The general aim of this paper is to establish the plausibility of a postfoundational intentionalism. Its specific aim is to respond to criticisms of my work made by Vivienne Brown in a paper “On Some Problems with Weak Intentionalism for Intellectual History”. Postfoundationalism is often associated with a new textualism according to which there is no outside to the text. In contrast, I suggest that postfoundationalists can legitimate our postulating intentions, actions, and other historical objects outside of the text. They can do so by reference to, first, philosophical commitments to general classes of objects, and, second, inference to the best explanation with respect to particular objects belonging to such classes. This postfoundational intentionalism sets up a suitable context within which to address Brown’s more specific questions.

A study of the role of theosophy in the formation of the Indian National Congress enhances our understanding of the relationship between neo-Hinduism and political nationalism. Theosophy, and neo-Hinduism more generally, provided western-educated Hindus with a discourse within which to develop their political aspirations in a way that met western notions of legitimacy. It gave them confidence in themselves, experience of organisation, and clear intellectual commitments, and it brought them together with liberal Britons within an all-India framework. It provided the background against which A. O. Hume worked with younger nationalists to found the Congress.

This paper analyses conceptual change. A rejection of pure experience has prompted philosophers of science to adopt a certain perspective from which to view changes of belief. Popper, Kuhn, and others have analysed conceptual change in terms of problems or anomalies, that is, in terms of contingent reasoning about issues posed in the context of an inherited web of belief. This paper explores a more general analysis of conceptual change in dialogue with these philosophers of science. Still, because changes of belief are not all changes in scientific belief, we seek to unpack conceptual change in terms of dilemmas, as opposed to anomalies or problems. For a start, the notion of a dilemma differ has to be broader than that of an anomaly since it purports to apply to conceptual change as a whole, not just the transition from one era of normal science to another. In addition, we should detach the notion of a dilemma from the objectivism of Popper’s world-3 problems.

Many philosophers have rejected the possibility of objective historical knowledge on the grounds that there is no given past against which to judge rival interpretations. There reasons for doing so are valid. But this does not demonstrate that we must give up the concept of historical objectivity as such. The purpose of this paper is to define a concept of objectivity based on criteria of comparison, not on a given past. Objective interpretations are those which best meet rational criteria of accuracy, comprehensiveness, consistency, progressiveness, fruitfulness, and openness. Finally, the nature of our being in the world is shown to give us a good reason to regard such objective interpretations as moving towards a regulative ideal of truth.

This paper offers an interpretive alternative to the idea of the state as sovereign over a territory and possessing a monopoly of power. It interprets both Territory and Power (the book by Bulpitt) and territory and power (the objects studied in that book). Bulpitt’s ideas were part of a broader movement to rethink the state to (i) accommodate new behavioral topics, and (ii) to defend modernist empiricism and institutionalism from the positivism and general theories of behavioralism. Now we might adopt an alternative interpretive approach. An interpretive approach decenters territory and power, revealing them to be contingent products of struggles over meanings in which the beliefs of some actors come to dominate, obscure, and even obliterate those of others.

This article argue against both hard linguistic-contextualists who believe that paradigms give meaning to a text and soft linguistic-contextualists who believe that we can grasp authorial intentions only by locating them in a contemporaneous conventional context. Instead it proposes that meanings come from intentions and that there can be no fixed way of recovering intentions. On these grounds the article concludes first that we can declare some understandings of texts to be unhistorical though not illegitimate, and second that good history depends solely on accurate and reasonable evidence, not on adopting a particular method.

This essay explores the ethical import of deconstruction through a reading of Derrida on Heidegger. In Of Spirit, Derrida traces through Heidegger’s writings the interplay of “spirit” and spirit. Spirit denotes an involvement with the question of Being, and in thus pointing towards a positive content, it embodies a metaphysical gesture in which a spiritual mission becomes the human essence. In Heidegger’s entanglement with National Socialism, he tied this spiritual mission to German self-assertion. “Spirit” is a concept under erasure that calls our attention to the absent Other. It reminds us of an ethical responsibility that is prior to ontology; it sets up a “cosmopolitanism” that precedes all particular identifications and so avoids spiritual racism. Derridean “cosmopolitanism” differs importantly from liberal universalism. From a Derridean perspective, liberal universalism remains insufficiently attune to the Other; it retains a metaphysical gesture, and so imperialistic and exclusionary tendency, akin to that found in Heidegger.

This paper provides a short summary of Mark Bevir, The Logic of the History of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Logic stands here as a subset of Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as a matter of the grammar of our concepts. It studies the forms of reasoning appropriate to a discipline, rather than the material of that discipline. Hence, the logic of the history of ideas considers the nature of meaning, the way we should justify our knowledge of past meanings, and how we should explain things such as the existence of meanings, the beliefs people held, and conceptual change.