You are all warmly welcome to our next event in our running seminar series.
The Helsinki Centre for Intellectual History's February Seminar is titled "Back to the Drawing Board: New Readings of Classics in Intellectual History" and takes place on Friday, February 21 at 15:15!
We will have two presentations and ample time for discussion.
The event takes place at Fabianinkatu 33, University Main Building, Lecture room F3006.
Program
15.15-15.20
Dr. Cesare Cuttica, Opening of the event
15.20-16.15
Prof. Adrian Blau, Quentin Skinner's “Meaning and Understanding”: the Unexplored Early Draft, and Lessons for Today
16.15-17.00
Dr. Jani Marjanen & Dr. Antti Kanner, What are concepts in conceptual history? Revisiting Koselleck through theories of semantic relations
17.00-17.15
Concluding discussion
---
Abstracts
Adrian Blau, Quentin Skinner's "Meaning and Understanding": the Unexplored Early Draft, and Lessons for Today
Skinner's seminal essay on "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas" remains one of the most important defences of a genuinely historical approach to interpreting texts. It was first presented as a conference paper in 1968, one year before its publication. The conference paper has never been analysed, but it is interestingly and importantly different from the published version. I will compare the two versions, and also critique them. Most importantly, I address a crucial gap which remains a problem: Skinner overlooks philosophical kinds of meaning and understanding. By caricaturing John Plamenatz, and by sidestepping John Passmore, Skinner encourages historians to overlook the inevitable combination of historical and philosophical analysis. Yet Skinner himself brilliantly exemplifies this combination, in his actual interpretations of Machiavelli, Hobbes and others. The failure to theorise this has had a very damaging effect on how intellectual history is still understood by many historians. That must change.
Jani Marjanen & Antti Kanner, What are concepts in conceptual history? Revisiting Koselleck through theories of semantic relations
Reinhart Koselleck’s notion of a concept has been the object of both criticism and clarification. Points of debate include in particular the relationship between words and concepts as well as the multiple meanings related to words. This paper takes Koselleckian Begriffsgeschichte as its point of departure and tries to clarify it by linking it to linguistic theories of semantic relations. We argue that the words that are in general of interest to conceptual historians are of a specific type. They are open to contextual interpretation and re-interpretation, that is, their exact point of reference is not fixed. We suggest that, following the established descriptive framework in linguistics (e.g. Dirk Geeraerts), that this openness rather is about vagueness, not ambiguity, meaning that these words do not have a selection of distinct lexicalized senses, but become playable because of their vagueness. Following Geoffrey Leech’s semantic categorization, those words not only carry complex conceptual meanings, but are usually also characterized by connotative and affective meanings. Such connotative and affective meanings are properties of the words and semantically stand in complementary relation to what Leech calls conceptual meaning. This fits well together with Koselleck’s insistence that concepts and words cannot be distinguished. This link can be further explained by Lynn Murphy’s theory of metalexical concepts, which explains how ordinary language users operate with the notion of particular words being associated with particular concepts. This feature is particularly present in abstract terminology, which is often of interest to conceptual historians.