Happiness

B. Russell, The Conquest of Happiness , London, 1930

"Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself. We have been concerned in this volume with the part which depends upon oneself, and we have been led to the view that so far as this part is concerned the recipe for happiness is a very simple one". p.241

Hardwire

In computatiional talk it refers to the way computers are built excluding the software. In philosophy of mind it refers to the assumption that some features of thought or behaviour are physical and invariant. Hardwire is code for brain.

Martin Heidegger

Heidegger (1869-1976)

He was influenced by German romanticism. Dasein as being in the world is a denial of the Cartesian framework. Dasein is beset by sorge because of its temporality. The temporality of Dasein puts it face to face with the future and its possibilities, principally death. The nothingness of death is the cause of angst. Against angst it is possible to assume an upright (yecto) attitude. Thus, non-being enters into being. Heidegger introduced the concept of being as different from all individual beings to the study of history. Since being is, then nothingness too exists, at least as an interpretive concept, and Heidegger continually plays with the possible interactions between the two concepts. It takes a great effort of concentration to determine how all of this relates to actual reality. In Heidegger the being of beings refers to things. From the relation subject/object he defines the concept of the objectivization of nature, which implies its technological exploitation. The rivalry over the domination and exploitation of nature leads to struggle and the enslavement of man. This is what he calls nihilism. In the rivalry for the domination of man and nature, ideologies are the instruments of historical justification. They in fact become history itself. "History thus serves only as an apologetic and a polemic for the various conflicting forces concerned with the unlimited objectification and exploitation and thereby becomes entangled in this conflict itself...History thus becomes ideology and replaces philosophy, politics, art, etc. as the determinative explanation of human life."

In Being and Time man is also subjected by the things which he produces in his drive to objectivize nature. In order to escape nihilism, humanity has to understand history in terms of Being. Man must find Being from the nihilism of the erroneous understanding of human progress. Being is the opposite of the being of beings. Nothingness is the opposite of Being and it is not the same thing as nihilism. The reasoning seems to proceed more or less this way: the concept of Being is the means to overcome nihilism. Since nihilism consists in the being of beings, then Being is the alternative to the being of beings, but since nevertheless the conception of history as Being is an entelechy and we only actually have the being of beings, then in doing away with or turning our backs on the being of beings, we move towards Being from nothingness. In Being and Time, man is free to assume certain attitudes whereby he escapes from the tyranny of things, which is the same as the escape from nihilism. Therefore, the historical transformation which Heidegger seeks is to be accomplished on the individual level. Having disposed of nihilism and the being of beings, what then is Being? And if nihilism is a way to define and conceive history, what is the definition of history involved in the concept of Being? Being means freedom and history is the free becoming of Being. The pre-Socratics understood the purity of Being to which Heidegger aspires and wants humanity to aspire. "For Heidegger history is kairetic, therefore unpredictable and in retrospect, fundamentally incomprehensible."

"`What is history?'...The question seeks to understand history as a what, for example, as a causal series, or as the unfolding of absolute spirit, or as the dialectical development of the means of production, or as the conjunction of the will to power and the eternal return. In Heidegger's view, however, history is not a what but a how, indeed the how of what is, that which determines the what, which determines how being is. Thus, to demand a ground of history, i.e., a what that underlies history, is to demand a ground for the source and determination of all grounds. There is no such ground, however: history as Being is groundless since it has no ground, ungroundable since it is the source of all grounds, and abysmal since it undermines all grounds...What is necessary in Heidegger's view is not a ground for history but a recognition of the historical necessity of Being itself through the recognition of human finitude."

 I believe Heidegger is right and wrong. He is right in dismissing ideologies, fixed principles of historical interpretation and prediction, but he is wrong in going to the extreme of denying all historical principles. I believe that history can be interpreted and if it can be interpreted then it has meaning, it makes sense. All I can hope to achieve in this direction, however, is just a few rather wide-angle considerations on the trends of history. It might be possible to get a basic principle or two from there, but they would hardly involve or permit prediction.

 Heidegger makes no distinction between history and historiography. In fact, history is past, hence does not exist except in the mind. Since even history in books is history in the mind, then there is in reality no distinction to be made between history and historiography.

Hegel

Hegel and history

It could be argued that all philosophy is systemic in that it, in some manner, takes up the traditions of philosophy that we have identified, namely ontology, epistemology, and ethics

History merits separate consideration

Like mind, it became a fundamental part of philosophy, but it was not part of Aristotle's system and it did not acquire philosophical status, as the interpretation of historical events, until Hegel

St. Augustine first combined a philosophical with a historical outlook

He had an understanding of historical change and he was conscious of his own historicity

But it would be exaggerated to say that he was the founder of philosophy of history

This achievement must be laid at Hegel's feet

We can speak then of a cycle within the history of philosophy, starting with Hegel and defined by the presence of the history and its interpretation as a philosophical theme

History is not a theme which comes up in every philosophical enterprise after Hegel--it is not an analytical theme, except very marginally--but history has not ceased to be present in philosophy as an actual or potential source of speculation

Hegel was himself the founder of philosophy of history

This proposition raises a host of other issues and in particular it can be interpreted as the source of another historical watershed and of a philosophical cycle or framework distinct from but analogous to the Cartesian watershed and cycle or framework

Even though the philosophy of history has become a specialized field in itself--not invariably part of the philosophical tradition, and more a concern of historians--philosophy since Hegel has never lost touch with the cycle which he inaugurated either as hermeneutics or as critique of the widescope interpretations of world historians

Michael Inwood on Michael N.Foster, Hegel and Skepticism (Harvard) in TLS, January 19-25 1990, p.73

concept-instantiation: "the fact (or assumption) that a concept does not guarantee the reality of an object corresponding to it"

"Foster challenges the widely held view that Hegel was uninterested in epistemology: his system can be seen in part as an attempt to avoid sceptical attacks; his response to equipollence is to show that no coherent alternative can be counterposed to his own view, since all competing views and concepts are self-contradictory; and his attempt to show that the concept of his own system guarantees its own realization is his response to the problem of concept-instantiation"

John Dunn on Jeremy Waldron, The Right to Private Property, Oxford: Clarendon, 1989, in TLS May 5-11 1989, pp.489-490

"In the end, a careful reader of this book can expect to derive from it an impressively clear sense of the logical architecture of recent moral theorizing in Oxford (Hart, Dworkin, Raz) and a confident ability to demolish some of the more brazen recent arguments for making the rich richer"

"Hegel is treated as exemplar of a theory that sees private property as a good to which every adult human individual is entitled, in virtue of its potential contribution to the development of their personality: a structure which places him appreciably closer to the views of John Rawls than previous commentators have been apt to acknowledge, and one which is in some disharmony with his treatment of the `pauperized rabble' whose existence he also fully acknowledged"

"Waldron's attack on the moral force of a special right to property, based on the contingent history of human production, is much the most politically effective element of his book"

The Hegelian cycle

The Hegelian social agenda is taken up and "turned on its head" by Marx, and the philosophy of history theme is present in world historians such as Toynbee, Spengler, McNeill et al, and in "philosophers" of history such as Bury, Croce, and Collingwood  

Hegel argued that the process of history was the becoming of spirit

Spirit is both the guiding principle of history and the objective of history

[This is close to the Aristotelean sense of actuality as being both the cause and the objective of movement or of change in a thing]

Beyond principles, it is an extrahistorical entity with a will of its own

History happens under the guidance of spirit

In so far as history is consciousness, it is also consciousness coming into line with spirit

Since spirit was conceived philosophically, no matter what Hegel really believed or purported to believe--whether reason or God were spirit or behind spirit--it could be argued that the fundamental philosophy of history was built upon a set of related metaphysical concepts that were not necessarily exclusive to Hegel's philosophy

In other words, philosophy itself contained the conceptual gropunds of philosophy of history

Nevertheless, even though St. Augustine and Vico and perhaps others were precursors in philosophy of history, it was Hegel who first had a sufficently comprehensive and systematic approach to history rather than a merely historiographical approach

Whereas in Comte it was a theory of mental evolution--analogous to or like the history of events--that served as basis for a philosophy of history, Hegelian metaphysics encompass all of history

Arguably in Comte the history of thought, including the history of philosophy, served as a model for the philosophy of history

In Hegel the metaphysics provides the means for the interpretation of history

Schematically, this is the way these interpretations can be represented:

--Comte: a history of thought--> philosophy of history (discredited)

--Hegel: metaphysics --> philosophy of history --> world-history

In any event, with neither Comte nor Hegel can we really argue for a very close relation between the history of philosophy and philosophy of history

From Hegel, Heidegger, and the ground of history, by Michael Allen Gillespie

Prelinaries

Hegel introduced talk of awareness or consciousness greater than individual consciousness, but with the attributes of individual awareness, and specifically, with the attribute of will, albeit in a very abstract mode

Assuming the state was the final concrete historical form of spirit, then knowledge too, as a form of consciousness, was a function of history

Hegel realized the importance of history to knowledge

With the concept of dialectic, he also posited a compelling form of reasoning about history different from formal logic

When Hegel speaks of consciousness he means collective awareness

When he says that consciousness is the absolute he probably means the totality of awareness, which encompasses history, although it is not history

He errs of course because consciousness can at best be the totality, not the absolute

The guiding principle behind history is the spirit or the absolute spirit

That we do not possess, although we could possess it descriptively at the end of history

But history implies more history

Hence, the absolute is unattainable

In fact, the totality is unattainable also

The proposition that "the rational is actual and the actual is rational" is perfectly justified, unobjectionable even, but Hegel errs in that he thought he saw in his "actual" the end of history, which was certainly a foolish, unphilosophical thing to do

There is always more "rational" to come

We must assume that knowledge encompasses error and that error is part of being

Since time is the unfolding of being and history is time, then from history we can conclude that knowledge is being

Marx was a critical disciple of Hegel: he took from the latter the idea of a historical dialectic, which he then subjected to materialist forces rather than to the guiding principle of spirit

As he himself said, he took Hegel's dialectic and he stood it on its head

From Hegel, Heidegger, and the ground of history (1984), by Michael Allen Gillespie

Before anything else, let's get the concept of ground out of the way

As far as I can gather, and that is far enough, ground in this work refers to two things: one, it is the theoretical approach to a subject that makes it intelligible, and consequently, ground implies categorization, e.g., what Hegel does is define the metaphysical categories needed for the interpretation of history, and two, ground is simply another way of saying the meaning of history

In my view, language as such and as epistemic means, e.g., the language of science, of psychology, and so on, gives us the categories of structured reality

German philosophers were determined to categorize all of realitty from their individual perspectives but within a continuum of thought

Preface

"In [Hegel's] view, history is, on the one hand, the development of the knowledge of the objective or natural world...As such it is the account of the development of consciousness to absolute knowledge. On the other hand, history is the experience of consciousness itself, i.e., of the subject as it comes to an ever deeper and fuller knowledge, not about the natural world but about itself"

"In his lectures on the Philosophy of History Hegel attempts to show that the process of the development of consciousness and self-consciousness that he described in the Phenomenology is identical with the concrete history of humanity as the interaction and reconciliation of freedom and nature within the political realm. In the Phenomenology Hegel considers each of these moments separately, as the development of consciousness, spirit, and the absolute. From the perspective of completed science as it appears in the Philosophy of History, however, this development can be understood in its unity and truth as the concrete history of humanity"

[Here we have prime examples of the dialectics: the reconciliation of necessity and freedom, which comes to be in the state, and the fusion of spirit and consciousness in the absolute

However, I am not sure that consciousness, spirit, and the absolute should be described as different moments: the absolute certainly is a culmination, but spirit and consciousness operate simultaneously, hence hardly as moments which connote diachronicity

And what about events different from knowledge?

Events both become propositions and validate propositions, and in this sense history is the development of knowledge

And since knowledge is in consciousness, the growth of knowledge is also the growth of self consciousness]

3 The ground of history as phenomenology

"The antinomy of freedom and natural necessity...was the immediate impetus for Hegel's philosophizing"

"Consciousness as Hegel presents it, discovers as the culmination of its individual development that it is a moment of spirit (Geist), ie., that it is not isolated in the individuality of its own self-reflection but is fundamentally united with the community"

"For transcendental idealism that which appears, the phenomenal, is utterly separate from the noumenal thing-in-itself. It is precisely this dualism, however, that Hegel seeks to overcome"

[There is no noumenal world

The only world is the actual world

But the actual world involves presences, entities, what have you, such as consciousness, spirit, freedom, and so on, that Kant would have placed in the noumenal world]

"Phenomonelogy for Hegel...is the appearing of the truly real as the shining forth of the logical or noumenal in the phenomenal or empirical as the phenomenological"

[What he tries to do is show that the real world is imbued with reason

Yet Kant would not have said the contrary

But Hegel goes further: it is not only imbued with reason: it is also the only reality there is

Still, Hegel does not want to be saddled with all the limitations that Kant discovered in the phenomenal world]

Schelling: "We will thus not come to rest in philosophy until we have accompanied spirit to the goal of all its striving, to self-consciousness"

"Spirit is thus fundamentally universal or absolute consciousness for both Schelling and Hegel. However, in contradistinction to Schelling, who understood this reconciiation as the discovery of the absolute self in nature...Hegel understands spirit as the process of reconciliation of the individual and the community, of the natural and the conventional, and of the human and the divine. Spirit thus constitutes the concrete history of man...Consequently, it replaced consciousness as the name for the fundamentally real but retains the character of consciousness as the relation of being and knowing. The phenomenology of spirit is thus the development of spirit to the realization of itself as absolute, i.e., as the reconciliation and ground of the psychological, social, political, and historical...Phenomenology names the way of the appearing of what is, of the various moments of history (consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, and absolute knowledge), and is thus the determination of their relationship to one another. The Science of the Phenomenology of Spirit is the account of the way in which spirit comes to be and to know itself in and as the unity of these various forms...The experience of consciousness is completed in and as the phenomonenology of spirit. The phenomenology of spirit, however, is always the experience of consciousness"

[Again, notice the absolute lack of concrete historical arguments for these propositions

It is to this attitude, if it is Hegel's--and I incline to agree--that Marrou addresses himself when he writes: "On est très frappé, quand on remonte de Marx à Hegel, de Hegel à Fichte puis à Kant, de découvrir avec quelle parfaite franchise la philosophie de l'histoire, dans sa jeunesse proclamait cette disqualification de l'histoire empirique"

However, let us try to see Hegel's viewpoint

Consciousness is what humanity experiences

The experience of humanity develops towards and under the guidance of spirit, which is self-knowledge and absolute knowledge, plus the reconciliation of the actual and the rational, and the revelation of this relation and process is possible through phenomenology

Thus, phenomenology is, somehow, spirit itself, yet always part of consciousness

What exactly does this mean?

Hegel apparently felt that he was so perfectly and accurately objective and rational that phenomenology as he conceived it could reveal within experience the working of spirit, that is, the process of the universe towards the totality of knowledge, towards absolute perfect knowledge of nature and and self knowledge

This process towards the total and absolute and perfect was embodied in the history of events and in the constitution of society and its institutions and in particular the state, although the state as the fruition of spirit, as its parousia in history, does not really come into the picture until the philosophy of history itself, that is, the reading of historical events as the confirmation of all this metaphysics

So far what Hegel is doing is speculating about the "meaning" of existence in its temporal process

By "meaning" he meant the interpretable process and the inevitable goal of life

But there is more to come!

Hegel: "The single thought which philosophy brings with it is the simple thought of reason, that reason rules the world, that therefore world-history also has taken place rationally"

[But whereas Hegel says that spirit guides history, and consequently, that the knowledge of history is transcendent, I argue for the concept of a mainstream of history and the total immanence of the historical process

There is nothing above history: all of history is happening in history and it is not a smooth movement forward, but a transactional, accident-prone, recurrence-prone, imperfect, bloody, painful, and often discouraging process

Instead of spirit and total knowledge and such concepts I rather prefer vox historiæ and knowledge as propositions within and without mind

The final touch in Hegel's pretentious philosophizing, the ultimate self-invoked sanction, is religion]

"The Phenomenology proper is the detailed execution of...the development of natural consciousness, spirit, and their reconciliation, religion, to absolute knowledge and unity...[I]t is clear that Hegel understood them as simultaneous and independent moments of a unified whole, for, as becomes evident in Hegel's discussion of absolute knowledge, it is only the whole of which these three are moments that truly develops"

[Religion seems brought in by the hair

It acts as the transcendent sanction of the absolute that is achieved as consciousness becomes one with spirit

However, the idea of "simultaneous moments" does not sound right

In dialectical terms there is at least separation, hence some degree of opposition, between consciousness and spirit, and there is therefore not a sequence as implied in moments: first this, then that

What coud be described as simultaneous are "processes" or "aspects"

Be that as it may!!]

4 The philosophy of history and the question of its ground

"The Philosophy of History...is the consideration of historical development, not with a view to the demonstration of the interaction and reconciliation of the phenomenal and the logical as the presencing of the phenomenological ground but rather the account of the rational development of the absolute itself in its concrete actuality as history"

[In other words, after the metaphysics comes the foreordained demonstration of the metaphysics: it is rather futile, and objectively circular, for how could Hegel have built his metaphysics without a previous, so to speak surreptitious, interpetation of history?]

"The individual passions, which are the source of historical motion, are themselves organized into a rational whole by the direction of reason. Reason is by its very nature general; it is not a particular characteristic of one individual but of human being per se. Each individual is also rational and thus participates in reason"

[This coincides with the workings of history to form the mainstream of history: from diversity to greater uniformity, from statist rigour to social openness, from fanaticism to tolerance, and so on

But in Hegel reason is spirit

It is above history

The tendencies that define the mainstream are in history]

"The variety of convention...is not an indication of its irrational basis. On the contrary, convention in Hegel's view is the province of reason--it is the structure of reason's rule, which encompasses without extinguishing the natural individual"

[However, convention cannot be made out to be rational except in a world-historical sense

Societies can be grievously sick

Again, it is inevitable to refer to the mainstream

It is the mainstream which is rational

And how do we know the mainstream?

Usually, it is defined by prevalence, but even prevailing contains an admixture of positions and attitudes

The subject is complex

Should we say "mainstream"?

Wouldn't perhaps "thrust" or "immanent thrust or orientation" be more accurate?

Mainstream in any case connotes the events of history rather the interpretability of such events]

"The transformation of convention...is not merely a gradual and undifferentiated process. Although by and large incremental, the process periodically reaches a point at which a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference"

[This suggests my own idea of cultural density as the explanation of progress and change as well as of why history does not repeat itself]

"The natural individual is the source of historical motion, but the path and the direction of this motion is determined not by the individual, and not even by the world-historical individual, but by spirit itself. [see above]

      "Spirit, according to Hegel, is general consciousness. As general it transcends nature and all natural laws, for natural causality presupposes a particular object. Spirit, moreover, is not merely consciousness of nature, i.e. not merely in itself (an sich), nor is it merely self-consciousness, i.e., merely for itself, but rather `essence that is in and for itself' and therefore free from the necessities of nature. It neither perceives nor is perceived by anything other than itself; it is neither for another nor is there any other for it. According to Hegel, `the essence of spirit is freedom...Spirit is being-by-itself'"

[This comes close to an argument I had about history being free and the individual determined

I rejected it

The entire interpretation can be seen as the operation of dialectics and the answer to Kant's antinomy between natural law and freedom

I do have a problem with the definition of spirit as general consciousness

General consciousness in my view is an abstraction

As such it can never have the role that Hegel assigns to spirit

But then Hegel's metaphysics are transcendent, more than transcendental, and this is shown in his "personification", in the "thingness" of spirit

I discover no such guiding or overarching entity in history

And even in the context of Hegel spirit can only be identified with general consciousness once consciousness has achieved the ideal of absolute knowledge towards which spirit tends, once consciousness and spirit have become one

Of course, if we posit that spirit too develops--rather than being a guiding principle or a goal--then it coud be general consciousness at different stages of history, but how can we conceive of spirit as developing?

On the other hand, also, spirit could be what moves general consciousness, in which case it must be in general consciousness and therefore somehow like general consciousness but different also

The identification from any angle is problematical]

"Spirit, as Hegel understands it, is the ethical or social world, the _thos or Sittlichkeit within which all individuals subsist. These conventions and institutions, however, have an existence and a development independent of the individual. Moreover, this development is not the result of the action of individuals but follows in Hegel's view a rational and irreversible path of its own toward a specific destination. This development is not the result of natural forces and thus not subject to natural necessity but is rather the movement of spirit or general consciousness itself towards absolute knowledge and science"

"This reconciliation of natural consciousness and spirit, of natural causality and freedom, of the individual and society, is the state"

[This is the ultimate dialectical product

I believe that in concrete terms Hegel made freedom consist in submission to the legal system of the state]

Hegel: "The state is the divine idea, as it is present-at-hand on earth"

"History in Hegel's view is thus fundamentally the political development of humanity"

"On the basis of the Phenomenology...it is...possible to reconstruct the actual history of humanity in its fundamental truth as the history of the absolute itself. The concrete embodiment of the absolute, however, is the state, and the true history of humanity is thus fundamentally political history"

[Phenomenology seems to be the key to everything

Hegel possibly sensed that mere human knowledge, that is, a manifestation of consciousness, was incongruously puny as the means to encompass the entire, absolute truth of existence and the universe, hence his constant, as per Gilespie, exhaltation of its significance, reach, and possibilities as phenomenology

But when you come right down to it it is the emperor's new clothes

In Husserl phenomenology is the unsurprising claim in a philosopher that he himself and maybe his followers can introspect better than ordinary mortals, which is as it might be except for the connotation of accuracy and truth in mostly interpretative propositions

Hegel: "The final goal and interest of philosophy is to reconcile thought, the concept, with actuality"

[So Hegel's final stratagem is to appeal to the august majesty of statehood for the ultimnate and irretrievable and irrefutable sanction of his phenomenology and all the baggage that goes with it

In some respects he is not wrong

The state can make mediocrities stand materially above the run of mankind, seem even superior to genius

But in a deeper sense he is wrong, for states are like logs in the mainstream of history: they can hit shoals and turn to pieces

The Venezuelan state, for instance, is brimful with imbeciles, yet they are powerful imbeciles constantly being sought out the press for quotations and rays of light

But does this mean that they are better than imbeciles?

Hardly!

It is not with the state that history culminates

In fact, history does not culminate

It is the mainstream and it flows on unheeedful even of civilizations]

5 History as being

After Hegel

"...Hegel saw that the basis for traditional Christianity had been decisively

undermined by the Enlightenment and that consequently only a Christinaity that could come to terms with reason henceforth would be viable. It was such a reconciliation of reason and revelation, of the finite and the infinite, that he sought to achieve...Kierkegaard...was dissatisfied with with Hegel's systematic solution...for in reconciling reason and revelation [Hegel] had undermined the basis for the real choice between reason and revelation that is central to an authentic Christianity and an authentic human existence"

"...Nietzsche was unwilling to accept any solution that hearkened back to Christianity. God in his view was dead..The result of this confrontation...is nothing other than the explicit recognition of historicism, relativism, and nihilism, i.e., the recongition that there is no ultimate goal or purpose and thus no inherent reason or meaning to existence.

      "Nietzsche, however, did not thereby simply abandon the notion of the ground but attempted to show that the ground was implicit in actuality itself. This is his doctrine of the eternal recurrence"

"...Husserl was convinced that philosophy had to come to terms with concrete existence, but he did not believe that historicism or for that matter positivistic naturalism had really done so...for the real, as Husserl understood it, is discovered not in being but in consciousness. It is this truth that phenomenology attempts to reveal by tracing the various modes of being back to the fundamental structures of transcendental consciousness"

Hermeneutics

Originally hermeneutics referred to the interpretation of the Bible. It is often now used to refer to probabilistic deductions, principally in the phenomenological or existentialist tendency of thought in philosophy.

S.L. Clark, The mind's sky (1992)

The author claims that the existence of God implies many intelligences. On the other hand, evolutionary catastrophism tends to reduce the validity of many intelligences. To get to these arguments he assumes and does not assume God. In either case he is guessing.

Heuristics

Heuristics are cognitive principles. Sometimes more specifically the word is used to denote shortcuts towards solutions of problems.

Hiatus

Hiatus is the necessary condition for freedom. It requires that thought and behaviour should emanate from a void. See Nihilation.

Higher order logic

An instance of predicate logic, which includes quantificaton, is: "for all x, there is a y property, such that x>y --> z." Propositional logic would say: a is a painter, painters paint pictures, a paints picture.

Hinduism

In the course of the second millenium BC, probably around the middle or before, a people had descended into the Indus river valley. This people spoke a language belonging to the Aryan or Indo-European family of languages--it was later known as Sanskrit--which means they were ancestrally related to the ancestors of the Europeans and the Iranians and other peoples like the Hittites of Anatolia and the Sogdians of Western Turkestan. The Indo-Aryans, who had many gods, gradually expanded towards the Ganges river basin--usually, in their own account, led by Agni or fire--and there they met dark-skinned Dravidians (from the general name for their languages).

As they advanced the Indo-Aryans were composing a great deal of literature, called Vedic, in which they fused their religious beliefs with their new experiences. Eventually the society they created in India was caste-ridden, but scholars are undecided on whether they were organized into castes before they occupied India or they created castes to keep the Dravidians, the previous, darker natives of India, in their lower places. Belonging to a caste is like being a fan of a baseball/footbal club from birth and not being allowed to change sides even if your club never wins a championship. At the apex of the Indian caste system were the Brahmins or priests, although Kshatriyas or soldiers were also important. The rest were lowly merchants, artisans, peasants, and so on, and lowlier still were people without caste. The Brahmins have always claimed they are racially pure, but there must have been a lot of miscegenation between Aryans and Dravidians or else the Brahmins have the longest lasting sun tan in history.

Be that as it may, during the first half of the first millennium BC, the former Aryans, much given to ritualism from time immemorial and now fully indigenized rulers of a very fragmented northern India, were also becoming introspective, perhaps because the Brahmins had a lot of time on their hands or they needed more reasons to justify their privileges. The set of beliefs they developed--expressed in the Upanishads , but with many variants and branches--gradually constituted the religion known as Hinduism.

Historical meaning

The most fundamental sense of historical meaning is that history can be interpreted rationally. All that is needed for rational interpretation is to find causes for events. Since events must have causes then history must be rational and meaningful. Would this make Nazism meaningful? Strictly speaking, this is inescapable. There is also the possibility of arguing that for meaning to be there must be a rational chain plus. This plus can only be God. But the fact remains that the Holocaust is part of the rational chain of history.

Historicism

Historicism is often used as synonymous with relativism, In another sense historicism is the belief that history has the last word on matters of right and wrong and on the validity or invalidity of propositions. In the latter sense it is a rather stark version of vox historiæ , which see. The trouble with this doctrine is that since history doesn't stop there would seem to be no last word on anything. However, I don't think it means that anything goes.

Historiography

One approach to history consists in trying to get into the mind of people in the past. This is akin to the discovery of intentions. This method was pioneered by Vico and is evinced today in the mentalité concept. Another approach denies this is possible (Gadamer). A third approach is that it is not necessary: the painters of Chauvet cave were essentially as we are.

History

History is a flow of events Since time is what makes possible anything at all but especially the flow of events, then history is akin to time. History is a special sort of time. It could be that history is only what is public and collective, but since anything is potentially public and collective, then history is virtually indistinguishable with time.

A philosophy of history entails the awareness of history as such or of history in its totality rather than of history as periodization. There are two potentially philosophical aspects of history: (1) epistemology, which is basically the awareness of history as historiography and about what can be said of historiography and its methods; and (2) hermeneutics, which is the interpretation of the events of history as having some kind of meaning besides the logical categories and connections that historiography establishes. Either of these approaches can be philosophy of history. The constraints or conditions of philosophy of history are hardly satisfied by the sketchy indications about methodology in Herodotus and Thucidydes.

Concerning epistemology a pair of objections are immediately evident. One is that the knowledge of history is not different from the knowledge of anything else in the sense that cognition is one and universally applicable. The other objection is that every discipline is about the past, so what distinguishes history from other disciplines? On the first objection there is little by way of answer. There is no cognitive criterion specific to history. However, the methodology of historiography is not the same as those of other disciplines, so this at least saves the day. Collingwood's The idea of history comes close to being an epistemology of history. Collingwood discovers certain attitudes towards and opinions about this historical flow of events--how knowable? what is the point of recording it? does it go anywhere? etc.--which vary from age to age and even period to period as can be found in the works of historians. Since these attitudes and opinions are on history itself, what he discovers and describes in his famous book are theories of historiography or on how to record the events of history, and to be more precise, implicit theories of historiography, and in no way philosophies of history. By way of contrast and elucidation Whitrow's Time in history is about the measuring of time, time as entity, and temporal concepts including history, historiography, and philosophies of history. On the second objection we stand on firmer ground. All books are indeed about the past given that the present is but the instant of recognition. The characteristic of history books is that: (1) they choose a time frame; (2) within, and outside, the time frame they seek to establish continuities. The time frame cannot be arbitrary. Some times the historian makes a time frame. Much of historiography is about the justification of the time frame, in doing which the historian defines its traits and establishes the continuities.

Other books too, whether sociology, economics, or what have you, even science, are about the past but as if time frames did not exist or as if they were part of a special dialectic (a set of premises). A book on economics might imply a time frame but it tries to be as "abstract" as possible. However, a book on he history of economics is historiography of a specialized sort. In the study of history the time frames are as significant as the events themselves within the time frames. Historiography uses with logic within a context or specific premises. Other books work with logic and posit abstract or universal premises or principles. Therefore, we can indeed say that historiography has epistemological or methodological features of its own but not to such a degree of specificity as to contribute to epistemology, although it is licit to speak of an epistemology of history.

The other philosophy of history also evokes objections. One is that it seeks laws and history has no laws because if it did it would be predictable, which it isn't. The other objection is that historical knowledge is of the past and it does not involve any possibility of anticipation. We shall make a long story very short. Although it is indeed true that there is no possibility of anticipation in history, the continuities that history traces in the past include some which it is inevitable to assume, e.g., society, government, and so on. Hermeneutics gets into trouble when it pretends to prophesy this and that, e.g., Spengler's decadence of the West, or Gobineau's fears about miscegenation, et al. However, without getting into these visions of universal and ineluctable trends, cycles, or whatever, it is possible to go beyond self-evident continuities to continuities that go beyond claiming that no one can "see" the future. Within certain limits, it may be possible from what is known about the past to make certain predictions within certain limits, e.g., the gradual retreat of Islamic fundamentalism. This philosophy of history is possible but must be held in check. It should be mainly about the implications of past events. These implications could be, as Danto describes them, "elaborate enthymemes", but after all has humanity not made its way to the present and will continue into the future on the back of probabilistic inferences?

If we assume hermeneutics, can we give some indications about its history? Do the Early Christian philosophers, specifically Augustine, qualify as philosophers of history, i.e., long before Hegel "invented" philosophy of history? Augustine takes up history from the foundation of his faith. It is his faith that determines the reading of what facts he knew or the order in which he presents them. The faith itself is not engendered by the study of historical events. But is this vastly different from Hegel? Hegel had his metaphysics before he did his philosophy of history, although admittedly he derived more than any philosophy before his some metaphysical propositions from history. Whatever other testing grounds he might have used for his idealistic dialectics, it was universal history that became their main expression. But in the general sense of taking the ideas about history from sources other than history Augustine was as philosophical about history as Hegel. The least that can be said is that he did proto-philosophy of history. But the difference, however small, stands: Hegel relied more on history and knew much more about history than Augustine and his metaphysics and epistemology are "history-referent", Finally, the extra-historical sources of Hegel's philosophy of history are always rational whereas in Augustine the premises are in the Scriptures as God's revelation. On whether faith can yield public philosophy, see Private philosophy.

History and historiography

The past is all. Reality is the past. Some past is history, some is not. The past that is not history are our private lives in so far as they have no bearing on the public existence of humanity. Only by stretching our concept of what is public or collective can we say that our private lives are history. But this is easy enough to do. All events are potentially historical in the public, collective sense. And who is to say that, by the same standard, events that are seemingly not historical are in fact not historical?

A more complicated issue is raised by the question: is physics history? It certainly is an aspect of history. Are we then doing history when we do physics? Evidently not, just as we do not do psychology when we do economics even though economics is about how people behave.

A distinction is in order here between history and historiography. Physics, as well as economics and psychology, are indisputably history. What they are not is historiography. Every public process is historical. What they are not is necessarily historiographical. Doing physics is making history but it is not about history itself, not even about the specific part of history constituted by physics. Analogously, economics is about an aspect of human behaviour but it is not about psychology which is about human behaviour per se
The histories of physics, economics, and psychology are, however, aspects of historiography.

History is the totality of events. Historiography is about facts. Facts are not always available. Therefore, historiography is also about the approximation to facts. It does a lot of interpreting and speculating where facts are scant or not available in a "direct" manner. Although historical facts are not always available, facts are particularly scarce or non-available in the cases of pre-historical times and of all tribes and primitive groups. Without facts historiography would not seem to be possible. How can the deficiency be solved? Where historiography as such is not possible--and we are assuming that it is possible if there is writing--there are other disciplines which can infer facts. Economics, e.g., has branches of study devoted to ancient economic forms. In particular, archaeology, anthropology, and ethno-studies in general are supposed to come up with facts where there is no written evidence for them. They are basically efforts to extend historiography beyond the factual boundaries of the past and even the present. We often assume that these "pre-historical" disciplines seek "deeper" truths about man--often the so-called psychic unity--than are possible from the mere establishment of facts. That there is such a deeper reality is an underlying assumption in Frazer, Graves, and in general in historians of ancient religions such as Eliade and Przsulsky. Is this justified?

We live among relicts of the past: folk tales, ancient narrative motifs, vestiges of rites, superstitions of all sorts, even tribalistic throwbacks and barbaric aberrations. We have even tried to trace the animal origins of our social behaviour. Modern art makes references to the primitive in man. We do not always make sense of such relicts. We can often only infer their ancient lineage. These relicts and vestiges and survivals and the echoes of them in ancient remnants, might be the source of our belief that the ancient past of man holds the clues to his "essence". But again is this belief justified? Is there some human reality deeper than the yields of the study of cognition and of the propositionality of mind or of representation in general? The attraction of these dark layers is there, but it is easy to resist them if you are certain of what you know about cognition and representation. All you have to do is introduce certain premises and all the ancient painted cave walls will come vibrantly to life.

History and knowledge

Cognition is an inferential system. But the inferences that cognition yields are not necessarily apodictic or valid, i.e, some are either and some are neither. Cognition does not determine belief. Mind as the specificity of cognition explains belief. But either from cognition or from mind we are left with the "iffiness" of knowledge. And the only way that we can mitigate the iffiness of knowledge is from history. What we are saying in the final analysis is that cognition and mind are the premises that yield the valid inferences that constitute history. This is as close as we can get to real knowledge. If knowledge is the becoming of being, i.e., as against false belief, then history is the concrete manifestation of the becoming of being.

History of philosophy and the specification of philosophy

Philosophy has been variously defined: etymologically (and of course historically) as the love of wisdom; as the quest for truth, and in this guise, as science; as an attempt to encompass the totality of knowledge, i.e. structured reality; as the quest for the "meaning" of life; and so on. All of these definitions are deficient. The love of wisdom per se can mean different things and so can justifiably be applied to other disciplines besides philosophy. Philosophy can be considered science only as proto-science, and as such this description must be considered historical and contextual. The question of the meaning of life is so subjective as to disqualify the possibility of philosophical validation.

In abstracto, philosophy can be said to be about three very ample, very abstract concepts: being, knowing, doing. However, the most realistic and reasonable approach to the definition of philosophy is through the history of philosophy. What this yields are certain recurrent themes. The most common of these themes is epistemology: philosophy is about knowing.

It could plausibly be argued that all philosophy is epistemological, that all philosophical thought contains, implicitly or explicitly, a theory of knowledge, and that epistemology is the self-awareness of philosophy. However, those philosophical structures in which epistemology is only implicit cannot be said to be strictly about epistemology, such being the cases of Lucretius, Boethius, Plotinus, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietszche, Bergson, Heidegger, Sartre, et al. On the other hand, there are systems which are principally or crucially epistemological, such as those of William of Ockham, Roger and Francis Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Comte, J.S. Mill, Frege, Dilthey, Husserl, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Derrida, Quine, Dummett, et al.

Another step in the quest for a definition of philosophy is the Descartes watershed and the mind cycle. Before Descartes the world was directly knowable. The senses were considered a reliable source of knowledge about the world, to which reason could also reliably be applied. After Descartes, the world became essentially unknowable, a matter of deduction rather than of sensory faith. Before Descartes, therefore, the self and related themes, such as psychology, were part of the study of the world, but after Descartes the self and the world become two equipollent areas of study, the two large fields of philosophical speculation, and there is even a tendency from this vantage to exaggerate the importance of res cogitans, of intellect and intelligibility, over that of res extensa.

Some recurrent philosophical enterprises have attempted to encompass the whole of structured reality. The prototypes of such efforts were the pre-Socratics and the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. Lucretius was well within this tradition. Underlying these efforts was the absence of a recognizable separation between philosophical and scientific thought because of the rudimentary state of the knowledge of nature. The attempt at the philosophical systematization of knowledge reappears in Augustine, Thomas, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Comte. The core of this type of comprehensive philosophical work is metaphysics with either implicit or explicit ontological attitudes or definitions.

The context of Kantian thought marks a watershed between philosophy as systemicc knowledge of reality and philosophy as a specialized field, for science then was on the threshold of its modern expansion to the vastnesses of specializations. Comte's philosophy was the last attempt to systematize all of knowledge and it was also the first attempt to restrict the validity of philosophical thought, although since his thought was self-consciously philosophical it cannot be considered to be an invalidation of philosophical thought as such. J.S.Mill was not as ambitious as Comte, but he did try to restrict the areas in which he thought philosophical thought was justified, taking as guideline for his effort a scientific paradigm.

The classic justification of the separation of philosophy and science was undertaken by Dilthey. But contemporaneouly, taking the cue from the progress of science and technology, there started, specifically in Frege, the tendency to subsume philosophy to strictly logical, non speculative criteria. And this was overtly a disqualification of metaphysics. Frege was of course the forerunner of analytical philosophy, to which Russell and Wittgenstein and many others subsequently contributed.

Over analyticity hangs the question of its essential nature: is it philosophy or is it something else? Frege was avowedly a meta-mathematician, and so were Russell and Whitehead. This ambiguity often leads to the inclusion within the field of philosophy of thinkers who were in effect mathematicians whose thought has implications for epistemology, Gödel being the paradigmatic example. More recently H. Field represents an attempt to make the relation between mathematics and science central to philosophical thinking. Others have tried to do the same thing with computer technology, particularly as manifest in the field of artificial intelligence. However, it cannot be denied that a thinker such as Quine, for whom logic is the model of clear productive thought, belongs rightfully and unambiguously within the philosophical tradition of epistemology, and if such is the case, then it could also be argued that some mathematicians and all meta-mathematicians must also, in some indirect manner, be considered to be part of the history of philosophy.

Ultimately, analytical philosophy stems from Kant's development of synthetic a priori propositions: such as we logically self-evident but went beyond logic to the empirical.

There are other traditions in philosophy besides epistemology and the systemic categorization of reality. The original systematizations of Plato and Aristotle included social, political, ethical, and of course theological themes. The Hellenistic schools were mainly concerned with ethics. Theology was the central concern of philosophy from the Patristic on and through the entire Middle Ages. Boethius combined theology and ethics in addressing the problem of divine foreknowledge, which he was not the first to raise. Ethics is a constant theme in philosophy, with particular importance in Spinoza, Kant, J.S.Mill, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, Sartre, et al.

Augustine introduced the interpretation of history entwined with theology into philosophical thinking. Hobbes is best known as a socio-political thinker, and so are Rousseau and Marx. Kant proposed a prescriptive approach to the interpretation of history, but it was Hegel who actually built a historical hermeneutics from the knowledge of history itself, although Vico is often said to have had a philosophical approach to the study of history.  He was a meta-historian and all "meta-disciplines" are philosophical in nature.

Hegel was the founder of philosophy of history. This proposition raises a host of other issues and in particular it can be interpreted as the source of another historical watershed and of a philosophical cycle or framework distinct from but analogous to the Cartesian watershed and cycle or framework. Even though the philosophy of history has become a specialized field in itself--not invariably part of the philosophical tradition, and more a concern of historians--philosophy since Hegel has never lost touch with the cycle which he inaugurated either as hermeneutics or as critique of the widescope interpretations of world historians. World-historical interpretations, such as Spengler's and Toynbee's, hark back to Hegel's systematic effort at interpretation. Marx, in his own words, "stood Hegel's historical dialectics on its head". Comte constructed his own historical interpretation on the idea of stages of history, which had been used before by Herder and perhaps others.

What can be derived from the history of philosophy towards the definition of metaphysics and ontology? Ontology refers to the systematization of reality. Insofar as this involves basic principles, all ontological thought can be considered metaphysical. Ethics and the philosophy of history can be metaphysical but are not ontological. The only possibility of differentiating between metaphysics as a concern with structured reality and ontology would have to lie in philosophical studies that do not in the end posit unitary principles, and this implies that the proposed differentiation is unrealizable. Nevertheless, we need not conclude that ontology and metaphysics are coextensive, for as we have seen metaphysics can comprise any field of philosophical speculation, which is not the case of ontology.

Critical ontology, or the critique of metaphysical systems, could be said to eschew categorization as metaphysics. If this is possible, it could be claimed that ontology can stand outside of metaphysics. Alternatively: it can be argued that ontology asks the questions that metaphysics answers. Therefore, we would be talking of two distinct categories: ontology as a discrete if wide area of enquiry and metaphysics as specific approaches or attitudes towards reality. Metaphysics would then arise from ontology and it could not be said that ontology is a part of metaphysics. In the end, what can be said is that all ontology is metaphysical, that philosophy too is metaphysical by definition, but that not all philosophy is ontological. Ontology questions the concept of being and metaphysics answers that it is either the thought of being or being itself.

The distinction between philosophy and psychology depends on the systemic character of philosophical thinking and on the more specialized nature of psychological thought. However, it should be kept in mind in using the concept of systematicity, that as psychology developed it too, like any other discipline, became systemic, so that in classifying ideas and theories it is the system to which they belong that matters rather than their inherent systemic character. In reference to Wundt his thought was part of the system of psychological categories and therefore it can only be considered philosophical in a tangential or indirect manner. On the whole, on the issue of the autonomy of psychology, it can be said that, despite lingering ambiguities and links with philosophy, psychology advanced during the 19th century towards the kind of systematicity which was the defining trait of philosophy since Aristotle. Philosophy is necessarily systemic but being systemic does not necessarily mean philosophical.

Is philosophy systemic? It could be argued that all philosophy is systemic in that it, in some manner, takes up the traditions of philosophy that we have identified, namely ontology, epistemology, and ethics. History merits separate consideration. Like mind, it became a fundamental part of philosophy, but it was not part of Aristotle's system and it did not acquire philosophical status, as the interpretation of historical events, until Hegel. But if we go back to our historical review, we shall find that not all philosophers take up the systematic study of the structure of reality, that in fact the majority of philosophers make choices of fields, and that this leaves in their works what could be considered to be gaps from a systemic point of view. This of course is relative since philosophers who make choices of fields and deal as exhaustively as possible with the issues can hardly be said have gappy thought or to produce gappy works.

One philosophical tendency which seems definitely not only not to be systemic but to be actually anti-systemic. Since analyticity is inimical to metaphysics, it does not exhibit openly and freely an ontological definition. By the same token, it is most emphatically involved in the characterization of knowledge, through which endeavour it is deeply involved in the categorization of reality, which it does through its commitment to empiricism and positivism. It is antithetically metaphysical. Additonally, ethics is noticeably absent from analytical thought, except in Moore, who can only at most be considered a precursor of the analytical mainstream, and tangentially in Russell and Wittgenstein.

So where does that leave the claim that philosophy is always systemic? Either we assume that the system can be implicit or we drop the claim altogether. To drop the claim altogether would be premature. Let us suppose the implicitness thesis, and come back later to this subject, perhaps with the idea that analyticity inaugurates a wholly new tradition: one which is in part a denial of the old traditions. And this could be a part of the issue of whether analyticity constitutes a philosophical cycle of its own. We postpone the subject because we still have to go over contemporary philosophy of mind.

Let us consider American philosophy of mind as a branch of analyticity. The crucial step to the American version of philosophy of mind was the mind/machine analogy known also as philosophical functionalism. This step was taken by philosophers (Putnam claims he did it), but it was at least facilitated by the analytical logicians Church and Tarski (both based in America) and by the British founder of artificial intelligence theory, A. Turing.

American philosophy has two antipodal attitudes to mind: the refusal to accept it as a legitimate philosophical concern in hardcore analyticity (except perhaps insofar as it has to do with knowledge in a prescriptive rather than descriptive sense) and the full-blown, unabashed concern with mind . The latter evinces different tendencies: "primitive" philosophical functionalism; various extensions of functionalism: language of thought (closely associated to cognitivism) and artificial intelligence (with its own extension in connectionism); and physicalism.

There are these versions of American philosophy of mind:
--philosophical functionalism as an approach to the understanding of mind from then the mind/computer analogy;
--the fusion of functionalism and cognitive psychology which results in the thesis of a language of thought;
--the extension of functionalism into artificial intelligence research and its connectionist offshoot;
--and the physicalist approach to the knowledge of mind, which however is dependent, at least initially, on the concept of awareness.

How do these versions relate to the traditions of philosophy? What principles do they hold in common that could configure a specific philosophical outlook? In what fundamental sense does American philosophy of mind constitute a legitimate form of philosophical thought?

H. Putnam claims the mantle of originator of the functionalist thesis, which derives from computational theory. Now, whether this is accurate or not, Putnam's thought is epistemological and ontological. He himself makes all three claims and it cannot be gainsaid that at least he holds to a version of philosophical realism, which is metaphysical, i.e., it says something about the existence of the world, its relation to mind, and the concept of truth. Additionally, Putnam considers himself a part of the analytical tradition and he uses Gödel in his later critique of the original functionalist thesis. He is also in the same tradition in his unconcern for ethical and historical issues, but this, of course, reinforces the possibility of analyticity as a tendency wholly different from the philosophical tradition going back to Classical Greece.

Fodor seems to be another kettle of fish. His philosophy is based on language acquisition (Chomsky and generative grammar) and in general on how mind grasps and understands reality (cognitive psychology). However, he is neither a linguist (he merely makes certain linguistic assumptions) nor an experimental psychologist, and he deals with these disciplines in an argumentative, basic-principles philosophical fashion. He himself would probably disclaim any affiliation with metaphysics, but he bases his thought on a Cartesian metaphysical approach (the problem of other minds and so on), and the least that can be said is that there are metaphysical implications in his thought. Therefore, he too would seem to be part of the traditional philosophical mainstream.

However, these issues are not so easily answered in connection with artificial intelligence, which can be considered the radicalization of philosophical functionalism.

It is possible to make certain distinctions within artificial intelligence
--the technology of artificial intelligence, including work on connectionist models;
--speculations on its possibilities (Hofstadter);
--speculations on its implications for the knowledge of mind and on the mind/body problem.

The first category is certainly not philosophical in any sense. The second category does not actually make philosophical claims, although it does recur to certain manifestations in the analytical tradition, such as the work of the analytical logicians and of Quine. Although it does have philosophical implications, and it is overtly epistemological, it is in a grey area, but this grey area also comprises the logicians, whom we have accepted as legitimate contributors to the analytico-philosophical tradition. Therefore, the second category does merit marginal philosophical categorization, and indeed it is possible to refute Hofstadter's thesis upon strictly philosophical grounds. The third category is undoubtedly philosophical in the latter sense and in the sense that it is not solely concerned with the technology of artificial intelligence, but rather filters philosophical thought through the artificial-intelligence technology and its implications.

Physicalism is based on the proposition that, given the unreliability of introspection, the best way to understand the working of mind is through the study of the brain and the nervous system. The fundamental physicalist axiom is not entirely original. Physicalism cannot quite disentangle itself from the primary reliance on so-called folk psychology, i.e., the data about mind that is gathered by mind itself, and it is this that reveals its fundamental incoherence. Claims about future progress in neuroscience are basically meaningless. In the final analysis, physicalism is the "philosophical" justification of the physiological pre-emption of psychology, and as such it is neither psychology, nor physiology, nor philosophy. Its affiliation to philosophy of mind is mainly established from its polemics with philosophers in other, more plausible fields of speculations about mind.

The case for neurophilosophy and artificial intelligence as philosophy is frail. If they are philosophical, it would be like scraping the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, and it would depend on how involved they are with the philosophical mainstream. Nevertheless, history could shed some light. Some thought that was once considered strictly philosophical was later categorized as more properly in another discipline (Herbart and the subconscious) and some philosophical systems that were the rave of their time have been "downgraded" to minor philosophy (positivism). Therefore, from a contemporary, immediatist perspective, neurophilosophy and artificial intelligence are only marginally philosophical in the sense of the historicity of knowledge. This approach allows a lot of margin within philosophy for marginal thought, and it still respects the philosophical tradition. But the case is not strong.

There is another possibility of categorizing American philosophy of mind, as well as the entire analytical tradition. It is the idea that analyticity constitutes a philosophical cycle of its own inaugurating a wholly new tradition: one which is in part a denial of the old traditions. This idea can be justified with various arguments. Both analyticity and philosophy of mind have scientific pretensions, which were part of the philosophical baggage up to the 18th century but not beyond. Unlike traditional philosophical outlooks, analyticity and philosophy of mind not only freely accept but also actively seek inputs from non-philosophical sources. Analyticity brought to philosophy a strong concern for language. Both analyticity and philosophy of mind deny the epistemic value of consciousness, which was not questioned in the tradition and is still a respectable tool in existential and Continental philosophy. Consequently, analytical philosophy of mind is radically different from philosophical psychology. Both finally, although implicitly systemic, do not make overt claims on traditional systematism.

The general purport of these arguments is that analyticity and its philosophy of mind offshoots, constitute something of a clean break with the past. But where then do we place them if not in philosophy? On one hand, there's no evidence that they have made scientific contributions, not even to experimental or cognitive psychology. The flow of knowledge is from science to analyticity and not vice versa, and in fact Quine has been faulted for his persnickety arguments about the underdetermination of theory, not excluding scientific hypotheses. Fodor's language of mind thesis is a hollow shell, a research program, taken from Chomskian linguistics, itself not without its critics. And on the other hand, analytical and philosophy-of-mind thinkers themselves have never disclaimed the philosophical nature of their thought. However, these are negative arguments of the sort if-not-this-then-necessarily-that (elimination).

And there is a positive line of argumentation, which is the affiliation of analytical philosophy of mind with Cartesianism. Descartes was the "founder" of dualism. Dualism introduced fundamental uncertainties about the relation between mind and reality. From this feature of Cartesianism, which is almost, one could say, even more pellucid in Kant than in Descartes, flow some of the fundamental preoccupations of modern and contemporary philosophies. To confirm all of this it is only necessary to compare the Aristotelian synthesis with the Kantian synthesis or with the principal philosophical themes after Descartes. Therefore, even though core analyticity is not specifically Cartesian, it has an ultimately Cartesian outlook, it probably could not have arisen from a tradition not imbued by the Cartesian awareness of mind. In sum, it merits inclusion in the Cartesian cycle.

There is the question of language, which is not a Cartesian motif, but being in a philosophical cycle does not necessarily require full adherence to the restrictions or limitations within that cycle. It is possible to make contributions within the evolution of the cycle. The linguistic approach to mind is an analytical contribution to general philosophy, but it is not exclusively analytical--there is a linguistic tradition in Continental and existential philosophy--and the exploration of meaning has always been a philosophical endeavour and what analyticity did was to make it stand out, gave it value in itself rather than as a means to further goals.

In the case of analytical philosophy of mind as part of the Cartesian cycle, the arguments come to hand with ease, because its practitioners make it so. Ryle's philosophical psychology was a systematic, point-by-point refutation of Descartes and his influence on philosophy of mind was strong both in England and America. British philosophy of mind is Lockean and empiricist and empiricism is Cartesian in perspective (the world is grasped as mind). In America, philosophy of mind, in all its variants, including physicialism, has deep Cartesian roots. In this respect, it is pertinent to recall that one of the branches of Cartesianism contributed crucially to the disciplinary autonomy of psychology and that it is from this achievement, fully realized in the 19th century, that experimental psychology and its cognitive subdivision were begotten.

Even though it is possible to maintain the distinction between philosophy and experimental psychology, one branch of the American version of philosophy of mind either derives from or merges with experimental psychology, and specifically its cognitivist branch. The relationship is not unlike the one between mathematical logic and a philosophical system such as Quine's.

Dennett evinces with utmost clarity, perhaps better than all of his colleagues, the basic features of American philosophy of mind: its twinned affiliation to experimental psychology and to Cartesianism. Dennett is Rylean by his own emphatic and admiring admission. But he does his own refutation of Descartes--different from Ryle's in that he is not partisan to the dispositional theory of mind--in the course of which he proposes a set of images in substitution of the Cartesian stage metaphor. Now it might seem that a fundamental critique of Cartesianism would signify escaping from the Cartesian cycle, but in fact Dennett's refutation, which is not as conclusive as he thinks--he keeps using arguments that willy nilly revalidate or rejustify cartesianism--actually place him foursquare in the Cartesian cycle. In addition, Dennett is also closer to experimental psychology, as well as to cognitivism and to abnormal and medical psychology, than other American philosophers of mind. In fact, Dennett's thought, which also forays into neurophilosophy and into connectionist practice and theory, probably at this point in time represents the most thorough attempt at a synthesis of all of the main themes and avenues of research within American psychology of mind.

From the positive tack that we have taken towards American philosophy of mind, it would seem the that it is a legitimate active part of the philosophical tradition, and not just by willful choice or by default, although the negative argument is itself also valid. But we should not from all of this belittle the characteristics of analyticity which singularize it within the capacious Cartesian cycle. In other words, despite its cartesianism, philosophy of mind has its own peculiar say, which can be described as a form of anti-cartesianism within the Cartesian tradition. The point is that we cannot entirely cut it off from its roots, not in any event at this stage.

What can we in a general sense conclude about the relation of American philosophy of mind to the philosophical tradition? Although American philosophy of mind is affiliated to the analytical tradition and has recognizably philosophical features, it is marginally systemic, often only implicitly so, and tenuously affiliated to the philosophical tradition. Since the tradition is there, which affiliates it with philosophy is general, but not the systematicity, we have here arguments to the effect that philosophy is not necessarily systemic. Or that if it is systemic it is only by implication in the sense that if you are a realist in metaphysics you will have a realist ontology and be a realist in ethics.

SUMMARY

It remains to bee seen whether:
(1) philosophy is recursive;
(2) philosophy is cyclical.

Cyclical it certainly is not, for there are no "closures" in philosophy. Recurrence though is a fact of philosophical life. How far it is definitional is arguable. Having said all this, what we have done is to add to the rational definition of the categories of philosophical thought--being, knowing, doing--a historical perspective in which we recognize certain philosophical traditions: ontology, epistemology, and ethics. To these, mind was added by Descartes and history by Hegel. It could be argued that what we have done is to discover a manner of historical confirmation for what we had deduced before from "pure" reason: ontology is about being, epistemology is about knowing, ethics is about doing.

The history of philosophy reveals certain characteristic: tendencies, fundamental concerns, recurrent themes, etc. Systematism is of philosophy at its origins. The growth of scientific knowledge by Kant's time confined systematism to the rigorously philosophical themes of being, knowing, and doing. When Comte tried going back to the systematic tradition of Aristotle, he failed. Nietzsche replaced systematism with aphorisms. Today philosophy is systemic only by implication. My philosophy is both systemic and coherent, although to finish it I might have to recur to Nietzsche's method.

Descartes introduced dualism into philosophy. Dualism was the beginning of the separation of psychology from philosophy. It is also one of the roots of philosophy of mind.

Augustine speculated about history in itself. Herodotus and Thucidydes thought about historiography. Augustine's thought was meta-historical. All meta-thought is philosophical. However, Hegel was the first systematic thinker on history, no matter that what he thought was mostly rigmarole.

Analytical philosophy was epistemological. It was rooted in Kant: to achieve irrefutable general propositions about experience, such as the definition of truth. It contains and implicit/explicit denial of dualism. The combination of renewed concern with dualism and the analytic tradition gave rise to philosophy of mind.

Philosophy therefore is the concern with the most fundamental concepts in a systematic or implicitly systematic way to which over time the issues of dualism and of history have become indissolubly attached. It is not cyclical but it has a tendency to recursiveness.

History and time

The only way to mitigate the problem of the iffiness of knowledge is from history. The inferences that cognition yields are not necessarily either necessary or apodictic. Cognition can yield interpretation. If interpretations on all possible issues converged, they would be necessary, but such is not the case, and interpretation is nearly synonymous with divergence and controversy.

Time encompasses everything. The discipline that comes closest to the comprehensiveness of time is history. We can speak of time in relation to all events. We can speak of history in relation to all events that have a public and collective significance. However, this distinction raises difficult issues. What the distinction amounts to is that history does not encompass all of time. Since time does encompass all of being, then history is not equivalent to being, and the history/knowledge codependence relation entails that knowledge cannot be fused with being for it is not equivalent to time. Essentially, this means that being includes not just knowledge as the valid contents of propositions but also error whereas history does not. And our argument that knowledge and being are the same requires that history be equivalent to time. Time also includes transient experience and private matters, neither of which would be part of history as per the above public-and-collective definition of history. And how can we exclude private matters, e.g., from being? The fact of the matter is that the time/history distinction is non-existent. History and time are equivalences and history includes error, transiency, and private matters. All events, however insignificant, are all, if not historical, potentially historical. And why not? After all, if Henri IV is history, then he is history even when he is in bed. And there is no denying that the Ptolemaic system is part of history. In sum, we would like to exclude from history many things that are ineluctably part of history. But this means that we open the way to argue for the equivalence between history and time as a solution to the problem of dualism.

History as mainstream

History is intimately related to time. It can even be described as a sub-category of time. In a fundamental sense, history is the past. In the sense of the events of the past, it is history proper. In the sense of the way the events of the past are recovered it is historiography.  

Since history is about the past and the past is divisible, then historiography is divisible. Also, since past reality (the expression is pleonastic) is polymorphic, historiography to the extent that it "reflects" the past must also be polymorphic. The divisibility of past time leads to the periodization of history. The polymorphism of reality leads to specialization within historiography. Periodization and polymorphism are the basis for the forms of historiography. When historiography assumes the denial of periodization, it is world history. However, there cannot be "the denial" but always "a denial".  

Does history comprise all of being? If natural history is a token of the type history, then history comprises all of being. But we assumed duality. On a fundamental level, duality is the distinction between awareness and non-awareness. It seems also possible to distinguish between what can be called our private lives and public events. All events are potentially historical. History seems to be self-validating. It is history and not an abstract criterion that determines what is and what is not historical. History is not equivalent to being. 

History embraces all of knowledge. This can mean that knowledge is historical in a very elementary sense. Science in this sense is historical. Science derives authority from history in so far as history is the compendium of long-term trial-and-error. But knowledge is also historical in a more complex sense, which is also a frankly epistemic sense. In this sense history is identified as vox historiae, which embraces all the processes by which history validates, inclusive of individual cognitive processes in themselves, but primarily in reference to public, collective processes. Newton invented "fluxions" (calculus) in private, but it was the means for the public formulation of gravity. If history validates, then history makes knowledge possible. History is the middle term that makes knowledge and being equivalent. However, the story does not end here. How can we know that history is really validating? 

The future is one aspect of time that has no being.  It would appear as if history could have no commerce with the future. Yet in so far as time is continuous it necessarily "points" to the future and history being a subtype of time (although this sub-category has not been made clear) it must also be in some way about the future. One way that can be immediately discerned is that history is only really validating in terms of the future. For history to be knowledge it must "have a future". History is both validating and self-validating in the "long run". 

This can mean one of two things that make immediate sense and can lead to other sensible possibilities. Either history is being led by an intelligence that makes sure that humanity takes all the right turns or self-destructiveness in humanity is anomalous. The notion that history obeys ultimately constructive tendencies, perhaps rooted in self-preserevation, can be associated directly with subconscious cognitive processes. History is the result of our determined specific selves.  

In history, events are grasped as meaning something, in themselves as being one thing or another, and in different relations to other events. This sort of meaning is perfectly compatible with an overall conception of history in which events as a whole do not mean anything at all. They occur one after another towards no realization or goal beyond themselves. They just happen indifferently for good or ill. Humanity exists for the sake of existing and it could end in a second. 

History could connote meaning as in a novel or in classical Greek drama. Meaning of this sort implies an ethical perspective that is not compatible with the complexity of historical events. From a world-historical perspective, meaning in history might refer to the pattern of the rise and fall of civilizations. Despite its breadth, this version of history is founded on an implicit comparison with the cycle of existence, and it is also perfectly compatible with overall meaninglessness. In fact, the cycle of civilizations could, from an economical perspective, seem like a lot of waste.  

Meaning in history could perhaps lie not in the events of history in themselves but in further events towards which present events are labouring. There could be a purpose in history whether we can see it or not. But this is like trying to defend meaning without knowing what meaning is in the first place. We may be able to move on if instead of purpose we proposed direction as the highest possible expression of historical meaning. Insofar as direction could be towards some specific end, we would be involved in the impenetrable issue of ultimacy, unless we appealed to some conceptual intermediation that could reveal patterns or forces in historical events. History may not consist in a blind thrust towards nothing, but its rational interpretation need not require the specification of ultimate purpose. The meaning of history, then, could be history itself--the short-term past that defines our historical present, but as well any "present" in the past--as a thrust or direction according to rational patterns or forces.  

Do these patterns or forces conform what could be called a mainstream of history? We cannot speak of a unity of history as we can of the specificity of self. The study of history cannot be oriented around one basic idea, such as knowledge or being. Time cannot fulfill this unifying role either. History is time but it is time without a center, time as multiplicity and variability. We know what our individual present is, but the present of history has different meanings depending on the perspective that we adopt. One way to give the complex diversity of history a manageable conceptual reference is to recur to the mainstream metaphor, which could also function as a means to put reasonable limits on subjectivity. 

The comparison of history to a river seems at first blush to run counter to our perception that history involves an unmanageable multiplicity of variables in an unmodifiable past. However, a river too, at any specific point in time, is an unalterable and complex manifestation of the past. Besides the mainstream or river bed, it can have channels forming islands, empty bends or meanders, shallows, sand banks, and so on, and this means that the mainstream itself is the result of a long and complicated process. The mainstream of a river illustrates two things that characterize history: a continuous "flow" and a discernible direction. But no metaphor is perfect. It is constrained by its surrogacy role.  

A river can be known from source to end whereas history cannot be charted beyond the present. A river at any one point in time is a complete physical entity whereas history is the constant becoming of the past. Theoretically, of both history and mainstream it can be said that a perfect knowledge of the past would allow the prediction of the future. In the case of the river, it would be possible to calculate its downstream course from a perfect knowledge of its hydrology and of the downslope terrain and its geology.  

The ultimate irreducibility involved in this metaphor is that the spatial reference of mainstream can only take us so far and no longer in comprehending the temporal nature of history. Time and space seem to merge when the physical "upstream" can be expressed in the abstract temporal "previous", but "downstream" is useless for the unpredictabilities of the future. Since time is the condition for both awareness and history, a purely spatial metaphor is necessarily of limited usefulness. Nevertheless, it is with the image of a river that the ancient Greeks characterized the passage from life to death (Styx), that the Hindus express the idea of the sacred (the Ganges and the Brahmaputra), that Heraclitus characterized reality, that Julius Caesar for all time embodied the notion of defiance (crossing the Rubicon), that Kant bolstered his refutation of Hume's description of causality, and that psychology sometimes defines the human mind (stream of consciousness). 

Whatever benefits we can derive from the mainstream metaphor, two things are not to be expected: historical truth and a way to end controversy and struggle. Assuming that history follows a mainstream, what lies outside the mainstream would be historically irrelevant. The measure of relevancy and irrelevancy is success or failure. This sounds like a solid proposition, a sort of gold-standard for the interchange and debate of historical propositions. Unfortunately, failed historical movements, even the most virulent forms of ideological fascism and totalitarianism, will always have partisans, and their contentions must still be countered. The concept of mainstream does not make historical failures "inherently" or "self-evidently" refutable. Mainstream is a neutral concept-metaphor. Its possible influence as arbiter on events or debate is nil. Its usefulness in the search for the direction of history lies not in that it offers means to avoid the din and uproar of controversy, but in that it implies the proposition that meaning can only be found in certain formal aspects of history, not in the events themselves but in persistent traits that can be derived from events and which can be identified as patterns and forces.  

The present "privileges" itself. The tracing of the mainstream of history is only possible from the historical "configuration of the present". But the definition of the "present" is a problem in itself. There is no "present" insofar as it is, on the level of the individual, only an instant, and on the historical level, a conventional definition of pastness. From either perspective, the present can only be described as the "future" going into the past. So what is it that makes the historical  present so "meaningful" that we would dare project from it an unmistakable world-historical direction? We live in a conventionally defined present and it is inevitable that its issues and events should be the field of interpretation about any possible future. But what the previous question boils down to is that the concept of a historical mainstream places us again in the circularity of the meaning of history lying in the becoming of history itself, which is the sort of whirligig that we wanted to avoid with the mainstream metaphor. We can provisionally and cautiously advance towards disarming this circularity by proposing that the mainstream of history is determined by the fundamental aspirations of humanity, hardly less vague than our claims about patterns and forces, except that at least we seem to be inching beyond the concepts of patterns and forces towards their possible definition.

 One thing that history is not about is justice. If anything, history might even be closer to another metaphor: the one expressed in the crude phrase dog-eat-dog. The concept of justice is one of those that, like void or emptiness, can best be approached from its contrary. The void is the absence of being. Justice is the absence of injustice. A more concrete way of putting this is that justice requires the absence of unmerited suffering in the relations between human beings. Since suffering is a subjective standard that can encompass anything from torture to a perceived slight, the qualification of injustice, if it is to have more than a trivial personal connotation, must be removed from the area of individual experience and judgement. The substitution of the subjective standard of suffering with notions such as "harm" or "death", does not make what are at best very difficult ideas any more manageable, for the notion of harm is as subjective as that of suffering, and if injustice were to be restricted to the unjustified or arbitrary privation of life, then the ideas of justice and injustice would become hopelessly intractable. An airplane crash or a natural disaster would be paradigms of injustice and the perfection of justice would consist in infallible means for resuscitation.

 Since the rule of law, which can only make abstract claims on justice, is the closest that this concept has by way of an external correlate, justice cannot be said to be "rationally self-evident". Humans say: "we want justice done", but what this means is: "we want the law applied", or "we want this situation to cease", or "we want compensation or redress", or "we want vengeance"; but none of this has anything to do with justice, because no one can do anything about injustice. Since justice can only be said to be possible without the impossible elimination of injustice, justice can never be obtained from so-called demands for justice, and more significantly, justice is non-injustice and cannot actually be given a valid definition. Justice is just a figure of speech and a dramatic ploy. Once an injustice has been committed, it is inalterable: there's nothing that can be done about it.

It is particularly sarcastic to speak of justice in the case of a man who is released after having spent decades in jail for a crime he didn't commit. However, the temporality of justice and injustice also has its advantages. The perception of injustice is, and can only be, awareness of the past, and as such, it must yield to the exigencies of time. Even the man unjustly condemned has at some point to accept that he got a raw deal and there's nothing he can do about it. If the sense of injustice is swallowed up in time, so is justice, and our coming to terms with both concepts from historical awareness must consist in their denial as plausible references for the justification of the idea of meaning in history.

The difficulties involved in trying to make the concepts of justice and injustice relevant to history do not mean that it may not be possible to establish rough balances of right and wrong within discrete historical situations. Our definition of the present as a short-term past delimited by concrete or specific temporal references implies that the awareness of the present is a discrete though variable situation in itself. Idiographic or specialized historiography is based on the possibility of delimiting such discrete situations in the general or long-term past. The determination of right and wrong in historical awareness is a complicated and controversial task that entails (1) the problem of establishing the verifiable contents of history and (2) the difficult casuistics of specific issues. Abstract principles are useless in determining right and wrong in historical situations. Without an objective assessment of the circumstances surrounding concrete historical situations, it is not possible to determine where right or wrong lie, although very seldom exclusively on one side of issues.  

It is a common practice in historiography to pretend to steer clear of casuistics by staking a claim on strict investigative objectivity, but such claims can usually be shown to be spurious either from the assumptions behind research, or from implicit value judgements at any stage in the process of research, or from any of the inevitable manifestations of the historian's opinions and attitudes. However, the complications of historical research do not necessarily invalidate judgements about right and wrong in historical issues. It could even be said that such judgements themselves can serve to delimit areas of research and to orient the process of research, as when Appeasement, which was a policy with complex moral implications, is used to designate a specific if brief period of 20th-century history. Lest, however, we get carried away by the possibility of prematurely re-introducing an ethical dimension into the historical past, let us be reminded that such balances and comparisons would not attenuate the stark irreductibility of historical outrages. The idea of discrete balances of right and wrong tends to lose its appeal when confronted with the reality of an historical outrage such as the Holocaust, for here we sense that the facts of history refuse the bounds of rationality.

The monstrous character of the Holocaust can be read as a flat denial of the gradual coming to terms with the aspirations of humanity involved in the metaphor of a historical mainstream. All attempts to "rationalize" the outrage of the Holocaust either by belittling its dimensions or by trying to make it fit some pattern of signification are worthless. The crassest manoeuvre consists is dismissing the Holocaust as bloated incidents no different in essence from the ordeals of the Waffen SS in the USSR. The utmost indulgence that could be mustered for such a view, would be that it reveals an inability to cope with the reality of evil, which results, literally, in putting the blame for it upon its victims.

The denial of the historicity of the Holocaust is usually a neo-fascist ploy and hardly deserves attention. But well-intentioned, if agonizing, arguments from the undiluted, unfalsified contents of history are often a factitious grasping for meaning. It can be argued that the Holocaust permits a positive interpretation in that it variously contributed to (1) the definite extinction of German militarism and expansionism, (2) to the historical demise of fascism, or (3) to the Western post-war consensus on democratic practice and world peace. However, in view of the ravages of Nazism and of the bitter-end struggling of the German nation in WW2, it is difficult to maintain that the Holocaust was necessary to establish the over-all pattern of events after the war. Such arguments attempt a rationalization of suffering, but they cannot diminish the crushing impact of the Holocaust in itself. They also contain a decisive argumentative flaw in that they assume that history makes sense in the way a novel or a scientific treatise make sense. This claim is vitiated through the intension of purposefulness in a discrete situation characterized by cross-purposes and circumstantial necessities.

But if the outrage of the Holocaust cannot be dissimulated neither can it in reason be made to stand alone. It is in all its horror part of the ancient and open ledger of the suffering of humanity. The true historical context of the Holocaust is not a discrete historical period, but all of history. The criterion for a historical mainstream only requires that the forces and conditions that permit or perpetrate historical outrages should not prevail. The Holocaust could constitute a denial of a mainstream of history if it were part of the present, but it can stand out in its being in the present as a reasonable reference for defining a short-term past only in the sense in which the post-war is now be a receding present. The Holocaust is part of history but it cannot be made part of the present reality of history. It is not now and it never was in the mainstream of history.

There is one sense in which the Holocaust is part of the present and that is in its being a specific "cause" of the Jewish nation. Despite Nazi thuggery against other nations and groups--Slavs, gypsies, communists, political dissidents, homosexuals, et al--Jews perceive that they were its principal victims. The Holocaust partly justifies that perception, but what it mainly does is characterize the ferocity of Nazism. The Jewish view of Nazi ferocity is perfectly understandable, but it cannot justify the exclusion from the Holocaust of the mass of atrocities against non-Jews. It is only human that we should feel with greater intensity a historical outrage because it was perpetrated against a group to which we belong, but what is not so understandable is that our concern should have engendered a set of attitudes that implicitly demarcate a mass of suffering from the shared tragedy of human suffering. What all the victims of Nazism, and not just Jews, have in common is that they lived all the horrors of life in a concentrated form. Death camps were the acme of the Nazi nightmare, but the concentration camps and all the other atrocities committed by Nazism cannot be excluded from it. Jews float in the mainstream of history like the rest of mankind. As a particularly heinous historical outrage, the Holocaust can be interpreted as the embodiment of an "anti-mainstream", were it not for the utter defeat of the forces behind it. The only glimmer of "justice" that history emits is the possibility of a mainstream in the unfolding of events, for this would be the only way to "explain" how it is that such evil as the Holocaust represents did not prevail. 

Conditions in the present are not such that would make likely, or even possible, the repetition of an outrage such as the Holocaust. But can we be sure of this? Are the apparent achievements of our times really representative of the mainstream of history? Is it not possible to conceive that the rational and humane tendencies in human affairs that seem to be struggling not entirely unavailingly to prevail today might also fail and that other tendencies and manifestations, which we now see as failures, could replace them? Behind the façade of the present there could be other patterns and forces at work and the façade itself could mean nothing. We seem to have emerged from the nuclear tunnel (if even this), but what we see in the landscape is mayhem: war, massacres, intolerance, ethnic factionalism of the most poisonous sort, social and economic inequalities, not to mention the possibility of the damaging side-effects from technological "progress". It can be said, once again, but with perhaps more conviction than ever, that "we live in the best of times and we live in the worst of times". How do we know that the mainstream of history will not turn into a raging white torrent? Or that in some way its course will be skewed? 

The historical usurpation by Jews of Arab lands that occurred with the creation of the state of Israel has kept the Middle East in a condition of instability since then. Israel made things worse by overflowing its boundaries and settling parts of the lands that remained to Palestinians. In the sense that no people can impose itself on another without expecting a backlash, this was going against the historical mainstream. This situation got worse when the Arab reaction took the form of an airborne terrorist attack against New York. But what really constituted a deliberate counter-flow to the mainstream was the American invasion and destruction of Iraq. "War on terror" itself, which was the American response to Arab terrorism, was a concept and a policy that went against a common sense appreciation of what constitutes the mainstream of history. But even these aberrations, particularly from the nation that itself has been in the middle of the mainstream since its creation, do not mean that history is now going backwards. American policies in the Middle East have generally been repudiated, even by the American electorate, which initially supported them. Israel sooner or later will have to make concessions to Palestinians. The mainstream hit a rocky narrows creating powerful rapids, but this does not portend a change of direction. 

The idea of a mainstream of history entails the cognitive unity of mankind, which is the foundational proposition that it forms one genetic pool and cannot be segmented or partitioned into superior and inferior groups. Above a certain level of social complexity, humanity's known ability to reason has been the same throughout the ages. Chaldean astronomy, the Hebrew Bible, Vedic literature, Chinese ethics, Greek philosophy, Roman jurisprudence, the Latin Patristic--they all attest to the same basic human rationality. The systemic pseudo-rational denial of the cognitive unity of humanity is expressed in the Western doctrine of racism. There does not exist any reliable scientific verification for that claim. From the present state of research in paleo-anthropology, it is likely that modern man first evolved on the African continent and from there spread very gradually, but did not move completely, to the rest of the globe. If claims of Western racism are to be believed, whites must have acquired their superiority at some time after the emergence of the human species. If this superiority was environmentally determined, then it must be circumstantial and transitory. The alternative hypothesis has to be that it was in some manner inalienably "given" to whites, but this only underscores the irrationality and incoherence of such a proposition. Racism is an accident of history and it does not represent a serious obstacle to the idea of a historical mainstream.

From the premise of the cognitive unity of mankind and on a very large historical scale, we can interpret the evolution of human events from a common source, first, towards cultural diversity and, then, towards the prevalence of basic social forms. This is, in essence, what conforms the mainstream of history. On the whole, difference are more pronounced as we go back in history and sameness tends to increase. Emphases vary from culture to culture in the past but rather than to fundamental differences these variations advert to the interactions between human groups and their environments. The general historical pattern of the reduction of diversity can be compared to the concept of knowledge, as when sensations produce perception, or as when nature is conceived in terms of regularity and predictability.

The tendency of history towards basic social forms is a result of Westernization. Inter-cultural disparities cannot be predicated except in finite historical terms. The inequality of nations implicit in the international political category of a third world can likewise be explained as the product of relatively short-term socio-economic disparities of environmental origin, often reinforced through political means and cultural prejudices, that will work themselves out over time. It might have been Western civilization that generated the world-historical circumstances that have made possible a historical mainstream, but given the briefness of the colonialist interlude, when the West imposed itself by force on the rest of the world, it is likely that colonialism only accelerated a process that was bound to occur anyway.

To summarize so far: meaning in history as some kind of ultimacy is like blindsight. The concept of direction, however, leaves us well short of easily refutable concepts involving world-historical purposes and ends. Direction suggests the metaphor of a mainstream of history, which can be useful to contain the impetus to read into events more than they warrant. Mainstream of history presupposes that humanity as a whole has certain aspirations, survival being the most elementary. Assuming these aspirations, we can also surmise the patterns and forces that configure the historical mainstream. From the "present" as the only historical perspective open to humanity at any time, it can be argued that the trend of the mainstream of history is towards certain basic forms that embody the fundamental aspirations of mankind. For this, we need to be more precise about the latter two concepts and how they relate. Is it even possible to make a real distinction between them? 

The most striking manifestation in our times of the mainstrean trend towards basic social forms is the breakdown or failure of ideologies, which can be descried principally in the collapse of Soviet communism but also to some extent in the critique of ideological capitalism. The Soviet collapse, which was prefigured in the earlier failure of third world ideologies, can be explained from the inability of Marxist doctrine, as concretely manifest in Leninist and Stalinist praxis, to satisfy fundamental human aspirations towards material well-being, social equity, and intellectual freedom. Marxism extrapolated backward and forward an interpretation of history from a flawed analysis of 19th-century industrial society. Ideological capitalism argues from contrafactual propositions in order to refute Marxism, but the thesis of capitalism as the mainstream of history is also difficult to sustain because of the powerful tendency within capitalism towards the extreme advocacy of strong social inequalities.

Ideologies represent a schematic awareness of history. The practical side of ideologies consists in the political application of rigid socio-economic programs. As instruments of analysis, ideologies bring to bear on the contents of history inflexible principles with nomothetic pretensions. They have proven less than accurate as means for the interpretation of history. Historical events would seem to be flowing in the general direction of increasing "social openness", which is the polar opposite of ideological constraints. In all fairness, however, even if the thesis of ideological capitalism as mainstream is not tenable, it can safely be said that it is much closer than communism to the ideal of social openness. Capitalism and democracy have the same Western historical roots. It is their commitment to social openness that permits rectifications of the sort embodied in the critique of ideological capitalism.

Insofar as it stands at the other extreme of despotism and arbitrary power, social openness implies democratic values leading to the enhancement of individual existence. This proposition needs to be translated in terms of statistics such as those in the UN human development index, but it also has to include abstractions such as "means of redress" and cultural, religious, and intellectual rights. Claims about "social caring" under communism are meaningless if they dissemble and justify the reality of political tyranny and enforced conformity of thought, which are a virtual guarantee that such claims are probably spurious anyway. As an alternative to the practical and theoretical rigidities of ideologies, the force of social openness can be discerned in historical trends that lie below the surface of events, in the sense in which it can be argued that the Second Russian Revolution occurred because of the humanist Marxist roots of the October Revolution, or that extreme Islamic fundamentalism, for all its ostensible energy, is a movement foredoomed to self-exhaustion.

On the theoretical side, social openness twins with the principle of inconsistency, which is a rational foil to ideological rigidity. It stands in relation to the schematic awareness of history as social openness to the inflexible application of socio-economic programmes. The principle of inconsistency is inescapable in reference both to action and to the interpretation of history. In respect of action, it states that at some level or at some stage all political options are inconsistent. In history, it is only by accepting some very latitudinarian version of inconsistency that a mainstream can even begin to be imagined. Given the complexities of events today, the principle of inconsistency also means that issues are never resolved. They linger on after imperfect settlements, which may or may not work, are gradually and grudgingly reached. Ultimately, what inconsistency implies is the acceptance of imperfection and the need for compromise. It is more or less inevitable as what is commonly known as the art of the possible, but raised to the level of doctrine. As it stands, however, the principle of inconsistency is quite unsatisfactory, at the very least in not shedding enough light on how the fundamental aspirations of mankind translate into the patterns and forces in the mainstream of history.

In seeking for some precision on the aspirations of mankind as the basis for a historical convergence on the basic social forms that characterize the mainstream of history, we focused on the breakdown of ideologies, particularly the dissolution of the USSR and the downfall of Soviet communism, and came up with the concept of social openness as the opposite of political despotism and enforced intellectual conformity. We proposed that the theoretical side of social openness is the principle of inconsistency. A brief exploration of this idea alluded to the well-worn nostrums of political compromise. This is fine but trite. If inconsistency is inevitable, it is also a non sequitur: it does not configure per se a coherent social and political position. In search of an alternative to ideologies beyond this purely formal outlook on issues, we now appeal to the concept of marginal choice or marginal consistency.

This concept can be initially understood as the explanation of how it is possible to remain consistent in principle while seeming inconsistent on issues. It is therefore the necessary underpinning of the principle of inconsistency, which merely states without explaining that social openness, as opposed to the rigidities of ideologies, often if not always leads to ambiguous and even contradictory attitudes. The historical failure and consequent uselessness of ideologies seem to make inevitable the adoption of apparently contradictory positions on issues depending on the circumstances that surround them. If it is to work, the principle of inconsistency must in some manner also allow the coherent possibility of consistency, an apparent contradiction that has to do with marginal choices. Such choices are possible when all contingent circumstances surrounding an issue have been resolved, or when the issue is not burdened with such circumstances, and what remains is either a stark pro or con option. Marginal in this context refers to an uncrossable line, or more dramatically standing at the edge.  

A commitment to economic freedom might find itself hampered by social or political complications, but once these are dispelled, or even if they are not entirely dispelled and it comes to a basic choice between opposing alternative policies, then it can be said that a choice for economic freedom is made at the margin where fundamental attitudes have to be asserted. Assuming a commitment to economic freedom, it would be incoherent to adopt a fundamental or marginalist position based on the argument that it could eventually or in other circumstances contribute to economic freedom. Realistic anti-fascist and anti-racist stances could place us in the position of having to compromise with forces that are not consistent with our ultimate objectives or with our core principles. We could be forced to accept the reality of autocracy in order to moderate or curtail the operation of autocracy. In these situations fundamental commitments must remain inviolate. It is on the margins where compromise is no longer possible that it is necessary to choose between basics.

Marginal consistency involves the combination of a core of principles with total flexibility on specific issues, which means essentially that in any debate there is greater room for compromise than for principled inflexibility. It could be argued that if marginal-choice consistency originates in a commitment to a core of democratic principles, it could as well be said to derive from a commitment to ideological principles. But this is only possible if one loses sight of the origins in the principle of inconsistency of marginal-choice consistency. Inconsistency and marginal choice work for social openness. Otherwise, they would only be a façade for ideologies to re-insert themselves into the historical mainstream.

As long as marginal consistency is maintained, it is possible to be on different sides of the same issue at different times. There must be an underlying commitment, but once this is clear, it is possible, indeed necessary, to be seemingly or superficially inconsistent. When politicians assume one position and then another, one can deduce that politics is about power, but also, from a marginal choice perspective, that realism in politics is a necessity. What these arguments claim is that there is an alternative to ideologies consisting in the unhindered search for rational possibilities from a principled stand nuanced, at times beyond recognition, through case-by-case analysis. Marginal consistency is principally about choice and debate in an era in which ideologies have lost efficacy. Below the issues there are the principles. Marginal choice involves adherence to principles, but adherence to principles gives leeway for the principle of inconsistency. Conversely, just as marginal consistency offers alternative means away from ideological stances, so it can function as an epistemic tool in support of a theory of coherence. With respect to vox historiae marginal consistency or marginal choice opens the possibilities of partial validation, transitional validations, and "un-decidable issues".

Anti-racism is a fundamental stance. Assuming a mainstream in which anti-racism is a matter of principle, racism should eventually succumb. Failing to prove this is not compelling enough to abandon the concept of a historical direction and therefore the anti-racist idea that racism will be overcome is a marginal choice that re-affirms the core anti-racist principle. Will this validate any anticipation on the future of racism? No more and no less than any other ideas on the becoming of history, for validity is not involved in connection to any of them. The mainstream argument is a package. We could argue that science too involves such packages, but this won't take our ideas on social issues any closer to validity. The mainstream concept itself could be considered to result from a marginal choice, so that we could say that we make marginal-choice commitments on the basis of a previous marginal-choice commitment. Talk of history is circular and we can never decontaminate reason from circularity in dealing with historical issues. But however circular historical thinking may be, it is indisputably on the edges or margins where they risk being diluted or destroyed that core principles are tested and re-affirmed.

Since the mainstream metaphor implies an over-all direction in history over-riding all competing directions, it involves a margin of tolerance for provisional or transitory deviances. A historical mainstream is inconceivable without the principle of inconsistency, which will not work without marginal-choice consistency. Consequently, marginal-choice consistency is the necessary explanatory complement on the social and political level for the concept of a mainstream of history. Just as marginal choice allows a claim of fundamental consistency behind the appearance of inconsistency, so it also sustains the possibility of a historical mainstream. Simply put, history points to a mainstream, but much of history constitutes a denial of a mainstream. Marginal consistency can serve to refute the historical denial of a historical mainstream. Conversely, since marginal choice allows a realistic assessment of possibilities, it is an approach to issues that puts a premium on the awareness of the contents of history. Marginal consistency is the necessary flexibility underlying the conceptual possibility of a mainstream of history constantly beset by contradictory evidence.

There is one point on which the concept of a historical mainstream interdicts the operation of the principle of inconsistency and of marginal choices and that is the absolute rejection of counter-factuality as a means of historical interpretation. It is not uncommon to come across arguments to the effect that it had been better if the USSR had never existed. It is also possible to argue that better Marxism than fascism. Suppose facing Hitler there had been an autocratic Tsarist Russia, or a democratic Russia for that matter. An autocratic Tsarist Russia would (a) have joined Hitler (b) have opposed Hitler (c) have collapsed before Germany. A democratic Russia would have opposed Hitler? Would have resisted better than Soviet Russia? Is Hitler even conceivable without a Bolshevik Revolution?

Once one takes this path, one can make one's premises and derive whatever conclusions one desires. Objectively, it is a fact that the Soviet Union wanted to oppose Hitler at the time that Great Britain was championing Appeasement. This fact can be interpreted in many ways, but it cannot be changed. Stalin's crimes are deplorable, but even so the Russian commitment to Marxism was historically more influential, if only because it lasted longer, than the German commitment to racism and genocide. Whatever counter-factual arguments can be mustered against it, Marxism is inconceivable without the "background" of the Industrial Revolution. It is from such an unbreakable chains of events that the mainstream of history is constituted including the fact that the USSR turned its back on Stalin and finally evolved towards the dissolution of its own totalitarian system. Things are as they had to be. They cannot be changed. Had communism in Russia been crushed before it had time to fail of itself and by itself, then conceivably it would still be very much a live, competing option, or at rate, much more than it is now. But this is just another example of the sort of counter-factual reasoning that is not compatible with the idea of a historical mainstream. 

The existence of historical patterns and forces as the expression of the fundamental aspirations of mankind licenses arguing for a direction in events that can be represented in the mainstream metaphor. Ultimately it is those aspirations that determine the course of history. The direction of the mainstream is towards basic social forms bringing about cultural uniformity. The principal agent in this process is Westernization, partly because of its commitment to rationality, partly because of transitory disparities between cultures determined by the interactions between social groups and their environments. It is possible then to argue for an identification between mainstream and Westernization. But beyond Westernization, the purport of mainstream is that it responds to and promotes the fundamental aspirations of mankind through the operation of rational patterns and forces leading to the spread of basic social forms.  

Over and above survival, the aspirations of mankind are material, social, and intellectual. The basic forms which they promote can be encompassed with the concept of social openness. Social openness is of a piece with the principle of inconsistency, which claims that beyond marginal-choice consistency all political options are inconsistent. The historical mainstream flows, like a river, through twists and turns. Inconsistency is complemented by an argument for fundamental choices about the core of principles. Together, inconsistency and marginal-choice consistency are the mechanisms that make possible the direction of history. They are to the metaphorical mainstream as hydrology and geology are to a real river bed.

In relation to the patterns and forces in history we mentioned the elementary idea of survival and argued against the historical significance of the concept of justice, in fact against any possibility of its coherent specification. One way of summarizing fundamental historical aspirations is that mankind has sought through the ages the rights to a livelihood, to appeal against "wrongs", and to profess group-beliefs freely. At a more advanced point of social development, those elementary aspirations become the concrete goals of material well-being, social equity, and intellectual freedom. Both sets of aspirations and goals can be traced to the desire of humanity to endure. Some of the patterns that conform the mainstream of history are cultural density and complexity, which lead to cultural inter-actions, and technological and scientific advances.

An unmistakable historical pattern is the possibility of the periodization of the past. Periodization, as one of the basic means to structure and organize historical events, is fundamental to historiography. There are multiple historical patterns--sedentarization, war and peace, economic cycles, etc.--but our intention here is not to do a review of historical processes. Our basic argument is that the forces and patterns of history tend towards the difficult objective of relative social openness. Our claim is not that social openness has been achieved anywhere or even that it is achievable, but that it is the one component of fundamental human aspirations that can define them in a global manner. Basically then mainstream becomes manifest in social forms, which can be defined globally in terms of social openness.

If the mainstream of history becomes manifest in basic social forms--such as democracy, economic freedom, an independent judiciary as the means to seek redress, the mechanisms through which societies have tried to temper the unfairness of extreme economic inequality, and so on--then these basic forms only imperfectly reflect the ideal of social openness. They are, however, tenacious as a tendency towards cultural uniformity. Although we still live in a world of nations and nationalism appears to be on the upswing, especially in those nations that have achieved a high degree of social and economic development, the evidence of current superficial trends does not stand up well to the pressure of deeper and more persistent forces, such as those that in an astoundingly short time begat the collapse of the USSR and launched the process of the dismantling of communism in the country where it got its start.

The crisis of ideologies is one of the crucial arguments that the present offers for a historical mainstream directed towards basic social forms and cultural uniformities. If the aspirations of mankind can be embodied in basic social forms, then the trend of the mainstream is towards social openness and the concepts of basic social forms and social openness are complementary, as is mainstream through the reciprocity of inconsistency and marginal choice. Marginal-choice consistency can be said to determine the evolution of events, for it is through such a stance that it is possible to explain how history can be the expression of trends towards social openness and cultural unoformity which appear to be contradicted by the surface of events.

In our approach towards history it is assumed that there is a fundamental cognitive unity of humanity and that there exist fundamental human aspirations, which can ultimately be defined as the enhancement of the value of individual existence and the corollary of social openness as the most practical if very imperfect means to that end. The mainstream of history lies in the contents of history that are most acceptable to or compatible with the aspirations mankind. Even without its utter destruction, the political force of Nazism was counter-historical in its espousal of mass murder as a policy, which was as if a society had abrogated the laws against homicide. However, just as there is no tangible historical mainstream and social openness is the expression of a paradigm, so the aspirations of mankind as such cannot determine anything let alone the contents of history. They are an abstraction from the events of history, hence a quasi-metaphysical concept, and it does not do much good going back to history to discover their incarnations, for we will find nothing there that confers human faculties on abstract concepts.

The concept of fundamental human aspirations concretely entails that personalities do not determine the course of history and more importantly that events are not fortuitous. A way to support this assertion would to argue from counter-factuality--if De Gaulle had not existed, the Allies would have invented him--but it is not allowed from our commitment to the mainstream metaphor and inconsistent-choice consistency. The latter principle is at the antipodes of what could be called the for-the-lack-of-a-nail school of historiography. As to personalities and events, when we contemplate the history of the Byzantine Empire it becomes perfectly clear that in its apogee as in its decline the best rulers and the worst rulers and the victories and the defeats did not make a whit of difference to the ultimate outcome. The most that can be said is that in the decline the bad rulers came thick and fast, but there were also bad rulers in the good times and good rulers in the bad times. Another valid observation--slightly out of the central focus on the Byzantine Empire--is that the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the coming of the Dark Ages did not contain an over-all and homogenous retreat or deterioration in all fields of social activity. True, Classical culture foundered but in its place a different culture, partly constructed on that of Rome, grew and built upon itself without pause.

However, this still leaves us facing the problem that fundamental human aspirations do not have a will of their own. It could be said vaguely and obliquely that they "promote" the historical becoming of what is most acceptable to themselves. This implies that humanity exists for its own sake and that it is history as it unfolds that reveals the direction of a historical mainstream. The aspirations of humanity are not always explicit, or even undisputed, but the general course of history seems to have been shaped by them. It is towards these aspirations that history seems to be converging. When all is said and done, this is all that we can derive from the mainstream metaphor. The least that can be said is that such ideas afford us a general orientation in the tangle of events, like being in a jungle and knowing that the sun travels from east to west, which can be helpful if we keep in mind that looking directly at the sun can very quickly result in blindness.

What these ideas and arguments do not tell us is how the fundamental aspirations of mankind translate into the patterns and forces that determine the mainstream of history towards social openness and basic social forms. Assuming that history is the concretion of the aspirations of mankind, what is it about or within history that gives it form and direction permitting over and above chance and the actions of individuals and the contradictory policies of states the discovery of uniformities and trends? For an answer, we have to recur once again to the principle of inconsistency and of marginal-choice consistency. These concepts refer to the instruments of historical meaning. But they too are abstractions and need to be placed in context. At the historical level, the principle of inconsistency holds that the equivalent concepts of direction, historical patterns and forces, basic social forms, and social openness can be upheld without the need for history to show at every turn that they are operative. It is the claim that inconsistencies are inevitable but not necessarily incompatible with the over-all consistency of events. At the personal level, the principle of inconsistency involves choosing, and volition, as we have argued at length, can be fully explained as the result of human cognitive processes.  

The specific or real self is constituted by specific propositions. If there is volition, it must involve every action and every thought and every action and every thought must be for a purpose. We live from one instant of awareness to another instant of awareness and this succession appears to be somehow "directed". Directedness implies a source. This source has to be the self. Since the object-self is a theoretical construct of cognitive theory, then volition must involve the specific self. Just as cognitive theory alone cannot account for belief, so it cannot account for volition. There is no volition different from cognitive processes involving the specific propositions that constitute the specific self. To put it very succintly, the specific self is constituted by a hierarchy of propositions derived from the inter-action of basic cognitive processes. The specific self entails self-perservation. Choices are the result of the application of cognitive processes to the hierarchy of propositions that constitute the specific self. It is manifest in the prevalence of certain propositions as thought and as "motivations" for conscious, physical behavior. Volition is a result of cognition, and the principle of inconsistency, which involves volition, is also a cognitive phenomenon.  

Marginal-choice consistency is the "relation" that reveals the coherence behind apparently inconsistent and even contradictory cognitive operations. It is also a crucial expression of the possibility of historical patterns and trends. In the cognitive scheme that we proposed to explain volition, marginal-choice consistency corresponds to the "hierarchy" of propositions proper to any specific self at any point in time. Propositions prevail in the individual depending on the operation of basic cognitive processes, but the results are always specific. No matter how disparate or inconsistent the results of those processes, they are always consistent with the specificity of self. At the historical level, marginal-choice consistency explains why it is possible for historical events to be consistent with each other regardless of seeming inconsistencies.

If the principle of inconsistency is the claim that the mainstream of history metaphor holds despite contradictory events, then marginal-choice consistency is the argument that events that would tend to undermine the metaphor can be shown to be transitory or of lesser significance than those that indicate a direction in history towards basic social forms and social openness. Both inconsistency and marginal-choice consistency are primarily cognitive derivations of the specific self. They are cognitive propositions and cognition is individual as opposed to historical or collective. So how does their cognitive character affect history? Specifically, how can cognition, which is a property of individuals, serve to demonstrate that it is possible for quasi-metaphysical principles derived from history--essentially, the concept of fundamental human aspirations and its derivations--determine history? How do the cognitive processes that specify volition and the principles of inconsistency and of marginal-choice consistency affect the course of events?

The present is the instant of recognition, which is the essence of awareness. The present is an unavoidable if ephemeral component of time between the past and the future. Cognition is a very complex process involving innate basic cognitive propositions and the application of propositions to propositions to obtain derived propositions. Any event in awareness must be the result of the process of cognition, but since awareness is but a fraction of time the process of cognition has to be taking place elsewhere than in awareness and that elsewhere cannot be anything other than the subconscious. We can have the results of cognitive processes in awareness, but it is not possible to have at the same time the processes whereby we can think or be aware. We think in the subconscious and not only do we think in the subconscious but the greatest and noblest faculties that we attribute to ourselves exist and operate in the subconscious entirely beyond our reach and power of manipulation. 

Awareness is the tip of cognition. It is constituted by successive acts of recognition, but it does not determine the specific self or the choices individuals make. All determinations about the specific self are done in the subconscious. Any other supposition would imply the impossible feat of simultaneously having two different thoughts or of being aware of all the principles of logic even as we do logical operations. From the historicity of human events, we can infer that it is not possible to be engaged in history and to be determining the course of history at the same time. We cannot both be part of a larger process and have full control over that process.  

Since history is the result of human actions, which are the product of subconscious cognitive processes, then history itself must be the product of subconscious cognitive processes. The mainstream of history is not a conscious choice but the product of the interactive behaviour and thought of individual human beings acting from subconscious cognitive processes. Even if it could be possible to explain the history of mankind from the actions of individual human beings, we would still be arguing for the operation of subconscious cognitive processes as they interact and become manifest on a public, collective stage. But history is not determined by individuals or by fortuitous events. If there is a "historical engine" it has to be humanity itself, or to be slightly more precise, the aspirations of humanity as they are expressed through the subconscious cognitive processes of specific selves. All of history is the result of subconscious processes and humanity is being driven by forces over which it has no control but which so far seem to be imbued by forces that favour its survival and its very gradual improvement, with the occasionally major setbacks.  

But if subconscious cognitive processes determine the course of history, on what basis can we claim that history follows a mainstream towards social openness? What is there about these processes that would favour the fundamental aspirations of mankind? Or that would affect the course of events towards basic social forms and cultural uniformity?

The subconscious processes that characterize cognition determine the behaviour of individuals. In the aggregate, they determine the course of history. In the individual, subconscious cognitive processes are oriented by the principle of the self-preservation of the specific self. But there does not exist an aggregate as such in history which can be said to correspond to the specific self. Furthermore, to say that subconscious cognitive processes determine history is merely to say that history is made collectively by human beings. Since the events of history do not obviously have the preservation of any specific self as an end in itself, the closest correspondence to specific self that there can be in the aggregate for subconscious cognitive processes must be the fundamental aspirations of mankind.

Specific selves do not exist in isolation. They are social beings and they participate in historical processes. The specificity of self is not self-generated. It is formed through the interaction of the individual and society. The principle of self-preservation embraces the specific self as individual and as member of society. The goals of cognition in history are those that we have proposed for humanity in general: the realization of basic social forms favorable or inclined towards the general objective of social openness. There is no incompatibility between the specific self and the fundamental aspirations of mankind. Self-preservation applies to the individual as a specific self immersed in society and however modestly contributing to historical processes. The thesis of the determination of history by the subconscious cognitive processes of specific selves is based the integration of collective goals as specific objectives of specific selves.  

Cognition occurs in the subconscious. Existence is material and its basic imperative is survival. Judging from what humanity has achieved subconscious cognitive processes build up to higher goals from the fundamental principle of self-preservation. These goals are contained in the concept of the fundamental aspirations of mankind. They can be included in the broad category of basic social forms conforming to the objective of social openness. Implicit here is a process that goes beyond the subconscious cognitive processes of specific selves. The notion that history obeys ultimately constructive tendencies rooted in self-preservation can be associated directly with subconscious cognitive processes. History is the result of our determined specific selves.

However, the mainstream of history, which has to involve the future as much as the past, must be found, if anywhere, in a coherent explanation of why the fundamental aspirations of humanity must prevail over other historical forces, or of why social openness and the enhancement of the value of human life have a better chance than ideological constraints or political despotism. But from the awareness of historical becoming we can derive no overwhelming demonstration of why this must be so. Our dilemma is that meaning in history as we have so far defined it implies that humanity exists for its own sake and that history realizes its meaning in its own becoming and for neither of these propositions have we greater "proof" than the contents of history, whose interpretation can never set itself beyond the polemics of history. History has no meaning beyond itself and the confirmation or validation of meaning in history depends upon history's becoming.

The epistemic relevance of history is mainly in connection to interpretations. It is in this sense that we speak of vox historiae, which is the processes by which history validates, wholly or partially, controversial propositions. If history through the public, collective processes designated as vox historiae can be said to act as an arbiter of knowledge, then this would seem to constitute "evidence" or at least a very powerful argument for the meaning of history, which, as we have argued, is the assumption that it has some kind of direction, that it is not a blind thrust towards nothing in particular. The problem is that here we are putting the horse before the cart. We are assuming a mainstream of history that is expressed epistemically as vox historiae. The propositions that history validates are interpretations which are theoretically part of the mainstream of history. Basically we are arguing that a metaphoric interpretation, albeit an assumption about all of history, validates other interpretations, and this appears to be the same circular trap that we cannot escape when we utilize historicist arguments.

One common ploy is the presence of God in history. God's duty is usually to be rescuing an individual here, an individual there, at least from the claims of the rescued. Putting these bits and pieces together it could be argued that God's really important task is to rescue all of mankind from its own self-destructive proclivities. In abstract terms, God in history is the becoming of being. The totality of being that finally is the only possible realization of the fulness of meaning in history is conceivable only from the idea of the absoluteness of being. History can have meaning only if it is "guided" by a transcendental absolute, for it seems as if all concepts that we derive from history about "direction", "mainstream", "meaning", etc., in history are vulnerable to the rational criticism of circularity. However, given man's inhumanity to man it would be difficult to understand how the qualification of being could have an ethical significance or to argue that the being of history is a value in itself. In the end, however, the most telling argument against "divine guidance" is that it beggars reason to an inordinate degree to imagine that God acts upon history by directly manipulating events on a day-to-day basis. 

If we banish from history the concept of justice and the possibility of divine intervention, we are left for interpretative purposes only with the historicist circularity and this amounts to choosing between believing or not believing in a historical mainstream. However, it might not be quite as dreary as it sounds. To start, meaning in history as the direction of the historical mainstream is an unassuming alternative to the imposssibility of discovering ultimate purpose in history. It has nothing to do with justice. Once an "injustice" was committed that was the end of "justice", which is a figure of speech for the possibility of appealing against perceived wrongs. What matters are balances of right and wrong in discrete periods of time. Balances of right and wrong are never complete and final, because the idea itself of the mainstream of history implies the openness of historical becoming. If history has a plot, it is a plot that is continually unfolding and our balances of right and wrong are chapter summaries that give no hints to a specific dénouement.

But are we really so devoid of guidance about what the future may hold? There are certain possible replies here. One basic piece of evidence for a mainstream is that whatever crimes and excesses humanity is capable of, there are limits it hasn't crossed and does not appear to be willing to cross. The nuclear holocaust, for one, has not materialized. Humanity has not been disposed to commit collective suicide. Another reply is that despite much scepticism, history does not seem to be entirely futile. We cannot convincingly argue for any teleological version of history, but the future may not be entirely unpredictable. There are strong grounds for believing that human progress is real, at least in the sense that the average conditions of life for humanity have improved and are improving. Whether they will go on improving is another question.

The future is one aspect of time that seems to have no being. It would appear as if history could have no commerce with the future. Yet in so far as time is continuous it necessarily "points" to the future and history being if not synonymous at least an important subtype of time it must also be in some way about the future. One way that can be immediately discerned is that history is only epistemically validating in terms of the future. For history to be knowledge it must "have a future". It is possible to have reservations on the historical validation of interpretations--although we fail to see any alternative either to man's propensity to interpret events or to history's intervention as the vox historiae arbiter of controversies--but one would have to be inordinately obdurate to deny science and its foreseeable progress in the future, in whatever sense any one chooses to define progress. So if all else fails, we can always rely on science to embody the mainstream of history. But all else does not fail and science and the future of science is the crown in a chain of argumentation which concludes in that all we need for a philosophy or an interpretation of history is some anticipation.

There is one aspect of the world-historical process that might help us decide whether the preservation of humanity is a fluke or part of the process of achieving its fundamental aspirations, assuming the cognitive unity of mankind, which includes the basic propositions that human beings singly and collectively have shown time and again what it is that they want and expect from history. The aspect we have mind is the one that relates to knowledge. By knowledge we can mean two things here: the accumulation of knowledge and the process through which knowledge is obtained. It is on the process of knowledge then that we base our interpretation of history. The accumulation of knowledge has come about through the same subconscious cognitive processes to which we attribute the determination of history. Since there is no way any one could conceivably faulted in talking about the progress of science, then we have reason to take heart about history and the future of mankind. There is however one catch, but very important because it has to do with interpretation and interpretation is the kind of cognitive process in which all we can feed logic are probabilistic propositions. To try to solve it we invoke history. Knowledge as interpretation is what "history" determines at any given moment. Is history "right"?  

It would then seem as if (1) there is some point in teleology, yet (2) the events and trends for which teleology might be invoked do not require teleology and (3) it is perfectly possible for history to be "right" and yet very "imperfect". The refusal of teleology, in other words, does not in fact invalidate some vague sort of feasible anticipation. What it invalidates is "cosmogonical" or millennialist teleology. But teleology as "rational trends", even philosophy of history in a mildly predictive way, remains a possibility of thought. Science gives history a ballast it would otherwise lack. It would be possible to do a history of the world as a history of knowledge, including the errors along the way, which might not make the history of social and political events less controversial, but which would certainly have more coherence than the history of the world has from the usual socio-political perspectives. Beyond this, teleology is guesswork. We can only suppose that humanity will survive and that history involves some kind of progress.

Grappling with the problem of interpretation led to history and history to the concept of vox historiae. Cognitive historicism is circular: the historical validation of any proposition is subject to its possible, though not necessary, invalidation in the future, which will be subject to more future, and so on. We have sought for help in escaping from this circularity through philosophy of history. However, philosophy of history is more interpretation, which requires vox historiae sanction, and this means that at best what we can achieve through our exertions is that some additional interpretation will provide support to our previous interpretation. What's worse, philosophy of history necessarily involves the future and the future is not predictable. But it is not predictable in the detail. All that philosophy of history implies is some anticipation. The only anticipation that we indulge in with some assurance is the progress of science. So in order to try to validate our theory of knowledge we appeal to history and to make our appeal to history stick we appeal to knowledge. It is not quite as circular as it sounds. We can anticipate with a reasonable degree of probability more than science. Science reinforces our anticipations concerning the fundamental aspirations of mankind. But most tellingly, historicism is the only way to accommodate all theories about the validation of interpretations and therefore if it is not the solution to the problem of the iffiness of knowledge there does not exist one. This non-answer to a what, in very strict practical terms, could be a non-problem, may not be bad at all.

History of philosophy

Reality is the starting point of this or any philosophy. What is reality? Reality is the diversity of being. But it is also all that is thought as well as all that accompanies thought or is implied by thought. Affects, e.g., accompany thought. Thought implies, e.g., "squiggles" (language of mind). In other words, reality can be approached as something outside of mind, as the actuality of the world, and it can be approached as representation in mind.

Realism is the belief that external reality is real, that it obeys logic and laws, and that it corresponds entirely to its representation in mind. Realism is the proposition that there is no fundamental difference between my representation of the world and the world itself. Realism, finally, is the doctrine that the principal object of philosophical concern is the world as such rather than the world as representation.

Dualism is the belief that there are two realms of knowledge with two different sets of principles and laws: the realm of the physical world and the realm of mind.

Idealism is the belief that what is real and constitutes the principal object of philosophical study is the representation of the external world. Idealism is not necessarily a denial of the existence of the external world, although it can lead to such an extreme position.

In the history of philosophy, the main difference between realism and idealism resides in where the emphasis is placed in relation to the definition of reality: whether on the external world or on the representation of the external world. The extreme of idealism is represented by some derivations from Cartesianism and the extreme of realism is represented by some analyticity and by behaviorism. However, no matter how you cut it, representation is unavoidable. Behaviorism solves the problem by identifying representation with behaviour. Analyticity identifies representation with expression. Thus, realism in contemporary analytical philosophy is understood either in terms of behaviour or of language.

Solipsism is the extreme derivation from Cartesianism which posits that we can only know our individual representations of the world, not the world itself, and certainly not the representantions in other minds. For all intents and purposes, this means that we do not even have our own representations, which are but figments corresponding to nothing. The work of most idealist philosophers has consisted in devising theories to counter the inertial tendency of Cartesianism towards solipsism.

Subjectivism has different definitions. It can refer to the belief that all knowledge is unreliable. It can more plausibly mean that knowledge must be ascribable.

History of philosophy and philosophy of history

(A) History of philosophy and philosophy of history

History of philosophy and philosophy of history are prima facie two distinct categories. The only systematic attempt to have the history of thought inform a philosophy of history was Comtean positivism. It is considered of minor philosophical importance. A philosophy of history can, but need not, take into account the history of philosophy. Hegel argued that the process of history was the becoming of spirit. Spirit is both the guiding principle of history and the objective of history. Beyond the principle itself, Spirit is an extrahistorical entity with a will of its own. In so far as it is consciousness, history is the gradual realization of Spirit. Hegel's philosophy of history was built upon a set of related metaphysical concepts which attempt to encompass the events of world history. Whereas in Comte it was a theory of mental evolution--analogous to the history of events--that served as basis for a philosophy of history, Hegelian metaphysics as such do not single out the history of philosophy but comprise all of history. In Comte the history of thought, hence in a very wide sense the history of philosophy, served as a model for the philosophy of history. In Hegel the metaphysics provides the means for the interpretation of history. With neither Comte nor Hegel can we really argue for a very close relation between the history of philosophy and philosophy of history.

Despite their self-evident differences both categories share common terms, which can be inverted meaningfully. This is not the case of such terms as philosophy and science or history and science. Though not unheard of, it is not usual to say the science of philosophy or of history, although it is common to say the philosophy or the history of science. Philosophy and history are related in a special way. We shall consider history of philosophy and philosophy of history singly in succession in order to get a clearer focus on each one. Afterwards, we can try some kind of summary on their possible relations and points of contact, if any.

(i) History of philosophy

What is the history of philosophy? What does it reveal? How can we characterize it? Is the history of philosophy one huge historical cycle of thought? This is hardly the case, for we have no evidence that philosophy is an activity with a beginning, some sort of cultimation, and an end. As part of history, it cannot be described as a finite process. A simple description would be that it is a structure, even a narrative structure, exhibiting changing agendas which determine broad and far from discrete stages or cycles. The history of philosophy is a specialized branch of historiography. It is built on a combination of facts, probabilities, and interpretations. The epistemic problems and the "solutions" pertinent to history of philosophy are the same as in the rest of historiography.

Propositions on the interpretation of the history of philosophy refer (1) to its categorization into historical periods and (2) to the way philosophical doctrines originate, evolve, and relate. Although this distinction can be justified in diverse ways, its results are not reciprocally independent. The categorization of the history of philosophy depends on the nature of philosophical ideas but the latter are in turn influenced by the historical periods or cycles of philosophy. It is possible to study Kant's arguments in themselves and to determine their origins and consequences. Hence, we could speak of a "Kantian watershed" or some such concept whereby Kant himself constitutes a reference for historical categorization. But to fully understand Kant, it is also necessary to consider the history of philosophical ideas before him, and especially the ideas that explicitly or implicitly influenced or even oriented his thought. It is a legitimate question to ask how much or how little Kant's thought is indebted to those ideas. Hence, the categorization of the history of philosophy to some extent can determine the interpretation of individual philosophies and their precise historical positioning.

If we consider philosophy as an historical entity, then the history of philosophy can be thought of as the only reasonable, consensual definition of philosophy. Philosophy itself would then be the continuing stream of speculation on the agendas in the history of philosophy, including the present. Since the definition of philosophy is a legitimate philosophical issue, history of philosophy is a philosophical discipline in the same or equivalent sense as other philosophical disciplines or branches. Furthermore, since the definition of philosophy encompasses philosophy of history, the history of philosophy could serve as the bridge between the two disciplines that we have found, on a first approach, difficult to relate to each other.

There are other reasons to consider the history of philosophy not only as a branch of historiography but as a part of philosophy proper. To do the history of philosophy means to do philosophy, second-hand if you will, but philosophy nevertheless, with the same methods, the same premises, the same fundamental concerns. This means that the historian of philosophy is to be considered in the same category as the ontologist or the logician or the ethicist. It could even be argued that, given its multidisciplinary approach, history of philosophy has a greater general claim on being philosophical than any specialized branch of philosophy.

The fact remains that the historian of philosophy mostly, at best, reduplicates work done before on philosophical issues by other philosophers. Even on the question of the definition of philosophy, it is usually assumed that philosophy has been defined by others and what the historian of philosophy does is remit previous thought on definitions, formalizations, or specifications of philosophy. The specific historico-philosophical issues we have mentioned, such as historical categorization and the re-enactment of thought, are ancillary to core philosophical concerns at any point in history. Issues such as why a group of philosophers constitute a historical "movement", how some body of thought derives from another and leads to still another, when and why leapfrogging and crossreferencing across historical periods occur, and so on, have no direct bearing on the core issues in any philosophical agenda. We would not, for instance, consider Kant's refutation of Hume as the fulcrum of his philosophy, even though it is central to any history of philosophy. The question then comes up: even if doubtlessly a form of philosophizing, does history of philosophy contribute to philosophical debate? Can it "advance" philosophical thought in any way? Has it ever initiated a new cycle of debate or closed a previous one? History of philosophy appears to be philosophy only in a very limited sense: it partakes of philosophical methods and concerns but it is, formally, a division of historiography. Does it ever go beyond this towards original philosophy?

(ii) Interpretations of the history of philosophy

There are different ways to approach the history of philosophy. There are "standard" histories with conventional periodization, often derived from general historiography, such as Ancient Classical Civilization, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on. There is considerable degree of consensus in this approach. Philosophy is contextual. All philosophers and philosophical movements or tendencies reflect historical situations. Historical periods and philosophical thought can be said to be reciprocally dependent, although it is never the case that philosophy initiates important historical changes. Roman civilization did not have a philosophical origin, although there was Roman philosophy. Ancient Greek philosophy, for all its importance to history of philosophy, had nothing to do with the birth of the polis or of classical Greek art. Histories of philosophy then reflect historical periods. They are as as close to historiography as they are to philosophy, whose methods and concerns they assume. Nevertheless, the history of philosophy, however strong its affiliation to historiography, is fundamentally philosophical in nature and as such it legitimizes an area of philosophical debate.

There is a way to approach the history of philosophy which is closer to philosophy than to historiography. This can be observed when the "historian" is a philosopher interpreting the history of philosophy. In such cases, conventional historiographical categories are disregarded. Interpretations are more important than the establishment of facts, which really has very little part to play. Frequently in this approach certain philosophers, or even one philosopher, are used as reference for interpretation and periodization. History of philosophy of this sort can be exemplified in contemporary works by Rorty, Vattimo, and Craig.

(a) Richard Rorty, Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c. 1979

"Philosophy can be foundational in respect to the rest of culture because culture is the assemblage of claims to knowledge, and philosophy adjudicate such claims."

In strict logic, Rorty here is identifying culture with philosophy, for how can you assemble claims unless you previously determine what they are claims about.

"It can do so because it understands the foundations of knowledge, and it finds these foundations in a study of man-as-knower, of the `mental processes' or the `activity of representation' which makes knowledge possible. To know is to represent accurately what is outside the mind; so to understand the possibility and nature of knowledge is to understand the way in which the mind is able to construct such representations."

Descartes conceived mind as the "container" of mental processes. In Locke mental processes lead to knowledge. And from Descartes and Locke, Kant took up the task whereby philosophy adjudicates claims to knowledge from its privileged understanding of epistemology. But post-Kant came a radical separation between science and philosophy, so that philosophy could no longer be considered to be the tribunal of "pure reason". Further, both analytical philosophers and phenomenologists could not offer philosophical grounds for knowledge beyond their specific concerns. Wittgenstein denied that representation could encompass mind itself. Heidegger pointed to the divorce between science and philosophy. And Dewey modified the Hegelian version of historicism. From these thinkers, it ensued that philosophy was not foundational in the previous Kantian sense, that the study of mind did not yield the knowledge of representation, that in fact there could not be a specific philosophical study of mind.

Rorty admits that the agenda of analyticity is similar to that of Kant, but only in form: presumably, not in their motivation or their objectives. The philosophical project of investigating the foundation of all knowledge can only subsist as apologetics, if it subsists at all. Previous authoritative philosophical constructions can be understood in terms of images. Rorty says that Heidegger discovered the source of Cartesian images in Ancient Greek philosophy. He himself claims that in Descartes and Kant the image of mind is the mirror. What Rorty finds in philosophy now is the substitution of a pragmatic view of knowledge for the concept of knowledge as representation. And in lieu of apologetics, he sees history as the arbiter of validation in philosophy. Finally, he posits a contrast between "systematic" and "edifying" views of the role of philosophy. The upshot is that Rorty's insterpretation of the history of philosophy places Kant at a cusp between the past eminence of philosophy and its relativized role afterwards.

Brian Rotman on Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture (Oxford: Polity) in TLS, April 7-13 1989, p.373

Vattimo's argument is as follows. Philosophy attempts to grasp being through history. Behind this proposition is the assumption of progress, or, in other terms, that history is the concretion of validity. In Western philosophy, Nietzsche and Heidegger deny that role to history. Nietzsche's philosophy is a tacit and not so tacit debunking of all overt and implicit premises of all previous mainstream philosophy. Among those premises are the meaningfulness of  history, some kind of cosmic order, a hierarchy of moral values, well-meaning society, and so on.

"Nihilism's project is one of unmasking. What it has to show is how the whole apparatus of reason built on logic is nothing but a vast system of persuasion: logic is rhetoric, truth an illusion produced by argument; and all differences such as essence/appearance, rational/irrational, true/false and so on, lacking any grounding in an absolute outside themselves, have no more authority than the language and the culture producing them."

What Nietzsche and Heidegger claim is that technology results in non-historical immobility. A. Gehlen defines post-modernity in terms of that proposition. Fukuyama represents a sanguine version of the immobility thesis. Technology implies that progress consists in the total "secularization" of knowledge. But the thesis of technological progress is equivalent to immobility, hence to the denial of progress as consisting in goals other than the progress of technology itself, which is like going nowhere. There is, therefore, an opposition between secularization and a goal-oriented historical process. Secularization, in sum, constitutes a denial of philosophy of history. Philosophy of history posits a unitary process of events, that is, a coherent world-historical process. Assuming technological immobility, contemporary historiography consists in "many histories", which is a denial of the essence of philosophy of history. Vattimo himself does not agree with this reduction of the scope of historiography and the denial of philosophy of history. The position of Nietzsche and Heidegger is, in a sense, the denial of ontology. But Vattimo interprets this denial as the opening up of possibility. This possibility consists in the search for truth is aesthetics.

"For Vattimo modernity is that stretch of Western thought from Descartes to the  late 19th century ruled by the metaphysical system of God-guaranteed absolutes such `truth', `reason', `history'; and post-modernity becomes the era inaugurated by Nietzsche's celebrated proclamation of the death of God and the consequent secularization of all human affairs...nihilism's project can understand itself only through the language of that which it seeks to dissolve ("pensiero debole")." In the modern version of history: "the absolutes of progress and Hegelian overcoming". Post-modernism is a search for a weak version of history, truth, reason, and being. God was the sanction for morality and social absolutes up to the 19th century. Nietzsche argued against this assumption. Vattimo sees this démarche as leading to nihlism and the denial of truth, e.g., logic as rhetoric. Post-modernism would then be the search for a weak version of the equivalence between history and being. But this version is strong enough to constitute a denial of total nihilism.

John Cottingham on Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man (Oxford: Clarendon), in TLS, October 30-November 5 1987, p. 1201

In Craig's analysis there are two Weltbilds. Weltbild one is superseded by Weltbild two. The prevalence of Weltbild one means that the image of God is dominant and that man is a quasi-divine spectator of nature. Weltbild two is the "agency theory", according to which man is a "being that actively creates, or shapes, its own world".

"In the second half of the book Craig charts the gradual recession of the Image of God doctrine and its replacement by a still dominant world-picture [Weltbild] which he calls the `Agency Theory' or the `Practice Ideal'. No longer a quasi-divine spectator of reality, man becomes `a being that actively creates, or shapes, its own world'...Yet the Agency Theory as conceived by Craig is not simply a matter of seeing man as more actively involved with his environment, but has a deeper metaphysical dimension: the environment comes to be seen as something we not merely encounter but create: `the realities which we meet with are the works of man'. Or again: `As a participant [in the making of reality] Man is autonomous, his creations subject to no controls and no standards other than those which he himself imposes; and with this thesis of man's autonomy comes the corollary image of the surrounding, unresisting but also unsupporting void in which he has henceforth to make his way'."

The philosophical character of this interpretation can be clearly seen in the following argument. The question of the existence of a real world outside of mind was of fundamental concern to philosophers from Descartes to Kant. It is not an issue that has bothered philosophical thought much after Kant, or approximately in the last two centuries. Dummett's anti-realism, for instance, is not about the existence of things but about the validity of propositions about things. This change can be explained from Craig's perspective. A world-picture dominated by the presence or the concept of God can accomodate scepticism about the world. But that man makes the world--or that such is the idea that men have--as to some extent has been true since the heyday of the coal-and-iron industrial revolution, means that there is no way that man himself can doubt the existence of the world

In other words: if man makes the world, how can its existence be doubted? Aron considers that all history of philosophy is of this sort, or so it would seem from this quote: "La constitution d'une histoire de la philosophie exige une philosophie qui à son tour se constitute historiquement."

These interpretations of the history of philosophy are specifically philosophical in themselves. But are they different from derivative, "history-based" histories of philosophy? History of philosophy is necessarily re-enactment of philosophical arguments and themes. There is no history of philosophy which is not philosophical at the very least as doing philosophy at a second remove from direct philosophizing. Historico-philosophical thought places itself in a terrain which is equidistant from philosophy and historiography. Nevertheless, even within derivative history of philosophy positions emerge and philosophical debate arises. The philosophical interpretations of the history of philosophy that we have summarized here are part of the legitimate philosophical debate embodied in wider and more conventional histories of philosophy. They are historiographical and as such belong in the general category of history of philosophy. But in this category, because of their less derivative approach to the history of philosophy, they tend to drive this discipline further in the direction of philosophy proper. 

There are two caveats to be entered here. One is that histories of philosophy in the conventional history-based sense are engaged in a specialized but marginal debate and unless they participate in current philosophical debate their philosophical nature tends to remain derivative. They can be part of current debate when a philosopher seeks to defend a position by marshalling philosophico-historical support or background, but in such cases specific interpretations of the history of philosophy are secondary to the main thrust of philosophical positions. In this sense history of philosophy and specifically philosophical interpretation of history of philosophy are of secondary importance to the current philosophical debate itself. The second caveat concerns the greater philosophical pretensions of general interpretations of the history of philosophy such as those we have summarized above. The problem is that there does not seem to exist an agenda proper to the philosophical interpretation of the history of philosophy and without this it is difficult to sustain the claim that such interpretations belong to a well-delimited or precisely defined field of philosophical thought. Conventional histories of philosophy raise issues about the interpretations of specific philosophers, of philosophical works, or of trends, movements, and schools within the history of philosophy. To this sort of interpretations also belong the idiographical or opuscular literature devoted to specific issues within history of philosophy. But general philosophical interpretations of the history of philosophy are akin to interpretations of world history and in these as in those there is no general agreement or consensus on what the debate is about. They are metaphysical in that they break with the conventional historiography of philosophy, but they do not transcend to an area of recognized or identifiable metaphysical debate. Such works are constrained by the historiographical limits which they seek to break through, which means they keep falling back into the category of conventional history of philosophy. Their contribution to philosophical thought is diminished because they cannot escape from a philosophical category which is ancillary to current philosophical debate.

There exist historico-philosophical attempts to enter the mainstream of philosophical thought. This approach is present in Gracia and in Dummett for almost identical purposes. They have tried to find "bridges" between opposite tendencies in modern philosophy by going back to the sources of those tendencies. Specifically, they address the oppositions between analytical philosophy and philosophical thought in the phenomenological or existentialist tradition, sometimes also circumscribed to or described as continental European philosophy. Gracia believes that by going back to the sources of divergences between these traditions it may be possible to find common grounds for a dialogue. Dummett is more specific: he has tried to discover the ab origine similarities and affinities between Husserl and Frege. Are these efforts philosophical in the manner in which general philosophical re-interpretations of the history of philosophy constitute an attempt at original philosophical thought? Dummett is a philosopher in his own right. He considers himself to be in the analytical traditions and his historical concern does not affect his fundamental stance on issues. It can not be said that this specific foray into the history of philosophical ideas impinges on his philosophy as such. Dummett himself disclaims that he is doing history. His interest in historical sources is to clarify parts of his analytical convictions. Gracia represents another proposition altogether.

J.J.E. Gracia, Philosophy and its history (1992)

Gracia's argument is as follows. Post-kant there are two fundamental attitudes towards philosophy: the poetical attitude and the denial that philosophy leads to the knowledge of reality. Philosophy as poetry is expository, mystical, and literary. The thesis that philosophy cannot reveal being in itself leads to positivism. Positivism/scientism in turn flows into logical positivism, the Vienna Circle, and analyticity. The shared fundamental epistemological attitude in this current of thought is empiricist. From the analytical point of view, ethics is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Philosophy attempts to encompass reality through logic and language. It does not bother with being in itself. There is a basic contrast between the analytical concern with language and the concern of continental philosophy with consciousness. However, the history of philosophy reveals affinities between analyticity and continental philosophy consisting in common themes, methods, and objectives. In other words, analyticity and continental philosophy are not mutually exclusive and the history of philosophy can reveal their common grounds. Gracia appears to believe in the progress of philosophy towards truth. He claims an important role within philosophy for philosophical history, but even he admits that what he is proposing is more in the way of a program rather than the actual philosophical resolutions of issues. The contribution of his work is potential rather than actual. There is no concrete contribution to current debate in his thought. It could even be said that his ambitions are larger than that because what he attempts is to create a debate where there is none. His work is formally or methodologically philosophical. It could lead to philosophical stances, to dialogue, to conciliations, and so forth, but only if the parties which he would like to gather around a discussion table were willing to sit down.

(iii) History and historiography

So far in this survey we have found cause to consider history of philosophy a specialized if derivative field of philosophical debate. This claim is bolstered by philosophers who philosophize about the history of philosophy outside the conventional bounds of history-based periodization. It is also sustained by attempts to participate in current debate through an appeal to history of philosophy. Withal, history of philosophy remains rooted in historiography. It may be possible to relate historiography directly to philosophy through epistemology. There are concepts pertaining specifically to the epistemology of historiography and not just to epistemology in general. One is the distinction between history and historiography. History is often used in the same sense as historiography. More commonly, history refers to public, collective events. Since we cannot know beforehand which events are historical, it is history itself which reveals them as it unfolds. This is pure historicism and it is a metaphysical proposition abstracted from the experience of history. Historicism is an issue in history of philosophy but as well in epistemology and in any branch or aspect of historiography.

History can also refer to the totality of awareness, not in the sense of all experience, but of the cognitive processes that make experience possible. From this perspective it could be argued that history and time are equivalent. Even if this proposition were too difficult to defend, the least that can be said in relation to the concepts of history and time is that they are as tightly related as are philosophy and history. Everything happens in time, which is also true in a less comprehensive sense of history. History deals in time. It categorizes time and is an open door to the exploration of the ontology of time. Even if history and time are not identical, history is the discipline of thought that comes closest to the being of time. All physical processes also involve time and are measured in divisions of time. The theory of relativity is significantly about time. But is the relation of relativity to time about time itself or about the effects of certain physical events on time and vice versa? History is about nothing else but time. We know time as the living of individual lives and by extension as the "lives" of states and cultures, and this is precisely what history is about. History is the only discipline of thought that has time itself as its object and as such it can be said to embrace all other disciplines.

Historiography is the awareness of history as a discipline of thought. It would then seem as if it is historigraphy rather than the less unambiguous concept of history that determines historical events. But since historiography itself is part of history, it is history ultimately that determines the historiographical validation of historical events. History and historical events exist independently of historiography. The difference between history and historiography can be compared to that between nature and science. The awareness of nature is like the awareness of history: science emerges from the first as historiography does from the second. Assuming now that the distinction between history and historiography is philosophical in a general sense, can we go further and say the concept of historiography by itself involves philosophical issues?

The writing of history raises the fundamental epistemological distinctions between factual, probabilistic, and interpretative propositions. It does not necessarily do so, but it would normally do so if it were approached from a philosophical perspective. However, any form of knowledge does the same thing and there is nothing in this respect specifically philosophical about historiography. There is the possibility raised by the often heard expression of the "logic of history". But everything is logical. Historiography like all else is logical. Reason consists in the application of logic to experience. General and specific rational principles, such as cause-and-effect and and scientific laws, are derived from the application of logic to experience, but they are not logical principles. There is no logical principle which states that all events must have causes. Experience provides the premises from which logic derives rational principles. To say that history is logical is a truism. But it is not redundant to say that history is rational. And the patterns and relations to be found in history are rational, as are the logical deductions that can be made from their use and applications. However, this again is true of any area of experience in general and of any discipline of thought in particular.

History of philosophy has solid philosophical credentials, but historiography, one of the categories of thought which defines history of philosophy, appears to raise only the most general of epistemic issues, hence issues to which it has no exclusive claim. However, historiography does raise a question with clear philosophical implications which is proper to it and only to it and that is the manner of the specification of historical events, on which the previous considerations, beyond the general reference to historicism, have not shed any light. For this we must recur to the idea of consensus. Historical events are those which history as a historiographical consensus defines as such. It is conceivable that historiography could omit events with a claim on historicity, but we have no measure of the historical other than historiography however fallible and imperfect. The problem at the heart of the qualification of the historical lies in the definition of criteria of knowledge. What exactly is knowledge? In what sense is philosophy knowledge? And what specifically is the knowledge of history? It is likely that history, as Croce claims, somehow determines knowledge, but how exactly does it do it? It is to answer at least in part these questions that the concept of consensus has to be invoked, a historical consensus that changes with the passing of time and the accumulation of both facts and interpretations. Consensual propositions have different degrees of probability. Consensus is also applicable to the philosophy or metaphysics of history. Insofar as they share the same means of epistemic validation, historiography and philosophy of history converge, but their fields of interpretation are fer from coincident. Interpretations of historical events involve historiography as the rigorous and methodical investigation of history. Philosophy of history does not so much interpret specific historical events as build upon what historiography reveals about history. Bravo asks: "La question qui se pose ici est la suivante: quelle dimension doit avoir la courbe du devenir historique pour être lisible? Celle d'un événement isolé, comme enseignent les partisans d'une histoire événementielle? Celle d'une nation, comme on le croyait au XIXe siècle? La dimension d'une culture, comme l'affirme O. Spengler, ou celle d'une civilisation, comme a declaré Toynbee? Doit-elle être aussi longue que la cosmogenèse tout entière? Y a-t-il une ou plusieurs histoires?" These questions arise on the assumption of the possibility of philosophy of history, but is it historiography that lays the grounds for the possibility of posing such questions.

(iv) Summary

History of philosophy and philosophy of history not only appear to be but in effect are two entirely different things. This is not to say that history of philosophy is not, like philosophy of history, a source of philosophical issues. Some issues pertain strictly to the history of philosophy as historiography. Others refer to historiography in general, to which the history of philosophy belongs as much as to philosophy. Some of these issues in turn are specifically epistemological or epistemologico-historical rather than historical per se. The distinction between epistemologico-historical and historical issues is razor-thin. The first refer to the validation of propositions about history and could as well apply to propositions anywhere else. The other category refers to propositions about historiography alone. The question of the criteria of knowledge is epistemological, as are the basic metaphysical definitions that go with it, but they are as applicable to the history of philosophy as to any other branch of knowledge. Although there can be no doubt about the specifically philosophical import of the history of philosophy, this fact does not bring it any closer to philosophy of history than it was at the beginning of our enquiry.

(B) The interpretation of history

There is a category of historical writing which involves historiography but is not historiography in the strict sense. For the moment, we shall call it speculative history. Unlike the telling of history, one of its primary concern is with the prediction not so much of specific events as of the general course of future events. The closest analogue to speculative history in historiography is to be found in the attempts to write the history of the world, which deal with large-scale entities world, such as civilizations and long-term historical periods, involving a great deal of interpretation as well as the anticipation of events from claims about vast or epochal or cyclical movements or trends. However, world histories are only tendentially, not invariably, predictive, so we can speak at best of an analogy with speculative history. Historiography, or all the different manners of telling the events of the past, does not aspire to more than explanatory efficacy. Speculative history aspires to something akin to "natural laws": propositions involving not just explanation but also inevitability and predictability. Speculative history assumes the existence of regularities in history from which can be inferred the operation of laws.

Philosophy is metaphysical. Metaphysics is the discipline of thought concerned with the most fundamental and comprehensive concepts. The term is sometimes used to mean very abstract thought: thought that does not rely primarily on historical experience. Speculative history does not pretend to independence from historiography, but it does try to elicit from it basic concepts and principles, as in taking civilization as the unit of historical reference; or measuring the process of history in terms of centuries or millennia rather than years or decades; or assuming the psychological unity of mankind over the force of specific cultural influences. By way of contrast, historiography comprises mostly national or international histories within relatively restricted time frames and identifiable cultural contexts. Historiography comes in all sizes and formats, not excluding world history, but it is inequivocally immersed in experience. In sum, there is a distinction to be made between conventional historiography, however inclusive, and speculative history. The latter addresses itself to wider issues, it relies mainly on probabilistic premises, and it proposes law-like statements about history. If metaphysics is the attempt to elicit basic concepts from the vast variety of the categories of reality, then speculative history can consistently be defined as philosophy of history and the themes involved in speculative history as those proper to a philosophical enquiry into history.

(i) The history of the metaphysics of history

Leibniz interpreted history from metaphysical principles in which the existence of a Divine Providence was posited. He did not define laws of history, but he conceived that history was a rational process, and in this sense he anticipated Hegel. Vico can only be considered a philosopher of history in the sense of his methodology which brings him indirectly into epistemology. He had an understanding of the necessity of trying to understand past history from within rather than applying the specific criteria of his time. Helvetius, Diderot, and Condorcet were believers in historical progress and in this sense true if superficial philosophers of history.

(a) George Steiner on Alexis Philonenko, La Théorie kantienne de l'histoire (Paris: Vrin), in TLS, May 1 1987, p. 468

"It implies the very gradual, perhaps asymptomatic congruence between human history--in which certain great phenomenalities of amelioration are undeniable--and the prevalence of practical reason (in the rigorous sense of the Critique) in the individual. A threefold motion of spirit, at once individual and social, crowns Kant's vision. Existentially and in terms of self-reflectivity, mankind is progressing (has the obligation and the capacity to progress) from nothingness to totality or wholeness, from a `curved' state to one of ethical and intellectual straightness, and from the closed to the open conditions of mutual awareness (it is this last modulation which entails Kant's ideas of universal peace). This triple advance is not at all likely; but a probabilistic doubt does not inform either its logic or its rootedness in the potential and the purpose of humanity."

(b) From Hegel, Heidegger, and the ground of history, by Michael Allen Gillespie

Hegel introduced talk of awareness or consciousness greater than individual consciousness, but with the attributes of individual awareness, and specifically, with the attribute of will, albeit in a very abstract mode. He realized the importance of history to knowledge. With the concept of dialectic, he also posited a form of reasoning about history different from formal logic, but equally compelling in his view. When Hegel speaks of consciousness he means "collective awareness". When he says that consciousness is the absolute he means the highest form of existence, which encompasses history although it is not history. Absolute knowledge is the totality what is known. The guiding principle behind history is the spirit or the absolute spirit. The proposition that "the rational is actual and the actual is rational" is perfectly justified, unobjectionable even, but Hegel thought that he could discover in his "actual" the end of history, which was certainly an unphilosophical thing to do.

Marx was a critical disciple of Hegel: he took from the latter the idea of a historical dialectic, which he then subjected to materialist forces rather than to the guiding principle of spirit. As he himself said, he took Hegel's dialectic and he stood it on its head.

Gobineau had a racist and H T Buckle an environmentalist-determinist view of history. They both believed in "laws" in the sense of inevitable forces. However, they did not actually commit themselves to specific predictions. Their laws--especially in Gobineau--were of the sort that if something occurred there would be this consequence, but it was not fated that this or that would occur. Now, theoretically, the law of gravity does not apply unless there is matter and space, but these phenomena are so prevalent as to seem inevitable. In Gobineau, it was conceivable that the conditions that would lead to the downfall of the "pure white race" from mixing with other races could be averted. For Buckle the environment was deterministic and there was nothing else to it: the denizens of the Tropics were doomed to laziness and submission to the stronger peoples from the temperate climates. He might not have said explicitly that this was to be their eternal fate, but he might not have felt the need to do so, since the West was entering its phase of world domination. This is more consistent with "natural law".

Dilthey was a philosopher of knowledge and in this sense he was a philosopher of history through the distinction between understanding and explaining. Philosophical thought must always probe in two directions: (a) its proper ends, and (b) the means to its proper ends. The means to the ends of philosophy are reason and logic. What probing in this direction means is that all philosophical thought must start with the question of knowledge. Since the means of philosophical thought are the same for all its ends, there are no epistemological means proper to philosophy of history. It is true that philosophy of history must count on historiography, but, on the understanding that all philosophical thought has its ultimate basis in experience, there is nothing specific to philosophy of history in its reliance on historiography. Aron followed Dilthey in his own critique of "philosophical" histories of civilizations.

Heidegger took from the pre-Socratics the concept of being as different from all individual existents and applied it to the study of history. Since being is, then nothingness too exists, at least as an interpretive concept, and Heidegger continually plays with the possible interactions between the two concepts. It takes a great effort of concentration to determine how all of this relates to actual reality. From the relation subject/object Heidegger defines the concept of the objectivization of nature, which implies its technological exploitation. The rivalry over the domination and exploitation of nature leads to struggle and the enslavement of man. This is what he calls nihilism. In the rivalry for the domination of man and nature, ideologies are the instruments of historical justification. They in fact become history itself.

"History thus serves only as an apologetic and a polemic for the various conflicting forces concerned with the unlimited objectification and exploitation and thereby becomes entangled in this conflict itself...History thus becomes ideology and replaces philosophy, politics, art, etc. as the determinative explanation of human life."

In Being and Time man is also enslaved by the "things" which he produces in his drive to objectivize nature. In order to escape nihilism, humanity has to understand history in terms of Being. Man must rescue Being from the nihilism of the erroneous understanding of human progress. Being is the opposite of "things". Nothingness is the opposite of Being. The reasoning seems to proceed more or less this way: the concept of Being is the means to overcome nihilism. Being is the alternative to the enslavement of man to "things". But Being is an abstract ideal. We only actually have "things" and it by turning our backs on "things" that we can move towards Being from nothingness. In Being and Time, man is free to assume certain attitudes whereby he escapes from the enslavement to "things". By moving away from "things" and towards Being, we can put a stop to nihilism. The historical transformation which Heidegger seeks is to be accomplished on the individual level. Having disposed of nihilism, in ehat does Being consist? If nihilism is a way to define and conceive history, what is the definition of history involved in the concept of Being? Most vaguely, Being means freedom and history is the free becoming of Being. The pre-Socratics understood the purity of Being to which Heidegger aspires and wants humanity to aspire.

"For Heidegger history is kairetic, therefore unpredictable and in retrospect, fundamentally incomprehensible...`What is history?'...The question seeks to understand history as a what, for example, as a causal series, or as the unfolding of absolute spirit, or as the dialectical development of the means of production, or as the conjunction of the will to power and the eternal return. In Heidegger's view, however, history is not a what but a how, indeeed the how of what is, that which determines the what, which determines how being is. Thus, to demand a ground of history, i.e., a what that underlies history, is to demand a ground for the source and determination of all grounds. There is no such ground, however: history as Being is groundless since it has no ground, ungroundable since it is the source of all grounds, and abysmal since it undermines all grounds...What is necessary in Heidegger's view is not a ground for history but a recognition of the historical necessity of Being itself through the recognition of human finitude."

We are assuming that Spengler and Toynbee and others (see Braudel) belong in the category of philosophers of history. In what sense precisely, since their knowledge was mainly world-historical? In the sense of speculative history involving predictiveness. Curiously, they themselves do not make philosophical claims but world-historical claims, and it has been the philosophical refutation of their claims, known as critical philosophy of history--including the analytical critique of Hempel and Danto--that has elevated their thought to the status of philosophy.

J Pelikan has a history of Medieval theological thought that is so rational and coherent as to seem inevitable in its unfolding. But is this philosophy of history? The "logic" behind it is so possible to find in it all sorts of philsophico-metaphysical implications, as if one could see God pointing out the way for thought, instilling thought in the minds of men. It is therefore philosophical by implication, for if Divine Intervention is conceivable in the history of thought, God cannot have left the history of physical events out of his calculations.

Wallerstein is neo-Marxist. His historical "standard" is center-periphery with the core iron-law that the center always inevitably impoverishes the periphery.

(ii) Danto's refutation of philosophy of history

From this survery, philosophy of history is primarily characterized by interpretativeness and predictive pretensions. However, it can also be precisely the contrary as in Danto's refutation of the possibility itself of philosophy of history.

There are two three parts to Danto's critique of phil-history: (1) the refutation of laws and predictability; (2) historical explanations; (3) historical narrative as explanation.

(1a) Historical philosophy has predictive pretentions. It pretends to encompass the totality of history. The totality of historical accounts cannot give an account of the totality of history. If prediction is not possible, then, philosophy of history is not possible.

(1b) The aim of historiography are true statements about the past. True statements about the past are explanations and explanations do not necessarily encompass the future.

(2) Danto argues that the positions on historical knowledge come in three varieties: (2a) that historians some times explain events; (2b) that every explanation must necessarily include one general law; (2c) that historical explanations do not include general laws at all.

(2a) The first variety is that of historical idealists, for whom human beings are free and that knowledge of history is about understanding and not explaining. This comes straight from Dilthey and is exemplified in Aron's critical philosophy of history.

(2b) The second variety is logical empiricistm, which requires one general law at least and is sceptical about explanation. Logical empiricists believe in the unity of scientific method, which posits an explanans and an explanadum and deduction from assumption. This is supposing a law already exists. The uniqueness of historical events constitutes a denial of the possibility of historical laws. Historical explanations are "elaborate enthymemes". In Aristotle enthymemes are persuasive but not necessarily valid arguments. They are explanatory statements in which something is assumed but not stated. The denial of historical idealism, or the possibility of historical explanations, leads in Danto to the thesis of "explanation sketches", and this is what he means by enthymemes. A historical explanation assumes that there are laws, but cannot appeal to laws. And this is finally to where his initial denial of philosophy of history leads.

"We may say that the explanations historians offer are really not explanations as such, but are, in Hempel's phrase, `explanations sketches'. Places are, so to speak, marked off where the appropriate general law which is presupposed will, in time, be inserted, converting the sketch into a fully satisfactory explanation. Such a sketch `consists of a more or less vague indication of the laws and initital conditions considered as relevant, and needs "filling out" in order to turn into a fully-fledged explanation."

The general analysis exhibited here is apparently due, originally, to Popper.

(3) Danto himself has certain philosophical views on history. He thinks that historiography is about explaining the past, and specifically explaining change, although I see no reason why it should not also be explanation for the absence of change. The narrative is the form of historical explanation. It involves general laws, although what Danto actually means is that human life is subject to natural laws. It is also analogous but only analogous to the syllogism. The one thing that the syllogistic narrative cannot do, no matter how many general laws it involves, is anticipation.

So in conclusion Danto says:

--there are no historical laws

--there are explanatory sketches and narrative explanations

--prediction is out of the question

--therefore, there is no such thing as philosophy of history, except presumably his own and like-minded philosophical views on history, which are essentially epistemological.

There are arguments against this: the future is necessarily assumed in historiography. The problem is reliable, short term predictability: the one cause-one effect approach. It is possible to anticipate trends. Danto holds that the denial of historical idealism implies logical positivism, and vice versa, and that these are the two poles of historical epistemology. But it is in my view perfectly possible to believe in historical explanations, even in some anticipation and long-term prediction, but believe neither in human freedom nor in so-called historical laws.

(iii) The concept of historical law

When a high degree of interpretativeness and of predictive content are present in historical writing, the inescapable implication is the existence of historical norms or laws. But what sort of laws or norms are we talking about here? We can start by making a distinction between a "law" as pertains to history and a "law" as pertains to science. Even in science what is called a "law" is not a law. The concept of law was originally solely social and juridical. Social laws or legal norms are compulsory and theoretically enforceable, but there is no inevitability in their compulsoriness and consequently no predictability is involved either. A law is a social injunction that society is committed to enforcing. But a law in physics is a formulation concerning certain regularities whose verification lies in their predictability. The concept of natural law arose by analogy with the compulsoriness of social laws, but its natural-law compulsoriness is inevitable and its effects are predictable. A natural law is a description which says that under certain conditions certain results will ensue. It assumes that every event has a cause and that nature cannot behave otherwise than as it must. Natural laws embrace events as huge as the birth and expansion of the universe or universes, but they always describe or involve specific attributes of matter no matter how infinitesimal. Natural laws are fundamentally explanatory. The concept of natural law is often used synonymously with explanation and description of natural phenomena, as in the case of atomic structure.

Since humanity is part of nature, it could be assumed that human behavior both physical and mental must also be describable in terms of laws involving the (1) inevitability, (2) predictability, and (3) explanatory value of natural laws.

(1) Since nature is assumed to be deterministic, humans too should be subject to cause-and-effect and to the principle that they cannot act otherwise than as they do.

(2) The reason for this is that it is not possible for humans, as it is for nature, to segregate their specific attributes from their cognitive processes, and it is impossible to isolate causes for events which cannot be reduced to a condition with the specific attributes of matter. Human action can be described as being this or that, but its "totality" or its "wholeness" cannot be subjected to the principle of one effect having one cause or even a combination of effects having a set of causes. Cause-and-effect is necessary to the scientific understanding of nature, but it is not observable in relation to human behavior.

(3) Of the traits or features associated with natural laws, the only one that more or less applies to human action is explanatoriness. It is not justified to assume that man's actions are describable in terms of laws, but it is to try to give approximate and often quite convincing explanations for them. 

It is possible to have some knowledge of what it is that motivates behaviour, as its is possible to construct viable cognitive models, but it is virtually inconceivable to have all the necessary information that would permit reliable specific prediction, although a kind of coarse-grained predictability or anticipation in certain conventional situations is possible.

If scientific cause-and-effect has no precise application to human behavior, then the same must be the case for history. Yet philosophy of history is predicated on the existence of laws or law-like propositions. Is there any possibility of recovering some modicum of signification for the concept of law that would be compatible with a minimal specification of philosophy of history? All events have explanations and explanations are best given as causes. There are various "forms" of causal explanations.

Parliaments enact laws: they "cause" laws. Parliaments themselves have causes and these causes in turn have a causal effect on specific laws. The statement that parliaments enact laws is a formal truth.

Do formal truths conform universal historical laws? Or to put it another way: are so-called universal laws in historiography just truthful or probable propositions? There are no universal historical laws on how or why parliaments come about and for the specific laws that parliaments enact. It is hardly the case that historiography involves universal laws derived from formal historical truths. Explanations and causes would be laws iff whenever something occurred some other specific event also occurred inevitably. Is this the case of "parliaments enact laws"? Parliaments exist to enact laws but they do not universally and necessarily enact laws. Evidently, since prediction, in the scientific controlled-conditions or reliable-input sense, is not applicable to history, and since history does not occur as per enforceable social laws, we cannot even remotely conceive that historical laws could have much in common with so-called social or scientific laws.

(iv) Is philosophy of history at all possible?

We have true statements and we have explanations about the past. Causes are explanations. When explanations are true statements, we should theoretically have the full knowledge of historical causes. True statements in history are usually about artifacts and sources in general but these are not causes. Explanations in history are possible, but they are not fully causal and true statements are not laws. What then are historical morms or laws? The latter question can be answered not as oughtness, as in society, or predictability, as in science, but in a middle ground where we can say this is the way things ought to be and this is the way things will eventually be. This concept of law entails universality and long-duration. It has value not in itself but as a ground for analysis, in the approximate sense in which it was necessary in the West to expand immeasurably the breadth of time from its restricted Biblical constraints before geology could make any headway in understanding the history of the earth and subsequently physics in relation to the universe. The explanation for the common usage of the concept of law in society, science, and history is that it alludes to a dividing line between order and chaos. Historical causes, the only possible graound for historical laws, are accumulative, gradual, and ultimately "indiscernible".

History is rational. This means all effects have causes. There may be general historical laws as there may be general cognitive principles. The question is moot as to whether they are different or the same, but it is not likely we shall ever find either. In history, all we can hope for are causal explanations. The best explanation is a statement that is factually true.

History can be told. To tell history we have to follow a methodology. We have to apply certain epistemic criteria to propositions about past events. But in telling the past we are also assuming the future. We cannot absolutely predict that the world will go on, but there is a high probability that it will do so. Historiography not only bridges from the "present" to the past, but it also crosses from the past to the "present" and the future. These continuities make anticipation inevitable.

Historical laws are like patterns that have occurred in the past and that, for justifiable reasons, could reappear in the future. Now, the fact that historical causes are not causes in the scientific sense does not mean that they are not valid for the anticipation of the future. History can never be science. It cannot make scientific predictions. But this does not mean that historical propositions cannot involve anticipation. Therefore, we can order concepts in this way: (a) in science, causes produce effects and this relation can be expressed in terms of propositions involving predictability; (b) in history, patterns justify anticipations/expectations on the basis of the interpretation and explanation of past events. We can have philosophy of history in the sense of the interpretation of historical movement, but not necessarily in the sense of laws or predictability.

There exists the interpretation or the hermeneutics of history and there is historiography. Does the interpretation of history justify positing historical laws? The interpretation of history is analogous to the interpretation of a text, assuming of course historical facts, and it is in itself controversial, hence a possible source of further controversy. From the interpretation of history it is posible to derive anticipations, but these are not necessary deductions and would therefore hardly qualify as the sort of prediction implicit in natural laws. Nevertheless, every historical interpretation is conducive to anticipation. It is possible to say: "thus far history and this is what it reverals". If this is what it reveals, then it is to be expected that this or that should happen in history. No greater precision is possible in the matter of anticipation. However, there is nothing in this argument to justify any sort of prediction and if prediction is discarded then anticipation can only consist in expectations, general tendencies, possible even probable convergences.

In the impossibility of laws, philosophy of history cannot pretend to be predictive. But it can be anticipatory. In fact, historiography is, on various countsm, anticipatory. Philosophy of history deals in long durations and its anticipations are coarse-grained, as is inevitably its reading of the past. History does not repeat itself in a precise sense. But in another less restrictive sense it does repeat itself. Certain political and economic patterns do repeat themselves. In fact, the problem here is defining in which specific sense history does not repeat itself. The anticipation of history we have in mind is best illustrated or explained metaphorically as the mainstream of history.

Holism

According to Webster's, holism is the philosophic doctrine that "the determining factors in nature are wholes (as organisms) which are irreducible to the sum of their parts and that the evolution of the universe is the record of the activity and making of those wholes."

Holism is the belief that the meaning of words is only determinate in a propositional or expressive context. Quine goes further and claims that holism applies not only to words but to entire systems of belief. In this sense, holism is the claim that there is no theory-neutral belief. The contrary thesis is that certain cognitive processes are encapsulated, i.e., isolated from or untainted by previous belief. Putnam claims that belief-fixation is holistic, which is Quinean.

The basic epistemological argument that Quine and Putnam share goes more or less as follows. Belief fixation is holistic, i.e., it is not a process that can be subjected to rational analysis. This indicates that meaning and reference are unstable as scientific criteria, because there is no criteria for sameness of meaning, "except actual interpretative practice". Therefore, scientific "truth" emerges from the theoretical context of meaning. However, whereas Quine is eliminativist about mind, Putnam declares his beliefs to be internal realism. Internal realism is more or less the acceptance of the representational theory of mind, i.e., that there exist cognitive processes and that these can be specified by the use of language although not from the use of language alone.

Holism can also be used to refer to the interactiveness of basic cognitive propositions in cognitive processes. Perception is logic and memory. Logic cannot function without memory. Nothing can go against the axioms of logic. Hence, an act of perceiving involves different cognitive process and different basic-cog's apart from those that refer to perception itself. This has nothing to do with the debate between encapsulation and theory-infected cognition. But it is incompatible with encapsulation as long as it is understood that cognitive holism need not be holistic in the Quinean sense. All our cognitive resources enter into cognitive processes but this does not mean necessarily that our cog-processes are determined by previously held theories, although they may very well be.

Hofstadter

See Artificial intelligence (AI) and TNT; Church-Turing thesis, Tarski, and logical rules (from Hofstadter); and Gödel.

Homunculus

I am driving along Park Avenue but my mind is not entirely occupied by driving. You can do this where traffic is well-organized. You certainly couldn't do it in Caracas. This would seem to be proof of Dennett's homunculi thesis and his argument that consciousness involves "multiple drafts". Searle to start with says that to explain the different cognitive processes and their complexity Dennett posits "stupider and stupider homunculi". I start from the assumption that our thoughts are specific and that their specificity is the key to the unity of self. Now, this belief is incompatible with stupid and mechanical homunculi. This however is claim against claim. What is more telling is that both my driving and whatever it is that I am thinking about while driving involve many processes, basically logic and memory, but not different specialized homunculi. Or else these homunculi are always working together, and then what would be the difference between the homunculi and the propositional interactiveness of cognition?

Furthermore, when you have many homunculi it is hardly likely that the result will be like other results in similar or even identical circumstances. Specificity cannot be gainsaid and if specificity is the case then the hegemony thesis also goes by the board. Dennett says that at the sign of danger one draft becomes hegemonical and I react exactly like everyone else in trying to defend my life. In point of fact, when I am driving I am not thinking as efficiently as if I were thinking alone rather than doing both things. The hegemony is there all along. But my reaction to danger will be different from that of all others. In any event, it will not be like an universal reaction because otherwise either we all would crash or we all would avoid danger, and the way we avoid danger would be the same in every similar circumstance but in fact the ways of avoiding danger are legion just as the possible dangers are myriad.

Honderich

Ted Honderich, Mind and Brain (Vol. I of A Theory of Determinism) (Oxford 1988)

 Honderich's avowed aim is to elaborate a theory of determinism, but this means that he has to propound an account of mental causation. Since he starts from a dualist position he must first explain how mind and brain relate. "Thus we need first a conception of consciousness...It is taken by some to be that which falls under statements of certain logico-linguistic kinds. As the story goes, these are statements, first, which have the distinction that their truth-values do not depend on the truth-values of statements they contain." This incidentally is intensionality and the awareness paradox. The first part of his argument concerns what he calls psychoneural nomic correlation. Basically, what this means is that a mental event necessitates a neural event and a neural event necessitates a mental event. We are talking of such events as involve both, for there obviously exist neural events of which mind takes no note whatever. What Honderich in effect is trying to do is to conciliate his initial dualistic perspective with some kind of unifying arguments, for, after all, you cannot have causation of two types: one for the mental and one for the neural. "The hypothesis of psychoneural nomic correlation...is to the effect that each of our thoughts and feelings, indeed every item in our ongoing conscious experience, is in nomic connection of a certain kind with a simultaneous neural event...As we shall understand it, then, the hypothesis of psychoneural nomic correlation has to do with sets of neural events. The hypothesis is this: For each mental event of a given type there exists some simultaneous neural event of one of a certain set of types. The existence of the  neural event necessitates the existence of the mental event, the mental event thus being necessary to the neural event. Any other neural event of any of the mentioned set of types will stand in the same relations to another mental event of the given type."

 Notice that Honderich goes from "each of our thoughts" to "each mental event of a given type". Notice also that the basic concept is "necessitates" rather than "depends" or "causes". "Concept" here is tantamount to "interpretation". However, this is a synchronic theory. It explains or purports to explain how thought and neurons stand to each other. The sense of nomic is that they always relate in one way and can only relate in that way. But the hypothesis does not explain how this relation is caused or how it stands in relation to subsequent relations of the same type. And it is fundamental because Honderich considers psychoneural intimacy to be of the essence in his theory of causation and he can only explain such intimacy in terms of the concept of necessitation. In sum, a causal sequence leads to psychoneural pairs, but the causal sequence and the psychoneural pair do not assure psychoneural intimacy, which is fundamental to correlation. An immediate answer to this is that causal sequences entail continuities, which are dispositions or persistent neural structures, which in turn make psychoneural intimacy possible.

 Honderich starts his search for a coherent synchronic account of the psychoneural nomic correlation with what he calls causal interactionism. In his graphic outline causal interactionism is a sequence from either a neural or a mental event to a corresponding mental or neural event and so on, in a kind of horizontal zigzag where each peak is a point in time or in a temporal sequence. However, this leaves more than a few holes: from the neural to the neural and from the mental to the mental apart from not taking the psychoneural nomic correlation into account at all. To put it another way, in causal interactionism n does not necessitate m and m does not necessitate n whereas m determines n and n determines m.

 "Causal interactionism...also faces a third objection, that it does not allow for personal indspensability", and personal indispensability is crucial to Honderich's arguments because it is the hypothesis that underlies a connection between mental events. For causation to work this connection is as crucial as the connection between n and m, and vice versa, and between n and n. From causal interactionism Honderich goes to what he calls neural causation with psychoneural correlation. This at least respects his thesis on psychoneural intimacy and in addition it posits that the n side of a psychoneural correlation is not sufficient to account for n prime and requires an n* working with n.

Why? I presume that n relates to m, but in itself it does not relate to m prime. Another n is needed. But neural causation does not account for the relation between mental events and n and n* account for n prime but not for m prime.

"The short story as we have it about the theory of neural causation with psychoneural correlation is that if we have the mental correlates explanatorily indispensable, we cannot have the non-mental causation of the neural correlates...The same story, put the other way on, is that if we have the non-mental causation of the neural correlates, we cannot have the mental correlates explanatorily indispensable. Of the general problems raised by the mind, perhaps none is more fundamental than the one of which this is is a clear formulation. It is a formulation, of course, which derives from and presupposes a proper rejection of identity theories as tenable accounts of the psychoneural relation, and puts the correlation hypothesis in their place." Another way of putting it is that identity presupposes supervenience and causality whereas the psychoneural relation implies not causality but necessary correlation between mental and neural. But this means that Honderich still has not given us an acount of the causation of the mental and he cannot have determinism unless he has causation. From this stumble, Honderich proceeds to the psychoneural relation as a macromicro relation.

"Its basic proposition is that neural events are effects of wholly neural or other bodily causal sequences. The neural realm, however, consists in micro-events of which the macro-events are mental. That is, mental events stand to neural events in a macromicro relation--mental events are in a certain sense reducible to neural events. Mental events thus stand to neural events as, say, events of temperature stand to molecular events, or molecular events stand to atomic events. As a consequence of this nature of the psychoneural relation...a certain conclusion is drawn about mental events causing mental events...(M)ental events are macrocausal with respect to neural events, which is to say: (i) if there occurs an instance of one type of mental event, there necessarily occur neural events of some or other type, and (ii) if there occur such neural events, there necessarily occurs a mental event. Suppose now...that neural events n together with neural event n* cause neural events n prime. Events n are micro-events of which m is the macro-event...In virtue of the microcosmic causal connection between n and n prime we may conclude something about the causal connection between the macrocosmic events m and m prime."

Self-evidently, this merely presumes the m to m' relation. It does not ground or establish it. It is just another version of pure material causation or identity theory with a subtle, mainly verbal, distinction between mind and matter. A variation of the macromicro psychoneural relation is the theory of psychoneural causal transfer. Presumably, the causality at the neural level is transferred to the macro level. Honderich inclines to this view because it emphasizes the correlation idea which is at the base of his own theory. The two types of events "somehow share...causal roles". And so having gotten this far Honderich takes us to what he calls causation of psychoneural pairs which is the foyer to his answer to the problem of causation, i.e., psychoneural union or union theory. What this theory argues is, in a few words, that psychoneural pairs, which are a deduction from the correlation hypothesis, function together as both causes and effects, but they themselves are the effects of a combination of causes and subsequently contribute to the combination of causes that produces the next psychoneural pair as effect. This description is graphically represented in Honderich's book. "Figure 15 thus (i) gives the circumstances n1, b1, e1 as causal with respect to m,n but not with respect to either m or n taken separately. Also, m, n is given as a cause of m', n', but not of either m', n' taken separately. Further, (ii) with respect to the latter connection, involving a pair as causal, it is only the pair that is shown as a cause, not either of its elements, m or n...The items n1 and n2 are neural events or persisting neural structures, item b1 is a non-neural bodily event, and e1 is an environmental event."

The argument for m, n as inseparable as effects of previous causes and as part of the causes of subsequent events is, as I interpret it, that m and n are psychoneural pairs but that neither m nor n necessarily causes n or m respectively. What Honderich says is that "there can be nothing that necessitates n by itself. There can be nothing of which n alone can be an effect. "There is roughly the same story about m--that nothing can necessitate it by itself. In virtue of the correlation hypothesis, n is dependently necessary to the occurrence of m, but n's being missing would not logically entail m's being missing. Hence, there can be nothing which necessitates m by itself. There can be nothing of which m alone can be an effect"

Let's see if I read this correctly. The mental and neural are codependents: they reciprocally need each other. But they do not logically entail each other: m cannot logically account for n and vice versa. They are a combined and inseparable effect of different converging causes and consequently m and n cannot exist as independent or separate effects or causes. The only possibility of m and n entailing each other singly would be a logical entailment relation, which is not the case. Consequently, nothing necessitates m or n by themselves. This, in sum, is Honderich's answer to causation of the mental.

"The answer resembles but is different from identity theories, so-called, and it is distint from traditional dualisms. It does not make a mental event and a neural event into a unity but it does bring them into a certain union. The answer, therefore, is tolerably named the theory of psychoneural union or the Union Theory...Each psychoneural pair, which is to say a mental event and a neural event which are a single effect and in a lesser sense a single cause--each such pair is in fact the effect of the initial elements of a certain causal sequence. The initial elements are (i) neural and other bodily elements just prior to the first mental event in the existence of the person in question, and (ii) direct environmental elements then and thereafter."

Why psychoneural pairs are lesser as causes than as effects is due to that in the Honderich outline they are effects of a set of causes but that as causes they do not constitute the whole set of causes of another effect.

Why so much interest in Honderich? Like Honderich I start from awareness. It is a ground-floor property of mind. Unlike Honderich, I assume that cognition can be studied independently of the brain. I consider that mental events have their concrete expression in brain events, but I see no need to consider brain events in order to explain mental events. However, in the act of considering cognition, I have to posit its temporality, and as soon as I make it temporal--and awareness instantaneous--I am necessarily forced to face the mind/matter issue. Any thought in itself entails a continuity and where is this continuity if not in the brain? But the brain remains as opaque to my enquiry on thought as before. What I do do is to hypothesize an apparatus of symbols and their rules which accounts for the continuity of thought and does the work of thinking and emoting and everything else that mind does. Awareness then is but the tip of cognition. And it is this metaphoric conclusion which I see extensively and intricately argued for in Honderich's theories about mind and matter leading to his passionate defense of determinism, about which I couldn't care less.

 Why is this so? The psychoneural nomic correlation, as far as my own thinking goes, is neither here nor there. I can do without it. However, the diachronic side of Honderich's theory is another matter, for it is here that time enters the picture and Honderich necessarily draws the same conclusion that I do, which is that each and every mental event is necessarily the result of "internal" processes, which he calls neural and I call cognitive. In sum, even though we both start from awareness, we both end up making awareness subject to extensive, complicated, and subcortical forces. For Honderich this is crucial for his determinism persuasion. For myself this is crucial for the description of my cognitive theory

Honderich's explanations of various phil-mind theories

Honderich uses the qualia argument against functionalism. "I stop at the traffic light when I have a visual experience which others would describe as seeing green light. I, of course, describe it as red. It follows from causalism and funcionalism, seemingly absurdly, that our private visual experience is identical." Worse, really! If I see green and call it red because others call red what I see as green, then it follows that others and myself see different colours all across the spectrum yet call each colour by the same name. This commitment to a system which corresponds in every respect to another system--except in the use of designations--has to entail a commitment to a nervous system and not to any other kind of cognitive system. In other words, underlying my designation of colours is a system which has to be like the system of all other human beings. Since all human beings have a nervous system, I too must have a nervous system even if the colours I experience are different from the colours others experience. "Functionalism, having fled the traditional mysteries of the mind, appears to rarify consciousness, to speak quickly, into a Platonic universe, out of space and time"

Identity

 "The psychoneural identity claim is to be understood on the analogy of the inter-theoretic reduction of heat to total molecular kinetic energy, lightning to electrical discharge, and so on. The analogies are in fact distant from our subject-matter, and in some respects hopeless. The principal thing to be said, however, is that whatever good or bad analogies exist, the given theories of mind, if they are to achieve their ends, must identify neural and mental events. What is it exactly to do that?"

 "As has been objected, two physical processes which are in the same place and time may indeed be two processes rather than one...(I)t is at least a conceptual possibility that seemingly two things have the same causes and effects but are not spatio-temporally coincident. Thus they cannot be identical"

 Identity for Honderich is the indiscernibility of identicals.

My own position is analogous monism. From the temporality of awareness I derive the system of squiggles. Squiggles do everything that brain does. They are identical. But do squiggles exist?

The temporality of awareness at the very least means that something exists beyond awareness. This can be described as either brain or cognition. The observation of brain will not per se reveal cognition. And cognition can only be explained linguistically. The linguistic description involves squiggles. Squiggles do the work of brain. Squiggles are a cognitive analogy for neurons. Is it an analogy in the same sense as above? Certainly not! The analogies above are between mind/matter and physical pairs having nothing to do with mind/matter. My analogy is strictly relevant to neurons and it is derived directly from what neurons make possible which is cognition, on which see Nagel in Physicalism.

The first step Honderich takes towards his correlation hypothesis is the refutation of dualistic identity with neural causation. This is how it goes. Identity is a disjoint in which a and b have properties c. Assuming neural is causal but mental is not, then we do not have identity. The argument is that the identity consists in that the disjoint exists within the same subject. Apparently the presence of S invalidates the objection from causality. Honderich is not convinced and neither am I.

"In particular, to come to the fundamental point, we do not have the conclusion that since x and y are parts of one thing, and y is causal with respect to the later item, x is also causal. The given theory attempts to secure the indispensability of the mental through causal connection, which is certainly sensible, but it fails to do so. We cannot get x as causal and therefore indispensable by speaking of one thing of which another part, y, is causal."

A cause is not necessarily a law. I decide to walk and I walk is a cause. But there is no law which says that if I decide to walk I will walk.

 The use that Honderich makes of the by now commonplace Gedanken of philosophy of mind

 Honderich cites the usual phil-mind thought-experiment ploys in defense of his psychoneural correlation hypothesis. He cites parallelism which is "associated with Leibniz's doctrine of pre-established harmony, and with Malebranche's occasionalism: all events are caused not by other events but by God." Honderich mentiones a thought experiment developed from Wittgenstein. All a Gedanken requires is that whatever is thought or argued be logically possible. In the case of the African lad, which is the case in point, a process is applied to a person's brain, e.g., an African lad, that makes him entertain a belief about Paris, which he doesn't even know exists. The upshot is that it is absurd to posit a nomic connection between the neural and the mental. The African lad, whatever his neural processes, cannot have such a belief. "The correlation hypothesis...requires only that something is a logical possibility...If the hypothesis did have the consequence that the belief could be produced `in isolation', it would be untenable."

 Basically the arguments Honderich cites are against dualism and he takes them up because the correlation hypothesis is dualistic. The opposition to dualism, presumably, is that we can know all about mind by considering the neural events and forgetting about the experiences. Behaviorism is a strong denial of dualism. The refutation of behaviorism therefore must lead to the refutation of the correlation hypothesis. Honderich chooses to see the debate on behaviorism as consisting in an incompatibility between a physical-object-language and a sensation-language, and he says that the psychoneural nomic correlation is not merely linguistic, which apparently in his view is all that the question of behaviorism amounts to. Of course, any number of controversialists could claim the same thing for their views.

There is the question of "twin earth". In this experiment two identical individuals in different planets have a thought of a person. But since the person in one planet cannot be the person in another planet, the two individuals have different thoughts. What we have here are the same neural events and different thoughts. The neural process does not justify or is not related to the belief. The belief comes out of the blue so to speak. The mind/matter correlation is presumably broken. Honderich argues back that correlation involves the totality of consciousness and not just an incident involving personal epistemic facts. It seems to me, however, that the totality of consciousness necessarily involves "personal epistemic facts". The real trouble with Twin Earth is that it proves nothing.

Another case concerns the thought of the assassination of McKinley at two different times in a person's life: the first when the person is lucid and the second when the person is senile. They are the same thought but the underlying neurology is totally different. Honderich's final rejoinder is that the correlation hypothesis has nothing to do with what he calls "personal epistemic facts" which involve a history and a context. It is concerned strictly with individual, specific mental events. It is a diachronic and not a synchronic theory.  Couldn't we suppose then that these objections refer to the causation of psychoneural pairs rather than to correlation? I think so. If the twin earth argument is applied to the causation of psychoneural pairs, we are going to have a dissolution of the correlation hypothesis.

 Another objection to correlation is from holism. Propositional attitudes are holistic although observation is not. The determinate is the contrary of holism. The correlation hypothesis assumes determine mental events, but holism denies that there are such events, i., all events imply a multitude of other propositions. But holism, responds Honderich, does not in fact necessarily refute the determinateness of mental events. It makes a distinction between mental events and dispositions, i.e., persistent neural states. However holistic, prop-att's are as such determinate. And if the prop-att is determinate, then the neural part is just what is necessary for the prop-att to be determinate, hence it is determinate itself.

Honderich is using famous or infamous philosophical arguments and Gedanken to try to outflank his own position. It is a curious, unconvincing game. But at least it gives us versions of some recurrent themes in contemporary philosophy.

 Another objection to correlation is from indeterminacy of translation or the denial of sameness of meaning. Indeterminacy of translation is the argument that, saving observation propositions, two translation manuals will translate matters of opinion in different ways. The truth or falseness of matters of opinion cannot be established. The correlation hypothesis concerns beliefs which can be matters of opinion, e.g., knowledge of mental events. Matters of opinion or belief entail indeterminacy of meaning, which makes correlation impossible. Correlation between neural events and what? Yet, for one, observation cancels indeterminacy and so belief per se is not necessarily a denial of correlation. The possibility of translation is a denial of the denial of sameness of meaning. Historically, the denial of correlation goes against identity, which Quine holds even as he also holds to indeterminacy of meaning. It is an antithetical position.

 Finally, Honderich essays the so-called "domains argument": mental events are propositional and logical whereas neural events are neither. The opposition between the mental and the neural constitutes a refutation of correlation. Yet some mental events, e.g., pain, are not propositional. Assuming consciousness to be single domain, if pain allows for a nomic correlation with the neural, then other mental events must also be nomically correlated to the neural. 

Hume

D.M.Armstrong on Galen Strawson, The Secret Connection: Causation, realism, and David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon) in TLS, December 22-28 1989, p.1425 

Hume accepted real causes for practical purposes. His speculations on real causes are dismissed as irony. The author emphasizes Hume's "serious and strong belief in the existence of a material world lying beyond, and bringing about, our perceptions." "Strawson argues that Hume does think that he can refer, in indirect, glancing, and almost empty style, to that which is responsible for the regularities of things. And if we can thus refer to true causes, we can believe in them, and disbelieve in the incredible hypothesis that nothing lies beyond the regularities."

Husserl

M. Dummett, The Origins of Analytical Philosophy (1993)

Husserl believed that the totality of mental acts have meaning, in the Brentano sense of intentionality/aboutness

For Husserl meaning involves mental acts, which are not necessarily manifest in language

It is mind that gives sentence their meaning

For Husserl as for Frege sentences can have different senses but the same reference

Epoché is the mental act of bracketing thought, "whether its object exists or not"

Dummett says that Frege's sense corresponds to Husserl's meaning

However, Husserl believed that all mental contents have meaning, whereas it is only thought that has meaning in Frege

So how can Frege say that?

Husserl accepts the doctrine of intentionality as aboutness

Each intentional act includes a noema which constitutes its sense

The noema reveals the object

Mind includes the noema and the object

Noemata apply to all mental content and this characterizes mental content as a relation, which solves Brentano's dilemma

Epoché is the mental act by which noemata are revealed

Page 26-7:

"In order to arrive at the conception of noema, which he developed after Logische Untersuchungen, from 1907 on, Husserl generalised the notion of sense or meaning. Something like sense, but more general, must inform every mental act; not merely those involving linguistic expression or capable of linguistic expression, but acts of sensory perception, for example. An initial favourable response is natural: surely at least a vague analogy is possible between the particular way something is given to us when we understand an expression referring to it and the particular way an object is given to us when we perceive it by means of one of our sense-organs. And yet the generalisation precludes the linguistic turn: language can play no special part in the study and description of these non-linguistic animators of non-linguistic mental acts. Frege's notion of sense, by contrast, was incapable of generalisation. Senses, for him, even if not intrinsically the senses of linguistic expressions, were intrinsically apt to be expressed in language; they stood in the closest connection with the truth of thoughts of which they were constituents

Page 39:

"Husserl's `meaning' corresponds to Frege's `sense'; but he boldly applies it, not only to what he called `expressive' acts, carried by means of linguistic utterance, but to all mental acts without qualification, that is, all that exhibit the phenomenon of intentionality. Plainly, meaning for him was independent of language, even if apt to be expressed in words. Senses were independent of language for Frege, too, in that their existence did not depend upon their being expressed; but he held, at the same time, that we can grasp them only through their verbal or symbolic expression"

Page 56:

"Thus, like Witt in the Tractatus, Husserl does not follow Frege in taking truth-values as the references of sentences, but, rather, states of affairs"

Page 67:

"[Husserl] starts from the content of the individual mental act. From there he ascends to the `ideal meaning' as the species to which it belongs. So far, language has played no part, even if the act is an expressive one, in which the mental act is fused with a linguistic utterance. And here is the gap in Husserl's theory: how are the meanings attached to the words? What renders those words an expression of the meaning?"

Page 72:

"The reduction of epoché is the celebrated `bracketing' of transcendent reality: prescinding from the existence or constitution of the external world, we attend solely to the mental act, indifferent to whether its object exists or not"

Page 73:

"`Each intentional experience has a noema and in it a sense through which it relates to the object', [Husserl] wrote, and again, `Every noema has a `content', namely its `sense', and is related trough it to `its' object'. The noema is clearly distinguished from the object...On this interpretation, then, the notion of a noema is a generalisation of that of sense to all mental acts, that is, to all acts or states  possessing the characteristic of intentionality. The object of any mental act  is given through its noema: the noema is intrinsically directed towards an object, and it is therefore their possession of a noema that accounts for the intentionality of mental acts...Every mental act must have a noema, and hence must have the quality of being directed towards an object: but it is no more problematic that there should be a noemas that misses its mark, so that no external object corresponds to it, than that a linguistic expression should have a sense that fails to supply it, the world being as it is, with any actual objectual reference. A delusive perception is therefore no longer a problem: it possesses the feature of intentionality as well as does a veridical one, but simply happens to lack any actual object"

[On this account even stupid sentences that mean nothing at all, inventions of a febrile state of mind, would have a noema

A delusive perception has to be a hallucination, which implies a failure of perception]

Page 75:

"In the case of perception, too, Husserl thought that we can, by an act of reflection, make the noema the object of our attention: but he held in this case that this is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, which only the philosopher can achieve, and that it is the fundamental task of philosophy to fasten its attention on noemata and attain a characterisation of them"

[This reminds me of what Everitt wrote on the Centenary of Mind

In 1907, Husserls posited that noema constitutes the sense of perception

Noema does not contain language

Since for Frege sense and language are reciprocally dependent, it is on this point that Husserl and Frege diverge]

p102

"Now grasping a sense, dispositionally understood, is plainly not a mental act, but a kind of ability. It is on this ground that Witt argues that understanding is not a mental process; in so arguing, he expressly compares it to an ability. When, by contrast, Frege acknowledges that, although thoughts are not mental contents, grasping a thought is a mental act--one directed towards something external to the mind--he must be construing the notion of grasping a thought in its occurrent sense. Witt labours to dispel the supposition that there is any occurent sense of `understand'. If this could be maintained, the conception of understanding an utterance could be reduced to that of hearing it, while possessing a dispositional understanding of the words it contains and the constructions it employs. But it is difficult to see how it can be maintained that no occurent notion of understanding is required: for it is possible to be perplexed by a sentence on first hearing it, through a failure to take in its structure, and to attain an understanding of it on reflection"

Dummett

Page 115:

"Frege's theory [of sense-perception] is hobbled by his commitment to the thesis that thoughts are accessible to us only through language. If this means that we can grasp thoughts only by understanding sentences expressing them, we obtain a very implausible theory of sense-perception; but, if we set any such contention aside, we are left with no explanation of how we grasp those thoughts that open up the external world to us in perception. But Husserl's theory is not in better but in worse case. His notion of meaning was not, indeed, connected at the outset with the senses of words, and so can be thought to be detachable; but that only underlines the lack of any substantial account of what it is...We do not know why all noematic sense are capable of being expressed in language; and, although it is clear that they are detachable from language, we do not know how we grasp them, or, hence, what exactly the noematic ingredient in an act of sensaory perception is..."

Page 121:

"Both Frege and Husserl surely went too far in assimilating the `interpretation' whose informing our sensations constitutes our sense-perceptions to the thoughts that we express in language. For Frege, it simply consisted in such thoughts, to which, moreover, he believed that we human beings hace access only through language; for Husserl, it consisted in part in meanings that are completely expressible in language--probably by whole sentences, although he left this unclear--and in part of meanings in a generalised sense that are not so expressible. But we are here operating at a level below that of thought as expressible in words; at that level, namely, at which animals devoid of language operate...But the vehicle of such thoughts is certainly not language: it should be said, I think, to consist in visual imagination superimposed on the visually perceived scene. It is not just that these thoughts are not in fact framed in words: it is that they do not have the structure of verbally expressed thoughts. But they deserve the name of `protothought' because, while it would be ponderous to speak of truth and falsity in application to them, they are intrinsically connected with the possibility of their being mistaken: judgement, in a non-technical sense..."

Pp.127-8

"If we identify the linguistic turn as the starting-point of analytical philosophy proper, there can be no doubt that, to however great an extent Frege, Moore and Russell prepared the ground, the crucial step was taken by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus of 1922. We have been concerned, however, with the preparation of the ground. Before the philosophy of language could be seen, not as a minor specialised branch of the subject, but as the stem from which all other branches grow, it was first necessary that the fundamental place should be accorded to the philosophy of thought. That could not happen until the philosophy of thought had been disentangled from philosophical psychology; and that in turn depended upon the step that so perplexed Brentano, the extrusion of thoughts from the mind and the consequent rejection of psychologism. The step was taken by Frege and by the Husserl of the Logische Untersuchungen, who had been so deeply influenced by Bolzano, if not, as many have argued, by Frege himself. Frege was the first philosopher in history to achieve anything resembling a plausible account of the nature of thoughts and of their inner structure. His account depended upon his conviction of the parallelism between thought and language...[H]is strategy for analysing thought was to analyse the forms of its linguistic or symbolic expression. Although he continued to reiterate that it is inessential to thoughts and thought-constituents that we grasp them as the senses of sentences and their parts respectively, it is unclear that his account of the senses of linguistic expressions is capable of being transposed into an account of thoughts considered independently of their expression in words. When philosophers consciously embraced the strategy that Frege had pursued, the linguistic turn was thereby decisively taken.

     "Once the linguistic turn had been taken, the fundamental axiom of analytical philosophy--that the only route to the analysis of thought goes through the analysis of language--naturally appeared compelling. Acceptance of that axiom resulted in the identification of the philosophy of thought with the philosophy of language, or, to give it a grander title, with the theory of meaning."

Page 139:

"The true ground for Frege's doctrine, shared by Bolzano and by Husserl, that thoughts and their constituent senses are not mental contents thus lies in their categorial difference from mental images and sense-impressions, rather than where Frege located it, in the objectivity of thought and the subjectivity of the mental."

[The fundamental argument of both Frege and Husserl is that senses cannot "depend upon incommunicable inner processes of states"

Now, I argue that disjoining sense from mind makes belief and communication rest on faith

How can I know what I mean if I do not possess meaning internally?

How can I use language if my mind does not have the meaning attribute?

My expressions are expressions of belief and belief implies the qualification of propositions

Unless there is a mental attribute involving meaning and the qualification of meaning as valid or invalid, then my statements cannot be taken as expressions of belief and communication would be nugatory

However, Dummett argues precisely the contrary]

"Any such conception [sense dependent on mental process] makes communication rest on faith: since whether you understand my words according to the meaning I intended to convey depends on processes within your mind which you cannot communicate and of which I therefore have no knowledge, and since the meaning I intended to convey likewise depends on similar processes within my mind, our belief that we understand one another rests on a faith, which can never be verified, that our mental processes are analogous"

[Why can't they be communicated? In principle I mean?

Might as well disqualify the ability to acquire knowledge because we do not know all that is involved in the acquisition of knowledge eg from perception

The idea of meaning as something meant is a confusion of the two sense of meaning: to mean, in the strict sense, and to mean to mean

However, whatever he may mean by this, the fact remains that my beliefs are the product of my internal qualification of propositions, or else, they are mere language-use without the backing of the belief-formation process

Meaning and communication depend, according to Dummett, on the use of an objective common language with meaning independent of mind]

Husserl laid the epistemological foundations of existentialism through his definition of the phenomenological method, which is in essence a lengthy and complex defense of introspection

Husserl's philosophical outlook is definitely systemic and his influence has been immense, including principally Heidegger, Sartre, and Ricoeur, but in general as the justification, direct or indirect, of all modern thought that is not specifically analytical

However, beyond Husserl existentialism was not oriented towards the specific epistemological study of rational processes, and it is for this reason that, even though phenomenology is paradigmatically a philosophy about mind, it is not considered a part of the contemporary philosophy of mind

HUSSERL

Husserl distrusts psychology

Yet he is oriented in his thinking towards mind

This orientation is given by Brentano

From Brentano he takes the idea that mind is intentional and relational

The relation is between the acts of mind and the objects of those acts in the sense that mind gives meaning to its objects

What Husserl finds is phenomenology

Phenomenology is the method whereby mind can turn upon itself as an object of apperception or of the understanding of itself

This uncovers noesis or the relational process by which mind gives meaning to its objects

This is what is meant by reduction of mental contents to consciousness, where meaning is found as noemata

But in addition through phenomenology mind can also examine the general question of meaning itself (noema)

And finally, phenomenology can also discover the different structures of meaning (noemata)

In all cases, phenomenology involves epoché or bracketing

What are these structures?

Husserl apparently did logic

He could theoretically have done economics, history, or what have you

Mayz Vallenilla apparently addressed himself to the structure of the meaning of knowledge

H.L. van Breda, in Encyclopædia Britannica (1962)

"Phenomenology has to describe the basic meanings and structures by `intentional analysis' of them; i.e., an analysis of their meaning as such. Such an analysis has to respect the necessary relation act-object of all consciousness; consequently the `noetical' (act) and `noematical' (object) aspects of every intentional datum must be analyzed corrrelatively. Transcendental phenomenology, the theory of the universal constitution of all meaning by the transcendental ego, is nothing else than the metaphysical background required by the intentional analysis"

Paul Ricoeur, Husserl, an analysis of his phenomenology (Eng. 1967)

For Hegel phenomelogy was the study of how consciousness and spirit converge in history as the state

Husserl philosophizes about knowledge including knowledge itself

Knowledge implies consciousness

In the Logical Investigations "The question is whether the facts of the understanding, concepts, and judgments should be studied as psychological facts, consequently with all the subjective conditions which accompany them in their formation, or whether they should be considered as general elements of representation, elements independent of the consciousnes we have of them"

[Now this is an ambiguous statement

Husserl criticized positivism and its concept of epiphenomenology

Epiphenomenology means reductionism of mind to psycho-physics

Hence, hardly subjectivism

But since it is unmistakable that Husserl did consider psychology subjectivistic, what exactly was it that he found so subjective?

One possibility is positivism itself: the philosophy behind epiphenomenology

Another possibility is the subjectivism of psychologists

Another possibility, perhaps the likeliest, is that he believed that the study of mental events in itself was useless, revealed nothing, and so on

The last possibility is the likeliest, but it makes his philosophy not only pretentious but downright near-blind, for, however profound he might have seemed  to himself, one cannot simply ignore mental events because they are subjective, that is, not the mental events of philosophers, or more precisely, of Husserl himself]

The roots of Husserl's critique of psychology was his interest in logic

As Dummett claims, he was not in this different from Frege

They both sought to eliminate subjectivism from knowledge, as logic supposedly achieves, by subjecting the study of mind to the rigour of logic

"[Husserl's] logicism is linked...to a movement issuing from the mathematical sciences. This movement sought to reestablish in opposition to Kant the Leibnizian thesis according to which mathematics is an `extension of general logic'. Mathemetical judgements are not synthetic, as Kant believed, but rather analytic...This same movement concluded in Germany with the works of Hilbert and Cantor, in England with those of Russell, and in Italy and France with logistics"

[Prima facie, since math helps science categorize and explain reality, then mathematical judgments are not analytic

It is to refute this argument that H. Field devotes an analysis in which he tries to prove that the advances of science can be explained without numbers]

In his orientation towards knowledge--not mind, though, but consciousness--Husserl found the question of meaning or of intentionality

And in this he was perhaps more fruitful but merely as a forerunner

The study of signification itself, or meaning, has two branches: one branch towards meaning itself and another branch towards the objects of meaning

The means by which these branches could be studied was phenomenology

"After the Logical Investigations Husserl's works follow two paths: On the one hand, descriptive themes never cease to be enriched and to overflow the initial logical framework; on the other hand, Husserl continues to refine the philosophy of his method and thus to mix a phenomenological philosophy with a phenomenology actually practiced"

Intentionality is the only objective characterization of mind

Alternatively: by defining or conceiving mind as intentionality, the subjectivism in the study of mind is reduced or eliminated, or so Husserl believed

The intentionality of mind means that every mental content, every act of mind is meaningful

Perception is one of the meaningful acts of intentionality, and, as per Ricoeur on Husserl, it "never ceases to reveal how living goes beyond judging. At the end of this road is the theme of `being-in-the-world' explicated by the phenomenology of the later Husserl, by Heidegger, and by the French existentialists"

[Actualy, it could be argued that Heidegger and Sartre draw the ethical "implications" in Husserl's phenomenology through the use of a "method" somewhat resembling phenomenology]

Phenomenology reveals both the process of conferring meaning (noesis) and meaning itself (noema)

The concentration of phenomenology on the noesis is the search for consciousness in itself

Consciousness is a residue

And this residue consists in intentionality or the giving of meaning and in the noemata

[Ultimately then noemata are the objectivity of consciousness

But on what do they repose

Frege and the analytical philosophers went to language

Apparently Husserl did recognize the significance of language, but according to Dummett, he did not relate adequately noemata and language

Likewise, Frege never did manage the transition from sense to language

Dummett, and other analytical philosophers, prefer to remain at the linguistic level

But language cannot explain all mental contents--something Dummett himself admits--and it was thus that language of thought came to be]

"The Cartesian Meditations are the most radical expression of this new idealism for which the world is not only `for me' but draws all of its being-status `from me'"

"Phenomenology is obliged to at least two things for this radicalism. In  the first place it advances the theme of temporality; this theme was perceived very early. The present, we are told in the Lecture on Inner-Time Consciousness, `retains' the immediate past, which is not a represented memory but a `just now' implied in the consciousness of the `now'. This analysis, originally destined to resolve a psychological enigma, that of the persistence of an identical object in consciousness, becomes one of the main keys to the constitution of the ego by the ego..."

"In addition, the identification of phenomenology with egology leads to the promotion of a second great problem, that of the existence of the Other...The existence of the Other plays the same role in Husserl that the existence of God does in Descartes in preserving the objectivity of my thoughts"

[This is what I call transactionality]

As Husserl's philosophy evolved in his later writings, as per Ricoeur, "The accent is placed no longer on the monadic ego; instead the accent is placed on the totality formed by the ego and the surrounding world in which it is vitally engaged"

"This life-world (Lebenswelt) is the `pre-given passive universal in all judgmental activity', the "antepredicative" (Husserl), the "primordial evidence of the world"

Mayz, Fenomenología del conocimiento (1954) 1976

(a) Mayz starts with Husserl's antipositivism

Husserl included psychology in the scientist program

He did not deny the progress of science, but he claimed that its metaphysics were "ingenuous"

Since there are two poles to knowledge--mind and the world--his aim was to provide the grounds for both, which, in his opinion, a purely scientist, positivist perspective did not have

In connection with mind, it meant getting away from empiricist psychology

To do this he proposed to do away with empirical content and to attempt to get  a grip on consciousness itself

The method he "invented" was phenomenology and his discovery concerning consciousness was the existence of noemata

As to the world, he did some phenomenological investigations of certain structures of meaning, but he did not try to cover the structure of knowledge itself, which is the subject of Mayz' book

(b) Philosophy is historical: it necessarily functions in a historical setting

Husserl's main concern was to make philosohy a science

Mayz's mains sources on Husserl's philosophy are Logische Untersuchungen and Ideen

Grounds

"La idea de una filosofía como ciencia rigurosa debe entrañar en su fundamentación más radical una absoluta carencia de supuestos, vale decir, un suelo original en donde las primeras y las últimas afirmaciones que sostienen el edificio de la doctrina filosófica reposen, antes que en algo subyacente dado o postulado como `comprensible de suyo', sobre evidencias últimas de carácter apodíctico y comprobables en cuanto tales por medio de un rigurosos y reiterable examen"

[Estos planteamientos son, peor que racionalmente erróneos, casi "primitivos", ciertamente más ingenuos que los supuestos del positivismo]

"Las ciencias naturales proceden con total ingenuidad en lo que se refiere a su fundamentación y, como en el caso de las ciencias positivas, `se instalan en el terreno de la experiencia del mundo previamente dado y presupuesto como existente en forma comprensible de suyo'"

Husserl no crítica a las ciencias experimentales en sí, ni duda de sus logros, según Mayz

Lo que el critica es la ingenuidad de la ciencia al aceptar sin fundamentar metafísicamente los dos polos del conocimiento, que son la conciencia y el mundo

According to Mayz, Husserl held that the implicit metaphysics of science was "ingenuous", read "wrong"

From this can be gathered an implicit refutation of metaphysics in analyticity

If science advances despite being metaphysically wrong, then metaphysics is redundant

"Toda filosofía que desee convertirse en ciencia rigurosa debe, según Husserl, entregarse a `la elaboración sistemática del método que pregunta retroactivamente por los últimos supuestos concebibles del conocimiento', pues sin antes realizar esta tarea, y adoleciendo de `una absoluta evidencia intelectual en la reflexión sobre si misma', no puede cumplir con la exigencia radical que postula su aspiración de convertirse en ciencia rigurosa"

La explicacioón o filosofía "vigente" del conocimiento cuando Husserl especulaba era el positivismo

Frente al polo del yo, mente, o conciencia (como se quiera), de acuerdo a los postulados positivistas, "la sicología debía tender hacia el ideal de su naturificación y hacia la meta de convertirse resueltamente en una verdadera y auténtica ciencia natural...y debía converger hacia el modelo supremo y absoluto del conocimiento positivo, es decir, hacia la física"

Esto conducía a la negación de la conciencia

Dejaba de lado el hecho de que en el conocimiento hay la conciencia del conocimiento

Dicho por Mayz: "Asimismo, dominada la sicología por los mismos supuestos que se han detectado en relación a la ciencia natural, la existencia de una conciencia o de un conocimiento se tomaba y se aceptaba simplemente como un dato natural y adscrito a él, como características naturales suyas, el hecho de que tal dato viniese acompañado por la existencia de una objetividad [de que la conciencia fuera en sí una realidad distinta a los datos], no causaba la menor extrañeza a los investigadores naturalistas...La existencia de una franja o de una zona de elementos característicos de ella, merecía cuando más la denominación de epifenómeno"

En otras palabras, la actitud cientifista sencillamente reducía la mente a la captación de datos y se negaba a ver lo que estaba más allá de esos datos, o sea, la conciencia propiamente

Fuera de los datos del conocimientono no había más nada que descubrir, y Husserl se propuso descubrir lo que había de propio en el acto de conocer, o sea, en el polo que conoce, en la conciencia misma

"El error de las gnoseologías hasta entonces existentes era el aceptar por objeto, sin demorarse en hacer la crítica correspondienmte, a una conciencia o a un conocimiento en cuanto hecho o realidad, derivándose de aquí una consecuencia igualmente errónea: el concebir que toda posible objetividad de conciencia debía ser explicada como secuela y característica natural del mismo hecho o de la misma realidad"

Según Mayz, Husserl describía la conciencia abstractemente de esta manera, después de hacer, o al hacer, la crítica de la sicología positivista: "la conciencia considerada en su `pureza', debe tenerse por un orden del ser encerrado en sí, como un orden de ser absoluto en que nada puede entrar ni del que nada puede escapar; que no tiene un exterior espacio-temporal ni puede estar dentro de ningún orden espacio-temporal; que no puede experimentar causalidad por parte de ninguna cosa ni sobre ninguna cosa puede ejercer causalidad"

[Para acceder a esa conciencia es que surge la fenomenología y epojé

Fenomenología es el nombre del estudio de la conciencia en sí y epojé el método que utiliza la fenomenología]

"La epojé fenomenológica--cuyo parentesco con la duda cartesiana el mismo Husserl admite...--es...aquella `operación necesaria para hacernos accesibles la conciencia "pura" y a continuación la región fenomenológica entera'"

[Ver "reflexión"]

"Por medio de [epojé] lo que se hace, en síntesis, es utilizar un procedimiento de reducciones progresivas realizadas mediante el recurso de poner entre paréntesis o de desconectar todas aquellas realidades o entes que no son propiamente la conciencia sino que, en cuanto son entes pertenecientes al mundo natural, caen dentro de la órbita u horizonte caracterizado por la actitud natural, morando en la dimensión de ésta como entes cuya trascendencia posibilita el que sean conocidos mediante la conciencia en cuanto tales entes naturales"

Por medio de estas reducciones surge la conciencia "bajo la forma de un residuo fenomenológico, la conciencia pura como conciencia trascendental: vale decir, como aquello que subsiste en su íntegro y propio ser despues de haber desconectado a toda la tesis de la actitud natural...bajo la forma de un residuo que sintetiza su sola función constituyente, vale decir, como el contenido a priori con el que se objetivan y diseñan todos los entes posibles de naturaleza trascendente que no son--justo por ser trascendentes--la conciencia misma en su acepción trascendental"

[Vale decir: se descubre la noesis y las noemata]

"La reflexión, en cuanto función característica del método fenomenológico, es propiamente el instrumento o el procedimiento por medio del cual se posibilita un tratamiento objetivo de la conciencia transcendental en cuanto tal"

[Ver arriba "epojé"]

"Mas este residuo que ahora se torna el tema de la investigación no es meramente una estructura formal y vacía de contenido, sino que en el se encuentran...todos los `contenidos objetivos' [noemata] por medio de los cuales la conciencia [noesis] intendía hacia los objetos trascendentes y los constituía precisamente como `objetos' suyos...en los que la reflexión apresa el diseño trascendental...por medio del cual la conciencia se refiere a los objetos trascendentes al intender hacia ellos en su función trascendental constituyente"

[El esquema va de la reflexión a la conciencia a la intencionalidad: lo que la reflexión descubre en la conciencia es la significación

Esta caractervistica es su intencionalidad

Y de lo que se trata, según Mayz, es de relacionar a la intencionalidad con las cosas]

"De lo que ahora se trata es de considerasr...como a tales formas de conciencia pura...`es inherente este maravilloso ser conscientes de algo determinado o determinable y dado de tal o cual manera...Cómo...[se constituyen] en `objetos' de una `conciencia de'"

[Después de descubrir la conciencia pura y la significación como su característica definidora, Husserl al parecer quería hacer el estudio de todas las posibles significaciones en su realidad objetiva dentro de la conciencia

La significación que Mayz exploró, la más fundamental de todas, es la de conocimiento]

"Pues de lo que se trata es de averiguar cómo es posible que el multiforme [manifold] continuo de la conciencia, integrado, como se ha dicho, por capas de elementos de naturaleza esencialmente heterogénea, pueda presentar la característica de referirse y fundirse en uno y el mismo objeto y hacerlo justamente por esto el centro de sus múltiples y variadas predicaciones constitutivas, tal como si fuera el una unidad idéntica que permaneciera invariable en medio del constante fluir de las multiformes actividades constituyentes de la conciencia"

Interpretación

Para empezar, esta proposición encierra un disparate

Habla de que el "multiforme de la conciencia" "refiere", "funde", y "hace", lo cual de por sí es un disparate

¿Y qué es lo que hace?

Convierte a un "objeto" en el centro de sus "predicaciones constitutivas", de lo que se infiere que el "multiforme" está formado por predicaciones, que presuntamente son las que, en su conjunto, "refieren", "funden", y "hacen"

Al hacer esto el "multiforme" parece ser, y quizás es, una "unidad", es decir, algo así como el "objeto" de sus predicaciones, el cual permanece "invariable en medio del constante fluir de las múltiples actividades constituyente de la conciencia"

En otras palabras, el multiforme permanece invariable en mitad del fluir del multiforme, a menos, que las multiformes actividades del multiforme no sean el multiforme, en cual caso volvemos al principio: ¿qué es el multiforme?

Pero dejemos de lado el disparate: digamos que la oración es torpe, que el autor no se expresa bien, que se hace deliberadamente oscuro, etc.

Hay varias posibilidades

El autor se puede estar refiriendo a la relación entre las vivencias y el yo

Otra posibilidad es que se trate del hecho de que el mundo existe en la conciencia, de que toda su variedad se puede reducir a vivencias (pero esta interpretación no parece probable, porque entonces el "multiforme" sería el mundo, y al menos aquí a las claras se ve que ese no es el caso)

Se me ocurre que hay otras posibilidades, pero la que me parece más probable, por referirse a la filosofía de Husserl, e indirectamente a Brentano, es que el problema que plantea es el hecho de que todas las vivencias tienen en común la intencionalidad, o sea, que la mente es significativa, que todo en ella tiene significación, sirve para crear y comunicar significación, etc.