Our research group builds on the competitive research projects on which we have worked so far. Our current research project, TOWARDS A COMPREHENSIVE CONCEPTUAL HISTORY: CULTURAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL TURNS (FFI2011-24473), continues the previous THEORIES AND PRACTICES OF CONCEPTUAL HISTORY: A CHALLENGE FOR PHILOSOPHY (HUM2007-61018-FISO), and aims to delve into the dimensions and limits of the different variants of Conceptual History –not only as a methodology but also as a theory of modernisation–, fundamentally in three major issues:

1. The indeterminacy of language in reference to the world: Here the two traditionally confronted dimensions of the linguistic turn will be combined: the analytical –especially in the setting of the history of ideas by the Cambridge School, Q. Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock– and the hermeneutic. The iconic turn, which arises against the totemisation of language, will also have to be exploited. It is not only a matter of understanding images, but of understanding the world through images. The image is not only considered as an object of study, but also as a multi-faceted means of knowledge (e.g. as visual epistemology or political iconology). Image and concept are no longer opposites. In the contemporary philosophy of image, at least three orientations must be taken into account: The anthropological (homo pictorial or symbolic), the semiotic and the perceptual or phenomenological. The trail of Aby Warburg’s influential style of thought in human sciences deserves a rigorous scrutiny, which must cover from its mutual enrichment with the philosophy of culture of E. Cassirer and the iconology of E. Panofsky to its impact on the emerging science of image and the philosophy of media. Nowadays we speak in a very lax and frivolous way of the turns in the sciences of culture, which are gaining ground to philosophy. Among these turns, today we can identify: the interpretative, performative, reflexive, literary, postcolonial, translational, spatial, iconic, medial, memoriographic, metaphorological, etc. Beyond ephemeral trends, we will have to assess what each of these perspectives adds to Conceptual History, or whether they are merely decorative.
2. The cognitive value of historicity: Here we will study the potential of Conceptual History to found a history of the present and the future, the relationships between prophecy and prediction, the affections and disaffections between history and memory, the chronological definition of modernity and its delimitation in relation to the Middle Ages, an era marked by the dying moments and eschatology, and in relation to the cyclical time of Antiquity. Germanic Conceptual History (either in the version of J. Ritter’s School: O. Marquard, H.Lübbe, either in that of R. Koselleck’s historical semantics, or in Gadamer’s hermeneutics) also serves as a theory of modernisation: Most of those who practise it counterpose an eschatological negation of the world (bad modernity) and a positive, compensatory statement of the present reality (good modernity), and take this Manicheism back up to the philosophy of history of the 18th century. The tendency to idealise Enlightenment is a threat to the current institutions, to the civility conquered by the Western liberal-democratic societies. This diagnosis of Conceptual History places Enlightenment in the field of humanist terrorism as the embodiment of the moral conscience that always condemns what already exists, and at the same time exonerates itself of any responsibility for the wrong course of things. Conceptual History reveres the period that goes from the French to the Industrial Revolution, which forges a new temporary grammar based on the ideology of accelerated progress.

Collaborators

• Enrique F. Bocardo Crespo - University of Seville.
• Luca Fonnesu - Università Degli Studi di Padova (Italy).
• Pedro García Durán - Universitat de València.
• Matthias Kossler - Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz (Germany).
• Ernst Müller - Zentrum Für Literatur- Und Kulturforschung Berlin.
• Gaetano Rametta - Università Degli Studi di Padova (Italy).
• José Manuel Sánchez Fernández - University of Castilla-La Mancha.
• Falko Schmieder - Zentrum Für Literatur- Und Kulturforschung Berlin.
• Karina Pilar Trilles Calvo - University of Castilla-La Mancha.

Research and experimental development on social sciences and humanities