Mgr. Frank Hernadez
Department of Philosophy, FHS UK Prague
History is made of changes. Whether we consider large scale changes, like political revolutions or high impact scientific discoveries, or smaller scale changes, like seasonal fluctuations in the market, it is undeniable that representing historical events involves representing some changes. Some of these are considered positive, in the sense that the succession from one moment to another is treated as a positive change in history. For example, the invention of antibiotics, the abolition of slavery, women’s emancipation, etc. are considered to have implied positive changes. We call some of these ‘progress’. When evaluating them, it is not uncommon to claim things like ‘the invention of antibiotics constituted progress’. Now, what do all these events (and others that are also qualified as ‘progressive’) have in common, such that we can qualify them all as ‘progressive’? I claim that it is a kind of robust normativity, constituted by three elements: diachronicity, positive valence, and relation to human well-being. There are problems arising for each of these elements nevertheless. In my dissertation, I focus on the study of those affecting the positive valence of progress. The main questions I seek to answer are: what makes it the case that ‘progressive changes’ ought to be positively valued? and, how can all these seemingly unrelated events be qualified equally (as ‘progressive’), on the basis of this? My thesis is that, once we relativize changes to particular disciplinary contexts (e.g. science, society, philosophy, etc.), it is possible to disambiguate the kind of robust normativity sought, by providing a structural delineation of what this normativity, seemingly implicit to the concept ‘progress’, entails. In this paper, I provide an outline for what this structural delineation should look like, and discuss some of the problems that arise in response.
Keywords: historiography, normativity, progress, science, society
References
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