Review of Historical Ontology, by Ian Hacking

2004 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 498-500
Author(s):  
Karim Dharamsi ◽  

Daímon ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Zaragoza Bernal

Los estudios filosóficos sobre emociones se pueden dividir en dos grandes grupos: 1) aquellos que consideran que las emociones son naturales, resultado de nuestra evolución; 2) aquellos que, interesados en el pensamiento de autores concretos respecto a las emociones, no sostienen ninguna posición sustantiva acerca de ellas. En este artículo exploramos una tercera opción: entender que las emociones son históricas, contextuales y socialmente definidas. Abrimos así la posibilidad a una nueva forma de investigación filosófica, que partiría de la ontología histórica del filósofo Ian Hacking como herramienta desde la que abordar el estudio filosófico de las emociones en la historia. Emotions research in Philosophy could be classified into two main groups: 1) Those that considers emotions as a natural feature, the result of our evolutionary history; 2) Those that are interested in the study of what a particular philosopher said about the emotions, and, therefore, do not sustain any substantive claim about the nature of the emotions. I explore a third option: to understand emotions as historical, contextual, and socially constituted. This new approach opens up the door to a new form of philosophical inquiry on emotions in their historical contexts, based on Ian Hacking’s historical ontology.


2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (spe) ◽  
pp. 3-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Adegas de Azambuja ◽  
Carolina dos Reis ◽  
Neuza Maria de Fátima Guareschi ◽  
Simone Maria Hüning

This paper problematizes the Brazilian Social Psychology and its knowledge production on the registers of the Work Group (WG) of symposiums of the National Association of Research and Post-Graduation in Psychology (ANPEPP), during 1988 to 2010. Using Michel Foucault's archeo-genealogical perspective and the contributions by Ian Hacking about the historical ontology of subjects, we analyzed technologies of power and knowledge in the disciplines of Social Psychology. We selected the WG abstracts in which circulate the utterances that make up the discursive field of Brazilian Social Psychology. Using the narrative of WGs we outlined a discursive formation of identities/technologies of the subject. The knowledges of Social Psychology in the history of the ANPEPP's WGs contribute to the constitution of categories and psychological classifications which objectivize subjects. We think Social Psychology, in its criticisms related to psychological and social concepts comprises practices and regimes of truth about the subject of Social Psychology.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-28
Author(s):  
Vladimir Gvozden

The commodity is recognized as an essential element of our world. If our relationship with commodity as the structuring form of capitalist society is an ongoing process of subjective work and the exchange of meanings, then the question of historical ontology becomes inevitable. Historical ontology means that “we constitute ourselves at a place and time, using materials that have a distinctive and historically formed organization” (I. Hacking). This paper is an attempt to interpret commodity through the extension of two concepts developed by Ian Hacking (the looping effect, the making up people), and their connection with the philosophical approach to economy. The looping effects of commodity create a special ambience, special forms of connection and separation, equality and hierarchy, community and singularity, freedom and affirmation. The article gives a short historical account of the emergence of the commodity loop (from the 1850s to 2001), and singles out the importance of the structural determinations of capitalism (the ideology of free market, property, state mechanisms, a specific type of culture, etc.). The “making up people” inside the commodity loop presumes the people who count, take part in the marketising, imagine the market in every situation, interiorize the market-conforming sense of guilt and responsibility, and, paradoxically, will be ready to be self-entrepreneurs, to participate in own making up. It is shown that contemporary doxa becomes evident from the perspective of the commodity loop, although it creates a context of harmony and reduces complexity. As the analysis goes deeper, we are discovering interactive nodes at steadily increasing levels of intensity but also two possible productive points of resistance (inequality, immigration). The commodity loop is an ontological fabric in which all threads are woven together, from political and economic to social and personal relationships. At the end of the article, we try to connect Agamben’s ideal of profanation with Hacking’s looping effect. This leads to the conclusion that commodity’s phantom-like objectivity should be profaned, which means to return it to free human use.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147821032110320
Author(s):  
Ann Christin Eklund Nilsen ◽  
Ove Skarpenes

Histories of statistics and quantification have demonstrated that systems of statistical knowledge participate in the construction of the objects that are measured. However, the pace, purpose, and scope of quantification in state bureaucracy have expanded greatly over the past decades, fuelled by (neoliberal) societal trends that have given the social phenomenon of quantification a central place in political discussions and in the public sphere. This is particularly the case in the field of education. In this article, we ask what is at stake in state bureaucracy, professional practice, and individual pupils as quantification increasingly permeates the education field. We call for a theoretical renewal in order to understand quantification as a social phenomenon in education. We propose a sociology-of-knowledge approach to the phenomenon, drawing on different theoretical traditions in the sociology of knowledge in France (Alain Desrosières and Laurent Thévenot), England (Barry Barnes and Donald MacKenzie), and Canada (Ian Hacking), and argue that the ongoing quantification practice at different levels of the education system can be understood as cultural processes of self-fulfilling prophecies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-224
Author(s):  
Vitaly G. Kosykhin ◽  
Svetlana M. Malkina ◽  

The article deals with the problem of the return of metaphysics within the framework of the ontological turn of philosophy and the situation of post-metaphysical thinking. The conditions for the possibility of modern metaphysical discourse in the projects of empirical metaphysics and historical ontology are revealed. Historical ontology as a meta-reflexion of philosophy over its own historical foundations is able to bridge the gap between the epistemological static nature of transcendental subjectivity and the ontological dynamism of the growth of scientific knowledge about reality by comprehending the conditions of interaction between science and metaphysics in conditions of post-metaphysical thinking and realistic reversal of ontology. Philosophical knowledge in the context of the ontological turn and the associated return of metaphysics becomes focused not so much on the sharp demarcation of science and metaphysics and postulating the incommensurability of their ontologies, but on identifying mutually enriching areas of research that could give a new impetus to their development.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-62
Author(s):  
Lisa Giombini

Abstract Although an ontological approach to musical works has dominated analytic aesthetics for almost fifty years, criticisms have recently started to spread in the philosophical literature. Contestants blame mainstream musical ontology for lacking historical awareness, questioning the cogency of metaphysical proposals that are substantially essentialist with regard to our musical concepts. My aim in this paper is to address this accusation by engaging the historicist critics in a sustained debate. I argue that even if the arguments based on history and sociology turn out to be accurate, this may not be enough of a reason to abandon the ontological project altogether. Ontology and history do not necessarily clash. Moreover, historical-sociological examinations do not fulfil our philosophical interest in music. I conclude by making a plea to “historical ontology,” a perspective that does not reject ontology but closely connects it to the dialectic between historical research and aesthetic interest.


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