Chiel Van Den Akker
Biographic Data
| ID | 1693374 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Chiel Van Den Akker |
| GIVEN NAMES | Chiel Van Den |
| FAMILY NAME | Akker |
| SIGNATURE | VAN DEN AKKER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5049-0843 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 15 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Sally Sedgwick on Hegel’s Philosophic History
In her Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit , Sally Sedgwick sets out to: specify the extent to which we can accurately attribute to Hegel the view that human reason and the freedom it affords us are indebted for their nature to this temporal order of nature and history. Hegel’s concern with our reason’s development conveys not just his fascination with the past but his interest in how reason responds to and is anchored in and shaped b…
Michael Rosen on the Eye of Posterity
Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God is a rich and fascinating book about our destiny ( Bestimmung ) to bring about a just world. This comment centers on the philosophy of history that supports this destiny. It offers a partial alternative to Rosen’s reading of Hegel’s claim that world history is the world’s court of judgment. Rosen ignores the explanation that Hegel gave of this claim in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Note from the Forum Editors
Introduction. On the Need for Theory in History
The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory
This Companion provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the conceptual issues that history as a discipline and mode of thought gives rise to. The book offers both historical and systematic treatments of these issues, as well as addressing their contemporary relevance. Structured in three parts – Modes and Schools of Historical Thought, Epistemology and Metaphysics of History, and Issues and Challenges in Historical Theory – it offers th…
Routledge Companion to Historical Theory
Arthur Danto, the End of Art, and the Philosophical View of History
This essay takes Arthur Danto's end-of-art thesis as a case in point of a substantive philosophy of history. Such philosophy explains the direction that art has taken and why that direction could not have been different. Danto never scrutinized the philosophy of history that his end-of-art thesis presumes. I aim to do that by drawing a distinction between what I refer to as the common view of history and the philosophical view of history, and by …
Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White on the Politics of Historical Representation
We do not learn from the past nor from possible analogies between the past and the present. Rather we learn from representations of the past and the insights they offer, for those insights allow us to adopt the political and moral values that we need to plan a future course of action. It follows, so Frank Ankersmit argues, that aesthetics in its sense as a general theory of representation precedes ethics . This essay is concerned with this bold a…
Museums in a Digital Culture
"The experience of engaging with art and history has been utterly transformed by information and communications technology in recent decades. We now have virtual, mediated access to countless heritage collections and assemblages of artworks, which we intuitively browse and navigate in a way that wasn't possible until very recently. This collection of essays takes up the question of the cultural meaning of the information and communications techno…
What are patterns in the humanities
This paper is concerned with patterns in past human behaviour, what they are, and how this relates to the detection of patterns in data by means of computation. Theorists have not given patterns the attention they deserve. Therefore it is far from clear what patterns are and to what purpose scholars may use them. This paper presents eight propositions on patterns which hold true for patterns found ‘by hand’ and patterns found ‘by computation’. On…
Mink’s Riddle of Narrative Truth
The problem how to ascertain the truth about the past is as old as history itself. But until the work of Louis Mink, no clear distinction was made between questions concerning the truth of statements on the past and questions concerning the truth of historical narratives as a whole. A narrative, Mink argues, is not simply a conjunction of statements on the past. Therefore its truth cannot be a function of the truth of its individual statements. T…
The Exemplification Theory of History
The "exemplification theory of history" is proposed to account for the relationship between the past and historical narratives. The theory states that what belongs to the past according to some narrative does so in order to exemplify the historical thesis of that narrative. As such the theory explains how the past receives its meaning. This implies that the past has no intrinsic historical meaning itself. Moreover, it follows that historical narr…
Ankersmit on historical representation. Resemblance, substitution and exemplification
Ankersmit has argued that the substitution theory of historical representation should be preferred to the resemblance theory. Historical representations do not resemble the past; they take the place of the absent past and function as a substitute for it. Contrary to Ankersmit, I will argue that there is no reason to prefer the substitution theory to the resemblance theory. Moreover, the substitution theory cannot account for the relationship betw…
Tradition (re)visited
Three ways of encountering objects belonging to our cultural heritage can be distinguished. We may encounter an object in its traditional environment, we may encounter an object in an environment of preservation, and we may encounter an object in an environment of representation. These three ways of encountering objects provide a framework for addressing the question of how we relate to cultural heritage by means of digital media. Digital reprodu…
Museums in a Digital Culture
The experience of engaging with art and history has been utterly transformed by information and communications technology in recent decades. We now have virtual, mediated access to countless heritage collections and assemblages of artworks, which we intuitively browse and navigate in a way that wasn't possible until very recently. This collection of essays takes up the question of the cultural meaning of the information and communications technol…
The Exemplification Theory of History
The "exemplification theory of history" is proposed to account for the relationship between the past and historical narratives. The theory states that what belongs to the past according to some narrative does so in order to exemplify the historical thesis of that narrative. As such the theory explains how the past receives its meaning. This implies that the past has no intrinsic historical meaning itself. Moreover, it follows that historical narr…
Arthur Danto, the End of Art, and the Philosophical View of History
This essay takes Arthur Danto's end-of-art thesis as a case in point of a substantive philosophy of history. Such philosophy explains the direction that art has taken and why that direction could not have been different. Danto never scrutinized the philosophy of history that his end-of-art thesis presumes. I aim to do that by drawing a distinction between what I refer to as the common view of history and the philosophical view of history, and by …
Mink’s Riddle of Narrative Truth
The problem how to ascertain the truth about the past is as old as history itself. But until the work of Louis Mink, no clear distinction was made between questions concerning the truth of statements on the past and questions concerning the truth of historical narratives as a whole. A narrative, Mink argues, is not simply a conjunction of statements on the past. Therefore its truth cannot be a function of the truth of its individual statements. T…
Tradition (re)visited
Three ways of encountering objects belonging to our cultural heritage can be distinguished. We may encounter an object in its traditional environment, we may encounter an object in an environment of preservation, and we may encounter an object in an environment of representation. These three ways of encountering objects provide a framework for addressing the question of how we relate to cultural heritage by means of digital media. Digital reprodu…
Ankersmit on historical representation. Resemblance, substitution and exemplification
Ankersmit has argued that the substitution theory of historical representation should be preferred to the resemblance theory. Historical representations do not resemble the past; they take the place of the absent past and function as a substitute for it. Contrary to Ankersmit, I will argue that there is no reason to prefer the substitution theory to the resemblance theory. Moreover, the substitution theory cannot account for the relationship betw…
The Exemplification Theory of History
The "exemplification theory of history" is proposed to account for the relationship between the past and historical narratives. The theory states that what belongs to the past according to some narrative does so in order to exemplify the historical thesis of that narrative. As such the theory explains how the past receives its meaning. This implies that the past has no intrinsic historical meaning itself. Moreover, it follows that historical narr…
Mink’s Riddle of Narrative Truth
The problem how to ascertain the truth about the past is as old as history itself. But until the work of Louis Mink, no clear distinction was made between questions concerning the truth of statements on the past and questions concerning the truth of historical narratives as a whole. A narrative, Mink argues, is not simply a conjunction of statements on the past. Therefore its truth cannot be a function of the truth of its individual statements. T…
Museums in a Digital Culture
"The experience of engaging with art and history has been utterly transformed by information and communications technology in recent decades. We now have virtual, mediated access to countless heritage collections and assemblages of artworks, which we intuitively browse and navigate in a way that wasn't possible until very recently. This collection of essays takes up the question of the cultural meaning of the information and communications techno…
What are patterns in the humanities
This paper is concerned with patterns in past human behaviour, what they are, and how this relates to the detection of patterns in data by means of computation. Theorists have not given patterns the attention they deserve. Therefore it is far from clear what patterns are and to what purpose scholars may use them. This paper presents eight propositions on patterns which hold true for patterns found ‘by hand’ and patterns found ‘by computation’. On…
Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White on the Politics of Historical Representation
We do not learn from the past nor from possible analogies between the past and the present. Rather we learn from representations of the past and the insights they offer, for those insights allow us to adopt the political and moral values that we need to plan a future course of action. It follows, so Frank Ankersmit argues, that aesthetics in its sense as a general theory of representation precedes ethics . This essay is concerned with this bold a…
Arthur Danto, the End of Art, and the Philosophical View of History
This essay takes Arthur Danto's end-of-art thesis as a case in point of a substantive philosophy of history. Such philosophy explains the direction that art has taken and why that direction could not have been different. Danto never scrutinized the philosophy of history that his end-of-art thesis presumes. I aim to do that by drawing a distinction between what I refer to as the common view of history and the philosophical view of history, and by …
The Routledge Companion to Historical Theory
This Companion provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the conceptual issues that history as a discipline and mode of thought gives rise to. The book offers both historical and systematic treatments of these issues, as well as addressing their contemporary relevance. Structured in three parts – Modes and Schools of Historical Thought, Epistemology and Metaphysics of History, and Issues and Challenges in Historical Theory – it offers th…
Routledge Companion to Historical Theory
Introduction. On the Need for Theory in History
Note from the Forum Editors
Sally Sedgwick on Hegel’s Philosophic History
In her Time and History in Hegelian Thought and Spirit , Sally Sedgwick sets out to: specify the extent to which we can accurately attribute to Hegel the view that human reason and the freedom it affords us are indebted for their nature to this temporal order of nature and history. Hegel’s concern with our reason’s development conveys not just his fascination with the past but his interest in how reason responds to and is anchored in and shaped b…
Michael Rosen on the Eye of Posterity
Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God is a rich and fascinating book about our destiny ( Bestimmung ) to bring about a just world. This comment centers on the philosophy of history that supports this destiny. It offers a partial alternative to Rosen’s reading of Hegel’s claim that world history is the world’s court of judgment. Rosen ignores the explanation that Hegel gave of this claim in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History
Museums in a Digital Culture
The experience of engaging with art and history has been utterly transformed by information and communications technology in recent decades. We now have virtual, mediated access to countless heritage collections and assemblages of artworks, which we intuitively browse and navigate in a way that wasn't possible until very recently. This collection of essays takes up the question of the cultural meaning of the information and communications technol…
Philosophy (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Art (6 works) · History (6 works) · Philosophy, History, and Historiography (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · History (5 works) · Classics (3 works) · Classics (3 works)