History

Immanuel Wallerstein and the system that makes the parts

He is filed under world-systems theory, which flattens him. Wallerstein's real move was to reject the national economy as the unit of analysis, and with it a century of comparative social science. Six years after his death, the framework is being spoken by people who have never read him.

Immanuel Wallerstein

10 September: Wollstonecraft's death, Bataille's birth and the argument about limits

Mary Wollstonecraft died on this date in 1797, eleven days after giving birth. Georges Bataille was born on it a century later, and Paul Virilio died on it in 2018. Three lives with almost nothing in common, and one shared preoccupation: where the line is drawn, and who draws it.

Georges Bataille, Mary Wollstonecraft, Paul Virilio

Azra Erhat and the argument that translation can build a past

Expelled from her university in 1948, the Turkish classicist Azra Erhat did her most consequential work afterwards: a Homer that took root in a language, and a contested claim that the ancient cultures of Anatolia belong to the people living there now.

Ludwig Wittgenstein and the case against the two-sentence summary

Everyone carries a potted Wittgenstein: first he drew the limits of language, then he decided meaning is use. Specialists have largely stopped believing that story. What survives is stranger and more useful - a single long experiment in what philosophy is for.

Anthony Kenny, Ludwig Wittgenstein

This Day in Philosophy — 9 September: Benhabib, Lacan, and what makes a person

Seyla Benhabib was born on 9 September 1950 and this year takes both the Johan Skytte Prize and the Karl Jaspers Prize. Jacques Lacan died on the date in 1981, John Passmore was born on it in 1914 and Paul Goodman in 1911 — four thinkers on what a person is made into.

Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva, Catherine Malabou, Alenka Zupančič, Seyla Benhabib

This Day in Philosophy — 8 September: Helmholtz, and the discovery that perception is inference

Hermann von Helmholtz died on 8 September 1894. He measured the speed of a nerve impulse, and concluded from a lifetime of work on the senses that we do not perceive the world directly: we infer it, unconsciously, from signs. The claim reshaped epistemology and is the ancestor of today's predictive-processing theories of the mind.

Hegel's most modern concept is not the dialectic but recognition

For two hundred years Hegel has been filed under 'unintelligible'. Yet the concept of his that is most discussed today is not obscure at all: we learn who we are only in the way others see us. In October the Hegel Society of America meets, this time on time.

This Day in Philosophy — 7 September: I. A. Richards and the problem of what a word does

I. A. Richards died on 7 September 1979. With C. K. Ogden he wrote the book that pulled the theory of meaning out of philosophy and into the reading of actual sentences — and then proved, with a famous experiment on his own students, how badly trained readers understand what they read.

This Day in Philosophy — 6 September: Mendelssohn and Haraway, two ways of asking who counts as a subject

Moses Mendelssohn was born on 6 September 1729; Donna Haraway on 6 September 1944. One argued that a state has no business inspecting its citizens' beliefs; the other dismantled the figure of the pure human subject with a cyborg. Two hundred and fifteen years apart, both were asking who gets admitted to the community of reason.