Mark Bevir
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Mark Bevir is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is the author of The Logic of the History of Ideas, which advocates an approach in the field of the history of ideas that is at odds with that of Arthur Lovejoy, often considered the founder of that field.
Bevir describes his general philosophical posture as "post-analytical." By this he means that he is broadly part of the empiricist/positivist tradition, but that he acknowledges its historical flaws, especially the drawing of an overly sharp analytic/synthetic dichotomy.
In answer to skeptics, in the field of history of ideas or more generally, he believes it sufficient to say, "the nature of our being in the world compels us to accept a set of concepts as true."
Bevir deccribes the history of ideas as the study of historical relics and the assignment of meaning thereto. How to assign meaning? He defends intentionalism -- the view that the creators of certain objects, texts, etc., intended something by creating them, and that intention is what they mean.
He acknowledges four general lines of objection to intentionalism: contextualism, conventionalism, occasionalism, and a stress upon the unconscious nature of much of human meaning.
[edit] External Links
- Interview with Mark Bevir
- Mark Bevir investigates the effect of Michel Foucault's The Order of Things in the context of political theory
