FY 2021 Joint Research Project: UEMURA Genki
Project
What can be said about what is not written in the sources? Case studies on causal inference in the history of philosophy
Members
UEMURA Genki (Project leader)
Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Okayama University
NAKADA Kosuke
Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Okayama University
IGASHIRA Masahiko
Graduate School of Social Sciences, Hitotsubashi University
INABA Hajime
School of Political Science and Economics, Meiji University
Project Overview
As a facet of historical inquiry, research on the history of philosophy requires that certain judgements be made concerning past causal relationships. Of these judgements, those made when speculating whether or in what way the claims or position of one historical philosopher affected the claims or position of another are particularly prevalent in the history of philosophy. Such judgements, when largely based on these philosophers’ (primary) writings, suffer from a lack of data, difficulty in interpretation of the texts, themselves, and ambiguity concerning the very concept of “influence”, and thereby must take a different form than the statistical causal inference common in the natural and social sciences. This research project will therefore clarify how presumptions concerning relationships of influence are made within research on the history of philosophy and what assumptions are (implicitly) made therein through a collaboration with historians, adopting a bottom-up approach considering individual cases.
