TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: The Longue Durée of Intellectual History
Fernand Braudel held that the longue durée was the imperceptibly moving structure of history; Schopenhauer held that it was the history of philosophy that was the “fundamental bass” of history. Taking the two together, the slow moving development of ideas furnishes the structure of history, and we can project this back before any mind grasped any idea, as the emergence of new forms of complexity constitutes the material equivalent of novel ideas—they are the ideas of nature.
A Parable of Periodizations.—After the ancient, medieval, and modern permutations of Western history, what comes next? What can come next? Or does anything at all come next? Have the narrative epochs of the beginning, the middle, and the end (represented here in the form of ancient, medieval, and modern) exhausted the story of Western civilization, or is there more to come? Is it perhaps that the whole sequence is mere prelude, the prehistory to something much greater yet still unknown to us—a grand bifurcation of the past and the future, which now represent the before and the after of the event to be claimed as our calendar epoch? The great tripartite periodization that has shaped our conception of our own civilization would give way to simple bisection of history in the light of some great upheaval not yet known to us. Does this calendar epoch of civilization lie yet in our future, so that we haven’t yet achieved the initial maturity that would qualify our history as that of a true civilization? And the true civilization yet to come, that shows up our age as mere preparation for a true history—what would that be? Can we even imagine the magnitude of an event that would cleave history cleanly in half, separating past and future in one fell swoop, and that we knew this to be the case as it was happening, not being prevented by the trees in front of us from seeing the forest beyond? We can transcend the template of our periodization only if we consign the principled distinctions underlying that periodization to the darkness and ignorance of a prolegomenon to true history and true civilization. And should we experience such an event worthy of a calendar epoch, we would retain the traditional periodization as a kind of afterthought, but with all that came before now set as naught.
Friday 18 July 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 350 The Chefbot Thought Experiment mailchi.mp/cc3e3aaf999e/the-view-from-oregon-350 …In which I formulate a thought experiment consisting of a cooking robot connected to a large language model, discuss novel ontologies, consider the being of robots, the nature of machines, and subscribers…
The Mass of Life.—Every individual human life, whether we acknowledge it or not, is part of a continuum of life. We live in the shadow of our ancestors, and we become, in our turn, ancestors—perhaps revered, perhaps viewed as a cautionary tale, but useful in either case. Our posterity fans out before us even as our origins fan out behind us. Ancestors and descendants are not confined to the scope of immediate family; cast the net just a bit wider, and the scope of our connection to the world balloons beyond a continuum of life into a mass of life. Every individual life, again, has a place within this mass of life. Immediate family, it is true, will find it easier to claim you, should you live an admirable life or leave a beneficent legacy, and your extended family will find it easier to disown you, should you live a shameful life or leave a disgraceful legacy, but in either case your legacy lies with the mass of life.
My paper, “Building to Shape Civilization: Space Ethics and the Burden of the Highway Planner,” is now available in the JOURNAL OF SPACE PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 14. No. 2, Fall 2025.
Taking, as a point of departure, a Peter Fleming quote, the prayerful attitude of infrastructure planning and development is considered, especially in the light of the future buildout of civilization that will follow in the wake of space exploration and development. How the space frontier is developed, now and in the near future, will determine how future generations live, work, and play in space. How these developments will unfold is examined through the lens of what philosophy of religion has said about prayer, and further through the lens of the Rawlsian conception of reflective equilibrium.
The Linguistic Catastrophe.—Over the past century philosophy of language has opened up a can of worms that has affected even philosophy of history, which finds itself struggling with the problem of linguistic transcendentalism, as Ankersmit put it. Nothing is safe, it seems, from the twofold tyranny of and dissolution into language. This “linguistic turn” in philosophy might better be called the linguistic catastrophe, in which former conceptual gains were surrendered in a torrent of grammar and rhetoric—“the silly things silly people say,” as Bertrand Russell once put it. At each stage of its development, the linguistic catastrophe grew in scope and scale, like a snowball rolling downhill, seemingly gaining in mass and speed with every discipline it consumes, so that it now appears unstoppable. However, we got ourselves into this mess, so we should be able to extricate ourselves as well.
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Petrarch and the Development of Historical Consciousness
Sunday 20 July 2025 is the 721st anniversary of the birth of Francesco Petrarch (20 July 1304 to 19 July 1374), who was born in Arezzo, at that time an independent city-state, on this date in AD 1304. Petrarch himself tells us that the 20th of July in 1304 was a Monday, and that he was born at dawn.
Petrarch belongs in one sense to the late Middle Ages, and in another sense he belongs to a modern world that had not yet dawned while he was alive. Nietzsche called himself the first-born of the twentieth century; we could with some justification call Petrarch the first-born of the modern era. As a (partially) modern man in the medieval era, Petrarch contributed to the growth of a new kind of historical consciousness.
Metahistorical Misunderstandings.—There are at least two ways to misapprehend one’s place in life: one can get the drama wrong, being oblivious or mistaken about the emplotment of the situation, or one can get one’s role in the drama wrong. Four permutations follow from these two possibilities: getting both the drama and one’s role and in the drama wrong, getting the drama right but one’s role wrong, getting the drama wrong but one’s role correct in the actual drama that’s taking place, and being right about both the drama and one’s role in the drama. And while it’s probably helpful to know the drama and one’s role in it, it is no guarantee of successfully carrying off the performance. One begins hopefully enough believing one is a hero in an epic, but then a comedic turn robs the moment of its gravitas, further developments threaten to transform the situation into a tragedy, but eventually that pretense falls apart as well, and the whole imbroglio ends as a farce, without the players being able to assert the dignity of a tragic end.
Friday 11 July 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 349 Idealization in the Study of History and Civilization mailchi.mp/1fdd68b64640/the-view-from-oregon-349 …in which I discuss ideal histories and ideal civilizations, perfection, idealization in science, properties of a simple pendulum, Einstein’s photon box thought experiment, purposive movement, exemplars, Clive Bell on paragons of civilization, approximations to an ideal, Beowulf, and another paper revision…
The Logic of History.—If it were possible to formulate laws of history according to the nomothetic paradigm, it would not follow that a logic of history had been established. Laws must be formulated in a context, within a received conceptual framework, in which the concepts employed in the laws have some prior definition, if only implicitly through their use. The logic of history is not that any nomothetic principles posited to predict the course of events do in fact predict the next steps in history, but rather this logic would provide the theoretical basis of any proposed nomothetic principles. (If preferred, this could be called the philosophical logic of history, rather than logic simpliciter, but it is, in any case, prior to the promulgation of laws.) Laws framed in terms of concepts unelucidated or presupposed would be laws without foundation. The laws themselves are derivative of an anterior logic, so that to leap ahead to any predictive principles such as Popper denied in denying that there could be any theoretical science of history is to put the cart before the horse. First we must put in the hard work of a fine-grained parsing of every concept we employ, knowingly or not, and for those concepts employed unknowingly, there must be the additional step of rescuing from obscurity the concealed presuppositions that have been the basis of our explanation and understanding of history. Until that work is done, laws of history will be nothing more than anecdotal, and are rightly to be viewed with skepticism, if not to be dismissed outright with derision.
Nick Nielsen
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: The Longue Durée of Intellectual History
Fernand Braudel held that the longue durée was the imperceptibly moving structure of history; Schopenhauer held that it was the history of philosophy that was the “fundamental bass” of history. Taking the two together, the slow moving development of ideas furnishes the structure of history, and we can project this back before any mind grasped any idea, as the emergence of new forms of complexity constitutes the material equivalent of novel ideas—they are the ideas of nature.
Quora: philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Video: https://youtu.be/gLlZxRh1UqE
Podcast: open.spotify.com/episode/4lNl3coe7EDVrCg3fvVgZm?si…
www.centauri-dreams.org/2015/01/23/who-will-read-t…
#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory #LongueDurée #FernandBraudel #ArthurSchopenhauer #IntellectualHistory #FundamentalBass #EmergentComplexity #EternalIntelligence #EncyclopediaGalactica #SuperTasks
5 days ago | [YT] | 4
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Nick Nielsen
A Parable of Periodizations.—After the ancient, medieval, and modern permutations of Western history, what comes next? What can come next? Or does anything at all come next? Have the narrative epochs of the beginning, the middle, and the end (represented here in the form of ancient, medieval, and modern) exhausted the story of Western civilization, or is there more to come? Is it perhaps that the whole sequence is mere prelude, the prehistory to something much greater yet still unknown to us—a grand bifurcation of the past and the future, which now represent the before and the after of the event to be claimed as our calendar epoch? The great tripartite periodization that has shaped our conception of our own civilization would give way to simple bisection of history in the light of some great upheaval not yet known to us. Does this calendar epoch of civilization lie yet in our future, so that we haven’t yet achieved the initial maturity that would qualify our history as that of a true civilization? And the true civilization yet to come, that shows up our age as mere preparation for a true history—what would that be? Can we even imagine the magnitude of an event that would cleave history cleanly in half, separating past and future in one fell swoop, and that we knew this to be the case as it was happening, not being prevented by the trees in front of us from seeing the forest beyond? We can transcend the template of our periodization only if we consign the principled distinctions underlying that periodization to the darkness and ignorance of a prolegomenon to true history and true civilization. And should we experience such an event worthy of a calendar epoch, we would retain the traditional periodization as a kind of afterthought, but with all that came before now set as naught.
5 days ago | [YT] | 10
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Nick Nielsen
Friday 18 July 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 350
The Chefbot Thought Experiment
mailchi.mp/cc3e3aaf999e/the-view-from-oregon-350
…In which I formulate a thought experiment consisting of a cooking robot connected to a large language model, discuss novel ontologies, consider the being of robots, the nature of machines, and subscribers…
Substack: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/the-chefbot-thought…
Medium: jnnielsen.medium.com/the-chefbot-thought-experimen…
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1m9…
1 week ago | [YT] | 7
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Nick Nielsen
The Mass of Life.—Every individual human life, whether we acknowledge it or not, is part of a continuum of life. We live in the shadow of our ancestors, and we become, in our turn, ancestors—perhaps revered, perhaps viewed as a cautionary tale, but useful in either case. Our posterity fans out before us even as our origins fan out behind us. Ancestors and descendants are not confined to the scope of immediate family; cast the net just a bit wider, and the scope of our connection to the world balloons beyond a continuum of life into a mass of life. Every individual life, again, has a place within this mass of life. Immediate family, it is true, will find it easier to claim you, should you live an admirable life or leave a beneficent legacy, and your extended family will find it easier to disown you, should you live a shameful life or leave a disgraceful legacy, but in either case your legacy lies with the mass of life.
1 week ago | [YT] | 12
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Nick Nielsen
My paper, “Building to Shape Civilization: Space Ethics and the Burden of the Highway Planner,” is now available in the JOURNAL OF SPACE PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 14. No. 2, Fall 2025.
keplerspaceinstitute.com/project/volume-14-number-…
ABSTRACT
Taking, as a point of departure, a Peter Fleming quote, the prayerful attitude of infrastructure planning and development is considered, especially in the light of the future buildout of civilization that will follow in the wake of space exploration and development. How the space frontier is developed, now and in the near future, will determine how future generations live, work, and play in space. How these developments will unfold is examined through the lens of what philosophy of religion has said about prayer, and further through the lens of the Rawlsian conception of reflective equilibrium.
1 week ago | [YT] | 9
View 0 replies
Nick Nielsen
The Linguistic Catastrophe.—Over the past century philosophy of language has opened up a can of worms that has affected even philosophy of history, which finds itself struggling with the problem of linguistic transcendentalism, as Ankersmit put it. Nothing is safe, it seems, from the twofold tyranny of and dissolution into language. This “linguistic turn” in philosophy might better be called the linguistic catastrophe, in which former conceptual gains were surrendered in a torrent of grammar and rhetoric—“the silly things silly people say,” as Bertrand Russell once put it. At each stage of its development, the linguistic catastrophe grew in scope and scale, like a snowball rolling downhill, seemingly gaining in mass and speed with every discipline it consumes, so that it now appears unstoppable. However, we got ourselves into this mess, so we should be able to extricate ourselves as well.
1 week ago | [YT] | 14
View 3 replies
Nick Nielsen
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Petrarch and the Development of Historical Consciousness
Sunday 20 July 2025 is the 721st anniversary of the birth of Francesco Petrarch (20 July 1304 to 19 July 1374), who was born in Arezzo, at that time an independent city-state, on this date in AD 1304. Petrarch himself tells us that the 20th of July in 1304 was a Monday, and that he was born at dawn.
Petrarch belongs in one sense to the late Middle Ages, and in another sense he belongs to a modern world that had not yet dawned while he was alive. Nietzsche called himself the first-born of the twentieth century; we could with some justification call Petrarch the first-born of the modern era. As a (partially) modern man in the medieval era, Petrarch contributed to the growth of a new kind of historical consciousness.
Quora: philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/petrarch-and-the-de…
Video: https://youtu.be/UBMyeHz7u2Y
Podcast: open.spotify.com/episode/2ZqK7tXJ2OZaY7p6Ux3pqV?si…
#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory #FrancescoPetrarch #renaissance #HistoricalConsciousness #RaymondAron #humanism #MedievalHistory #MiddleAges #modernity
2 weeks ago | [YT] | 1
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Nick Nielsen
Metahistorical Misunderstandings.—There are at least two ways to misapprehend one’s place in life: one can get the drama wrong, being oblivious or mistaken about the emplotment of the situation, or one can get one’s role in the drama wrong. Four permutations follow from these two possibilities: getting both the drama and one’s role and in the drama wrong, getting the drama right but one’s role wrong, getting the drama wrong but one’s role correct in the actual drama that’s taking place, and being right about both the drama and one’s role in the drama. And while it’s probably helpful to know the drama and one’s role in it, it is no guarantee of successfully carrying off the performance. One begins hopefully enough believing one is a hero in an epic, but then a comedic turn robs the moment of its gravitas, further developments threaten to transform the situation into a tragedy, but eventually that pretense falls apart as well, and the whole imbroglio ends as a farce, without the players being able to assert the dignity of a tragic end.
2 weeks ago | [YT] | 7
View 1 reply
Nick Nielsen
Friday 11 July 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 349
Idealization in the Study of History and Civilization
mailchi.mp/1fdd68b64640/the-view-from-oregon-349
…in which I discuss ideal histories and ideal civilizations, perfection, idealization in science, properties of a simple pendulum, Einstein’s photon box thought experiment, purposive movement, exemplars, Clive Bell on paragons of civilization, approximations to an ideal, Beowulf, and another paper revision…
Substack: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/idealization-in-the…
Medium: jnnielsen.medium.com/idealization-in-the-study-of-…
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1m7…
3 weeks ago | [YT] | 8
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Nick Nielsen
The Logic of History.—If it were possible to formulate laws of history according to the nomothetic paradigm, it would not follow that a logic of history had been established. Laws must be formulated in a context, within a received conceptual framework, in which the concepts employed in the laws have some prior definition, if only implicitly through their use. The logic of history is not that any nomothetic principles posited to predict the course of events do in fact predict the next steps in history, but rather this logic would provide the theoretical basis of any proposed nomothetic principles. (If preferred, this could be called the philosophical logic of history, rather than logic simpliciter, but it is, in any case, prior to the promulgation of laws.) Laws framed in terms of concepts unelucidated or presupposed would be laws without foundation. The laws themselves are derivative of an anterior logic, so that to leap ahead to any predictive principles such as Popper denied in denying that there could be any theoretical science of history is to put the cart before the horse. First we must put in the hard work of a fine-grained parsing of every concept we employ, knowingly or not, and for those concepts employed unknowingly, there must be the additional step of rescuing from obscurity the concealed presuppositions that have been the basis of our explanation and understanding of history. Until that work is done, laws of history will be nothing more than anecdotal, and are rightly to be viewed with skepticism, if not to be dismissed outright with derision.
3 weeks ago | [YT] | 9
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