05.11.09

Is History & Theory kaput?

Posted in you've got mail at 3:22 pm by nemo

I thought I would post an email in my inbox from History & Theory, the website, and magazine, and H-net listserve. I lambasted History & Theory once already: Darwin propaganda machine and WHEE

This gang of academics fills me now with a kind of frustrated contempt.
Blah blah blah on the subject of the philosophy of history, but the result is a complete nullity.
In the absence of anything significant, the mind closes in on seemingly profound apecus, and it is easy to whip up that into a froth good enough for a moribund academic journal.
One reason is the domination of the Darwin paradigm. To do the philosophy of history and not challenge Darwin, well, throw up your hands. We lost academia on the evolution question.
It is a good example of the endless reverberation of harm done to many subjects by the browbeating tactics of the Darwinian loudmouths.

The question of defining the philosophy of history is not complex (as opposed to resolving its noumenal mysteries): check out the material on Kant’s Challenge at history & evolution.com:
Kant’s Challenge, one paragraph from Kant defines the issues perfectly.
But an age of scientism is incapable of this.
One way to consider the philosophy of history is to see it symmetrically as the study of freedom (in history) as opposed to the study of causality in history, the long-lost ‘science of history’ (and other phantoms) rescued by the renewed consideration of the philosophy of history.

I discuss this issue, unkindly perhaps, because few realize that academia is paralyzed. I need to justify myself as an outsider. This legacy of interaction with H&T is depressing and shows that postdarwinism isn’t likely to come from the current system.

email:

Hello from History and Theory:

The February 2009 issue of History and Theory features a wonderful
interview with Hayden White conducted by Erlend Rogne, an interview
that reveals the springs of White’s thought and in the process the
springs of the so-called “linguistic turn” in historiography. In the
interview White is so lucid and revealing, and Rogne’s questions so
penetrating, that it’s a pleasure to read and a genuine eye-opener.
If you’d like to download a free copy of the interview, just click here:

http://www.historyandtheory.org/freearticle.html

The issue also features an essay that asks one of those “obvious”-in
retrospect!-questions that few if any have thought to ask, and then
in its answer discloses aspects of its subject that are surprising
and deeply illuminating. In “Historical Meaningfulness in Shared
Action,” Steven G. Smith asks, “Why should past occurrences as such
matter to us?” Smith answers this question in broadly ethical terms-
knowledge of past actions enlarges our capacity for what Smith calls
“shared action,” and he does so in elegant prose that is a delight.

In “The Impact of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the
Study of History,” Antoon De Baets shows that the Declaration is a
source for important rights and duties of historians, and he
discusses the limits to, and conflicts among, these rights and
duties. De Baets also demonstrates that the Declaration has an impact
on historians’ subject of study. The Declaration has rightfully been
called the “Magna Carta of all people everywhere,” and De Baets, by a
thorough and careful analysis of it, demonstrates in what ways it is
also a Magna Carta for all historians.

Don’t be fooled by the title of Mark Thurner’s essay (“The Founding
Abyss of Colonial History: Or ‘The Origin and Principle of the Name
of Peru’”) into thinking it’s just for the specialist in South
American history. Specialists will find it enlightening, but so will
the rest of our readers: the essay shows that Peru’s name is itself
an inaugural event that marks what it calls “the founding void or
abyss” of colonial and postcolonial history, which is to say, of
modern global history. The essay is

Click here to read abstracts of all the articles in this issue:

http://www.historyandtheory.org/archives/feb09.html

The issue also includes these review essays:

Martin Jay on Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

Lloyd Kramer on Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What
Meaning Cannot Convey

Noël Bonneuil on David J. Staley, History and Future: Using
Historical Thinking to Imagine the Future

James Cracraft on Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions
and the Making of the Modern World

Michael Printy on Annabel Brett and James Tully, ed., Rethinking the
Foundations of Modern Political Thought, and D. N. DeLuna, ed., The
Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J. G. A. Pocock

Georg G. Iggers on Jörn Rüsen, ed., Meaning and Representation in
History

Giuseppina D’Oro on Karsten R. Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy:
Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences

David Konstan on Salvatore Settis, The Future of the “Classical”

To download a free copy of Kramer’s intriguingly titled review,
“Searching for Something That Is Here and There and Also Gone,” of
Gumbrecht’s Production of Presence, please click here: http://
www.historyandtheory.org/freereview.html

To subscribe to the journal (which you can do entirely over the web
with your credit card via Blackwell’s secure server), click here:

http://www.historyandtheory.org/subscribe.html

(As a subscriber you also get access to the electronic version of the
journal).

I welcome any comments you have about this issue or other topics that
are germane to the journal. You can contact me at: bfay@wesleyan.edu

Brian Fay
Executive Editor

P.S. I invite you to forward this message to your friends and
colleagues, and have included a clickable link for them to join this
list:

http://www.historyandtheory.org/email.html

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