Historical Ontology

In order to help dispel a stubborn Enlightenment myth that continues to warp understandings of political speech, this analysis draws on developments in theories of "4E" cognition (theories of the embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted mind). Here I treat the ideal Kantian figure of the individual political actor who exercises public reason, the famous "scholar" of "What Is Enlightenment?", as a myth that has already in effect decomposed from the inside. It has been undermined by academic developments across fields including Foucauldian genealogy in the humanities, social-constructivist philosophy of science, and 4E theories of mind in cognitive science. It has also been undermined in common practice by complications of authorship, literacy, and publicity in current digital media. Yet its theoretical trouble persists as the Kantian model remains a dominant conception of political speech, and subsequently of freedom and reason. I use the example of Foucault's engagement with the Iranian revolution, muchcritiqued, to show how the persistence of this myth precipitates a major theoretical obstacle for a project committed to overcoming the transcendental themes of Kant, such that they re-emerge through an idealization of a spiritual dimension of the revolution. This episode indicates that Foucauldian genealogy did not complete its rejection of Kantian transcendental idealism, and more specifically that the issue lies in its concept of subjectivity. Introducing Andrew Pickering's theory of the mangle, from his work in philosophy of science, in conjunction with 4E theories of cognition provides a supplement to genealogy that allows it better to address the still-clinging root of the Enlightenment myth of the ideal actor, namely Kant's own theory of cognition, particularly in its relationship to Newtonian physics and the basic conception of reason as "internal." The introduction of these supplementary theoretical elements can help conceive political speech beyond outmoded strictures-possibly helping to make it newly effective.

In recent years Ian Hacking has devoted himself to work mainly on human sciences. The purpose of this article is to present some of the notions coined by the Canadian philosopher -essentially the notions of historical ontology and dynamic nominalism-for that field. Based on this presentation, we conclude that the proposed historical ontology deals with the particular trajectories of the being and it is part of a wider contingentist perspective that is outlined in several of his works. At the same time, we see how Hacking proposes a nominalism different from the traditional and how he makes it work in relation to his professed defence of realism.

In the summer-fall of 1968, Michel Foucault met with literary critic Claude Bonnefoy for a series of conversations (entretiens) that were to make the object of a book for the publisher Belfond. The book never materialized. The tapes too have disappeared. All that remains is a typescript of the very first conversation, presumed to be by Bonnefoy, bearing no correction or addition by Foucault (Beau danger 12). The typescript, preserved in the archives of the Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault, forms the substance of this little book inaugurating the collection Audiographie of the Éditions EHESS. In size and scope, Le beau danger cannot of course rival more ambitious editorial projects like the four-volume collection of Dits et écrits (1995), or the ongoing release since 1997 of Foucault's courses at the Collège de France. But what Le beau danger lacks in heft, it more than makes up for in provocation and poignancy. For one thing-as Philippe Artières, editor and author of a short but helpful introduction, suggests-it rounds out for us the portrait of a "Foucault parlant" (7), whose spoken interventions seem to have always deliberately complicated the image of the author Foucault. Artières goes so far as to characterize this first conversation with Bonnefoy as paradigmatic for the manner in which Foucault tends to "subvert" (14) the set rules of any oral genre in which he nevertheless agrees to participate. In this case, the subversion would have to do with Foucault's effort to relinquish any power or authority (18) associated with his professional activities (as a philosopher, author, teacher, etc.), by practicing-so Artières believes-"an autobiographic discourse" (19). In this sense, Le beau danger would mark the "endangering of Foucault by himself (la mise en danger de Foucault par luimême)" (22). I could not agree more, though I believe that the stakes are even higher. First, let us note that there are at least two-better yet, three-timelines that come to intersect in this small, fragmentary, yet oddly monumental little book. The first one has to do with the moment, in Foucault's career, when these conversations took place, i.e. after the publication of Les mots et les choses (1966) and the completion of his Archéologie du savoir (which appeared in 1969, the same year that his lecture on "Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur?" was delivered and published)though it is Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (first published in an abridged form in May 1961) that receives the most attention in this conversation. At this point, Foucault is an established author and proponent of a new method ('archaeology') for the historical and systematic study of the human sciences. The second timeline, already invoked, is ours: thanks to the massive

Our paper will try to provide an analysis of the changing meaning of philosophy in the contemporary period. More
precisely, taking the Marxian problematic of the "realization of philosophy" as its central point, it will be a study that
analyzes how the practical failure of this "realization" has affected the historical ontology of philosophy as a domain.
Taking Engels' 1886 proposal seriously, i.e. taking the workers' movement as the "extimate" subject-object of
philosophy after Marx, our project will attempt to use the history of the defeat of the workers' movement to analyze
contemporary philosophy. Through a historical materialist analysis of the defeat of the workers' movement, and using
the resources of psychoanalysis, we will examine the desire-of and for-philosophy - a concept we intend to articulate
through this work. - in contemporary trends such as post-humanism, new materialism, new realism etc.
Psychoanalysis will help us mediate our understanding of the workers' movement as a lost subject-object and
contemporary philosophy, which only becomes possible through the denial of the melancholy caused by this loss. In
this way, we will try to show that the subjectivity of the contemporary philosopher as a subjectivity in denial.
Philosophy's denied melancholy can only be traversed by the recognition of its speculative identity (Rose, 1981) with
the "melancholy of the left" (Traverso, 2016). Drawing inspiration from Gillian Rose in "Mourning Becomes the Law",
but also critiquing her political-theological approach, we will attempt to construct a work of mourning adequate to
this speculative identity. Contrary to Rose, we will argue that mourning is not achieved through recognition of the
"comedy of the absolute spirit" or "the comedy of misrecognition" (Rose, 1996), but can only be achieved through a
historical materialist analysis of failure. In this sense, our project will attempt to invert Rose's dialectic on its head

This essay explores Foucault's conception of the historical a priori through the lens of an archival ethics of eros. Highlighting the paradoxical nature of the historical a priori as both constitutive and contingent, it harnesses the temporal dynamism of experiences of the untimely as erotic. Drawing on the work of Anne Carson, the essay brings out the strangeness of eros as an ancient Greek word that remains unintelligible to us. That strangeness signals an ethics of dissonant attunement to the untimeliness of the historical a priori. Such an ethics of eros names those experiences of connection and rupture that both bind and unbind us in relation to a biopolitical present that is radically unstable. Reading eros as strange thus ultimately allows us to find resources for an ethics of self-transformation in Foucault's reflections on the temporal instability that the historical a priori names.

The article focuses on Koselleck’s historical ontology. History does not develop itself according to an inherent logic –that the philosophy of history, this quite peculiar product of modernity, must be abolished is a constant idea in Koselleck’s work–, but in the “in-between” that defines the space of tension between different experiences of temporality and different visions of the future within which historical actors relate. That action is not subject to any internal necessity or determinate causality. This implies not only the need to deconstruct the assumptions at the core of modern historical studies, but also implies an idea of historic- ity that recognizes and enacts heterogeneous factors, the co-presence of different temporalities (and sometimes in acute tension with each other) in the stratigraphy of any historical object, that agglutinates the very notion of experience around an eminently political and collective center of gravity.

Practices-specific, recurrent types of human action and activity-are perhaps the most fundamental "building blocks" of social reality. This book argues that the detailed empirical study of practices is essential to effective social-scientific inquiry. It develops a philosophical infrastructure for understanding human practices, and argues that practice theory should be the analytical centrepiece of social theory and the philosophy of the social sciences. What would social scientists' research look like if they took these insights seriously? To answer this question, the book offers an analytical framework to guide empirical research on practices in different times and places. The author explores how practices can be identified, characterised and explained, how they function in concrete contexts and how they might change over time and space. The Constitution of Social Practices lies at the intersection of philosophy, social theory, cultural theory and the social sciences. It is essential reading for scholars in social theory and the philosophy of social science, as well as the broad range of researchers and students across the social sciences and humanities whose work stands to benefit from serious consideration of practices.

This book considers the legal history of colonial rule in South Asia from 1757 to the early 20th century. It traces a shift in the conceptualization of sovereignty, land control, and adjudicatory rectification, arguing that under the East India Company the focus was on ‘the laws’ factoring into the administration of justice more than ‘the law’ as an infinitely generative norm system. This accompanied a discourse about rendering property ‘absolute’ defined in terms of a certainty of controlling land’s rent—and made administrable mainly as a duty of revenue payment—rather than any right of ostensibly physical dominion. Leaving property external to its ontology of ‘the laws,’ the Company’s regime thus differed significantly from its counterparts in the Anglo-common-law mainstream, where an ostensibly unitary, physical, and disaggregable notion of the property right was becoming a stand in for a notion of legal right in general already by the late 18th century. Only after 1858, under Crown rule, did conditions in the subcontinent ripen for ‘the law’ to emerge as a purportedly free-standing institutional fact. A key but neglected factor in this transformation was the rise of classical legal thought, which finally enabled property’s internalization into ‘the law’ and underwrote status and contract becoming the other key elements of the Raj’s new legal ontology. Formulating a historical ontological approach to jurisprudence, the book deploys a running distinction between the doctrinal discourse of (the) law and ordinary-language discourse about (the) law that carriesimplications for legal theory well beyond South Asia.

This cross-disciplinary doctoral thesis examines thegns (OE/ON þegn) in late pre-Norman England and Viking-Age Scandinavia, departing from the problem of interpreting thegns commemorated in 45 runic inscriptions from around 1000 AD. The thesis highlights that thegns’ socio-conceptual roles stemmed from concrete historical processes and changing social meanings. Studying them provides insights into the social order and interconnectedness of the North Sea region. The dissertation comprises five research chapters, five accessory vignettes for historical context, and two excursuses into related but not decisive matters.
CHAPTER 1 presents the problem and research questions on: 1) social structures communicated through OE/ON þegn; 2) power distribution illuminated by thegns’ socio-economic and political conditions; 3) interactions between England and Scandinavia that follows from the answer to the former two questions. The chapter also charts the historical and theoretical background, methodology, and study design. It emphasises the need to sidestep the few and potentially problematic sources and to instead use digital language corpora for a maximum range of contextualised meanings of OE/ON þegn.
CHAPTER 2 outlines the historiographical background, summarising previous scholarship and potential hurdles in interpretation of primary sources: Archbishop Wulfstan of York’s texts in England; post-Viking-Age English sources and native toponymic material in Scandinavia.
CHAPTER 3 establishes that OE þegn always connoted non-humiliating service by a free man to a lord, usually a king. Through royal co-optation during the studied period, the term evolved to denote lay landowning aristocratic elites. This process involved tenurial and interpersonal relationships, which in the monarchocentric discourse attracted the name “bookland” for the landed property and “thegn” for its owner. The chapter wavers to definitively pronounce if such elites internalised the thegnly identity as a master status and became a historical ontology. With that, the chapter concludes by offering a new possible reading of Wulfstan’s writings.
CHAPTER 4 shows that ON þegn rarely meant “servant” and instead denoted lay elites and/or kings’ junior partners, and that Scandinavian kings sought to turn the former into the latter. The chapter argues that their common trait was an economic powerbase in ancestral landed property, the “odal”. The chapter explores the hǫldar status group associated with “odal” and the thegnly elites’ transition from royal liegemen to subjects through an expanding royal lordship. The chapter concludes by interpreting runic thegns as local magnates rather than immediate royal agents.
CHAPTER 5 summarises the conclusions, positing that pre-Conquest England’s social order was strongly affected by a monarchocentric discourse, unlike in Scandinavia. The chapter emphasises recognising the bias in the term “thegn”, especially in England, and that in Scandinavia, senses imbued in ON þegn appear independent of each other and irreducible to one “core” meaning, unlike in England. The chapter harmonises these conclusions by suggesting that thanks to a closely knit socio-conceptual space, social ideas traversed the North-Sea region. A possibility is entertained that due to significant interactions at the turn of the 9th–10th and 10th–11th centuries, Old Norse inherited late OE þegn senses in received forms and adapted them to local social conditions, the results of which, among others, got engraved in the 45 runic inscriptions in question.

NOTICED ERRATA:
155 printed: "western third of the “Greater” Wessex" read: "western third of “Greater” Wessex"
158 printed: "six historical counties" read: "six historic counties"
165 printed: "Darlington in favour of  must" read: "Darlington in favour of Styrr must"
170 printed: "9201" read: "920"
170 printed: "yields no addition information" read: "yields no additional information"
171 printed: "hēafodman" [×2] read: "hēafodmann"
172 printed: "who pointed Dr Blair’s article to me" read: "who pointed out Dr Blair’s article to me"
172 printed: "reiterating (Sukhino-Khomenko and Guimon" read: "reiterating: Sukhino-Khomenko and Guimon"
274 printed: "Rättegångsbalken, V" read: "Rättegångsbalken V"

Ian Hacking is among the few that have successfully undermined the Analytic/Continental divide, by working on the “trading zones” between these two strands, and forged their conceptual instruments by drawing these latter from different sources and applying them to widely diverse philosophical debates, across natural, social and medical sciences: debates ranging from the problem of induction and proofs and deduction in mathematics to the theories of meaning and truth as well as to the controversy between realism and constructivism in natural and social sciences.

Albeit well-known and widely inspiring, Hacking is still rarely studied, and his wide-ranging production has not yet received an accurate and comprehensive analysis. This Focus aims to precisely fill this gap, by providing one of the first extensive studies dedicated to Hacking’s philosophy. It does not wish, however, to cover all the philosophical areas to which he has possibly contributed, neither does it aim, more generally, to provide a commentary nor an exegesis of his works. By collecting papers by both established and young scholars, this Focus rather intends to explore why Hacking has so largely in- fluenced the field of history and philosophy of science. Analyzing Hacking’s contribution to the 20th-century attempts to bring together history and philosophy of science as well as discussing his arguments on scientific stability, the Focus tackles, from different perspectives, the question of the historicity of reason. Without aspiring to definitive answers, this Focus wishes to open up lines of further research on Hacking’s works as well as along their path.

During the eighteenth century, authors of chemical treatises and courses on chemistry often introduced their work with a chapter devoted to the history of chemistry. While there may have been different reasons for the use of history, its importance was never seriously questioned. However, when Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) took a professional interest in chemistry in the early 1770s, he progressively became uneasy with this literary tradition. In this essay, I intend to explore the ways in which Lavoisier looked at the history of chemistry and to show how, from the 1780s onwards, he began to adopt a hostile attitude towards historical erudition. This vision, which culminated in the publication of the Traité élémentaire de chimie (Paris, 1789), was not only the result of a stylistic preference but constituted a direct attack on a way of doing chemistry from which Lavoisier intended to distance himself.

Term Paper for ENGLISH 295LI taught by Kelly Mee Rich, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Fall 2023

Death rituals in Hong Kong underwent massive changes when the city became a British colony in 1842. I use “rituals” in a broad sense, following Richard Schechner and Roy A. Rappaport. “Rituals” denotes “more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances” that assume a relatively stable “form or structure.” They are “stylized, repetitive, stereotyped” actions taken “at [certain] times fixed by the clock, calendar, or specified circumstances.” They could be sacred (such as praying) or secular (such as singing the National Anthem at sports events), extraordinary (such as the exchange of rings at a wedding) or utterly quotidian (the making of a cup of coffee every morning). It is in this sense that the British colonial government transformed death rituals in Hong Kong. Even though the British did not interfere with Qing-dynasty funerary observances, they implemented additional protocols that choreographed how dead bodies were buried, how deaths were reported to government officials, and how death was transformed into statistics and documented in the government’s archives, which became a part of the broader ritual undertaken at the event of one’s death in Hong Kong. Moreover, this effort was not without impediments. Over time, the borders of cemeteries were redrawn, death-related statistics were presented in multiple formats, and related bureaus were established, moved, and abolished. In tracing the British colonial government’s troubled management of death in Hong Kong from 1842 through 1901, this essay highlights the traditionally overlooked turbulent changes to death rituals in Hong Kong in this period. More broadly, it adds to the burgeoning body of scholarship that recasts Hong Kong’s colonial history as inherently unstable, contingent, and haphazard.

Canada and Australia share a colonial history which featured an attempt to eradicate Indigenous spirituality and language and which involved governmental intervention in areas such as health and education. The movement across traditional borders in order to access health and education created a kind of intra-national diasporic condition, which Indigenous peoples in these countries continue to negotiate on a daily basis.

Foucault's Critical Philosophy of History: Unfolding the Present provides a comprehensive interpretation of Foucault’s work by focusing on its methodological, procedural, and epistemological elements. Adam Takács argues that despite all its thematic and analytical diversity, Foucault’s procedure can be understood within a unified framework based on the historical problematization of the present. This procedure, triggered by current social issues and aiming at a diagnostic screening of the present through a constructive exploration of the past, thus sets in motion not only a specific philosophical vision of history and a research practice often related to the procedures of historiography, but also new ways of critical analysis of social phenomena. This book subjects all these elements to a systematic analysis, demonstrating that within this framework, Foucault’s often debated views on historical realism and constructivism—his methodological choices and ontological commitments—take on a coherent profile, culminating in a timely social critical project of “liberation of knowledge” and “political subjectivation.”

Marine extraction accounts for one third of the world's hydrocarbon production. Several analyses suggest that seismic surveys employed in oil exploration harm marine life; however, their long-term impacts have not been extensively studied. We examine debates between fishers, the oil industry, and governmental authorities over the effects of oil explorations in Tabasco, Mexico. The study employs ideas from historical ontology in tracing the contested production of truth-claims about exploration in the context of scientific uncertainty. It shows how actors, through their different engagements with the sea, and with different degrees of power, frame claims about the relations between exploration and fish. We argue that fishers, through their efforts to "think like fish" produce situated knowledges about the effects of oil exploration. They explain a disappearance of fish by their understanding that seismic surveys disturb fish migration, impair the hearing of fish and cause fish death. Oil company and governmental representatives frame the impacts of oil exploration as insignificant by separating environmental and social dimensions, by isolating individual exploration events, and by arguing that possible effects are transitional. Due to scientific indeterminacy, oil exploration is malleable in the hands of powerful political representations that understate its possible impacts on marine socio-environments.

Both Lavoisier and Priestley were committed to the role of experiment and observation in their chemistry practice. According to Lavoisier the physical sciences embody three important ingredients; facts, ideas, and language, and Priestley would not have disagreed with this. Ideas had to be consistent with the facts generated from experiment and observation and language needed to be precise and reflect the known chemistry of substances. While Priestley was comfortable with a moderate amount of hypothesis making, Lavoisier had no time for what he termed theoretical speculation about the fundamental nature of matter and avoided the use of the atomic hypothesis and Aristotle's elements in his Elements of Chemistry. In the preface to this famous work he claims he has good educational reasons for this position. While Priestley and Lavoisier used similar kinds of apparatus in their chemistry practice, they came to their task with completely different worldviews as regards the nature of chemical reactivity. This paper examines these worldviews as practiced in the famous experiment on the composition of air and the implications of this for chemistry education are considered.

In 2021-22 I revisited Droysen and his Historik, almost ten years after completing a book on both. I was asked to write a new introduction to the old English translation of his Grundriss der Historik - a synopsis of his theoretical lectures.Though I was already familiar with most of the issues to be dealt with, I decided to start the research from scratch - as much as possible. It took a lot of effort, but circumstances allowed me to do it this way, and I really enjoyed working on it. My original idea was to give the text the title "The Way of the Bee. An Introduction to Droysen's 'Outline of the Theory of History'", in reference to Bacon's allegory of the ant, the spider, and the bee, which Droysen quoted at a strategic moment in his lecture, to stress his attempt to find a stance beyond empiricism and theoreticism. Unfortunately, however, the title was incompatible with the editorial context of the publication.

Contemporary discussion about the ontology of society identifies two groups of perspectives. One of them, associated with Searle, includes rules in the inventory of elements that constitute social reality. The other one, associated with Smit, Buekens, and du Plessis, claims that rules can be reduced to more fundamental units. Despite the fact that both perspectives seem equally efficient in describing institutional phenomena, we identify both flaws in the viewpoint that dismisses rules and reasons to prefer the alternative position.

Marine extraction accounts for one third of the world's hydrocarbon production. Several analyses suggest that seismic surveys employed in oil exploration harm marine life; however, their long-term impacts have not been extensively studied. We examine debates between fishers, the oil industry, and governmental authorities over the effects of oil explorations in Tabasco, Mexico. The study employs ideas from historical ontology in tracing the contested production of truth-claims about exploration in the context of scientific uncertainty. It shows how actors, through their different engagements with the sea, and with different degrees of power, frame claims about the relations between exploration and fish. We argue that fishers, through their efforts to "think like fish" produce situated knowledges about the effects of oil exploration. They explain a disappearance of fish by their understanding that seismic surveys disturb fish migration, impair the hearing of fish and cause fish death. Oil company and governmental representatives frame the impacts of oil exploration as insignificant by separating environmental and social dimensions, by isolating individual exploration events, and by arguing that possible effects are transitional. Due to scientific indeterminacy, oil exploration is malleable in the hands of powerful political representations that understate its possible impacts on marine socio-environments.

Long after its alleged demise, phlogiston was still presented, discussed and defended by leading chemists. Even some of the leading proponents of the new chemistry admitted its ‘absolute existence’. We demonstrate that what was defended under the title ‘phlogiston’ was no longer a particular hypothesis about combustion and respiration. Rather, it was a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions and the empirical practices associated with them. Lavoisier's gravimetric reduction, in the eyes of the phlogistians, annihilated the autonomy of chemistry together with its peculiar concepts of chemical substance and quality, chemical process and chemical affinity. The defence of phlogiston was the defence of a distinctly chemical conception of matter and its appearances, a conception which reflected the chemist's acquaintance with details and particularities of substances, properties and processes and his skills of adducing causal relations from the interplay between their c...

This paper argues against a common misunderstanding of Foucault's work. Even after the release of his lectures at the Collège de France, which ran throughout the 1970s until his death in 1984, he is still often taken to have made an "ethical" turn toward the end of his life. As opposed to his genealogies of power published in the 1970s, which are relentlessly suspicious of claims of individual agency, his final monographs focus on the ethical self-formation of free individuals. I suggest that this basic misinterpretation makes possible interpretations of Foucault's work as being sympathetic to neoliberal government, by linking the ethical turn to a "liberal" or "neoliberal" turn in his thought. I present a case against the ethical turn by arguing that Foucault's main focus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, is a concern for the ways in which we become obligated by truth. 

The founding of several scientific journals during the second half of the 18 th century spawned interesting controversies on chemical issues. In the Observations sur la physique, in particular, it is possible to scrutinize in detail the evolution of important discussions concerning crucial questions: "Inflammation or Combustion?", "Pure Air or Oxygen Gas?", "Fire or Caloric?". In the Annales de chimie, the discussions were inspired by other questions such as "Simple or Compound substances?".

Long after its alleged demise, phlogiston was still presented, discussed and defended by leading chemists. Even some of the leading proponents of the new chemistry admitted its ‘absolute existence’. We demonstrate that what was defended under the title ‘phlogiston’ was no longer a particular hypothesis about combustion and respiration. Rather, it was a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions and the empirical practices associated with them. Lavoisier's gravimetric reduction, in the eyes of the phlogistians, annihilated the autonomy of chemistry together with its peculiar concepts of chemical substance and quality, chemical process and chemical affinity. The defence of phlogiston was the defence of a distinctly chemical conception of matter and its appearances, a conception which reflected the chemist's acquaintance with details and particularities of substances, properties and processes and his skills of adducing causal relations from the interplay between their c...

En este artículo proponemos una nueva aproximación al estudio de las emociones desde una aproximación transdisciplinar a la historia y a la filosofía. Para ello, cuestionamos lo que llamamos teoría del appraisal y apostamos por una definición social de las emociones, basada en la teoría de la emoción construida de Lisa Feldman Barrett. En concreto, proponemos considerar a las emociones como categorías humanas, lo que nos permitiría su estudio como parte de la ontología histórica. A partir de aquí, analizamos el problema acerca de la relación entre cultura material y experiencia emocional y proponemos el concepto de matriz, desarrollado por Ian Hacking, como una forma de ligar ambas. Apoyaremos esta aproximación con un estudio de caso: el del Hospital para Mujeres Incurables Jesús Nazareno, en Madrid, en la década de 1870. Este caso nos servirá para identificar y probar un conjunto de herramientas metodológicas que nos ayuden a analizar aquellos componentes materiales que construyen,...

The opposition between nature and culture has always been paradigmatic in the philosophy of society, and in this sense it is certainly striking that, in contemporary theories of collective acceptance in social ontology-theories which actually entail the presence of individual mental content in the form of (at least dispositional) beliefs-the shaping role of culture has not found significant recognition. However, it cannot but be trivially true that cultural presuppositions play a role in the maintenance and development of beliefs on rules and other kinds of abstract artifacts. But once we recognize that the reality of social institutions is at least culturally-dependent, the question emerges whether there is still room for nature as a possible determinant of social reality. Many authors maintain that there is and argue that there are objective natural features shared by human beings which are necessary conditions to explain the emergence of institutional structures within society. This is a culture-independent relation between nature and social institutions. In this paper, however, I will try to argue that there is another, very peculiar, way in which nature can work as a possible determinant of social reality, a way which is instead culture-dependent. In particular, I will give three examples of this kind of culture-dependent relationsexamples about states, corporations, and contracts-and I will introduce a new concept to account for it, that of ''institutional mimesis.'' I will then provide an explanation of how institutional mimesis can have an impact on the content of collective acceptance by appealing to two influential theories in contemporary cognitive psychology (those regarding conceptual metaphors and conceptual blending). Finally, I will explain the ontological significance of institutional mimesis using Ian Hacking's concept of historical ontology.

Resumen: El artículo ofrece un conjunto de reflexiones que tienen por objeto mostrar que el pasado, y en particular el pasado histórico, no es sino una dimensión del presente; lo cual no implica, en opinión del autor, "presentismo", en tanto que el pasado existiría en el presente como dimensión específica, irreductible a la mera actualidad del momento. Para mostrarlo se parte del esbozo de una ontología histórica, se analiza la idea del pasado como huella y se deshacen algunos malentendidos acerca del verdadero objeto de la historiografía. Palabras clave: ontología histórica, existencia del pasado, presencia del pasado, profundidad temporal, presentismo, huella, historia de los efectos

A BURNING DESIRE Scholars have speculated that gunpowder a mixture of saltpetre, charcoal, and sulfur was discovered during attempts to prepare an elixir of immortality. -William H. Brock, 1992. When I was in Junior High School, I became very interested in how to make a big bang not the cosmic but the pyrotechnic type. I knew that black gunpowder was made of sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal. However, I discovered very quickly that knowing the components was not sufficient to make black gunpowder. Real gunpowder had to be made to exacting proportions; so, I experimented with the three ingredients (really, this dignifies the trial and error process that I actually used). I found the most effective proportions, but still I was not satisfied with the performance of the mixture. I tried to grind the three constituents into a very fine powder in order to provide the most complete mixture. Then, it occurred to me that if I could dissolve the components together, I could get the most even mi...

EnglishThis paper aims to present a reflection on the activities of teachers, with reference to Ian Hacking (2009) epistemology or meta-epistemology. We argue that experiences lived at school before entering teacher training courses strongly influence the formation of a historical ontology of himself, Michel Foucault’ expression (1984), the theoretical framework that underlies the work of Hacking. In addition, consistent with theses authors argue that the teacher is limited to its ontological constitution, commonly characterized as traditional, and therefore do not realize interpretative possibilities that are beyond their lived history. Finally, we suggesting changes in initial teacher training in order to modify and restructure this scenario and the teacher’ view consistent with a more modern perception of teaching, more efficient and able to form people who can think and critically transform your reality portuguesEste artigo tem o objetivo de apresentar uma reflexao sobre as prat...

Michel Foucault’nun düşüncesinin farklı anlarında başlıca muhatap konumunda yer alan iki farklı Kant mevcuttur. Bunların ilki Foucault'nun antropoloji üzerine çalışmalarında karşımıza çıkarken, ikincisine Aydınlanma'yla ilgili soruşturmasında denk geliriz. Ben ise Foucault'nun bu iki ayrı Kant okumasının onun eleştiri felsefesi açısından kurucu önemde olduğunu iddia ediyorum. Foucault kendi döneminde Fransa'da (günümüzde adlandırıldığı haliyle) "tarihsel epistemoloji" adı altında icra edilen Aydınlanma fikrini "tarihsel ontoloji" çalışmasıyla sürdürüyor. Bunu yaparken de Kant'ın "Aydınlanma Nedir?" metnini merkeze alıyor.

In this paper I argue that the widespread use of liberal eugenics  would establish a biopolitical horizon for class conflict.  In the course of my discussion, I examine Foucault’s discussion of the origins of class racism in Society Must Be Defended.  I then turn to an examination of how a widespread use of genetic engineering could aggravate class divisions and produce new forms of class racism.  I conclude the essay with an overview of the political options which are available to opponents of liberal eugenics.

This is the second of a pair of papers, of which the first showed how each of the main late phlogistic theories effectively reached impasses due to internal problems or included features which made them unacceptable even to other phlogistians. This paper deals with theory comparison and theory change. It gives an unprecedentedly detailed comparison between the available theories in 1790-1791, and shows that this was overwhelmingly in favour of the new chemistry. This time period correlates well with many chemists changing to the new theory. There was a plurality of views held by individuals and there was freedom of individual choice concerning theories, yet there was also a widespread and rational change to the new chemistry.

More than a century-old gap of mutual incomprehension between social scientists and humanities scholars, famously pointed out by C. P. Snow in 1961, has resulted in the formation of two cultures-the sciences and the arts-which have ceased to communicate over a period of time. In the late 1980s, however, Carl Djerassi's invention of a new literary genre called science-in-theatre paved the way for the development of a 'third culture'. In focusing on this interface between scientific knowledge and humanistic enquiry, the present article outlines several conversations that take place among the areas of history, gender, theatre, and science, all of which find their place in the thematic landscape of Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffmann's play Oxygen (2001).

Historians often feel that standard philosophical doctrines about the nature and development of science are not adequate for representing the real history of science. However, when philosophers of science fail to make sense of certain historical events, it is also possible that there is something wrong with the standard historical descriptions of those events, precluding any sensible explanation. If so, philosophical failure can be useful as a guide for improving historiography, and this constitutes a significant mode of productive interaction between the history and the philosophy of science. I illustrate this methodological claim through the case of the Chemical Revolution. I argue that no standard philosophical theory of scientific method can explain why European chemists made a sudden and nearly unanimous switch of allegiance from the phlogiston theory to Lavoisier's theory. A careful re-examination of the history reveals that the shift was neither so quick nor so unanimous as imagined even by many historians. In closing I offer brief reflections on how best to explain the general drift toward Lavoisier's theory that did take place.

It was through the Chemical Revolution of the late eighteenth century that water fi rst came to be recognized as a compound, having been considered an element since ancient times. In this chapter I offer a revisionist account of that momentous event. A systematic appraisal shows that the old phlogistonist system of chemistry was not clearly inferior to Lavoisier's oxygenist system of chemistry. Lavoisier's system actually suffered from signifi cant empirical and theoretical problems already recognized at the time, and there was signifi cant methodological incommensurability between the two systems, though only mild semantic incommensurability. Aside from the effective and ruthless campaigning by the Lavoisierians, the demise of phlogiston (which was not as sudden or complete as often imagined) was most of all due to the advent of compositionism as a dominant trend in chemistry, into which phlogistonist practices did not easily fi t. With the demise of phlogiston, many valuable elements of knowledge were lost; in effect, these were recovered and developed later with the help of different concepts (e.g., potential energy and electrons), but I argue that it would have been better for science if the phlogistonist system had been allowed to continue its work. This conclusion also anticipates the more general argument for pluralism in science, to be given fully in Chap. 5. In order to give more precision in the articulation and defence of these ideas, I introduce and use the notion of system of practice as a unit of analysis. 1.1 The Premature Death of Phlogiston In the middle of the eighteenth century people still considered water as an element. For Europeans this idea dated at least back to the ancient Greeks at the time of Aristotle, according to whom water was one of the four basic elements (along with earth, air and fi re) which constituted all the substances making up the terrestrial world. Thales had even postulated that water was the element from which everything was made. We now know that water is not an element, but a compound made Chapter 1 Water and the Chemical Revolution 1.1 The Premature Death of Phlogiston Kinds of Air (1774, 1790) is a sheer delight for those who share a sense of fascination about all the diverse phenomena of nature and a childlike wonder at our own ability to call them forth. Priestley was the fi rst person to make and bottle what we now call oxygen and tell the wide world about it. In Carl Djerassi and Roald Hoffmann's amusing play Oxygen (2001) , it is left uncertain who should win the fi rst "Retro-Nobel Prize" in Chemistry for the discovery of oxygen. But those authors, or anyone else well enough informed, would not deny Priestley's priority over Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742-1786) in publication, and over Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) in deed. Priestley's excitement is palpable as he reports, in his letter of 15 March 1775 to James Pringle, the President of the Royal Society of London: "the most remarkable of all the kinds of air that I have produced. .. is one that is fi ve or six times better than common air, for the purpose of respiration, infl ammation, and, I believe, every other use of common atmospherical air." First he tested this new air by burning things in it. And then, "to complete the proof of the superior quality of this air, I introduced a mouse into it; and in a quantity in which, had it been in common air, it would have died in about a quarter of an hour, it lived, at two different times, a whole hour, and was taken out quite vigorous." (Priestley 1775 , 387-388) After that he found the courage to breathe the new air himself. "The feeling of it in my lungs," Priestley reported, "was not sensibly different from that of common air, but I fancied that my breast felt peculiarly light and easy for some time afterwards. Who can tell but that in time, this pure air may become a fashionable article in luxury. Hitherto only two mice and myself have had the privilege of breathing it." On the new site of the Mill Hill Chapel in Leeds, for which he preached for several years during his scientifi c heyday, a blue plaque proudly proclaims (Fig. 1.1): "Joseph Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, was minister here 1767-1773." Such commemoration would have annoyed Priestley, for he did not call his new gas "oxygen". He called it "dephlogisticated air", and that was not just a matter of words. By that phrase he really meant common air cleansed of the "phlogiston" that is normally mixed up in it. What was phlogiston? In short, it was the principle of infl ammability; "principle" here did not mean a fundamental rule, but rather a fundamental substance that combined with other substances and gave them its characteristic properties. Phlogiston was the principle that imparted combustibility to combustibles. A combustible substance was rich in phlogiston, and when it burned it released its phlogiston, which then manifested itself in the fl ame that came out. Certain experiments seemed to indicate that metals, too, were rich in phlogiston, and that it was phlogiston that gave them the characteristic metallic properties, such as their shiny luster, their malleability and ductility, and their electrical conductivity (and their infl ammability actually, under the right circumstances). When a metal was deprived of phlogiston, it lost its key metallic properties and became an earthy substance called "calx" (which we would now identify as rust or oxide). All of this sounds much too fanciful to our modern ear. Let us see if we can make the phlogistontheorist to see some common sense. If calx is really metal that has lost its phlogiston, then you should be able to turn it back into metal by giving some phlogiston to it. Can you do that? "Sure", says the phlogistonist. That is what smelters have been doing for 84 This was set up by Lavoisier and colleagues against the phlogistonist Journal de physique of Delamétherie. Crosland (1994) is the most extensive source; see also Court (1972). 85 Donovan (1993) and Poirier (1996) gives good accounts of Marat's role.

In diesem Beitrag problematisieren wir im Anschluss des agentiellen Realismus von Karen Barad den diskursiv-materiellen Schnitt zwischen Theorie und Empirie und stellen mithilfe eines diffraktiven Experiments (unter Hinzunahme erziehungswissenschaftlich-poststrukturalistischer Einsätze) eine andere/weitere Verschränkungsmöglichkeit zwischen Theorie und Empirie zur Diskussion.

This is the first of a pair of papers. It focuses on the development of the most notable phlogistic theories during the period 1766-1791, including the main experiments that their proponents proposed them to interpret. There was a rapid proliferation of late phlogistic theories, particularly from 1784, and the accounts of composition and important implications of the main theories are set out and their issues analysed. Each of them either reached impasses due to internal problems, or included features that made them unacceptable even to other phlogistians. The expositions and analyses of these theories are given in terms of details that were in the literature at the time or otherwise potentially understandable by the participants given contemporary practice. Some relevant methodological aspects of the history of science are discussed, and the secondary literature is briefly surveyed. The second paper deals with the contemporary development of the new chemistry, and with theory comparison and theory choice in the same period.

The diaries that detail Ernst Jünger’s time in occupied Paris can be as frustrating as they are captivating. Their tone is often both elegiac and detached, at once keenly aware of and distant from the suffering occurring all around their author. This ambiguity becomes particularly apparent in the contrast between the remarkable everyday encounters the diaries describe and their broader cosmic and world-historical ruminations. In this paper, I want to suggest that this tension can be read as a response to the imperatives through which totalising thought shapes how subjects operating under its confines relate to time itself. This dynamic, which can already be found in Jünger’s own earlier work, is dramatized in the way that the diaries construct the alternative temporal perspective of the witness. The witness here is one who survives outside of, and yet also remains caught between, two temporal imaginaries characteristic of modernity: Totalising historicization – the sweeping narrative of progress that demands the sacrifice of the present individual and individual present – and mechanised temporality, that is, instrumentalised clock time.

This article discusses some issues that arise from the fact of 'conceptual change'. We focus on the difficulties that Ian Hacking encountered when considering whether the consequence of conceptual change is the fact that the past of individual actions is indeterminate (Hacking, 1995). We consider his use of Anscombe's thesis on actions under description and find that he misrepresents it. We further find that he neglects tenses of descriptions and redescriptions, the contrast of which is essential to concepts that entail a contrast in understandings of how the matters were then, how they are now, or will be in the future.