Admir Skodo Consulting

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During the summer I wrote this review, certain events occurred that shook the socio-political order of the world. In July, the bombing and killing spree in Norway, dispassionately executed, yes, but grounded in the passions of unreason flowing in the whirlpool of history ...

This new book offers a clear and accessible exposition of Hayden White's thought. In an engaging and wide-ranging analysis, Herman Paul discusses White's core ideas and traces the development of these ideas from the mid-1950s to the present. Starting with White's medievalist research and youthful fascination for French existentialism, Paul shows how White became increasingly convinced that historical writing is a moral activity. He goes on to argue that the critical concepts that have secured White's fame – trope, plot, discourse, figural realism – all stem from his desire to explicate the moral claims and perceptions underlying historical writing. White emerges as a passionate thinker, a restless rebel against scientism, and a defender of existentialist humanist values. This innovative introduction will appeal to students and scholars across the humanities, and help develop a critical understanding of an increasingly important thinker.

... Jan Werner Müller, Peter Miller, Michael Neu, Peter Nicholson, Mike O'Brien, Jon Parkin, Phil Parvin, Emile Perreau-Saussine, Jennifer ... Helen Thompson, John Thompson, Keith Tribe, Richard Tuck, Jim Tully, Colin Tyler, Nadia Urbinati, Andrew Vincent, Ben Wempe, Richard ...

... help from the master, Giles Henderson, Lucie Walker in the library, and Jane Osborne, admirable accommodation officer; Paul Pickering, for illumination of the problem of historical re-enact-ment; Michael Rae, old friend, for ready hospitality in Naples; Abby Sabey, my daughter ...

Looking at the way the person is studied and conceptualized in the humanities in general, and in historical-biographical studies in particular, many shortcomings become visible, which in my view prompts a serious epistemological, metaphysical and normative interest in the person. Recent studies in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and Post-analytic philosophy have made strong headway in our understanding of the person. To be more specific, I believe that the results and insights from these studies can be incorporated into a holistic and normative theory of the person. Holistic because I argue that the person is best understood as being composed of elements and relations of many orders, and a sufficiently large amount of them are interrelated. The view is normative for two reasons: first, as in non-objective, because the theory’s validity stems only from a certain epistemolo- gical perspective. Second, it is normative as in prescriptive, that is, I am arguing that any scholar in the humanities studying the person should take this theory to be delineating the necessary, appropriate and justified presuppositions for the study of the person. The theory gives us a proper direction, which entails that several other current and fashionable directions are seen as inadequate. An outline of the theory, the systematic account of which is part of a larger project of mine, will be given in this essay.

This article argues that the relationship between analytical philosophy and the philosophy of intellectual history is conceptually uneasy and even antagonistic once the general philosophical viewpoints, and some particular topics, of the two perspectives are drawn out and compared. The article critically compares the philosophies of Quentin Skinner and Mark Bevir with the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, W.V.O. Quine and Donald Davidson. Section I compares the way in which these two perspectives view the task of philosophy. Section II points to a critical difficulty in Bevir and Skinner’s use of analytical philosophy in their discussions on objectivity. In section III, another such critical juncture is identified in the topic of explanation. Finally, section IV suggests an interpretation for the character of the comparison.

Other Logics: Alternatives to Formal Logic in the History of Thought and Contemporary Philosophy challenges the widespread idea of formal logic as inherently monolithic, universal, and ahistorical. Written by both leading and up-and-coming scholars, and edited by Admir Skodo, Other Logics offers a wide variety of historical and philosophical alternatives to this idea, all arguing that logic is a historical, concrete, and multi-dimensional phenomenon. To name a few examples, Frank Ankersmit lays down a representationalist logic, Alessandra Tanesini forcefully argues for the possibility of logical aliens, Christopher Watkin analyzes how leading contemporary French philosophers view the idea of logic, and Aaron Wendland unearths Heidegger's critique of formal logic. In Other Logics readers will find provocative interventions in a highly contested field in contemporary philosophy.

This book examines the legacy of philosophical idealism in twentieth century British historical and political thought. It demonstrates that the absolute idealism of the nineteenth century was radically transformed by R.G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott, and Benedetto Croce. These new idealists developed a new philosophy of history with an emphasis on the study of human agency, and historicist humanism. This study unearths the impact of the new idealism on the thought of a group of prominent revisionist historians in the welfare state period, focusing on E.H. Carr, Isaiah Berlin, G.R. Elton, Peter Laslett, and George Kitson Clark. It shows that these historians used the new idealism to restate the nature of history and to revise modern English history against the backdrop of the intellectual, social and political problems of the welfare state period, thus making new idealist revisionism a key tradition in early postwar historiography.

Other Logics: Alternatives to Formal Logic in the History of Thought and Contemporary Philosophy challenges the widespread idea of formal logic as inherently monolithic, universal, and ahistorical. Written by both leading and up-and-coming scholars, and edited by Admir Skodo, Other Logics offers a wide variety of historical and philosophical alternatives to this idea, all arguing that logic is a historical, concrete, and multi-dimensional phenomenon. To name a few examples, Frank Ankersmit lays down a representationalist logic, Alessandra Tanesini forcefully argues for the possibility of logical aliens, Christopher Watkin analyzes how leading contemporary French philosophers view the idea of logic, and Aaron Wendland unearths Heidegger's critique of formal logic. In Other Logics readers will find provocative interventions in a highly contested field in contemporary philosophy.

This article examines the historical thought of Peter Laslett against the background themes and dilemmas of British ‘Golden Age’ post-Second World War historiography, c.1945–1980. Laslett reappraised whig interpretations of English history, and extended these reappraisals to critiques of liberal political theory, in a similar
vein as other Golden Age historians. The article argues that Laslett drew on themes from Michael Oakeshott’s idealist philosophy of history and Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge in his revisions of Sir Robert Filmer, patriarchalism, John Locke
and liberal political theory. Tracing these specific themes in Laslett’s thought is significant as it allows, first, for an understanding of the exact interpretive moves and speech acts that Laslett performed in writing his revisionist historical accounts.
Second, this approach allows for an identification of the ways in which Laslett differed from both Oakeshott and Mannheim, and other Golden Age historians. The results of this article reveal several important aspects of Laslett’s historical thought: first, that,
why and how Oakeshott and Mannheim had a profound influence on Laslett. Second, that Laslett’s inverted whiggism was similar to that of other Golden Age historians in exhibiting welfare state anachronisms, but that it was different from theirs in its particular
critique of liberalism, and in its belief in the positive features of early modern patriarchalism. Third, underneath Laslett’s famous ambition to reform traditional political philosophy lay an unconventional form of inverted perennialism that reserved for
present use only those aspects of past political philosophy that were entirely unique.

The British philosopher F.C.S. Schiller (1864-1937) was a leading pragmatist in the early twentieth century. His critiques of formal logic and his attempts to construct a humanist logic, derived from an anti-foundationalist humanism, are recognized as lasting philosophical achievements. But scholars have failed to consider that Schiller was passionately committed to the British eugenics movement. This article explores the relationship between Schiller’s pragmatism and his eugenicism. It argues that Schiller represents the broad scope of pragmatism in the early twentieth century through his involvements not only with eugenics, but with psychical research as well. Underneath Schiller’s various undertakings lies a common theme: the self, conceived in voluntaristic, historicist, and concrete terms. By tracing the trajectory of this theme in Schiller’s thought, this article demonstrates that Schiller’s eugenicism was confined to the presuppositions of his pragmatist logic, which steered Schiller’s eugenicism toward a distinctively non-deterministic and non-Social-Darwinist kind.

This is one of two short essays based on my research on the concept of the immigrant and the "immigrant question" in Western modernity. The piece is written in view of educating a broad audience about the important place of immigration detention centers in Western politics and society.