Annotation Le but de ce livre est de promouvoir un echange de vues entre philosophes et historiens sensible aux chevauchement de la philosophie contemporaine de l'histoire et de la theorie de la pratique historienne d'aujourd'hui. The purpose of this book is to encourage an exchange of views between philosophers and historians interested in the overlap between contemporary philosophy and theory of historical practice.

Philosophical Problems Today is a new series of publications from the Institut International de Philosophie. lt follows upon Contemporary Philosophy, a series presenting philosophical research in various world cultures and so far published in seven volumes: Vols. 1-4 on European Philosophy, Vol. 5 on African Philosophy, Vol. 6 on Medieval Philosophy (Part 1 and 2) and Vol. 7 on Asian Philosophy (appeared in 1993). A further volume, dealing with the Philosophy of South America, is still in prepa ration (to appear in 1994/95). The new series is based on a different concept. Bach volume consists as a rule of five articles. The articles are extensive discussions of topical philosophical problems and offer always some original contributions. The articles in each volume repre sent different philosophical traditions and cultures and may thus contribute to crosscultural communication. Volume 1 in the new series contains articles on standard problems in European and American philosophy. Quine writes on truth and discusses various difficulties connected with the clear definition of the correspondence theory of truth. What are true and false, are propositions. Part of the difficulty stems from the ambiguity of "proposition". Some think that the word refers to certain types of sentences, others that it rather refers to the meaning of such sentences. Another major difficulty is due to the fact that the world, being unique, may be variously grasped.

A Philosophical Anthropology Drawn from Simone Weil’s Life & Writings situates Weil’s thought in the time between the two world wars through which she lived, and traces Weil’s consistent conception of a mind-body dualism in the Cartesian sense to a dualism that places the mind within a carnal part of the soul and establishes an eternal part of the soul as the essence of human beings. Helen Cullen argues that in Weil’s early conception of human nature, her Cartesian conception of perception already shows a glimpse of the eternal. Weil’s dualistic conception also forms the basis of her political analysis of the left of her time, and through working in factories and in the fields, she develops a conception of labour as a theory of “action” and “work with a method.” Weil was influenced by leading thinkers of her time, prompting her to do an analysis of current scientific theories. Cullen argues that Weil’s analysis of Christianity, already present in Greek philosophy, shows us a theory of “identical thought” inherited from the East (India and China) and brought forth by peoples around Israel. This theory leads to Weil’s analysis, developed in The Need for Roots, of how we’ve been uprooted through colonization and how we can grow roots in a free local society (both rural and urban).

The role which narrative discourse plays in the writing of history is an area of increasing interest to historians and literary theorists, resulting in some of the most stimulating and controversial historiographical work in recent years. The rhetoric of historical representation represents one of the first attempts to carry out a sustained textual analysis of historiographical practice. Ann Rigney focusses on three celebrated nineteenth-century histories of the French Revolution, written by Alphonse de Lamartine, Jules Michelet and Louis Blanc. What distinguishes her account is the sensitivity and sophistication with which she handles the semiotic issues each text raises. She shows how a greater understanding of the specific features of historical narration can be achieved through a comparative analysis of the different representations of a common event. This fresh new perspective on a long-standing historiographical debate brings into relief the ways in which the narrative medium can be used to invest events with one significance rather than another.

Sarah H. Beckjord’s Territories of History explores the vigorous but largely unacknowledged spirit of reflection, debate, and experimentation present in foundational Spanish American writing. In historical works by writers such as Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Beckjord argues, the authors were not only informed by the spirit of inquiry present in the humanist tradition but also drew heavily from their encounters with New World peoples. More specifically, their attempts to distinguish superstition and magic from science and religion in the New World significantly influenced the aforementioned chroniclers, who increasingly directed their insights away from the description of native peoples and toward a reflection on the nature of truth, rhetoric, and fiction in writing history. Due to a convergence of often contradictory information from a variety of sources—eyewitness accounts, historiography, imaginative literature, as well as broader philosophical and theological influences—categorizing historical texts from this period poses no easy task, but Beckjord sifts through the information in an effective, logical manner. At the heart of Beckjord’s study, though, is a fundamental philosophical problem: the slippery nature of truth—especially when dictated by stories. Territories of History engages both a body of emerging scholarship on early modern epistemology and empiricism and recent developments in narrative theory to illuminate the importance of these colonial authors’ critical insights. In highlighting the parallels between the sixteenth-century debates and poststructuralist approaches to the study of history, Beckjord uncovers an important legacy of the Hispanic intellectual tradition and updates the study of colonial historiography in view of recent discussions of narrative theory.