My main areas of interest are the philosophy of history and the history of historiography. As I understand them, the history of historiography and the philosophy of history are deeply connected. On the one hand, normative concerns about historical knowledge must be able to account for the various kinds of history in which historians are interested. On the other, the history of historiography is at its best when it shows us the limits and the conditions of possibility of what we could know about the past in any given historical context.
I also created and maintain the Digital Catalog for History Theses and Dissertations defended in Brazil between 1942 and 2000.
Current projects
Topics in Social Epistemology of History
This project consists of a series of investigations about the social aspects of historical knowledge, such as epistemic dependence, the role of testimonial knowledge in historical inquiry, and the roles of values in historical knowledge. Problems such as these raise challenges to an excessively individualistic picture of the epistemology of history. They call our attention to how historians are socially embedded and how these social factors play ineliminable and irreducible roles in the production, acquisition, and transmission of historical knowledge.
On epistemic dependence, this project focuses on two distinct aspects: (1) how ordinary people depend on historians to acquire historical knowledge and (2) how historians depend on one another to acquire historical knowledge. Both these aspects lead us to ask questions about the nature of this relation and, in turn, how trust and trustworthiness are fundamental components of good systems for the acquisition of historical knowledge. Here, the social epistemology of history is mostly concerned with the distribution of epistemic labor and the inevitable vulnerability that results from the growing complexities of our knowledge-producing practices.
Another problem for the social epistemology of history is the relationship between testimonial knowledge and historical knowledge. On the one hand, all historical knowledge depends at least partially on testimonial knowledge (i.e., textual evidence of past phenomena). On the other, there seems to be a qualitative difference between testimonial and historical knowledge in the sense that historical knowledge is tied to a retrospective view of past phenomena that would be inaccessible to any particular actor at the moment. The social epistemology of history should enable us to probe into this problem and clarify the distinction such that we can grasp, for instance, why and how credence is unequally distributed among different testifiers.
Finally, unlike many of the natural sciences, history has not and arguably cannot get rid of value-charged language. Perhaps more importantly, some of the greatest advances in historical knowledge during the 20th century came from the direct interference of non-epistemic values in the epistemic core of historical inquiry. All this makes it so that the growing literature on “values and science” is ill-equipped to deal with history. Therefore, it is up to the social epistemologist of history to offer a good normative account of the roles that values can play in historical inquiry and how value-freedom is not only unachievable but also undesirable in history, while also remaining at guard against wishful thinking.
Narrative as a Cognitive Instrument
This project aims at understanding the relationship between narrative form and our understanding of temporally extended phenomena (our lives, but also historical phenomena). For some, such as David Carr, Paul Ricœur, and Alasdair MacIntyre, there is a fundamental connection or continuity between our temporal experiences and narratives. In such accounts, narrative form is seen as an extension of properties already inherent to the ways we experience any temporally extended phenomena. Narrative, then, is entirely unproblematic as a means to turn these experiences into understandable wholes – e.g., “our lives”, “the Fall of the Roman Empire” – because the stories we tell about them would be at the very least isomorphic with properties inherent to these phenomena. For other authors, though, such as Louis Mink and Galen Strawson, there is nothing inherent to our experiences of these phenomena that lends credence to the idea that narrative form emerges from properties independent of our cognition. Thus, narrative form becomes problematic in the sense that it may demand an account of the “fit” between the stories we tell about temporally extended phenomena and the phenomena themselves. Here, my goal is to discuss and assess these different accounts and explore their intuitive and counter-intuitive features.
For instance, one important question is this: “beginnings”, “middles”, and “endings” are properties of stories, not of events. However, at least some events under some descriptions seem better suited to play each of these roles once the narrative arc is established. Few would regress through the causal chain of events all the way back to the Big Bang to tell the story of one’s life or of the French Revolution. Some specific events seem better suited to playing the role of a beginning once we define what the story is about. However, for every single story, there is no single event that is its necessary beginning: the story of a life may begin between conception and birth, but it may also begin with the choice (or accident) of a couple (the future parents). The French Revolution may begin with the États generaux, in May 1789, but it may just as well begin with the transformations that French society was experiencing in earlier decades. We seem to have some implicit guidelines that make some events salient as possible beginnings (or endings) in contrast to others, but no rule to establish the necessary beginning (or ending) of a given story.
Past projects
- A Digital Catalog of History PhD and MA theses in Brazil
- Epistemic Virtues in Brazilian Historiography
- Michel de Certeau’s concept of history
João Ohara 