History of Philosophy Commons^™

Blind Spots And Bottlenecks For Philosophy Of History, Bennett B. Gilbert

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Realist history does not meet many human needs. History needs a great deal more philosophy, but of what kind?

In his essay on this blog, "Reflections on Theory of History Polyphonic," Ethan Kleinberg suggests that historians often use theory to block change in their work rather than to advance it. One way they do this, he points out, is to include a little theory in order to inoculate themselves against greater and more fundamental challenges. They give or take a blow, and then hoist up their shield, thereby avoiding philosophy and miniaturizing it into "historical theory."

I cannot …

An Existential Philosophy Of History, Bennett Gilbert, Natan Elgabsi

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper we delineate the conditions and features of what we call an existential philosophy of history in relation to customary trends in the field of the philosophy of history. We do this by circumscribing what a transgenerational temporality and what our entanglement in ethical relations with temporal others ask of us as existential and responsive selves and by explicating what attitude we need to have when trying to responsibly respond to other vulnerable beings in our historical world of life.

Plato's Ethics: An Interdisciplinary Approach, Emmanuelle M. Mckinney

Young Historians Conference

Plato is undeniably one of the most influential men in the history of Western philosophy, and he deeply examined a remarkable number of diverse fields. However, in the attempt to understand his various writings, scholars too often over-categorize Plato’s work without recognizing that there are no partitioning lines between subjects: they are all blended together to form a complex body of thought. This paper summarizes Plato’s philosophy of ethics, with a focus on its inclusion of many contrasting disciplines.

Locke, Judgment, And Figure: A Consistent Answer To The Molyneux Problem, Jamale Nagi

Anthós

John Locke has been famously credited with resurrecting the distinction between common and proper sensibles, better known in the Essay as primary and secondary qualities. Although some argue that Locke’s adherence to the doctrine of the common sensibles is in conflict with his empiricist sensibilities, I will show this is not likely to be the case. In order to achieve this I will argue that Locke held there to be cross-modal connections in the mind for the representational content of ideas of primary quality, through the relation of resemblance, but that these representations need to be empirically verified to …

Locke, Figure, And Judgement: A Consistent Answer To The Molyneux Problem, Jamale Nagi

Student Research Symposium

Ever since the early modern period the Molyneux Problem has been a topic of debate both in the philosophy of perception and the psychology of perception. The problem centers on whether the senses share representational content between one another, or does each sense modality have its own stock of representational content that becomes associated with the others after some habituation. For example, if you knew a shape only by touch, could you identify that shape when seeing it for the first time without being allowed to touch the object? Typically, rationalists have held to the former claiming yes, while empiricists …

Freshest Advices On What To Do With The Historical Method In Philosophy When Using It To Study A Little Bit Of Philosophy That Has Been Lost To History, Bennett Gilbert

University Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

The paper explores the question of the relationship between the practice of original philosophical inquiry and the study of the history of philosophy. It is written from my point of view as someone starting a research project in the history of philosophy that calls this issue into question, in order to review my starting positions. I argue: first, that any philosopher is sufficiently embedded in culture that her practice is necessarily historical; second, that original work is in fact in part a reconstruction by reinterpretation of the past and that therefore it bears some relation to historiographic techniques for the …