On Breaking Up Time, or, Perennialism as Philosophy of History

Current and recent philosophy of history contemplates a deep change in fundamental notions of the presence of the past. This is called breaking up time. The chief value for this change is enhancing the moral reach of historical research and writing. However, the materialist view of reality that most historians hold cannot support this approach. The origin of the notion in the thought of Walter Benjamin is suggested. I propose a neo-idealist approach called perennialism, centered on recurrent moral dilemmas and choices. This suggests a view of the relations of moral thought and ontology placed in the diachronic context that historians study

Internal Chronotopic Genre Structures : The Nineteenth-Century Historical Novel in the Context of the Belgian Literary Polysystem

One of the most fundamental problems of systemic approaches to literature is the question of how systemic principles might be translated into a manageable methodological framework. This contribution proposes that a combination of functionalistsystemic theories (in casu Itamar Even-Zohar’s Polysystem theory – especially the textually oriented versions – and the prototypical genre approach proposed by Dirk De Geest and Hendrik Van Gorp 1999) with Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope theory shows great promise in this respect. Since I am primarily interested in literary genres, the prototypical genre approach assumes a central position in my theoretical framework. My main argument is that Bakhtin’s chronotope concept offers interesting perspectives as a heuristic tool within a functionalist-systemic approach to genre studies, enabling the study not only of the constitutive elements of genre systems, but also of their mutual relations. Bakhtin’s own vague definitions of the concept somewhat hamper the process of putting it into practice for this purpose, but with the aid of the distinction between generic and motivic chronotopes, that problem can be solved. A detailed, comprehensive account of the theoretical premises underlying my proposal can be found in Bemong (under review); here I restrict myself to the basics

Why Study History? On Its Epistemic Benefits and Its Relation to the Sciences

I try to return the focus of the philosophy of history to the nature of understanding, with a particular emphasis on Louis Mink’s project of exploring how historical understanding compares to the understanding we find in the natural sciences. On the whole, I come to a conclusion that Mink almost certainly would not have liked: that the understanding offered by history has a very similar epistemic profile to the understanding offered by the sciences, a similarity that stems from the fact that both are concerned with grasping how the objects of their study are structured, or how the various elements of the things they study depend upon and relate to one another. At the same time, however, I claim that historical inquiry naturally puts us in a position to acquire further epistemic goods, including the old-fashioned epistemic good of wisdom, which is plausibly constituted by knowledge of how to live well. This is something the natural sciences cannot offer, and it is part of the reason why history is such an important form of inquiry

Challenges and solutions for Latin named entity recognition

Although spanning thousands of years and genres as diverse as liturgy, historiography, lyric and other forms of prose and poetry, the body of Latin texts is still relatively sparse compared to English. Data sparsity in Latin presents a number of challenges for traditional Named Entity Recognition techniques. Solving such challenges and enabling reliable Named Entity Recognition in Latin texts can facilitate many down-stream applications, from machine translation to digital historiography, enabling Classicists, historians, and archaeologists for instance, to track the relationships of historical persons, places, and groups on a large scale. This paper presents the first annotated corpus for evaluating Named Entity Recognition in Latin, as well as a fully supervised model that achieves over 90% F-score on a held-out test set, significantly outperforming a competitive baseline. We also present a novel active learning strategy that predicts how many and which sentences need to be annotated for named entities in order to attain a specified degree of accuracy when recognizing named entities automatically in a given text. This maximizes the productivity of annotators while simultaneously controlling quality

“Dicam dumtaxat quod est historicon”: Varro and/on the past

Varro’s approach to his subjects is usually systematic and synchronic, but there are frequent diachronic digressions and observations on time and the past, often divided into three stages (remote past, near past, and present). I discuss Rust. 2.1, with a progressive concept of three successive stages in human history from Dicaearchus, and a fragment from Censorinus, where Varro distinguishes tria discrimina temporum. A significant affinity emerges between etymological research and the study of origins: both involve the study of antiquitas or the origo, and both use the genealogical-reconstructive method. The same image of gradus descendere indicates the sequence of logical and chronological steps in describing human history (Rust. 2.1.3–5) and etymological research (Ling. 5.7–9). Varro is fully aware of the difficulties in reconstructing the ancient past and the origins of language, because uncertainty is a characteristic of the origo of human history and of words

The beginnings of Boiotian local historiography. Localism and local perspective in Boiotia between the end of the fifth century BC and the age of the Theban hegemony

Presentation of a preliminary study on the early stages of Boiotian historiograph