Recently I’ve been somewhat mischievously interleaving two different series of posts — one on the great contemporary philosopher Robert Brandom’s recent account of his own relations to the American pragmatist tradition, and the other on Kurt Flasch’s groundbreaking investigations of the “Albertist” tradition in medieval philosophy. As different as these are, I have some sympathy for both.
Both of these series have to do with what I somewhat eccentrically call historiography. Historiography is methodologically oriented writing about history, and that description certainly fits, but what most people call historiography is completely abstracted from particular historical content, whereas I am aiming for concrete engagement with concrete content that seems to me to provide lessons of broader significance for how we think about history.
So for example, by Brandom’s light Flasch’s Albertist tradition should not even exist. We need to be very wary of sweeping historical generalizations that do not do justice to the details, such as claiming there was no recognition at all of an autonomy of reason before the Enlightenment. (See also Philosophical Storytelling). This is a distracting side claim that Brandom apparently inherits from Rorty, and in a way I’m happy to have that explanation. I call Brandom a truly great philosopher for his work on mutual recognition and his inferentialist account of meaning. On a broader level, I also value his emphasis on a kind of historical self-understanding.
The Postmodern Peripatetic 