Knowledge and Reality in the Historical Epistemology

2020 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-19
Author(s):  
Ilya T. Kasavin ◽  

The article gives a generalized view of the historical epistemology and highlights its main problems: the nature of historical reality, historical knowledge and historical agent. The historical epistemology represents a special philosophical discourse, the purpose of which is constructing historical knowledge for cultural assimilation of the new historical reality at the intersection of science and society. A distinction is proposed between the position of a historian of science and a historical epistemologist in terms of the essence of historical event and historical fact. The historical epistemology reveals its boundaries and a position within modern epistemological approaches. On the one hand, it is the substantialist interpretation of the historical event, which loses its a priori status only by socio-epistemological explanation. On the other hand, a figure of the historical agent (hero and author) keeping the status of a theoretical fiction in historical epistemology, acquires the adequate meaning in the existential philosophy of science.

Conatus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 99
Author(s):  
Oleg Konstantinovich Shevchenko

The Crimea (Yalta) Conference is by all means an extremely complex historical event. Any attempt to estimate its role and significance without analyzing its ethical components would unavoidably result in unduly simplifying the historical reality of the time, as well as in forming erroneous assumptions that would necessarily be used in the analysis of the causes of Cold War. A thorough examination will show that as far as the ‘ethical’ issues are concerned, there are significant developments with regard to general methodology, as well as its application to the sources. Generations of historians who have addressed the issue of Yalta Conference, although they have not been able to form a scientific, distinct ‘ethical’ tradition so far, have developed all the necessary prerequisites for its establishment. This is evident in the possibility of segmenting the issue in two parts on the one hand, and on the other in the availability of sufficient sources, structured databases, and selected outstanding works. Still, there are no studies about the Yalta Conference so far that address exclusively ethical issues concerning ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ ‘morality,’ ‘duty,’ and ‘honor.’ Although historiographical approaches are to a large extent dependent upon ethical viewpoints, in the case of Yalta agreements so far there have been no techniques available, so as to connect historical accounts with ideology, and historical facts with their philosophical background. In a sense, the situation is quite the same as it is with the study of prehistory: although there is an abundance of data and facts that can be primarily processed, there are no methodological guidelines, nor any devices to classify and explain them. This is also typical for any question raised about the ethics of the Yalta agreements in February 1945.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Piki Setri Pernantah

This article is a theoretical study using the method of literacy study. It aims to discuss and study historical learning in a new perspective. Learning of history should be oriented to provide historical knowledge and introduce the noble values of the nation. Because, those two things will not have meaning for the lives of students if they do not understand the meaning of every historical event that they have learned. Efforts to realize meaningful historical learning, related to students' actions for reflective thinking. One thing that cannot be separated from the study of critical pedagogy is reflective thinking. Applying critical pedagogy in learning history, which means emphasizing critical theory as an analytical tool for reading various historical realities in learning. It is expected that students will be able to interact with each other and study various historical realities so that they can reflect on themselves and think critically about these realities. Discussing the learning of history in the concept of critical pedagogy is a new approach that seeks to help students in the process of historical learning. So that they can question and criticize every material in historical learning so that it gives birth to critical-reflective thinking that makes students able to learn and interpret every historical fact and historical learning material in school.


Author(s):  
Vladimir N. Porus ◽  

Historical epistemology has to become a basis for reconsideration of a concep­tual framework of the philosophy of knowledge. Such reform was about to happen because this framework meets difficulties, so far as it concerns the un­derstanding of historical processes, including сhanging of that conceptual framework itself. Reform will allow comprehending such concepts anew as “historical reality”, “a historical event”, “the subject of historical knowledge”, “rational reconstruction of historical knowledge”, etc. The principle of histori­cism has to be put in organic connection with the principle of objectivity, and this connection is a necessary basis for understanding “the truth of historical judgments”. Thus “historicism” joins a row the main epistemological concepts and stops being the “additive”, implemented to this row by a researcher’s dis­cretion. All elements of this row are interdependent values. Considered out of this interconditionality, they lose the sense and can turn into anti-values. The objectivity and the validity are historical in the same meaning in what his­toricism there is a necessary condition of objectivity and validity. These values exist only in the course of continuous change of historical knowledge. Such understanding of a backbone kernel of epistemological concepts conducts to a specification of the concept “subject of historical knowledge”, which gains contextual sense, and properly epistemological research is enriched with psy­chological, sociological, and existential characteristics. Their interrelation re­mains under the joint control of the principles of objectivity and historicism. The reform also affects the ontology of historical knowledge. The problem of the historical theory’s ontological bases is put and solved according to the principle of historicism.


Author(s):  
А.G. Stepanov

The article actualizes the issues related to determining the status of historical knowledge in the paradigm of rational culture. History, involved by a person in the process of organizing a picture of reality, is endowed with other qualities than it has objectively. The mythologeme that arises as a result of the synthesis of the known and the assumed becomes one of the attributes of historical knowledge, the function of which is to combine the images of the past with the cultural paradigm of the present. Mythologeme is defined not as an arbitrary reaction of the subject, caused by an excess of his imagination, but as a consequence of the processes of adaptation of historical information to the corresponding type of culture.


Author(s):  
Ralph C.S. Walker

Kant is committed to the reality of a subject self, outside time but active in forming experience. Timeless activity is problematic, but that can be dealt with. But he holds that the subject of experience is not an object of experience, so nothing can be known about it; this raises a problem about the status of his own theory. But he ought to allow that we can know of its existence and activity, as preconditions of experience: the Critique allows that synthetic a priori truths can be known in this way. However, its identity conditions remain unknowable. Kant’s unity of apperception shares much with Locke’s continuity of consciousness, but does not determine the identity of a thing. Personal identity is bodily identity. Only Kant’s moral philosophy justifies recognizing other selves; it could warrant ascribing a similar status to animals.


Author(s):  
Maria-Cristina Pitassi

Bayle’s equivocal relationship to Arminianism is here examined from the perspective of the status of the Bible. Though rejecting the doctrine that every word was to be considered divinely inspired, Bayle did defend the divinity of Scripture in his polemic with Jean Le Clerc. For Le Clerc, biblical criticism could solve theological conflicts by discovering the authentic meaning of Scripture, but Bayle insisted that natural light precedes exegesis, and revelation is limited to those matters that do not conflict with reason. He dissociates himself from Socinianism by distinguishing moral from speculative reason. Only moral reason offers an absolute norm. Bayle disregards the Arminian distinction between what is against reason and what is beyond reason. His Commentaire philosophique juxtaposes the natural light that can identify divine elements in the Bible with our historical reality that frustrates its capacity for apprehending religious truths. Thus Bayle inevitably clashes with the Arminian tradition.


Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.


Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publication offering a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading epistemologists in North America, Europe and Australasia, it publishes exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: (a) traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of skepticism, the nature of the a priori, etc.; (b) new developments in epistemology, including movements such as naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and virtue epistemology, and approaches such as contextualism; (c) foundational questions in decision-theory; (d) confirmation theory and other branches of philosophy of science that bear on traditional issues in epistemology; (e) topics in the philosophy of perception relevant to epistemology; (f) topics in cognitive science, computer science, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology that bear directly on traditional epistemological questions; and (g) work that examines connections between epistemology and other branches of philosophy, including work on testimony, the ethics of belief, etc. Topics addressed in volume 6 include the nature of perceptual justification, intentionality, modal knowledge, credences, epistemic supererogation, epistemic and rational norms, expressivism, skepticism, and pragmatic encroachment. The various writers make use of a variety of different tools and insights, including those of formal epistemology and decision theory, as well as traditional philosophical analysis and argumentation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke Corcoran ◽  
Florian Loebbert ◽  
Julian Miczajka ◽  
Matthias Staudacher

Abstract We extend the recently developed Yangian bootstrap for Feynman integrals to Minkowski space, focusing on the case of the one-loop box integral. The space of Yangian invariants is spanned by the Bloch-Wigner function and its discontinuities. Using only input from symmetries, we constrain the functional form of the box integral in all 64 kinematic regions up to twelve (out of a priori 256) undetermined constants. These need to be fixed by other means. We do this explicitly, employing two alternative methods. This results in a novel compact formula for the box integral valid in all kinematic regions of Minkowski space.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (8) ◽  
Author(s):  
I. L. Buchbinder ◽  
E. A. Ivanov ◽  
B. S. Merzlikin ◽  
K. V. Stepanyantz

Abstract We apply the harmonic superspace approach for calculating the divergent part of the one-loop effective action of renormalizable 6D, $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = (1, 0) supersymmetric higher-derivative gauge theory with a dimensionless coupling constant. Our consideration uses the background superfield method allowing to carry out the analysis of the effective action in a manifestly gauge covariant and $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = (1, 0) supersymmetric way. We exploit the regularization by dimensional reduction, in which the divergences are absorbed into a renormalization of the coupling constant. Having the expression for the one-loop divergences, we calculate the relevant β-function. Its sign is specified by the overall sign of the classical action which in higher-derivative theories is not fixed a priori. The result agrees with the earlier calculations in the component approach. The superfield calculation is simpler and provides possibilities for various generalizations.


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