Conference at Roma 3. April 2009.

1. Untaming Reason
Gloria Origgi, InstitutNicod, Paris
Roma, 17 aprile 2009
Università Roma Tre

2. “History, if viewed as a repository for more
than anecdote or chronology, could produce a
decisive transformation in the image of
science by which we are now possessed”
T. Kuhn, 1962

3. History and Human Science:
• A need for historical explanations in
philosophy and other human sciences
• Objects of inquiry have an origin that can be
located in space and time.
• Is history the place to look at?

4. Problems with historical accounts:
• Chain of events in terms of
continuity, causality and influential cascades
• Delegitimation of the impact of historical
accounts due to the emergence of powerful
synchronic methodologies in
linguistics, anthropology, psychology

5. Counter-history:
• Evolution
• Genealogy

6. Questions:
• What is the role of these approaches in philosophy
and, more generally, in human sciences?
• Are they defendable from the accusation of “genetic
fallacy”, that is, that even if a claim on the origins of an
issue is true it is irrelevant for justifying this issue?
• Are we entitled to look at the genesis of a concept, an
attitude, a value in order to explain what kind of thing
it is or what can we know about it?
• How much “thick” our concepts should be to avoid the
shallow abstraction that is so frequently ascribed to
timeless philosophical reflection?

7. Evolutionary explanations
• An evolutionary explanation of a human attitude,
such as a moral value, a cognitive disposition or a
social behavior, conceptualizes this attitude as a
selected trait, a darwinian adaptation.
• It retraces its history in terms of the selective
pressure that may have stabilized this trait in a
population.
• One of the major contributions of Darwin’s
theory of natural selection is population-thinking:
evolution through natural selection can be
explained only at the level of a population.

8. Genealogical explanations
• A genealogical explanation of a human attitude, a moral value, a
cognitive disposition or a social behavior is a way of tracking back
the social and institutional pressures that have shaped, in a precise
historical time and geographical location, the form of that attitude,
value etc., as well as our awareness of them and our self-ascriptions
of them in describing ourselves and our social world.
• it is not just a “thicker” reading of a phenomenon, which simply
adds an historical dimension to its understanding:
• it is a way, as Judith Butler has defined it, of investigating “the
political stakes in designating as origin and cause those categories
that are in fact the effects of institutions, practices, discourses with
multiple and diffuse points of origin”