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.
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Bagby’s Unfinished Science of Civilization
Wednesday 16 July 2025 is the 107th anniversary of the birth of Philip Haxall Bagby (16 July 1918 – 21 September 1958), who was born in Henrico County, Virginia, on this date in 1918.
Bagby was only 40 when he died, but he had led an active life as a diplomat stationed in Casablanca and Culcutta, and he produced one book before he died, Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations. This is a remarkable book with an especially clear and concise conception of how civilization ought to be studied.
Transcendent History.—Formally, the lapse of time reveals nothing new. Each moment as a moment is identical to every other moment, the structure of the future mirrors the structure of the past, and one might enter indifferently at any point of the continuum of time without regard to its relationship to past, present, or future. The only unprecedented event that could occur in formal time would be a fundamental change in the structure of time itself, such as the bifurcation of time into two or more branches, or the end of time such that there eventually occurred a moment not followed by another. Empirically, on the other hand, each moment of time is an unprecedented novelty, bringing with it new experiences different in every detail from any previous experience. Even here, however, the empirical novelties of time become familiar to us as we recognize the temporal structures that repeat regularly in our experience, in the form of years, seasons, days, and the routines of life that recur unto monotony and ennui. The experience that is different in every detail with each occurrence is intimately familiar in its broad outlines, and identical in its essence no less than the structures of formal time. It is the development of history as it supervenes upon featureless formal time that transcends events identical in their essence; history pushes us into transcendence. Here too we can identify historical events that become familiar unto repetition, but, again, here too we can glimpse the unprecedented historical development that transcends the historical pattern, forcing a transition in all established patterns. And all forms of history, all social formations, are transitional except for the final form, which fails to be a transition only because it is followed by nothing, as with the unprecedented instance of a moment of time not followed by another.
Friday 04 July 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 348 Clustering Below the Threshold of Automation mailchi.mp/6e32f06ec7bc/the-view-from-oregon-348 …in which I discuss electromechanical and “pure” or hybrid technologies, diesel engines, Wankel engines, turbine cars, James Mauro, the 1939 World’s Fair, the Polyrhetor, elevator control systems, anonymization, and a book about AI…
The Footprint of an Elusive Beast.—Science does not begin with a blank slate, where concept formation occurs as a kind of epistemic creatio ex nihilo. On the contrary, we begin with naïve concepts, folk concepts, so hoary with age that their origins are unknown to us. Imperfect though they may be, these folk concepts are our first signposts of knowledge. Around them, we build a conceptual framework to takes us deeper into once inaccessible conceptual terrain—with each plunge penetrating further into the heart of reality, at times dredging up foundations once imagined to be beyond the scope of reason. Eventually, the conceptual framework we construct will be composed of much more precise and quantitative concepts than the folk concept with which we began, and so we undertake the rational reconstruction of the folk concept itself, displacing whatever irrational accretions still cling to that relic. Still, the science was formed around that imperfect folk concept, and its crude impression remains on the science like a footprint of an elusive beast; while unseen, its presence is felt. In the fullness of time, this science will enter into the constitution of other sciences, which have need of its specialized conceptions, and the complementary abstractions at play in multidisciplinary sciences will mingle and bring together once again, in a sublimated form, those primitive elements of the world that formed the original ground of knowledge. From this unlikely epistemic milieu there is the possibility of returning to the ultimate ground of knowledge. For folk concepts, whatever their fault (and these are many), preserve in themselves a relation to the world mediated by passion, not reason, and in activating a passionate engagement with the world, new perspectives on knowledge, and possibly even new sciences, may present themselves.
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: White on Metahistory and the Role of the Historian
Saturday 12 July 2025 is the 97th anniversary of the birth of Hayden V. White (12 July 1928 – 05 March 2018), who was born in Martin, Tennessee, on this date in 1928.
White is particularly known for his book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, which has been very influential, but also widely criticized. I discuss some of these influences and some of the criticisms, especially in relation to the role of the historian in the construction of history, which remains ambiguous despite attempts, like those of White, to clarify the problem.
Between the Garden and Paradise.—The problem of whether a distinctive formal intuition suggests a distinctive form of reasoning, and whether this distinctive form of reasoning implies a distinctive standard of rigor, also appears in natural science. May we not also experience a novel empirical intuition that requires a new form of reasoning that in turn entails a distinctive standard of rigor? Our senses are as old as our bodies, so we are not accustomed to needing new forms of reasoning for sensory intuition; the reasoning we need, if we can call it such, is readily available to us. So it would seem that we are not likely to encounter experiences unknown to our ancestors, but even the antiquity of the body does not ensure its comprehensibility. Indeed, our body, so familiar to us, so constitutive our identity as an individual, nevertheless surprises, humbles, and at times humiliates us by its unaccountable behaviors and responses. It was a preoccupation of St. Augustine that the body was not obedient to the will—a failing that did not trouble Adam and Eve in the Garden, and will not trouble us in Paradise to come. In our present fallen state, however, the body defies us, often remaining opaque to the mind. This opacity has been exacerbated by science. With the scientific revolution, there was a rush to subordinate the world entire, including the private corporeal world of the individual, to the norms of science, schematized according to the exteriority and alienation of physics and not the interiority and intimacy of bodily sensation. While science was believed to be rooted in sensation, its characteristic modes of abstraction are the antithesis of the sensual reality of life. With our intuitions of our own embodiment having been filtered through the lens of the schematization of natural science, we can return to the body at any time and find concealed and subterranean feelings that could spur our reason to novel concept formation, if only we will attend to them.
Friday 27 June 2025 Grand Strategy Newsletter The View from Oregon – 347 Negating Nietzsche’s Three Kinds of History mailchi.mp/7864b290f100/the-view-from-oregon-347 …in which I discuss Nietzsche, monumental, antiquarian, and critical history, Last Men, Hugh Trevor-Roper, purposive movement, contempt for the little tradition, ressentiment, micro-, cosmopolitan, and sycophantic history, Procopius, Bartolomé de las Casas, W. B. Gallie, essentially contested concepts, thinking, Ettinger on Heidegger and Arendt, and a finished paper…
Four Ages.—To watch the 1953 film Julius Caesar (with James Mason as Brutus and Marlon Brando as Mark Antony) is to simultaneously experience four periods of history. It is to experience the ancient history of Caesar’s assassination and the civil wars that followed, which is the original source of the story. It is to experience the Elizabethan overlay of the story as told by Shakespeare in Shakespearean language and with the added layers of early modern intrigue so typical of the period. It is to experience the Hollywood overlay of a confident spectacle from the mid-twentieth century, with the film industry at its height, both commercially and culturally. And it is to experience the contemporary overlay of one’s own experiences and one’s own age—its attitudes, feelings, moods, judgments, and so on—part way into the twenty-first century. All four of these epochs come together in a single experience in which one is at once struck by the strangeness of classical antiquity that produced the story, by the strangeness of Elizabethan England that told the story, and by the strangeness of Hollywood that filmed the story, because none of these are our time; but if we are drawn into the story, and find ourselves participating in the drama vicariously, the distinct ages collapse into a single experience in which the strangeness of these ages not our own is transformed into the strangeness of our own life, which is never absent, however at home we are in the present.
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…
2 days ago | [YT] | 7
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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.
2 days ago | [YT] | 9
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Nick Nielsen
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Bagby’s Unfinished Science of Civilization
Wednesday 16 July 2025 is the 107th anniversary of the birth of Philip Haxall Bagby (16 July 1918 – 21 September 1958), who was born in Henrico County, Virginia, on this date in 1918.
Bagby was only 40 when he died, but he had led an active life as a diplomat stationed in Casablanca and Culcutta, and he produced one book before he died, Culture and History: Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilizations. This is a remarkable book with an especially clear and concise conception of how civilization ought to be studied.
Quora: philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/bagbys-unfinished-s…
Video: https://youtu.be/sYPrjKEs_8k
Podcast: open.spotify.com/episode/5vqOCkSIQEztl2yBpgqLgc?si…
#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory #PhilipBagby #civilization #RobertRedfield #WHWalsh #ALKroeber #ScientificResearchProgram #ImreLakatos
4 days ago | [YT] | 4
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Nick Nielsen
Transcendent History.—Formally, the lapse of time reveals nothing new. Each moment as a moment is identical to every other moment, the structure of the future mirrors the structure of the past, and one might enter indifferently at any point of the continuum of time without regard to its relationship to past, present, or future. The only unprecedented event that could occur in formal time would be a fundamental change in the structure of time itself, such as the bifurcation of time into two or more branches, or the end of time such that there eventually occurred a moment not followed by another. Empirically, on the other hand, each moment of time is an unprecedented novelty, bringing with it new experiences different in every detail from any previous experience. Even here, however, the empirical novelties of time become familiar to us as we recognize the temporal structures that repeat regularly in our experience, in the form of years, seasons, days, and the routines of life that recur unto monotony and ennui. The experience that is different in every detail with each occurrence is intimately familiar in its broad outlines, and identical in its essence no less than the structures of formal time. It is the development of history as it supervenes upon featureless formal time that transcends events identical in their essence; history pushes us into transcendence. Here too we can identify historical events that become familiar unto repetition, but, again, here too we can glimpse the unprecedented historical development that transcends the historical pattern, forcing a transition in all established patterns. And all forms of history, all social formations, are transitional except for the final form, which fails to be a transition only because it is followed by nothing, as with the unprecedented instance of a moment of time not followed by another.
4 days ago | [YT] | 11
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Nick Nielsen
Friday 04 July 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 348
Clustering Below the Threshold of Automation
mailchi.mp/6e32f06ec7bc/the-view-from-oregon-348
…in which I discuss electromechanical and “pure” or hybrid technologies, diesel engines, Wankel engines, turbine cars, James Mauro, the 1939 World’s Fair, the Polyrhetor, elevator control systems, anonymization, and a book about AI…
Subtack: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/clustering-below-th…
Medium: jnnielsen.medium.com/clustering-below-the-threshol…
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1m2…
1 week ago | [YT] | 5
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Nick Nielsen
The Footprint of an Elusive Beast.—Science does not begin with a blank slate, where concept formation occurs as a kind of epistemic creatio ex nihilo. On the contrary, we begin with naïve concepts, folk concepts, so hoary with age that their origins are unknown to us. Imperfect though they may be, these folk concepts are our first signposts of knowledge. Around them, we build a conceptual framework to takes us deeper into once inaccessible conceptual terrain—with each plunge penetrating further into the heart of reality, at times dredging up foundations once imagined to be beyond the scope of reason. Eventually, the conceptual framework we construct will be composed of much more precise and quantitative concepts than the folk concept with which we began, and so we undertake the rational reconstruction of the folk concept itself, displacing whatever irrational accretions still cling to that relic. Still, the science was formed around that imperfect folk concept, and its crude impression remains on the science like a footprint of an elusive beast; while unseen, its presence is felt. In the fullness of time, this science will enter into the constitution of other sciences, which have need of its specialized conceptions, and the complementary abstractions at play in multidisciplinary sciences will mingle and bring together once again, in a sublimated form, those primitive elements of the world that formed the original ground of knowledge. From this unlikely epistemic milieu there is the possibility of returning to the ultimate ground of knowledge. For folk concepts, whatever their fault (and these are many), preserve in themselves a relation to the world mediated by passion, not reason, and in activating a passionate engagement with the world, new perspectives on knowledge, and possibly even new sciences, may present themselves.
1 week ago | [YT] | 5
View 1 reply
Nick Nielsen
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: White on Metahistory and the Role of the Historian
Saturday 12 July 2025 is the 97th anniversary of the birth of Hayden V. White (12 July 1928 – 05 March 2018), who was born in Martin, Tennessee, on this date in 1928.
White is particularly known for his book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, which has been very influential, but also widely criticized. I discuss some of these influences and some of the criticisms, especially in relation to the role of the historian in the construction of history, which remains ambiguous despite attempts, like those of White, to clarify the problem.
Quora: philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: jnnielsen.carrd.co/
Newsletter: eepurl.com/dMh0_-/
Text post: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/white-on-metahistor…
Video: https://youtu.be/9YwolQr1zjM
Podcast: open.spotify.com/episode/6U9iy2RUVhSWWxnxsUVzZK?si…
#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory #HaydenWhite #metahistory #GeoffreyElton #historian #historiography #practices
1 week ago | [YT] | 1
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Nick Nielsen
Between the Garden and Paradise.—The problem of whether a distinctive formal intuition suggests a distinctive form of reasoning, and whether this distinctive form of reasoning implies a distinctive standard of rigor, also appears in natural science. May we not also experience a novel empirical intuition that requires a new form of reasoning that in turn entails a distinctive standard of rigor? Our senses are as old as our bodies, so we are not accustomed to needing new forms of reasoning for sensory intuition; the reasoning we need, if we can call it such, is readily available to us. So it would seem that we are not likely to encounter experiences unknown to our ancestors, but even the antiquity of the body does not ensure its comprehensibility. Indeed, our body, so familiar to us, so constitutive our identity as an individual, nevertheless surprises, humbles, and at times humiliates us by its unaccountable behaviors and responses. It was a preoccupation of St. Augustine that the body was not obedient to the will—a failing that did not trouble Adam and Eve in the Garden, and will not trouble us in Paradise to come. In our present fallen state, however, the body defies us, often remaining opaque to the mind. This opacity has been exacerbated by science. With the scientific revolution, there was a rush to subordinate the world entire, including the private corporeal world of the individual, to the norms of science, schematized according to the exteriority and alienation of physics and not the interiority and intimacy of bodily sensation. While science was believed to be rooted in sensation, its characteristic modes of abstraction are the antithesis of the sensual reality of life. With our intuitions of our own embodiment having been filtered through the lens of the schematization of natural science, we can return to the body at any time and find concealed and subterranean feelings that could spur our reason to novel concept formation, if only we will attend to them.
1 week ago | [YT] | 6
View 0 replies
Nick Nielsen
Friday 27 June 2025
Grand Strategy Newsletter
The View from Oregon – 347
Negating Nietzsche’s Three Kinds of History
mailchi.mp/7864b290f100/the-view-from-oregon-347
…in which I discuss Nietzsche, monumental, antiquarian, and critical history, Last Men, Hugh Trevor-Roper, purposive movement, contempt for the little tradition, ressentiment, micro-, cosmopolitan, and sycophantic history, Procopius, Bartolomé de las Casas, W. B. Gallie, essentially contested concepts, thinking, Ettinger on Heidegger and Arendt, and a finished paper…
Substack: geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/negating-nietzsches…
Medium: jnnielsen.medium.com/negating-nietzsches-three-kin…
Reddit: www.reddit.com/r/The_View_from_Oregon/comments/1ls…
1 week ago | [YT] | 7
View 0 replies
Nick Nielsen
Four Ages.—To watch the 1953 film Julius Caesar (with James Mason as Brutus and Marlon Brando as Mark Antony) is to simultaneously experience four periods of history. It is to experience the ancient history of Caesar’s assassination and the civil wars that followed, which is the original source of the story. It is to experience the Elizabethan overlay of the story as told by Shakespeare in Shakespearean language and with the added layers of early modern intrigue so typical of the period. It is to experience the Hollywood overlay of a confident spectacle from the mid-twentieth century, with the film industry at its height, both commercially and culturally. And it is to experience the contemporary overlay of one’s own experiences and one’s own age—its attitudes, feelings, moods, judgments, and so on—part way into the twenty-first century. All four of these epochs come together in a single experience in which one is at once struck by the strangeness of classical antiquity that produced the story, by the strangeness of Elizabethan England that told the story, and by the strangeness of Hollywood that filmed the story, because none of these are our time; but if we are drawn into the story, and find ourselves participating in the drama vicariously, the distinct ages collapse into a single experience in which the strangeness of these ages not our own is transformed into the strangeness of our own life, which is never absent, however at home we are in the present.
2 weeks ago | [YT] | 11
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