised as they normally are, and entities need not be understood as processes (defined here as necessarily undergoing change) merely because and in so far as they are understood to persist through time. A stone is a “thing” and it typically persists through time. If it did not – if it were suddenly to behave in an unstonelike way, we would probably deny it was a stone. A hammer may change it, but that would not make it a process, and we still need to distinguish “change” conceived as “continuous” (like a shower of rain?) from changes that are discontinuous, like those brought about by hammer blows. No doubt the stone came into existence by something understood as a process, such as million-year-old volcanic activity followed by gravitational and other pressures, but it is certainly not a process now, and I don’t think my personhood is a “process” either. However, I do think it is time-extended, and that a narrative mode of understanding is appropriate to it simply because narratives are a pretty standard way of conceptualising timeextended matters of interest. No doubt narratives can express changes, but just because we may think of a narrative as continuous within itself as a unit of conceptualisation of a period of time does not mean that any changes that occur in 23 that period of time are in some way themselves “continuous”. Discontinuity and disruption are often what give drive to historians’ interests, and the imaginary Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” is suggestive of some of the issues here.60 Meinke’s consequent position is “striking”, say the Editors, where she imports “Heidegger’s ethics of existential authenticity, developed in opposition to depersonalization and ignited by the dynamics of ‘forerunning’ into mortality” (15), where we at last meet a word that brings the chapter within Section III, but it is a word supplied by the Editors. Section IV, “Reconsidering ontology” (193), begins with senior Māori scholar (206) Georgina Tuari Stewart’s “‘When the time is right…’ in the Māori world”, which I mentioned the Editors drew upon at the beginning of this review as showing “that totalizing concepts not sensitive to cultural differences can very easily be oppressive” (4).61 Here we find descriptions of “the” (are there others? It seems not) Māori world view and language, including their “notion of time as cyclic and circular” (201) and their approach to ethics (“difficult to understand in non-Māori terms”, 203). As an academic tourist myself, it is fascinating to read, and displays to a western philosophical mind some concerns that are commonly a subject for the philosophy of social anthropology. As someone who often discussed such issues with John Blacking,62 I would have liked to learn more about Māori music-making. While not Māori, much of relevance is presented by Ruth Behar’s tango story (257-271). Perhaps there still are polymaths who will learn little from this collection, but I was glad to learn from Georgina Tuari Stewart’s chapter. I feel much the same on reading Benda Hofmeyr’s “Levinas on time: the ethical import of our existential chronological inconsistency” (210-224) for, as an analytical philosopher and an academic tourist where Levinas is concerned, I read this with pleasure. “Levinas’s interests in time and history have grown to be of increasing interest”, say the Editors (16), and the “Desire for time” that Hofmeyr describes (220) seemed to me an important addition to the wide range of matters referenced in this collection, particularly because of its ethical implications: “the future gives me time, time to be otherwise than my egoist being” (221). However, Hofmeyr seemed to me to be an academic tourist where analytic philosophy is concerned, suggesting that “a linear model of time where moments succeed one another” is a position it typically subscribes to (221). Yet analytical philosophers always had a deep respect for science, and their understanding of time has largely kept up with the latest developments in physics; in addition, most analytical philosophers nowadays are 60 It seems to have derived from British Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain. Georgina Tuari Stewart, “‘When the time is right…’ in the Māori world”, 195-209. “In Māori thinking, the past is in front of us because we can see it; we walk backward into the future since we cannot look and see what it will bring” (198). See also her Māori Philosophy: Indigenous Thinking from the Aotearoa (London: Bloomsbury, 2021) . 62 Suzel Ana Reily (ed.), The Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking's Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2017). 61 24 pragmatists and consigned a linear model of time to the past longer ago than I can remember. I mentioned earlier Jeffrey Andrew Barash’s “Historical time, collective memory, and the finitude of historical understanding” (225-238), with its helpful appreciation of the importance for a pragmatic understanding of collective memory. It has a different importance, too, being a work in the history of ideas that outlines different conceptions of time used by historical theorists, presenting to us (among others) Dilthey, Lӧwith, Koselleck and Hartog. “I aim to distinguish what I take to be the specific temporal articulations of collective memory from traditional models of historical time” (230). Readers will recognise the centrality of this concern to questions about the nature of shared imagination that I introduced earlier as part of a neuroscience-based pragmatic account. Add to that my conclusion that Barash’s contribution seems to me to be a reliable and authoritative historical summary of the approaches dealt with. I confess to not wholly understanding the Editors’ summary (16) of Jan-Ivar Lindén’s “The time of history” (239-254), which begins with what is to me very early analytical philosophy of time, namely John McTaggart’s A and B series, followed by the even older Augustine’s Confessions and references to Plato, proceeding to a section called “Dispositions and presence” (241) that introduces Aristotle’s theory of change, suggesting that this bears two different modes of interpretation that correspond to the A series and the B series. “The Aristotelian notion of cause is not the modern one” (241), a remark the banality of which rather put me off. There were others. There is a long quotation on the role of affectivity from Georg Simmel (244), also somewhat opaque. His remark that history is “a way of indicating how historical relevance is profoundly marked by psychic connotations” (244), is not, I think, an obscure approval of the use of neuroscience. The present is “the temporal dimension that allows influence in the temporal process, this seems to render emotions quite important” (246). It may already have become apparent to the reader why I think this learned and scholarly paper does not fit in the collection. The last essay is Ruth Behar’s conclusion “The death of the angel: in search of a tango of temporal humanity” (257-271). Behar is an anthropologist, “a vulnerable observer” (266) “drawn to the philosophical ideas at the heart of this discipline” (262). “We care about those whom no one else cares about” (264). “We have only a little bit of the doctor and a lot of the novelist in us” (265). “Loss is a classical trope of the ethnographic imagination” (265). And she has a story to tell about the tango – it is indeed the dance - that you ought to read, but it would not be fair to summarise it here and I won’t. 25 26