Presentism and Precursorship in Intellectual History

Abstract

Presentism, which is to say the application of concepts of the present to the study of the past, is a topic that has recently earned a high level of attention, especially in the history of science and in the history of ideas. Over the past few decades, the historiographical discussion of the role that presentism plays has gradually become dominated by anti‐presentist methodologies. This article provides a careful overview of the debate about anti‐presentism in the history of science and the history of ideas; the coverage of the debate especially tries to pay attendance to non‐English language writings. The article argues that these anti‐presentist positions ultimately derive their plausibility from a historical availability principle. A significant part of the article is devoted to the examination of the availability principle, according to which historians should avoid interpretations that use linguistic and epistemic resources unavailable to the authors and their contemporaries. After a thorough reconstruction and critical assessment of the availability principle, I conclude that strict anti‐presentist accounts of historical interpretation ultimately face some major problems due to the implausibility of a general application of the availability principle. Against strict anti‐presentist methodologies I argue that presentisms might play a relevant and legitimate role in some areas of intellectual history.

Acknowledgements

For helpful comments I am especially indebted to Mark Bevir (Berkeley), Aviezer Tucker (Belfast), Adrian Wilson (Leeds) and Ian Hunter (Brisbane).

Notes

¹ Four classic texts should be mentioned: Butterfield (1931); Schuyler (1932); Lovejoy (1939); Febvre (1942). The most important narrative experiment in principled anti‐presentism is by Martin Rudwick (1985). The current debate about the role of present‐centred interpretations takes place for the most part under the descriptions of ‘presentism’, ‘anachronism’ and ‘whiggism’. A representative sample of the most important surveys of this debate would certainly include A. Rupert Hall (1969; 1983), T. G. Ashplant and Adrian Wilson (1988), Adrian Wilson and T. G. Ashplant (1988), Ernst Mayr (1990), John Pickstone (1995), Nicholas Jardine (2000b; 2003) and Malcolm Gaskill (2006).

² For an eloquent defence of a history of science which deals with the ‘failures’ and ‘losers’ in the history of science, see Robert Merton (1975: 336).

³ For methodological considerations on precursorship in the history of science and intellectual history, compare among others Henri Bergson (1934) (important comments on Bergson’s theory of precursorship are to be found in Danto 1985: 168–69; Veyne 1996: 423–29), Joseph Clark (1959), I. E. Drabkin (1959), Georges Canguilhem ([1966] 1994), Iris Sandler (1979), Helge Kragh (1987: 100–03), Tom Kindt and Hans‐Harald Müller (2000) and Judith Schlanger (2001).

⁴ These questions have resurfaced in recent years (Boucher 1984; Bevir 1994; Vanheeswijck 2001; D’Oro 2004) and tend to be discussed in relation to the problematicist account of Robin George Collingwood (see Collingwood [1939] 1978). Unfortunately, recent discussions ignore the (primarily neo‐Kantian) German tradition of Problemgeschichte which was stated most systematically by Nicolai Hartmann (see Hartmann [1909] 1958; [1936] 1957). A good account of German Problemgeschichte is provided by Michael Hänel (2001).

⁵ Skinner’s thoughts on an availability principle can be positioned within the methodological programme of the Cambridge School of the history of political ideas. For a critical reconstruction of this programme see David Boucher (1985), Mark Bevir (1999) and Kari Palonen (2003). Jardine’s availability principle is not, like Skinner’s, oriented towards chronological, but rather towards ‘institutional’ variables. While Skinner’s availability principle excludes all interpretations which were inaccessible to the historical author and his contemporaries (Skinner 1988), Jardine excludes all interpretations which would have been inaccessible to an idealised ‘competent participant’ or ‘competent practitioner’. According to Jardine, the availability principle requires precisely those interpretations that were available to the competent participants of the ‘form of life’ or the ‘style of inquiry’ to which the historical object to be interpreted belongs (see Jardine 2000a: 247–50). Jardine’s term ‘form of life’ is conveyed through Peter Winch’s influential interpretation of this concept in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (Winch 1958: 40–42).

⁶ The availability principle has an intentional and a modal dimension: the former is not subject to closer analysis in this article. For a brief reconstruction of the intentional dimension, see Adrian Haddock (2002: 7).

⁷ A variety of criticisms of the availability principle can be found in the contributions by Margot Leslie (1970), David Hull (1979), Christopher Janaway (1988), Gary Hardcastle (1991), Murray McGillivray (1994), Aristides Baltas (1994) and Nick Tosh (2003).

⁸ See Robert Wachbroit (1987: 45); some objections to the anti‐presentist position take a similar direction, suggesting that due to an institutionalised dislike for success stories, there is reluctance to talk about the central goal of the history of science, namely to provide information about scientific progress (Laudan 1990: 56–57).

⁹ Kuhn blamed the retrospective construction of tradition as produced by textbooks for the ‘invisibility’ of scientific revolutions. He assumes here that the histories written by natural scientists for ‘textbooks’ must have the same goals and functions as the histories written by historians of science. He also assumes therefore that both types of the history of science should be subject to the same evaluative criteria. This assumption has been contested, and with good reason; see Thomas Nickles (1992).

¹⁰ Some authors argue against using presentist forms of description in propaedeutics (see Allchin 2004).