The time of theory

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. For further discussion of this conception of culture, and of alternatives to it, see Tony Bennett, Culture: A Reformer's Science, London: Sage, 1998.

2. Terry Eagleton, After Theory, New York: Basic Books, 2003, pp 24–30, 44–49, 95–102.

3. On the methodological suspension of truth in contextual intellectual history, see Quentin Skinner, ‘Interpretation, Rationality and Truth’, in Visions of Politics, Volume 1: Regarding Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp 27–56.

4. Ian Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry 33, 2006, pp 78–112.

5. Vincent B Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, New York: W W Norton, 2001; Daphne Patai and Will H Corral (eds), Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

6. The reception milieu for Theory's Empire is well represented by the blog-journal The Valve (http://www.thevalve.org/), sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and driven by theory-sceptical junior academics and graduate students.

7. Jonathon Culler, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, p 3.

8. Culler, Literary Theory, p 4.

9. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Pantheon, 1971, pp 344–348. Eagleton's conception of culture, both as determined by capitalist production processes and as the means of thinking this determination, can thus be treated as a routine symptomatic expression of this conception of man the ‘transcendental-empirical doublet’.

10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Über Gewissheit/On Certainty, trans. Denis Paul and G E M Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969, p 50e.

11. See the important discussions in Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. R Hurley, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985; and Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the College de France 1981–1982, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Frédéric Gros, New York: Picador, 2006. In these late works on the history of forms of ethical and epistemic problematisation, Foucault provides a way of escaping the automatic or ‘structural’ conception of problematisation found in his earlier archaeological studies.

12. See, for example, Julia Annas, ‘Doing Without Objective Values: Ancient and Modern Strategies’, in Malcolm Schofield and Gisela Striker (eds), The Norms of Nature: Studies in Hellenistic Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; and Malcolm Schofield, Myles Burnyeat and Jonathan Barnes (eds), Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

13. For more, see Ian Hunter, ‘The History of Philosophy and the Persona of the Philosopher’, Modern Intellectual History, forthcoming, 2007.

14. Paul Rabbow, Seelenführung: Methodik der Exerzitien in der Antike, Munich: Kösel-Verlag, 1954.

15. Dorothee Kimmich, Epikureische Aufklärungen. Philosophische und poetische Konzepte der Selbstsorge, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993.

16. Ian Hunter, ‘The Morals of Metaphysics: Kant's Groundwork as Intellectual Paideia’, Critical Inquiry 28, 2002, pp 908–929.

17. Hunter, ‘History of Theory’, pp 81–87.

18. Edmund Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. W P Alston and G Nakhnikian, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964, pp 45–46.

19. For more on this, see Gregory B Moynahan, ‘Hermann Cohen's Das Prinzip der Infinitesimalmethode, Ernst Cassirer, and the Politics of Science in Wilhelmine Germany’, Perspectives on Science 11, 2003, pp 35–75.

20. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970, § 32, pp 118–121.

21. Husserl, Crisis, §§ 35–36, pp 135–141.

22. Husserl, Crisis, §§ 38–41, pp 143–152.

23. Husserl, Crisis, § 35, p 137.

24. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, London: Allen & Unwin, 1958.

25. For an indicative discussion, see Beroald Thomassen, Metaphysik als Lebensform. Untersuchungen zur Grundlegung der Metaphysik im Metaphysikkommentar Alberts des Grossen, Münster: Aschendorrf, 1985.

26. For more detailed discussions, see Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, ch 1; and Walter Sparn, ‘Die Schulphilosophie in den lutherischen Territorien’, in Helmut Holzhey and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann (eds), Die Philosophie des 17. Jahrhunderts, Band 4: Das heilige Römische Reich deutscher Nation, Nord- und Ostmitteleuropa, Basle: Schwabe, 2001, pp 475–497.

27. A standard metaphysics textbook of this kind, used in both Lutheran universities at Oxford during the first half of the seventeenth century, is Christoph Scheibler, Opus metaphysicum, duobus libris universum hujus scientiae systema comprehendens, Giessen: Hampel, 1617.

28. Paul Richard Blum, ‘Der Standardkursus der katholischen Schulphilosophie im 17. Jahrhundert’, in Eckhard Keßler, Charles H Lohr, and Walter Sparn (eds), Aristotelismus und Renaissance: In Memoriam Charles B. Schmitt, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1988, pp 127–148.

29. For more, see Ian Hunter, ‘The University Philosopher in Early Modern Germany’, in Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger and Ian Hunter (eds), The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp 35–65.

30. Catherine Wilson, ‘Nostalgia and Counterrevolution: The Case of Cudworth and Leibniz’, in Albert Heinekamp and Ingrid Marchlewitz (eds), Leibniz’ Auseinandersetzung mit Vorgängern und Zeitgenossen, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1990, pp 138–146.

31. For more, see Hunter, ‘History of Theory’, pp 108–111.

32. See the remarkable account in Walter Sparn, Wiederkehr der Metaphysik: Die ontologische Frage in der lutherischen Theologie des frühen 17. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1976.

33. R W Serjeantson, ‘Hobbes, the Universities, and the History of Philosophy’, in Condren et al., The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe, pp 113–139.

34. Compare the account of Thomasius's ‘Christian Epicureanism’ in Horst Dreitzel, ‘Christliche Aufklärung durch fürstlichen Absolutismus. Thomasius und die Destruktion des frühneuzeitlichen Konfessionsstaates’, in Friedrich Vollhardt (ed.), Christian Thomasius (1655–1728). Neue Forschungen im Kontext der Frühaufklarung, Tübingen: Niemayer, 1997, pp 17–50.

35. See J G A Pocock, ‘Religious Freedom and the Desacralisation of Politics: From the English Civil Wars to the Virginia Statute’, in Merrill D Peterson and Robert C Vaughan (eds), The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp 43–73; and, more generally, J G A Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Volume Two: Narratives of Civil Government, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

36. This narrative provides the organising framework for Williams's Culture and Society, 1780–1950, London: Chatto & Windus, 1958; and Thompson's William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955; and The Making of the English Working Class, New York: Vintage Books, 1963.