================= 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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]