1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method , trans. from 2d ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 274.

2. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 267-274.

3. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 268.

4. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem," in Philosophical Hermeneutics , trans. G. B. Hess and R. E. Palmer (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1976), 7.

5. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 271.

6. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 256; see, further, the whole of 253-258.

7. See for instance, Gadamer, Truth and Method , 259.

8. See, for a hint of the problem, Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences , in translation (New York: Random House, 1970), ch. 10; Jürgen Habermas, "Reconstruction and Interpretation in the Social Sciences" and "Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action," in Moral Consciousness and Communcative Action , trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990); and Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), ch. 2.

9. See, for instance, Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy , trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), ch. 6. Furthermore, in clarifying Aristotle's debt to Plato, notably anchored in the text of the Republic , Gadamer specifically remarks: continue

"This 'one' [the idea of the good] is certainly not Plotinus's 'One,' the sole existent and 'trans-existent' entity. Rather, it is that which on any given occasion provides what is multiple with the unity of whatever consists in itself. As the unity of what is unitary, the idea of the good would seem to be presupposed by anything ordered, enduring, and consistent. That means, however, that it is presupposed as the unity of the many. . . . for the Greeks 'one' was not an arithmos, that is, not a sum, not a unity of many. Rather, it was the constitutive element of the numbers" (32-33). It certainly seems reasonable to construe this reading as informing Gadamer's own account of the classical. That he undoubtedly means to avoid anything like the Forms merely confirms the problematic standing of his appeal to the classical.

The appeal to this and similar texts is here intended only dialectically. See, for example, the deliberately unguarded use of expressions like "common spirit" (of humanity) in articles like "Are the Poets Falling Silent?" (1970). in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics , ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992). Reflecting on a poem by Paul Celan, Gadamer says, in answer to the implied question, "The I of the poet?": ''In a composition belonging to the lyric genre, it would not be the I of a poet, if it were not to become the I of everyone" (p. 75). How strenuously Gadamer intends his remark is difficult to say, but it lends support to the "traditionalist" theme.

10. See Gadamer, Truth and Method , 10-39, particularly 13.

11. Foucault, The Order of Things , 344-348.

12. See, particularly, Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 170-171.

13. See Karl Marx," On the Jewish Question," in Karl Marx: Early Writings , trans. and ed. Tom Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); also "Marginal Notes on the Program of the German Workers' Party," Critique of the Gotha Program , in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works , 2 vols, (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950); and Joseph Margolis, " Praxis and Meaning: Marx's 'Species-Being' and Aristotle's 'Political Animal'," in Marx and Greek Philosophy , ed. George McCarthy (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991).

14. On bivalence and related options, see Joseph Margolis, The Truth about Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).

15. Compare Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science , trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), §374. I owe the reference to my colleague Tom Rockmore. See, also, Nietzsche's provocative remark, "an excess of history is harmful to the living man," in "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," in Untimely Meditations , trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 67.

16. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 2d ed. enl. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 111.

17. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 118.

18. See, for instance, Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening; Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). break

19. See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution , ch. 13.

20. For a convenient summary of the entire issue as it bears on the metaphysics of human culture, see Joseph Margolis, Texts without Referents: Reconciling Science and Narrative (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), ch. 6. This may also serve to elucidate the distinction of the cultural world.

21. For a specimen view of this sort, see John F. Post, The Faces of Existence: An Essay in Nonreductive Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

22. On the meaning of "emergent," see Joseph Margolis, Science without Unity: Reconciling the Human and Natural Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), ch. 10.

23. D. C. Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 28-29.

24. Dennett, Content and Consciousness , 189-190. These are in fact the closing pages of the book. Dennett has never "recanted." See Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987); and Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). For a fuller sense of various other forms of impoverished views of persons in the analytic literature, see P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959); Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).

25. I first introduced the distinction between the real! and the reall in Texts without Referents , ch. 8.

26. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations , trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1954), pt. I, §§240-241, for instance. See, also, Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice , trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

27. This, of course, is a way of coopting Strawton's Individuals .

28. See W.V. Quine, "Naturalizing Epistemology," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Alvin I. Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), particularly Introduction. It is a non sequitur, it should be noted, to suppose that the avoidance of an a priori epistemology entails "naturalizing" epistemology or strengthens the sense in which epistemology is "autonomous" or "prior" to the special sciences. This is actually Goldman's view, but it is nowhere defended.

29. Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 305; italics added (apart, of course, from the use of the variable " n ").

30. Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics , 305; see, also, 12-13.

31. See W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960).

32. See Margolis, The Truth about Relativism .

33. See Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce , ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 5.505.

34. Peirce, Collected Papers , 5.289, 5448nl.

35. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 261.

36. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 273; italics added. break

37. Gadamer, Truth and Method , 273.

38. The most compelling recent discussion of the conceptual difficulties involved in denying the reality of the past appears in Irwin C. Lieb, Past, Present and Future: A Philosophical Essay About Time (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

39. See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language , trans. Robert Czerny, with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S.J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), study 8. It is also true that Ricoeur sees a very strong connection between history and literature (even fiction)—in particular, an imaginative and paideutic function—which leads him to treat narrative structure as falling within a twilight zone between the real and the fictional. See, for instance, Time and Narrative , vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), Conclusions, particularly 261-274.

40. See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978).

41. See Aristotle, Poetics ; and Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor , study 8.

42. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative , 3: 192.

43. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative , 3: 81-82.

44. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative , 3: 191.

45. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), ch. 7, particularly 177.

46. See White, The Content of the Form , 147; also, 180-182.

47. White, The Content of the Form , 178.

48. White, The Content of the Form , 46-47.

49. White, The Content of the Form , 45; italics added. White relies here on Louis O. Mink, "Narrative Forms as a Cognitive Instrument," in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding , ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). He claims the same thesis appears in Marx's account of the 18th Brumaire (47). Our realist emphasis converges in a general way (but not more) with that in William Dray, "Narrative and Historical Realism," in On History and Philosophers of History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989). Dray terms both Mink and White "antirealists" or "skeptics" about historical narrative. He himself insists on the objectivity of recovering the historical past; but, apart from a very strong opposition to Hempel's model, an insistence on the autonomy of history as a cognitive discipline, and a certain (quite limited) tolerance for a "perspectivism'' or objective relativism of perspectives (which he draws from a suggestion made by Ernest Nagel), Dray has rather little to say about the metaphysics of history. See, further, "Point of View in History," also in On History and Philosophers of History ; and Ernest Nagel, "The Logic of Historical Analysis," in Hans Mayerhoff, The Philosophy of History in Our Time (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969). On the quarrel about the compatibility of views of the historical past as both "constructed" and "real" ( real! ) and its bearing on uniquely correct or alternative ("incongruent") interpretations of the past, see also Leon J. Goldstein, Historical Knowing (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976); and Michael Krausz, "Ide- soft

ality and Ontology in the Practice of History," in Objectivity, Method and Point of View , ed. W. J. van der Dussen and Lionel Rubinoff (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991).

In a curious way, the theme developed in Ricoeur and White is very close, structurally, to the dampened "theological" theme of Walter Benjamin's intriguing notion of "now-times" ( Jetztzeiten ). Benjamin's notion similarly bifurcates time and the historical meaning of temporal events. See Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations , trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969). Benjamin's essay, unlike Ricoeur's and White's accounts, however, treats history "existentially." In this sense it is related to a literature that includes Nietzsche's ''On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Kierkegaard's Repetition , and Heidegger's Being and Time . For a perspicuous reading of Kierkegaard and Heidegger along these lines, see Joan Stambaugh, "Existential Time in Kierkegaard and Heidegger," in Religion and Time , ed. Anindita Niyogi Balslev and J. N. Mohanty (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993). There is a strong analogy between Benjamin's " Jetztzeit " and Heidegger's " Augenblick " and between Heidegger's term and Kierkegaard's Danish cognate.

50. Lieb, Past, Present, and Future , 134.