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Fri Mar 31 17:19:17 2006 |
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================= HES POSTING =================
In response to Peter's reply to Roy:
Your mention of Rob Leonard's work is I think illustrative of Roy's point
-- economists will pay attention to work that does history well. Rob's
invitation to write for the JEL (an article that won the HES "best
article" prize this year, BTW) is indicative of the audience his work,
and others like it, receives from the economics mainstream. This is what
Roy said about the physicists recognizing good work in the history of
physics (only when the standards of the history of economics are those of
good history "will the interests of economists be engaged by the history of
their discipline, and their discipline's ideas, in the same respectful way
that physicists and mathematicians purchase and read histories of physics
and mathematics").
Your mention of Malcolm's work is also interesting. In our discussion so
far, we have focused on the difference between history of doctrine and
history of analysis (or historical reconstruction and rational
reconstruction, as I prefer). But there is another type of historical
writing which bridges the gap between the historian and the practioner.
Richard Rorty called it geistesgeschichte, and I can think of no better
word, so that's what I use. Because I also think in concrete examples,
I'll use the geistesgeschichte I'm most familiar with: MacIntyre's _After
Virtue_. In that book MacIntyre challenges the contemporary questions of
philosophical ethics via a reconstruction of the questions philosophers
have asked over the years. His argument that we have reached an impass and
need to go back and reconfigure the basic questions we ask in order to
move around that impass is simultaneously a historical and theoretical
question. He engages the "extended present" as you call it for the
purposes of the future by shifting the ground upon which the contemporary
theorist works.
In economics we occasionally have excellent geistesgeschichte. Recent
examples include Malcolm's book and Phil's book (in my estimation,
anyway).
Ross
Ross B. Emmett Editor, HES and Co-manager CIRLA-L
Augustana University College
Camrose, Alberta CANADA T4V 2R3
voice: (403) 679-1517 fax: (403) 679-1129
e-mail: [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
URL: http://www.augustana.ab.ca/~emmettr
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