RESEARCH AREAS

Philosophy of History.

This is an interdisciplinary group composed of historians and philosophers who are experts on the Enlightenment and Modernity. This research group argues for the restoration of the Philosophy of History, deriving from a new conception of the Philosophy of History as based on strong ethical grounds rather than empty narratives of contingency. The second objective is to analyse and develop descriptive categories and axiological, normative and epistemic concepts that could contribute to transforming the traditional Philosophy of History into a useful tool for tackling current problems. The group’s overall aims include: first, the rehabilitation of a space for the philosophy of history, based on in-depth knowledge of its Enlightenment roots; second, the search for a balance between historical memory and experience; and third, as a more specific objective, an in-depth reflection and elaboration of concepts such as globalisation, universality, or humanity/humankind; in other words: issues concerning global society and its historical dimension.

Production and Circulation of Knowledge.

There are historians of science and technology, general historians and philosophers in this group. It aims at exploring different dimensions of knowledge production linked to intercultural dialogue and cultural transfer, encompassing the Euro-Mediterranean and the Americas in the Early Modern and Modern eras. There is a strong historical justification for such a geographical framework, as network analyses and biographic studies have confirmed the interconnectedness – across political, cultural and religious borders - of the two geographic areas since the time of European discovery and colonisation of America, and intensified since the Enlightenment. First of all, the group will examine and question cultural frontiers and their relevance in knowledge production and circulation. Second, the group will discuss how encounters produce new knowledge in fields ranging from sciences and technology to philosophy and political thought. Third, spatial dimensions of knowledge production and circulation will be analysed from global and comparative perspectives. The group will identify the emergence and reproduction of global hubs and their connections with one other and with other areas, determine how spatial settings shaped knowledge production and circulation, and examine and question the divides that have been taken for granted, such as urban – rural, centre – periphery, metropolis – colony as well as the West - the rest.

Ethics and Politics

In this group we have an interesting interchange between ethical-political philosophers, historians and sociologists. In accordance with the aims of thematic areas 1, here the group argues that the values of the Enlightenment ought to be revisited. Such reconsideration took place during other periods of crisis when the return to the classics of philosophy proved to be a mighty tool in undermining ideologies tending towards the singularity of thought. The crisis of the moment is an economic one only in part. The proposal is to analyse its other levels if we wish to de-activate it and neutralise its negative consequences. One of the axes of this project consists in arguing for the continuing validity and utility of the ideals of the Enlightenment in moral philosophy and in politics. We maintain that a social pedagogy is needed, one that would recover the Enlightened principle of independent thought and dissolve reigning fatalist stereotypes. This methodological strategy would be, of course, accompanied by new theories of justice as well as gender analysis, organised around the legal-political axis. Within the phenomenon of globalization, political power has been displaced from its historical centres and the sovereignty of states has become more limited. This contributes to broadening the gap between citizens and their representatives, a gap that puts in jeopardy the prevailing “rules of play,” where citizens seem to have become mere tools of achieving objectives defined in strictly economic terms. A trend towards complexity and globalization implies great challenges to existing social systems as well as to our theoretical-conceptual repertoires.

Historical Reasoning and Theories of Epistemic Justification in the Study of History.

The goal in this area is to answer a double question: in what sense is history a form of knowledge? And is it possible to recover the collective memory of our cognitive past in a reasonable and justified way? The state of the art in human and social sciences (philosophy of history, evolutionary history of cognition, cognitive linguistics, etc.) shows that these two questions are and will remain a scientific challenge in the coming decades.
The attempt to answer these two questions has led to frontier research in disciplines such as Artificial Intelligence, social epistemology, the psychology of reasoning or the sociology of science. It is important to remember that these two questions are traditionally part of the philosophy of history.