`Abstracts and Participants`

Paul A. Roth
University of California at Santa Cruz, USA

Speaking of Facts: Or, Reality without Realism

A recent volume, The Poverty of Anti-Realism, insists upon the necessity of metaphysical realism in philosophy of history. The poverty of anti-realism is supposedly one of “facts’: anti-realists, the charge goes, cannot account for what statements of facts are about. My talk corrects many alleged puzzles that metaphysical realism find in anti-realism. The problems needing solution involves at least two separate vectors influencing putatively fact-stating statements. First, there is language as an historically received and socially conditioned set of practices; and, second, there is language as a product of mediation between causal, non-linguistic states--encounters with an environment--and normative ones--true fact stating statements. Only by examining both influences--language as a social product and language as a response to causal prompts--can questions about ‘aboutness’ be addressed. I demonstrate how naturalism answers metaphysical questions about the factuality of histories.

Paul A. Roth is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz. He publishes on philosophy of history, philosophy of social science, naturalized epistemology, and Quine. Roth has been a visiting faculty member in The Czech Republic, Italy, and England. He is currently a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the University of Manchester. His most recent book is The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation (Northwestern University Press, 2020). A French translation of his essay “Hearts of Darkness” appeared in 2022 with a commentary by Raphaël Künstler: Au coeur des ténèbres: Pourquoi il n’y a pas de pourquoi (Hermann Éditeurs).

Krzysztof Brzechczyn
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland

Piotr Kowalewski Jahromi
University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland

The Strategies of the Fabrication of the Past. An Attempt of an Analysis of Putin’s Historical Narrative

The purpose of this presentation in analysis of the Putin’s vision of the past (especially Russian-Ukrainian relations) in the notion apparatus of some theoretical approaches developed in the Poznań School of Methodology. In the first part of the paper, the modeling method used in science is seen as a kind of deformational procedure. In the second part Jerzy Topolski’s ways of distortion of historiographical narratives will be presented. In the third part, the examples of official Russian historiographical narration will be analyzed in the light of the presented notion apparatus.

According to Leszek Nowak scientific theory begins from the distortion of the object of research. Namely in the first model of a theory, factors assumed as secondary are neglected and the influence of the principal factors is investigated. Such understood idealization is only part of the whole family of deformational procedures that are used in culture. They can be identified in the historiographical narrative. According to Topolski, one can distinguish universalization, mystification, glorification, stereotyping, and prophetization. Based on Jade McGlynn Memory Makers. The Politics of the Pasts in Putin’s Russia one can analyze Putin’s technique of the distortion of the past. The key method is historical framing based on making analogies and similarities between events that happened in the past and those that are happening now which softens – for ideological reasons - the sharp border between the past, present, and future.

Krzysztof Brzechczyn is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University and the head of Epistemology and Cognitive Science Research Unit. Research interests: current history, philosophy of history, political and social philosophy, theory of history. He has recently authored The Historical Distinctiveness of Central Europe: A Study in the Philosophy of History (Peter Lang 2020) and edited: New Developments in the Theory of the Historical Process. Polish Contributions to non-Marxian Historical Materialism (Brill 2022), and Non-Marxian Historical Materialism. Reconstructions and Comparisons (Brill 2022).

David Černín
University of Ostrava, Czech Republic

Analytical Philosophy of History and Big History

The research program of Big History (associated with names like David Christian, Vaclav Smil, David Krakauer, Daniel Lord Smail, Brian Villmoare, or Peter Turchin) poses intriguing questions for the philosophy of history. The presentation aims to compare critical and supportive philosophical attitudes towards the idea of telling a continuous narrative of the past from the Big Bang to the present. It proposes that analytical philosophy of history can accommodate the Big History program and offers some answers to the criticism levelled both by philosophers and historians (e.g., Giuseppina D’Oro, Ian Hesketh, Geoffrey G. Harpham, Dipesh Chakrabarty) who aim to preserve rigid disciplinary boundaries between human and natural history, or who identify Big History project as yet another example of an overarching historical narrative which both misunderstands historiography and posits far too speculative framework. It will be argued that to properly assess Big History's role in contemporary discourse, it is necessary to differentiate between popular or educational “Big Historical” texts and the actual research inspired by the idea. The focus on actual research practices is inspired by L. J. Goldstein, P. Roth, J. M. Kuukkanen, and A. Tucker.

David Černín is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ostrava. He has published on topics including philosophy of historiography (mainly epistemology, realism/anti-realism debate, archaeology, etc.), philosophy of history education (the recently published collective monograph Dějepis mezi vědou a vyprávěním [History Education between Science and Storytelling] was an outcome of a project intending to improve history education in the Czech Republic aiming at skills of critical thinking and media literacy), abuse of historical narratives, and philosophy of Big History. Currently, he is working on several projects with Aviezer Tucker to establish the Centre for the Philosophy of Historiography at the University of Ostrava. They are currently co-editing the Bloomsbury Handbook of Historical Sciences.

Ewa Domańska
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland

Empirical Methodology and the Scientific Status of History

This talk emphasizes the significance of empirical methodology for history, drawing inspiration from Jerzy Topolski’s pioneering work in Polish methodology of history. It promotes a pragmatic approach to the study of history, concentrating on historians' actual research practices over abstract philosophical theories. This approach is crucial in an era characterized by post-factual and post-truth challenges, offering a critical tool for addressing and understanding the complexities of contemporary historiography and its varied methods and approaches. When reflecting on issues such as how to understand science today and what is currently important for understanding science in the humanities, I argue that insights inspired by and provided by analytical philosophy should continue to play an important role in the contemporary methodology of history. However, they might be more aptly suited to addressing issues beyond explanation, objectivism, and rationalism. Such issues include conceptual analysis, virtues (with a focus on virtue epistemology), the problem of agency (including free will), and transdisciplinarity. Establishing a methodology of history that is grounded in current scientific principles, along with innovative and emerging trends in historical research, is crucial for maintaining the scientific status of history. Yet, the question persists: Do we wish to preserve the scientific status of history, and if so, for what purposes?

Ewa Domańska – Full Professor of Human Sciences at the Faculty of History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań; a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences; since 2002 a recurring visiting professor at Stanford University. Her teaching and research interests include methodology of history, history and the theory of historiography, comparative theory of the humanities and social sciences as well as the environmental humanities, ecocide and genocide studies. Domańska’s recent publications include: A História para além do humano [History Beyond the Human], eds. Julio Bentivoglio and Taynna Marino (Fundação Getulio Vargas Press, 2024, in print); Knowledge in the Shadow of Catastrophe (ed. with Katarzyna Bojarska et al., Brill 2024, in print); “Wondering About History in Times of Permanent Crisis” (Storia della Storiografia, 2022).

Piotr Kowalewski Jahromi
University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland

Michal Hubálek
University of Hradec Králové, Czech Republic

Beyond Hempel? A Plea for New Analytical Philosophy of History (With Tentative Characterization)

In his A Plea for an Analytic Philosophy of History (1953), Morton White did not refer to Carl Hempel even once. Yet, in subsequent years, the D-N model became the main focus of the analytical philosophy of history (APH) to the extent that it is sometimes limited to this point. This paper aims to disprove this claim historically and, subsequently, to philosophically reflect on the possibilities of a new and broad characterization of APH. A central figure of this analysis is Paul A. Roth and his project of naturalizing historiography. To talk about it today is a challenging task as it may lead us to reconsider our basic intuitions about the nature of history and science. We want to position this discussion within recent debates concerning realism/antirealism and the rational choices between competing historical narratives.

Piotr Kowalewski Jahromi is an assistant professor at the Institute of History, University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland. His research interests are concentrated around analytical philosophy, history of historiography, theory of history, and legal history. Recently he has completed Kosciuszko Foundation research stay at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He is the author of “Analytical Philosophy of History in Poland. Inspirations and Interpretations” (Historyka Studia Metodologiczne, 2021). Recently he has coordinated the Poznań Congress Interviews project.

Michal Hubálek is a PhD student and pre-doctoral research fellow at the University of Hradec Králové (Czech Republic) who recently completed his Fulbright-Masaryk research stay at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He is interested in contemporary post-analytic philosophy, especially in debates about naturalism, post-positivism, and evolutionary/historical theorizing. His dissertation project deals with the impacts of "historicizing science" on naturalism in philosophy. He is also the author of the paper “A Brief (Hi)Story of Just-So Stories in Evolutionary Science” (Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2021).

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
University of Oulu, Finland

Methodologism as Pragmatism

A problem with most anti-representational and pragmatist approaches is that they often drift away from their pragmatist starting point. This applies even to the leading pragmatists, such as Robert Brandom and Huw Price, who resort to the representationalist framing on occasions. Once doing is prioritized over thinking, consistency requires that all knowing and meaning, and respective language that expresses them, is to be understood pragmatically and anti-representationally. My forthcoming book, Doing, Knowing and Getting it Right: Methodologism as Pragmatism, provides a comprehensive pragmatist reading, according to which knowing and meaning are forms of doings through and through. It does this by charting a so far untrodden path through the neopragmatist landscape.

In this talk, I explain the idea of methodologism. It refers to the etymological meaning of ‘method’ as a way. Methodologism is the stance according to which knowing requires following the ‘method’ or way that attributes a warrant to what is known. An example from the field of historiography will illustrate the matter: if a historian argues cogently and has taken into account all relevant existing literature and source materials, also applying source criticism, then she knows. Knowing is the sense in which knowing has been achieved. In this case, the argument itself is a knowledge-making feature that enables the gap between ontology and methodology to be bridged. In the spirit of the best pragmatist tradition, the thing known is not distinguished from the way it is known but both are part and parcel of the same process.

Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen was appointed as professor in philosophy at the University of Oulu in 2018 and was the chair of the department 2020–2022. Currently, he is the director of the Eudaimonia Institute of the Human Sciences at the University of Oulu. Previously he has worked or resided as a research fellow at the universities of Durham, Leiden, Hull and Cambridge. Kuukkanen was Editor-in-Chief of Journal of the Philosophy 2017–2021. His Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (Palgrave, 2015) was chosen as the best monograph in philosophy of historiography in 2016 by the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography (ICHTH) and has been translated into Spanish and Chinese. Journal of the Philosophy of History devoted a special issue to the book in 2017 (11:1). His most recent (edited) book is Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Juraj Šuch
Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia

Constructivism and Plurality: Historical Narratives in the Digital Age

Since the 1960s, analyses of the construction of the process of historical narratives by analytic philosophers (A. Danto) and narrativists (L.O. Mink, H. White) have shaped constructivist understandings of history. Relevant arguments of these thinkers and situations in historiography, historians began to change their beliefs about the model representation of the past in their works. With the constructivist understanding of history, the necessity of an ongoing plurality of representations of the past became more widely accepted. In this paper, the author will point out conclusions from analyses of the narrative works of H. White and the narrative explanations of P. Roth, which offer important tools for understanding and responsible orientation in the plurality of historical representations of the past. He will also express his conviction that these conclusions are relevant for the formation skills of a critical stance for the recipients who want to orient themselves also in the digital network of historical narratives.

Juraj Šuch is an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts and Letters, Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia. In his research, he focuses on philosophy of history, issues related to narrativism, especially the work of Hayden White. Šuch participated at several conferences in Poland and Czech republic. His publications include several books written in Slovak and papers published in philosophical (e.g. „Filozofia,“ „Human Affairs“) and historical journals („Historický časopis,“ „Historická sociologie“) in Czech and Slovakia. He published a book devoted to the work of Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit in the Czech Republic. Moreover, he serves on editorial the board of the „Czech History Journal“ (Dejiny-teorie-kritika etc.).

Rafał Paweł Wierzchosławski
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland

The Analytical Philosophy of History Meets Social Epistemology

Paul A. Roth has discussed the problem of historical understanding and explanation of historical events and processes as a naturalized issue. The objective of my presentation is to confront Roth’s narrative descriptivism as an explanatory approach with some recent challenges formulated in social epistemology. I would like to stress the pragmatic aspect, which refers to various “uses of history”. I think about historians as public intellectuals, historians who are partisans of this or that ideological orientation, or proponents of certain values, which should be reclaimed in the public sphere, i.e., politization of historical narratives. In other words, the relation resembles the distinction formulated by Poznań School between idealization (semantic aspect) and concretization in historical analysis (pragmatic one).
In this context I will focus my attention on approaches in the Polish humanities (i.e., L. Nowak, F. Znaniecki) and some recent debates around: (a) the Post-truth Condition and Academic Rentiership (S. Fuller), (b) The Ignorance Studies Perspective (L. McGoey), (c) Elective Modernism project (H. Collins, R. Evans), (d) Citizen Knowledge (L. Herzog), (e) and Epistemic Coercion concept (St. P. Turner) applied to historical politics.

Rafał Paweł Wierzchosławski - PhD in Philosophy, graduated from the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. He continued his studies in Bielefeld, Köln, Paris, Louvain-la-Neuve, Genève, and Neuchatel. His main interests are philosophy of social sciences, modern social theories, social ontology, political philosophy (republicanism), SSS and STS (Experts studies). He obtained his Ph.D. based on the thesis titled “The Intentional Subject and Explanation in the Social Sciences. Methodological Approach.”He has taught at the Faculty of Philosophy, Catholic University of Lublin (1990-2015), University of Social Sciences and Humanities SWPS in Poznań (2014-2021) and Liberal Arts and Sciences Program, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (2021-). He is a member of European Network of Social Ontology, The International Social Theory Consortium, European Network of the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, The International Social Ontology Society.

Eugen Zeleňák
Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia

On the Realist-Constructivist Controversy in Contemporary Philosophy of History

Over the last couple of years, several works appeared, which argue for a realist approach and reject constructivist views of historical discipline. Namely, Branko Mitrovic and Adam Timmins are very critical of what they conceive as quite widespread and implausible constructivist tendency in philosophy of history. In my paper, I examine and try to clarify some of their realist objections as well as the constructivist understanding they oppose. I argue their realist criticism is occasionally strange and sometimes it is based on misunderstanding.

Eugen Zeleňák is an associate professor at the Faculty of Arts and Letters, Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia. In his research, he focuses on philosophy of history, issues of explanation and causation and the question of realism and constructivism. His publications include several books written in Slovak and papers published, for instance, in the “Journal of the Philosophy of History,” “Rethinking History,” “History and Theory” and in edited volumes published by Brill and Routledge. From 2017 he has served as a review editor for the “Journal of the Philosophy of History.”

Abstracts and Participants

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`Abstracts and Participants`