Jonathan Gorman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3592247 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jonathan Gorman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jonathan |
| FAMILY NAME | Gorman |
| SIGNATURE | GORMAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University Belfast |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1855-6643 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Conceptual Engineering for Historians
Reviewing a sixteen-essay collection of essays on time, ethics and philosophy of history, involving a wide and eclectic range of cultural, anthropological and philosophical traditions and sources, I find the mix confusing. Needing to start from scratch, I adopt a pragmatic approach, enabling me to draw on neuroscience and link memory to imagination in order to structure the historical field. The field needs conceptualising, but I argue that, agai…
Required
This review essay on Paul A. Roth's The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation follows Roth in accepting the notion of a “narrative sentence” (from Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History ) and takes up Roth's view that a narrative explanation elucidates that which it constructs. I also analyze the “relating of events” within a temporal frame, but I come to different conclusions than Roth does: I deny any necessary connection between …
Where Neuroscience Gets Things Wrong (And Right)
Alex Rosenberg's book How History Gets Things Wrong holds that our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long evolutionary pedigree and a genetic basis, but this vehicle involves a defective theory of human nature because it involves a defective theory of the brain as shown by neuroscience. Reviewing his arguments, I argue that our attachment (if any) to history as a vehicle of understanding is not an inherited characteristic…
Paul A. Roth and the Revival of Analytical Philosophy of History
Krzysztof Brzechczyn’s important collection around Roth’s “revival” stimulates thought about the approaches adopted by analytical philosophers of history. Roth revives Danto’s 1965 pragmatic “constructivist” insights: in a narrative, earlier “events under a description” are described in terms of possibly unknowable later ones and, following Mink, in terms of possibly unknowable later concepts. Roth thinks of the resulting narrative explanation as…
Michael Kimaid. Modernity, Metatheory, and the Temporal-Spatial Divide
History is a wonderful discipline. It can cover everything in time and space from myriad points of view with myriad modes of meaning. It can also cover everything imaginable, and historical imagining is a central part of historical reading. Reviewing Michael Kimaid’s Modernity, Metatheory, and the Temporal-Spatial Divide: From Mythos to Techne is an intriguing exercise, and requires a lot of imagining. Throughout it is written in semi-allegorical…
The Need for Quinean Pragmatism in the Theory of History
I present the history of philosophy, and history more generally, as a context of ideas, with respect to which philosophers and historians share concerns about the meaning of the texts they both use, and where for some there is a principled contrast between seeing meaning in quasi-mathematical terms (“a philosophical stance”) or in terms of context (“a historical stance”). I introduce this imagined (but not imaginary) world of ideas as temporally …
Discontinuity Pragmatically Framed
This is an attempt to discover and clarify the philosophical nature of what Eelco Runia claims to be his new and up-to-date philosophy of history, a programme offered in his 2014 book Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation . His suggestion that his argument is a “dance” is taken seriously, and following an analysis of historical “meaning” and its time-extended nature it is argued that the book’s presentation commits Runia to a c…
Hayden White as analytical philosopher of mind
Philosophers and historians in Cambridge did not recognise either the relevance or the importance of Metahistory when it was published in 1973. The reasons are here explained in terms of the nature of the analytical tradition: the principled distinctiveness of analytical philosophy from (1) history, (2) speculative metaphysics, and (3) political morality. Following an analysis of ‘analysis’, Metahistory is argued to be an exercise in the recovery…
The Normativity of Logic in the History of Ideas
In his The Logic of the History of Ideas, Mark Bevir holds that when we investigate the logic of the history of ideas, our concern must be with the way historians of ideas reason about historical data, not with historical data itself. Moreover, because the logic of a discipline consists of the forms of reasoning appropriate to it, and because the practitioners of a discipline might not reason in the appropriate manner, philosophers must concentra…
Historical Knowledge, Historical Error
The Commonplaces of "Revision" and Their Implications for Historiographical Understanding
Recognizing the contingent entanglement between historiography's social and political roles and the conception of the discipline as purely factual, this essay provides a detailed analysis of "revision" and its connection to "revisionism." This analysis uses a philosophical approach that begins with the commonplaces of our understanding as expressed in dictionaries, which are compared and contrasted to display relevant confusions. The essay then t…
Convergence to Agreement
What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question. Edited by Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill
Historians and Their Duties
We need to specify what ethical responsibility historians, as historians, owe, and to whom. We should distinguish between natural duties and (non-natural) obligations, and recognize that historians' ethical responsibility is of the latter kind. We can discover this responsibility by using the concept of "accountability". Historical knowledge is central. Historians' central ethical responsibility is that they ought to tell the objective truth. Thi…
The Commonplaces of "Revision" and Their Implications for Historiographical Understanding
Recognizing the contingent entanglement between historiography's social and political roles and the conception of the discipline as purely factual, this essay provides a detailed analysis of "revision" and its connection to "revisionism." This analysis uses a philosophical approach that begins with the commonplaces of our understanding as expressed in dictionaries, which are compared and contrasted to display relevant confusions. The essay then t…
Hayden White as analytical philosopher of mind
Philosophers and historians in Cambridge did not recognise either the relevance or the importance of Metahistory when it was published in 1973. The reasons are here explained in terms of the nature of the analytical tradition: the principled distinctiveness of analytical philosophy from (1) history, (2) speculative metaphysics, and (3) political morality. Following an analysis of ‘analysis’, Metahistory is argued to be an exercise in the recovery…
The Normativity of Logic in the History of Ideas
In his The Logic of the History of Ideas, Mark Bevir holds that when we investigate the logic of the history of ideas, our concern must be with the way historians of ideas reason about historical data, not with historical data itself. Moreover, because the logic of a discipline consists of the forms of reasoning appropriate to it, and because the practitioners of a discipline might not reason in the appropriate manner, philosophers must concentra…
Historians and Their Duties
We need to specify what ethical responsibility historians, as historians, owe, and to whom. We should distinguish between natural duties and (non-natural) obligations, and recognize that historians' ethical responsibility is of the latter kind. We can discover this responsibility by using the concept of "accountability". Historical knowledge is central. Historians' central ethical responsibility is that they ought to tell the objective truth. Thi…
Convergence to Agreement
What's Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question. Edited by Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill
Historians and Their Duties
We need to specify what ethical responsibility historians, as historians, owe, and to whom. We should distinguish between natural duties and (non-natural) obligations, and recognize that historians' ethical responsibility is of the latter kind. We can discover this responsibility by using the concept of "accountability". Historical knowledge is central. Historians' central ethical responsibility is that they ought to tell the objective truth. Thi…
The Commonplaces of "Revision" and Their Implications for Historiographical Understanding
Recognizing the contingent entanglement between historiography's social and political roles and the conception of the discipline as purely factual, this essay provides a detailed analysis of "revision" and its connection to "revisionism." This analysis uses a philosophical approach that begins with the commonplaces of our understanding as expressed in dictionaries, which are compared and contrasted to display relevant confusions. The essay then t…
Historical Knowledge, Historical Error
The Normativity of Logic in the History of Ideas
In his The Logic of the History of Ideas, Mark Bevir holds that when we investigate the logic of the history of ideas, our concern must be with the way historians of ideas reason about historical data, not with historical data itself. Moreover, because the logic of a discipline consists of the forms of reasoning appropriate to it, and because the practitioners of a discipline might not reason in the appropriate manner, philosophers must concentra…
Hayden White as analytical philosopher of mind
Philosophers and historians in Cambridge did not recognise either the relevance or the importance of Metahistory when it was published in 1973. The reasons are here explained in terms of the nature of the analytical tradition: the principled distinctiveness of analytical philosophy from (1) history, (2) speculative metaphysics, and (3) political morality. Following an analysis of ‘analysis’, Metahistory is argued to be an exercise in the recovery…
The Need for Quinean Pragmatism in the Theory of History
I present the history of philosophy, and history more generally, as a context of ideas, with respect to which philosophers and historians share concerns about the meaning of the texts they both use, and where for some there is a principled contrast between seeing meaning in quasi-mathematical terms (“a philosophical stance”) or in terms of context (“a historical stance”). I introduce this imagined (but not imaginary) world of ideas as temporally …
Discontinuity Pragmatically Framed
This is an attempt to discover and clarify the philosophical nature of what Eelco Runia claims to be his new and up-to-date philosophy of history, a programme offered in his 2014 book Moved by the Past: Discontinuity and Historical Mutation . His suggestion that his argument is a “dance” is taken seriously, and following an analysis of historical “meaning” and its time-extended nature it is argued that the book’s presentation commits Runia to a c…
Michael Kimaid. Modernity, Metatheory, and the Temporal-Spatial Divide
History is a wonderful discipline. It can cover everything in time and space from myriad points of view with myriad modes of meaning. It can also cover everything imaginable, and historical imagining is a central part of historical reading. Reviewing Michael Kimaid’s Modernity, Metatheory, and the Temporal-Spatial Divide: From Mythos to Techne is an intriguing exercise, and requires a lot of imagining. Throughout it is written in semi-allegorical…
Paul A. Roth and the Revival of Analytical Philosophy of History
Krzysztof Brzechczyn’s important collection around Roth’s “revival” stimulates thought about the approaches adopted by analytical philosophers of history. Roth revives Danto’s 1965 pragmatic “constructivist” insights: in a narrative, earlier “events under a description” are described in terms of possibly unknowable later ones and, following Mink, in terms of possibly unknowable later concepts. Roth thinks of the resulting narrative explanation as…
Where Neuroscience Gets Things Wrong (And Right)
Alex Rosenberg's book How History Gets Things Wrong holds that our attachment to history as a vehicle for understanding has a long evolutionary pedigree and a genetic basis, but this vehicle involves a defective theory of human nature because it involves a defective theory of the brain as shown by neuroscience. Reviewing his arguments, I argue that our attachment (if any) to history as a vehicle of understanding is not an inherited characteristic…
Required
This review essay on Paul A. Roth's The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation follows Roth in accepting the notion of a “narrative sentence” (from Danto's Analytical Philosophy of History ) and takes up Roth's view that a narrative explanation elucidates that which it constructs. I also analyze the “relating of events” within a temporal frame, but I come to different conclusions than Roth does: I deny any necessary connection between …
Conceptual Engineering for Historians
Reviewing a sixteen-essay collection of essays on time, ethics and philosophy of history, involving a wide and eclectic range of cultural, anthropological and philosophical traditions and sources, I find the mix confusing. Needing to start from scratch, I adopt a pragmatic approach, enabling me to draw on neuroscience and link memory to imagination in order to structure the historical field. The field needs conceptualising, but I argue that, agai…
Epistemology (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Sociology (7 works) · History (6 works) · History (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Philosophy, History, and Historiography (5 works) · Political science (5 works)