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Critical Hermeneutics
Editor's Introduction
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Articles
2020-12-17
2020-12-17
2020-12-17
2020-12-17
I-XXXVIII
1
Pier Luigi Lecis
2020/12/17
10.13125/CH/4491
I
2533-1825
special II
XXXVIII
urn:nbn:it:unica-26459
Editor's Introduction
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4
Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)
Biannual International Journal of Philosophy
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ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 10.13125/CH/4491




                            Editor’s Introduction


                          (Immutability of the Past)



                                                    Not the gods can shake the Past.
                                                 R a l p h W a l d o E m e r s o n , The Past




1.
I think that the title ‘Immutability of the past’ well represents the
theoretical horizon where the articles of this volume containing in-
quiries from various disciplinary stances and different philosophical
and scientific traditions converge. The issue is a result of the research
programme about ‘The problem of indeterminacy. Meaning, knowled-
ge, action’ (‘Il problema dell’indeterminatezza. Significato, conoscen-
za, azione’, PRIN 2015, national coordinator Luigi Perissinotto). The
project was developed by a Cagliari research team that worked on
the indeterminacy problem concerning the linguistic, conceptual and
interpretative mechanisms actively involved in the construction of the
images of the past. These concepts and other themes were the sub-
ject of a conference in May 2019. The outcomes are now mostly pre-
sented in this number. The great questions of representation, fancy,
figurative languages, image (as a form shaping matter and not mere-
ly reproducing a given structure) and time (and the relationship
amongst past, present and future) are preeminently but not exclu-
sively linked to the past as it is investigated by historians (past hu-
man actions and resulting chains of events). The internal develop-



    Translated by Simonluca Pinna.
Editor’s Introduction




ment of such a line of research naturally concerns other methods,
languages and ways to refer to the past. The link amongst ‘profes-
sional’ historical representations, the ordinary expressions of the rec-
ollecting memory, the forms of the sociocultural processing of the
shared memory, namely, the forms of life and the ways a community
uses to represent itself should be considered. In this sense, the prob-
lem of the relationship between history and memory promotes a con-
vergence between the interpretation-focused disciplines and the hu-
man sciences based on explicative, empirical and statistical orienta-
tion.
        The methodological and thematic evolution and the ramification
of historical research generate a powerful enhancement in many oth-
er fields in the linguistic comparison of historiography and natural
(and social) sciences. Specialistic and academic history today appears
as an extremely varying patchwork of approaches, vocabularies and
methodologies that is reducible neither to a unitary building nor to di-
chotomies variously characterising the 20th century debates in phi-
losophy       (spirit-nature,   explaining-understanding,   nomological-
ideographic, causality-meaning, the ‘two cultures’ of humanities and
sciences). If the great lesson of the Annales made its mark above all
on the integration of history with social sciences, the diffusion of
comparative programmes of global history – according to which West
and East, Asia, Europe, America, Africa and Oceania cannot be stud-
ied and understood separately – shifted the balance even further by
elucidating the systematic connection with natural sciences (see
Moore 1997; D. Sachsenmaier 2011). However, history is strongly in-
tertwined with biology in relation to problems associated with the
food, propagation and preservation of species, environment, domesti-
cation and decease; the impact depth of the human intervention in
the biological traits of plants and animals cannot be underestimated.
Biology and ecology provide indispensable survey information for his-



II
                                                  Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




torians. Naturally, each discipline keeps its conceptual and methodo-
logical autonomy, but interactions modify the general scheme of
Global History inquiries1.
     Based on this background, our theme, i.e. the immutability or
definitiveness of the past, can be applied to compare the different
images of time, revealing new approaches to the problem of the truth
of historical descriptions and to the question of the sources, motiva-
tions and scopes of the reference to the past. Let us try to under-
stand why.
     Our common experience of time recalls a sensation of constant
flow, which progressively detaches us from more or less distant but
ended affairs that cannot be intuitively intervened. The aspect of
completeness remains untouched by the bonds of the past with future
consequences and developments, which conversely are at least in
part subject to our decisions and actions. Time flows in one direction
and does not come back. This simple and intuitive ‘schema’ appears
to be embodied in the shared practices of remembering and manag-
ing information about the past as indispensable elements of the sense
of ourselves and of our personal and collective stories. The various
dimensions of memory, as the ability to store traces of the past, play
a fundamental role in building such a perspective. To some extent,
this image is the effect of a long process of cultural sedimentation,
especially if it is connected with the linear and ‘progressive’ image of
historical time (different from the cyclical one) that generally happens


1
  See Rossi (2012: 423-453). I have drawn the successive references from that
chapter, which is entitled ‘Verso una storia globale’ (‘Towards a global history’). For
example, historically speaking, Rossi points out how population genetics (according
to Cavalli-Sforza and others) modified the traditional scheme of physical
anthropology and showed many relevant facts of distribution and migration. A host
of indispensable phenomena for the understanding of historical changes
(urbanisation, flight from the land, change in hygienic behaviours, decrease in the
mortality rate, sources of energy and impact of the industrial revolution)
highlighted the relevance of the relationship with the natural environment for
historical studies on archaic and modern societies.



                                                                                      III
Editor’s Introduction




with modern Westerners. It has become an undisputed and sponta-
neously shared element of our life scenario and cultural landscape.
      In addition to being well-established in daily practices, the repre-
sentation of time, together with its own corollaries (determinacy of
the past, openness and indeterminacy of the future, irreversible di-
rection of becoming), has been supported by a wide consensus and
strong justifications in various specialised fields and experts’ circles,
from historiography to thermodynamic models in physics or to the
‘archivistic’ theories of memory as a preservation-reproduction func-
tion of past experiences. According to the latter perspective, the past
surrounds us as a web of external traces, which are examined by pro-
fessional studies (the ‘sciences of culture’); moreover, the past condi-
tioned us internally in the form of persistent mental traces of the
events and material (notably, cerebral) inscriptions, which are a pre-
rogative of psychological and neurological research. As for historians,
a kind of realism should be discussed, i.e. realism that is more or less
spontaneously presupposed or ‘certain’ in the sense of Ludwig Witt-
genstein’s Gewissheit or Husserl’s Lebenswelt. It is part of a tacitly
shared background of truisms. Without it, the past cannot be de-
scribed to be accomplished and be ‘apart’ from the present, even if it
is not completely known. It is associated with the grammar embodied
in our ordinary speech, as suggested by Wittgenstein’s incisive exam-
ple of Earth before our birth2.
      The idea that we cannot act on the past causally seems to offer
an archetypal model of objective reality that is meant and experi-
enced as a set of states of affairs independent from us. Such a model
is recognised even by authors of a strong hermeneutical sensibility
such as Paul Ricoeur3. Some things are done in certain ways that we


2
  I am talking about the observations in Wittgenstein (1969) and in particular §§
84, 85, 183 ff.
3
  In Entre la mémoire et l’histoire – a short but acute presentation of the topics of



IV
                                                  Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




cannot change and this concept applies to human history (with its so-
cial, institutional and symbolic dimensions) no less than to natural
evolution. Obviously, in the Hermeneutic tradition, this recognition is
inconsistent with Heidegger’s legacy. His fundamental ontology intro-
duces a turning point in the way the structures of time are seen. It
also reshuffles the relationships amongst temporal dimensions, un-
derscoring the aspects of continuity and organicity in the experience
of time. Heidegger capitalised on the phenomenological analyses tak-
en by Husserl in the early 20th century, resulting in the lessons about
the phenomenology of the internal time consciousness that Heidegger
himself edited in 1928. Being and Time presented a very influential
analysis of time from an ontological viewpoint independent of episte-
mological and methodological interests and destined with the anti-
objectivist controversy to enhance the chasm between philosophical
and scientific culture. It is a notable philosophical course, but it leads
to a different direction from the specific interest discussed in here.
Thus, we should not follow it.
     In the case of culture and historical thought, a realist’s standard
view almost naturally develops with the interest in rebuilding wide
chains of events, which can be very distant in time and independent
of individual memory but can be linked to it as part of a cultural
memory belonging to particular communities; however, it also origi-
nates in a sort of species memory. We must be aware that this image
of the past depends on a network of presuppositions that are much


La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, which was published in digital form in 2002 – Ricoeur
points out three enigmatic aspects of memory: a) presence (of an image or trace in
mind), b) absence (of the past thing the image refers to) and c) antecedence of
what happened (temporal distance feeling expressed through verbs or adverbs; one
remembers that something existed aupavarant). The latter aspect fosters
historians’ spontaneous realism. The reality of the past is the complement of
memory practice, that is, the certainty that something actually happened is a tacit
element of our ordinary way of remembering; we could consider it as a background
aspect of ordinary knowledge. Ricoeur talks elsewhere of croyance antéprédicative
– et même prénarrative on which the basic matrices of historical knowledge lie.



                                                                                       V
Editor’s Introduction




more complex than what appears at first glance and that it has to ad-
dress questions and sometimes real challenges emerging from the
development of specialised studies on various areas of the current
scientific, academic and cultural scenario. In the following pages, the
developments in the late 20th and in the very beginning of the 21st
century, which are also the context of the studies collected in this
number of Critical Hermeneutics, are outlined.


2.
A certain number of problems are raised by philosophers interested in
the nature and limits of historical knowledge. Various questions sim-
ultaneously arise in the nonphilosophical areas of research and exper-
imental studies on psychology and neurobiology about memory and
subatomic physics about the structures of time. Signals and conflict-
ing perspectives come from specialised areas that are characterised
by tensions hard to be defused.
      Before the point is presented, clarification is needed. On the one
hand, the modifiability of the images of the past, interpretative plas-
ticity, openness and incompleteness of our knowledge or even the
conceptual indeterminacy of descriptions and flexibility of the ‘repre-
sentation system’ of past events should be discussed and all of these
aspects are associated with the forms of the knowledge of the past.
On the other hand, the indeterminacy of the past, namely, as the on-
tological referent of our descriptions, as a reality endowed with a
proper consistency, should be explained and our surveys try to ex-
pound it. Therefore, in different specialised worlds and research tradi-
tions, the intuitive distinction seems to blur and fade in importance;
otherwise, it is openly seen as problematic, if not untenable. In an-
other emerging idea, the past is nothing more than a shapeless mat-
ter, which is infinitely malleable for an interpreter (pure stuffism; see
Sidelle 1998). As such, traces have no any objective past to be com-



VI
                                               Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




pared with. Postulating the determinacy of the events and their ob-
jective independence of our practices would be an extremely strong
abstraction and it is as useless and misleading as the Kantian idea of
the thing in itself. The events as determined in their own objectivity
are inaccessible or even nonexistent at certain levels of reality. All we
can do is organise and analyse the pure matter of the traces in line
with our cognitive and noncognitive interests through conceptual and
linguistic conventions. According to these positions and successive
debates, the border between ontic and epistemic indeterminacy tends
to become thin and flexible. However, such an outcome seems to be
attributed to the insufficient perception of the central position and
theoretical importance of a conceptual distinction that we cannot
easily eliminate. It is – if not indelible – deeply rooted in our intui-
tions.
     We present some examples of the research areas where the
main concerns about our topic originate. A certainly restless domain
has been the philosophy of history. In general, antirealist accounts
reject the determinacy of the past, assuming a dual line between
epistemology and ontology. Good examples can be found in the
works of Hayden White, Hans Kellner, Frank Ankersmit and Keith
Jenkins4.
     In the field of ‘philosophy of memory’, the most radical construc-
tionist positions have criticised the idea of ‘memory fidelity’. Memory
is basically selective and distorting, but it is in a certain way always
false. Furthermore, the objectivity of the past is discussed at least in
epistemic terms. Kourken Michaelian claimed that memory can ex-
pand the information about the past and go beyond what is experi-

4
  I mention some of the most representative cases of the now enormous body of
writings in philosophy of history: White (1973) is certainly the prototype of the
narrativist tendency of second generation (of literary matrix) that is generally
labeled “postmodernism” in the debates; other important examples are White
(2010), Kellner (1989), Jenkins (2008) or Ankersmit (2012), while a very relevant
collection is Ankersmit and Kellner (1995).



                                                                                  VII
Editor’s Introduction




enced as in the case of an episodic (noninferential) memory concern-
ing particular, specific and singular experiences (one-off experiences,
such as remembering the birth of a little bird or a visit to Rome). The
case of ‘boundary extensions’ is typical. It is a series of visual
memory experiments involving showing some photos to a subject
that has to reproduce them (e.g. in form of sketches); in remember-
ing a particular photo, missing details are added and predictions
about what lies beyond the visual boundaries of the original image
are provided5.
       Two serious threats to the common experience of sequential
time are likely observed in fundamental physics. On the one hand, in-
fluential interpretations of quantum mechanics validate the idea of
the intrinsic ontic indeterminacy of reality. In other words, the inde-
terminacy of matter states is not derived from the lack of information
or cognitive limitations. On the other hand, the thesis of the nonex-
istence or irrelevance of time is based on some developments of the
relativistic paradigm. The theoretical possibility of influencing the past
is also discussed in some philosophical research areas, such as time
travel (see Torrengo 2011).
       If we literally consider the abovementioned developments, we
should believe that our stories, which are characterised by temporal
evolution both in biological and cultural senses, are a sort of (poten-
tially illusory) diachronic bubble floating on a neo-Parmenidean plat-
form; otherwise, we should accept the idea of a past becoming ‘de-
terminate’ (taking on a well-structured form) only under the selection
of our memories and ex post reconstructions. I do not think that this
outcome is unavoidable; however, if we must reach it, the path is
long and tricky. I will try to prove this concept in the following sec-
tions by recreating the points of departure of such theses with some

5
  Consider fn. 21 below for the latter references. For the rest, see Michaelian
(2011).



VIII
                                             Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




details. The points are also the background of the articles presented
here.   Indeed,   the   latter   are   limited   surveys     about     historical
knowledge, memory, linguistic representation of the past and physical
time.


3.
Questions on the epistemology, ontology and philosophy of language
are related to the philosophical discussion about the historical past.
All of these aspects, which are implied in the analysis of the descrip-
tive function of historiographical language, have unsettled the philos-
ophy of history of literature for decades. For the past half century,
new and lively controversies have emerged between realists and con-
structivists, epistemological monists and thinkers of hermeneutical
orientation, idealists of Neokantian ancestry, postmoderns, narrativ-
ists and nihilists of truth. These debates are based on the remarkable
impression of some case studies at ethical, civil or cultural levels (e.g.
the Shoah with its uniqueness, speakability and memory duty or the
historiography of genocides). A wide spectrum of research orienta-
tions highlights the complexity of the mechanisms governing the ex-
periential, linguistic and conceptual construction of the historiograph-
ical images of the past and the plurality of cognitive criteria and in-
terests directing the elaboration of the mere traces.
     With the late outcomes and more radical forms of the ‘linguistic
turn’, along with a strong narrativist and anti-positivist tradition, new
discussions concerning the accessibility itself of past events and the
referential function of historiographical descriptions have been pre-
sented. Many authors proposed to deflate or diminish the role of the
concept of truth if it is not within the assertable causal chains at least
in the understanding of the meaning of wide sets of historical events.
I would like to focuse on one of them, namely, William Henry Walsh,
who has not yet obtained the place he deserves in the reconstructions



                                                                                 IX
Editor’s Introduction




of such studies. Without being driven by any antirealist perspectives,
he initiated debates on the constructive role of colligatory concepts6.
Some examples of the latter are as follows: cold war, Hungarian
revolution, Early Middle Ages, democratic expansion, democratic
revolution, Carolingian Renaissance, Florentine Enlightenment, impe-
rialism, capitalism and Church, which are similar to Max Weber’s ideal
types. However, such expressions raise numerous questions. For in-
stance, their referential range is debatable because of the vagueness
of the borders introduced to the continuity of the historical process;
consequently, the identity conditions of their referent become unde-
fined. In the linguistic perspective, the object of historiography has to
be reconstructed from a scattered and fragmentary set of data, doc-
uments, memories, testimonies and material traces. It is a synthetic
and connecting procedure that creates complex aggregates by estab-
lishing more or less strong nexuses amongst the parts and highlight-
ing the relationship patterns between individuals and groups that are
the actors of such aggregates. At the epistemological level, the dis-
cussion focuses on the validity (nonarbitrariness and conventionality
grade) of the connections that the historical inquiry defines by dis-
secting constantly changing global processes derived by human ac-
tions. The question of setting boundaries, which are strictly connected
to the debates around ‘vagueness’, casts a philosophical doubt about
the degree of the dependence of these concepts on the ‘representa-
tion system’ and the level of the nature of the represented object.
This question is hard to maintain in the epistemological field. It inevi-

6
  Walsh, a philosopher formed at Merton College in Oxford, approached the issue
for the first time in the essay The Intelligibility of History (Walsh 1942), which
resumed and revised in An Introduction to philosophy of History (Walsh 1951) and
in Colligatory Concepts in History (in Gardiner 1974: 127–144). The term
‘colligation’ derives from Whewell (1847)’s analyses of induction. This kind of
concepts is generated by an act that, unlike Bacon’s induction, unifies data under a
connection rule, namely, establishes the limit of a conceptual unity holding together
the phenomena. The colligation is in this sense a well-defined phase of the
historical interpretation.



X
                                          Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




tably refers to the ontological dimension, above all if one thinks about
the role of the colligatory concepts not in the sphere of origins and
developments (causal sequences), but in the sphere of interpretation.
An interpretative activity aims to grasp the sense characterising a
historical path in terms of its interesting and global qualities by mak-
ing it intelligible and rational according to the logic of the part–whole
connection. The latter has to be distinguished from the cause–effect
nexuses.
    Considering only the speculative ‘spasms’ in these debates would
be wrong. The point could only be clarified by the words of a histori-
an. The following text incisively exposes the hidden dangers in the
construction mechanisms of the image of an event. It shows the ac-
tual genesis of the image within the historical praxis, as characterised
by a wide plurality and plasticity of the interpretations of the past.
However, emphasis on the prospective limits of any historical recon-
struction can be misunderstood. It can raise a doubt that the investi-
gated phenomenon has a defined form and likely generates fading ef-
fects or analytical disintegration of an object (an old-fashioned de-
composition strategy formerly practiced by Hume in the case of mate-
rial objects and personal identity). The passage is from an influential
monograph on fascism.




    Introduction.
    Has fascism ever existed?
                               Perhaps fascism has never existed.
                                Anonymous from the 21st century


    The history of fascism is a strange and singular story.




                                                                              XI
Editor’s Introduction




      After almost 90 years from its appearance in history and
      after more than half a century from its disappearance as a
      key player of the political actuality, fascism seems a rather
      mysterious object evading a clear and rational historical
      definition even though it has been discussed in tens of
      thousands books, articles and debates.
      […] The history of the interpretation of fascism is strange
      and singular. Indeed, interpretations vary amongst so
      opposite and irreconcilable views that one can sometimes
      judge the hope of defining the nature of fascism in largely
      shared terms as totally useless. […]
      [F]or 80 years, the nature of fascism and its meaning in
      contemporary history have been continuously discussed:
      whether it was an autonomous movement or an instrument
      of different forces, whether it had an ideology and a culture,
      whether it was modern or antimodern, whether it was
      revolutionary or reactionary and authoritarian or totalitarian.
      However, no agreement about the position of fascism in
      time and space has been reached: the place and time of its
      origin are still a matter of debate; studies have yet to
      determine whether fascism was an exclusively Italian
      episode or a universal one, whether it is correct to talk of
      ‘fascism’ as a unique phenomenon with many variants or of
      ‘fascisms’ as different trees with some shared features;,
      whether an ‘age of fascism’ was chronologically definable or
      whether a sort of ‘eternal fascism’, whose traces could date
      back to Cain and which is now hanging over the human
      existence as a forthcoming and real danger, actually exists.




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                                           Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




In other words, fascism has a ‘Homeric question’. […] As for
the Greek poet, opinions on fascism are conflicting not only
about the place and date of birth but also about its very
existence. The latter feature is actually challenged by those
who claim that fascism is not an autonomous political
movement with its own ideology, culture and political
system, similar to liberalism or communism; instead, it has
been only considered an epiphenomenon, that is, the
contingent and extreme secretion of other phenomena, such
as the anti-proletarian reaction of the bourgeoisie, the moral
disease of the European consciousness, the pathological
degeneration of the mass society and the explosion of
century-old shortcomings of people who were still immature
for liberal democracy. According to this view, fascism would
be   a   historical   total   negativity     and    had     no    proper
autonomous      and    specific   (and     conceptually       definable)
reality. Some scholars proposed to banish the concept of
‘fascism’ from the scientific community because it would not
have any precise meaning corresponding to a real historical
phenomenon. With the same argument, other scholars
asked for the adoption of an equal measure against the
concept of ‘totalitarianism’ […]. [I]n light of successive
theories about totalitarianism, which was established by
some political scientists only on the basis of nazism and
stalinism, fascist totalitarianism has been peremptorily
described to be nonexistent. Even more drastically, other
scholars affirmed that no form of totalitarianism has ever
historically existed. If this trend becomes popular, one
cannot exclude that some revisionist, postmodernist or




                                                                              XIII
Editor’s Introduction




      deconstructionist historians or political scientists may state
      that fascism has never existed7.




The    passage          ironically   exposes   the    framework       underlying   an
analytically decomposing and deconstructionist approach by refusing
the result of the radical historiographical relativism that openly denies
the determinacy and existence of the past. This approach tacitly
presupposes that historiography works on a raw material by
introducing,       with      its     own   conventional    criteria    of   linguistic
identification, a network of objects and events that would remain
otherwise nonexistent. The traces of the past appear under this light
as a shapeless piece of information that can be taken in infinitely
many ways without even establishing the correct way of dissecting
the historical world or whether such a way is available8. Notably, the
reasoning can be applied to material objects as well. A typical
example of this kind of discussion is a dismantled clock on a
clockmaker’s table. Is it still an individual object that is ‘dismantled’
or a set of more simple objects that are the aggregated parts
thereof?9 Considering psychological or practical kinds (regarding
advantages in sectioning the things in a particular way) cannot
specify the ontological building blocks of the world; consequently, our
distinctions       are      always     arbitrary     and   conventional.      Hence,
distinguishing objects and events would be an arbitrary act, which is
not supported by objective and intrinsic identification criteria.



7
  The passage is from the Introduction to Gentile (2005).
8
  For the problems concerning the conventionalist paradigms in general, see Morena
(2004).
9
   For the criteria of object partition or aggregation, Hillary Putnam’s analyses
against metaphysical realism are well known and always suggestive. See Putnam
(1990: 96 ff; 1987: 18 ff).



XIV
                                             Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




    A particularly insidious version of historiographic relativism was
illustrated (and condemned) by Beham McCullogh in the essay
Colligation and Classification in History (McCullogh 1978). Different
cultures describe the same thing in different ways. Viewpoints,
rationality standards, and practical interests underlying descriptions
change. A disease can be explained in terms of evil spirits or modern
medicine. Even medical explanations may change the paradigm. If we
are caged in our culture horizon, we cannot have the true knowledge
of a world independent of our (or other) culture. The world is a
construction that is entirely built with ‘local’ and untranscendable
concepts and beliefs. Indeed, some authors who are totally certain of
the nonexistence of past events can make true historical descriptions
simply because events are mere constructions of historians, are made
possible by the descriptions of the historians themselves and cannot
be emancipated by a particular life world (see Roth 2012).
    The arguments McCullogh moved against such developments are
worth mentioning. He took advantage of solid conceptual distinctions
and had no fear of admitting the problems of realist theories that are
too focused on perception as the basic level of knowledge. Assuming
the untenability of any idea of correspondence, he proposed a weaker
form of the correlation theory of truth. Certainly, studies on cultural,
conceptual    and   cognition-based      differences       have    shown      that
perceptions do not correspond to things as passive records, that is,
one can see a leaf, a drug or a botanical specimen in the same thing.
However,     this   definition   is   insufficient    to    claim     that     our
representations do not include any information about the world that
in part causes them. The subjective interest guiding attention steers
but does not necessarily twist data. It can be used to distinguish a
friend in a crowd. Acknowledging that our concepts do not perfectly




                                                                                 XV
Editor’s Introduction




reflect things does not mean to exclude that something in the world is
linkable to the objects of our descriptions. That we have no
independent access way to that something does not let us deny any
difference between the world and our experiences. Many scientific
theories describe the extent to which culture affects perception and
conceptual schemes. Nevertheless, we have reasons to hold that its
influence is partial and always combined with the causal influence of
the way the world is independent of our descriptions (McCullogh
1998: 17–19).
        Important questions involve the epistemological nature of time
scales, which are actually used by historians, in relation to causal
nexuses and determination of the meaning of events. Time itself is a
configuration template of past events and the innovative role of
Annales historiography in this respect is well known. What counts is
the difference in the time scales in terms of duration (long, middle
and short term; cyclical or serial time) through which significant
events are ordered or in terms of connections with individual actions
and sudden changes, with superindividual, collective structures and
natural rhythms (e.g. Fernand Braudel’s Méditerranée, production
modes        and     civilisations).   Simultaneously,         unique   and   linear
relationships or a more complex pattern of time dimensions may be
present. Historical facts are identified on the basis of their meaning
as crossroads of different time scales; they are reducible neither to
particular cases of a law nor to unique individualities, but they
acquire relevance and pertinence only in relation to the deep
structures of a sociohistorical and cultural background10.
        The discovery of a constitutive function for time that is upstream
of the historiographical praxis can contribute to weaken the sense of
completeness of the past as a corollary of a linear and progressive


10
     Consider on this point Borutti (2015)’s acute analyses.



XVI
                                               Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




conception of historical time. Relevant evidence can be found in the
results   of   Reiner    Koselleck’s        refined     concept       of    history
(Begriffsgeschichte). It was centred on concepts’ temporal structure
and semantic shift, especially the categories of the sociopolitical
sphere    (democracy,   liberty,   crisis     and     history).    The     German
philosopher anchored the sense of time to anthropological and
ontological roots and argued that its structure depends on an
irreducible tension between Erfahrungsraum (space of experience)
and   Erwartungshorizont    (horizon    of     anticipation).       The     cultural
changes in the way of seeing history hinge on the variation in the
balance between these poles. For example, the projection to the
future, which is a dominant trait of the modern culture (whose
analysis is one of Koselleck’s main interests), is explained through the
detachment of the anticipation horizon from the space of experience,
that is, from the repetition of the past. According to Koselleck, this
concept is a profound change that is bound to the end of a rural
culture with its image of a cyclical and slow time in harmony with
natural rhythms. The point of interest here is the double value of
historical concepts, both cognitive and pragmatical. They have an
indicator (Indikator) and performative function, that of an active
agent of historical changes (Faktor). They reflect past experiences
but open future horizons. Concepts define a horizon and open
possibilities and they have a transcendental dimension of construction
in addition to the comprehension of the historical reality. In this
pattern, distinguishing the specific position of historians with respect
to agents is difficult. Intuitively, they do not coincide. Thus, Koselleck
proposed a constructionist–hermeneutical model of historiographical
work and insisted on the potentially infinite plasticity of the past and
the limitless possibility of redescribing and reinterpreting past events.
The past is every time reconstructed and expanded in relation to the
demands of new contexts and cultural needs. It is also the object of



                                                                                 XVII
Editor’s Introduction




an uninterrupted creative revision11. Therefore, it is unstable and
indeterminate at least epistemically.
        Other aspects should be added in terms of the tensions in
philosophers’ metahistoriographical studies. Although the contrasts
between       naturalistic   and     hermeneutical      approaches       cannot    be
proposed       again    in   light   of   the   methodological      and     thematic
enlargement of the historiographical framework, the problem of the
specificity of an interpretative and symbolic dimension of the past
facts, as methodologically distinct from the forms of the causal
explanation, is still open12. As such, the necessity of modulating
ideals of truth and objectivity should be further discussed by
considering the difference in knowledge targets and procedures at
stake.


4.
Recently, in the philosophy of language, studies on the grammars of
time have produced a great deal of analyses and new acquisitions
about the informative and semantic role of verbal inflections, verb
tenses, active verbs and sentences, duration adverbs and temporal
particles. Other important lines of research have dealt with the
relationship between location information and internal articulation in
qualitatively distinct stages or on the accomplishment of the
mentioned processes13.


11
   See Koselleck (1979).
12
   An exemplary presentation of the issue is in Cassirer (1944: 217–260). The text
argues for the irreducibly symbolic dimension of history considered as a branch of
semantics. This characterization is entirely carved out on limited questions and cas-
es concerning history of culture, ideas, art, and, on the basis of that, I think it can
propose again the epistemological dichotomy causality/meaning. I also think the
privilege that is generally granted to this kind of historiography should be revised in
the light of the above mentioned very complex scenario of the second half of the
20th century.
13
   For a rich overview of the direction of research and a critical analysis of the
developments of these topics, see Bonomi and Zucchi (2001), as well as the
relevant collection edited by Klein and Ping Li (2009).



XVIII
                                                Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




     Previously, the semantic reformulation of the conflict between
realists   and   antirealists,   particularly    about     the    epistemic      and
nonepistemic conceptions of truth, dominates the scene because of
the work of Michael Dummett. The conflict had a major impact on the
great philosophical disputes around metaphysical, ontological and
epistemological questions. The main discord was as follows: do
sentences really exist whose truth transcends our possibility of
verification/acknowledgement not contingently but in line of principle?
According to the nonepistemic concept of truth as correspondence,
the sentence ‘the cat is on the carpet’ is true if it corresponds to the
extralinguistic fact that the cat is on the carpet. This fact makes the
statement true. The realist stance is essentially motivated by the
concern of not confusing the property of being true with that of being
held to be true in such sentences. A factor in (mathematical, physical
or historical) reality may make a sentence true regardless of that it is
under our cognitive grasp. A well-formed and nonvague sentence has
determinate truth conditions: it is either true or false; if it is not true,
it is false regardless of our possibility of verifying it. However, this
intuition generates many problems; for instance, if one goes beyond
simple and comfortable cases such as ‘the snow is white’ or ‘the cat is
on the carpet’, they are clearly used in conditions falling into our
control or acknowledgement possibilities. According to the epistemic
perspective, the truth of a sentence must be somehow bound to the
possibility of verifying or acknowledging the truth conditions thereof,
namely, the rational acceptability or guaranteed allegeability of a
sentence at least in principle. The truth with a human face must be
able to be expressed in terms of actual or possible knowledge. The
sentences about the past on which Dummett specifically worked are a
family of expressions that make the application of the nonepistemic




                                                                                   XIX
Editor’s Introduction




truth    model      of   correspondence   more   controversial,   similar   to
mathematical ones and those concerning infinite domains 14. The past
is a typical domain in which truth condition acknowledgement is
problematic, if not impossible. The question always remains open in
many ways and even from this area of research elements emerges in
support of the most radical forms of constructivist and antirealist
positions. They are avowedly interested in emancipating historical
knowledge from the constraint of the concept of truth and the
immutability of the past.
      Leaving now the area of the philosophy of language and history,
we may consider studies more directly connected to experimental
research. Cognitive and neurobiological studies are of particular
interest for our aims. A great and intense activity of classification and
conceptual clarification concerning empirical investigations has been
carried out in this field. The developments of this activity raise
relevant theoretical questions. One of the most controversial themes
about the privileged role of the notion of trace and the (causal or not)
relationship with past events. According to causal theories, one
cannot talk of memory without at least an indirect causal connection
between an event and a trace. The distinction of memory forms on a
(short or long) duration basis has great relevance in the literature. It
is intersected with the clarification of the types of memories as
distinct in implicit (e.g. the procedural one, which is the capacity of
maintaining the ability) and explicit or declarative (the capacity of
preserving information). The latter can be assembled in the subsets
of episodic (particular and singular experiences) or semantic (general
experiences) memories. The distinction amongst the description
levels of memory is very much relevant. Person-focused descriptions
are based on mental images and able to distinguish the memory type

14
   See Dummett (1978; 2004). About the problems and evolution of Dummett’s an-
ti-realist positions see Murphey (2009: 14–22) and Salis (2015).



XX
                                               Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




from other types of experience traces (perception and imagination).
Descriptions in terms of physicobiological processes and neural
mechanisms regarding the subpersonal cognitive level are provided.
Eventually, a solid body of studies have addressed representational or
conversely the direct and immediate nature of memory.
     Immediately, heated discussions are included in this analytical
platform. On the one hand, the ‘archive view’ conceives memory as a
device    passively    recording,     preserving     and     reproducing        past
representations through possibly exact copies. For a long time, the
encoding, storage and retrieval (ESR) model was considered a sort of
inescapable pretheoretical framework for studying memory. On the
other hand, constructivist perspectives reduce or eliminate memory
reproductive functions. Memory rather would have the task of
producing      detailed     representations       consisting       of     coherent
autobiographical narrations (irrespective of real past happenings) to
deal with anticipations, future planning or social unity support. In
other    words,   memory      should    merely     shape     and     colour     past
experiences. Indeed, the validation of new memories would always be
circular, hinging inevitably on precedent memories, whose reliability
on the successive ones is automatically assumed as their own. From
this point of view, the past is far from appearing as complete or
(much less) determinate and immutable. On the contrary, it is
something built, organised and handled by the selective and narrative
procedures of memory15.


5.
Changes in the image of time emerging in the ‘hard’ sciences are
particularly relevant and profound. At first glance, they present one

15
   My considerations drew from Bernecker (2008) and Bernecker and Michaelian
(2017). From the latter rich collection I consider above all: S. Bernecker, Memory
and truth (51–62); D. Debus, Memory causation (63–75); S. K. Robins, Memory
traces (76–85).



                                                                                  XXI
Editor’s Introduction




of the hardest theoretical challenges. Indeed, they complicate the
task of clarifying the relationships with the common-sense view on
the flow of events and the objective determinacy of the past.
Therefore, we need to dwell more on the introduction of these
scenarios and make a simple discussion because of the technicalities
of the literature.
        The most astonishing results come from the advanced frontiers
of physics and particularly from certain interpretations of relativity
and quantum mechanics. Many scholars considered the 20th century
physics in terms of a progressive disintegration of the notion of time
up to its final eclipse in the analysis of the elementary matter
processes. According to this vulgata, the 19th century paradigms of
thermodynamics laid a solid foundation to explain the common and
historiographical intuition of the course of events as the psychological
and cultural côté of an arrow of time bound to the irreversible growth
of entropy. Successively, relativity theory would have dealt a severe
blow to this view by eliminating any possible reference to a universal
clock regulating the equivalences amongst local times, which are
necessarily connected to specific reference frames and by referring to
a      deformable       and   curved   spatiotemporal   order   within   which
gravitational waves gather.
        The most radical threat would come from quantum physics. It
would push the interpreter into a direction that, on the one hand, let
her argue for the irrelevance of the time variable in theory’s
descriptions; on the other hand, it opens to a re-shuffling of the
relationships amongst past, present and future and reduces or
eliminates the irreversibility of the ‘arrow’ of time. Suffice it to say
that the phenomenon of entanglement violates the nonlocality
principle of classical physics and raises the issue of reformulating or
abandoning the notion of objectivity. According to Copenhagen
interpretation, which was proposed by Niels Bohr, nothing is ‘real’ at



XXII
                                                Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




a microscopic level until it is observed. In quantum mechanics, before
observation, particles are in an indeterminate superposition of
possible states. Given an ‘initial’ interaction between the quantum
states of two particles, they turn out to be linked to each other
(precisely, ‘entangled’) even if great distances divide them. A state
change in one of them instantaneously produces a measurable effect
on the state of the other, developing a ‘spooky’ action at a distance.
     This experimental situation is reflected at a theoretical level in
the opposition between two ways of seeing time: a presentist view,
that is, because it is focused on the ontological primacy of the
present and an ‘eternalist’ view16. According to the lexicon used for
the first time in John E. McTaggart’s famous essay, the rival views are
of two kinds: the one is dynamical (A-series theory) and the other is
static (B-series theory; see McTaggart 1908). Dynamical theory is
very intuitive, because it corresponds to the common experience of
time as a continuous passage of the things from one state to another
one; the course of the events from the past towards the future
implies the precise distinction of three temporal determinations. In an
ontological sense, only present exists, given that the past ‘is no
longer’ and the future ‘is not yet’. Time has an unstable and hard-to-
define character of an incessant becoming from the past to the
present and from the present to the future. A fixed point in this view
is the irretrievability of the past and its immutability opposite to the
(at least partial) openness of the future with respect to our causal
influence. Some processes are irreversible. It is the case of the
thermodynamical phenomena or human actions with their causal
effects. From these dimensions, it is natural to think the universe
moves on towards ever new states, which are different from the
present one and without the same state being able to come back.

16
  In the following context, I use the analysis of the fine volume by Dorato (2013).
See also Orilia (2012).



                                                                                 XXIII
Editor’s Introduction




       In the specialised literature, presentism is generally considered
as at odds with special relativity according to which the present has
no privilege. Arguably, it is not in harmony with Newtonian physics,
whose laws are symmetrical and invariant with respect to temporal
changes. The time variable is immaterial for their formulation.
Moreover, a natural law is supposed to be valid always and
everywhere and to have then an a-tensional sense. Thus, a
discrepancy emerges in physics between the macroscopic events of
our experience, which is oriented in time according to an irreversible
direction     and       the   microscopic   world,   which   is   governed   by
symmetrical laws with respect to the past and the future. No
ontologically privileged present moment is found at the subatomic
level. The simultaneity of two events is always relative to a particular
inertial observer, but this discovery undermines a key notion of the
experience regarding the position of events in time with respect to
the present. Relativistic physics guarantees that the present is never
directly experienced by virtue of the light signal travel time, from the
event to the inertial observer’s position (or to the particular reference
frame thereof), which is negligible only for short distances. What the
past or the future is according to us can be present according to
different observers. The past and the future actually exist according
to other reference frames and local backgrounds in some regions of
complex and fragmentary spatiotemporal cosmos, which are the
arena of physical events. Thus, eternalism seems to provide a more
suitable metaphysical alternative that conforms to relativity theory.
The future and the past have equal ontological dignity and have a
relationship between one another that is different from what common
experience affirms. According to the supporters of this view, the
presentist paradigm is committed to anthropocentrism, which is an
illusory result of the mix of the features of some physical phenomena
with our physiological, cognitive and cultural constitution. If one



XXIV
                                                  Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




denies the ontological primacy of the present, the two depending
corollaries, namely, the time direction and the immutability of the
past, lose their (anthropocentric) footing17.
     Various developments of the described situation are presented.
The criticism of presentism, as fostered by quantum mechanics, could
have extreme and paradoxical outcomes that are not yet delimited or
pondered in their          scope. Quantum         experiments and            quantum
computers      that    process    information      taking     advantage        of   the
interactions between particles according to the laws of quantum
physics open the door to the theoretical possibility of a retroaction of
the future on the past. A classical trend of research about the
‘quantum surrealism’ revolves around a two-slit experiment. This
concept has been proposed several times in different forms since the
19th century. It is variously explained on the basis of the classical
interpretations       of   quantum       mechanics        (from      the     standard
Copenhagen interpretation to those proposed by Louis De Broglie,
David Bohm or, more recently, Aephraim Steinberg; see Wiseman
2016). The experiments carried out at the Washington University St.
Louis of Toronto by the group of the physicist Kater Murch explicitly
put into question the temporal asymmetry of the microphysical
processes18. The quantum reaction of a superconductor is monitored,
reducing its temperature to near absolute zero and letting it act at
two interacting energy levels. Monitoring is conducted by projecting
photon beams at two different modalities (strong and weak).


17
   Though not taken into consideration as it deserves, Nicolai Hartmann’s work is
particularly rich in deep and rigorous analyses, insights and innovative arguments
on this subject. Certainly, his ontology of the past in particular should be examined.
I will mention here only some sections of his system directly connected to our
discussion. For the criticism of the anthropocentric conceptions of time focused on
the primacy of the present one should consider ch. 29 in the sec. IV of Möglichkeit
und Wirklichkeit (Hartmann 1938, 2018) or sec. I of Aufbau der realen Welt
(Hartmann 1940) or sec. III-IV in the first part of Philosophie der Natur (Hartmann
1950).
18
   See the report of Murch’s group (Tan et al. 2015).



                                                                                    XXV
Editor’s Introduction




Information units (qubits) travel simultaneously between two levels
and     detect     states   of    entangled    particles,   which     are   able   of
instantaneous at distance interactions. Therefore, the behaviour of a
particle seems to influence its precedent states, upsetting the
classical temporal coordinates.
       Steinberg        reached    a   moderate     conclusion   by    considering
experimental outcomes as compatible (from a mathematical and
practical viewpoint) with the standard indeterministic interpretation of
the    quantum          phenomena      and    the   deterministic   interpretation
proposed by De Broglie and Bohm, who depicted the possibility of
drawing the real trajectories of particles. Murch’s view seemed more
radical and willing to admit the retroaction of the future on the past:
microscopic material processes suggested that time in the quantum
world flows in all directions and not uniquely in one way. He argued
that the reasons why the macroscopic processes seem to follow a
unidirectional flow in compliance with the arrow of time remain
unclear.
       The attempts of integrating fundamental physics and information
theory are connected to this context. The precursor of this approach
was the great physicist John Wheeler19, as attested by his famous
motto ‘Everything is information’. The quantum world would be better
describable as a flow of relations and processes than as a set of well-
defined and stable objects. This relational mixture may be well
represented        in    terms    of   information.   Thus,   the     quantum      of
information becomes the building block of reality. Various research
projects have worked systematically in line with this view and
produced original results20.
       A rich and interesting theoretical approach is based on the


19
  See the notable tableau depicted by the physicist P. Harpern (2017).
20
  Amongst Italian scholars’ studies, the study of D’Ariano et al. (2017) should be
considered.



XXVI
                                                 Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




nonexistence of the time variable in fundamental physics without
totally denying a form of reality for sequential and directional time. I
think that this view is clearly expressed in the position of an
influential expert such as Carlo Rovelli, who highlighted the crisis of
the following image of time:


      Something uniformly and equally flowing in the whole
      universe and in which everything happens. A single present
      exists in the whole cosmos, a single ‘now’ that is the reality.
      The past is fixed, happened, the same for everyone. The
      future is open and still indeterminate. Reality flows from the
      past through the present towards the future and the
      evolution of things is intrinsically asymmetrical between the
      past and the future. We thought that this concept is the
      basic world structure21.


However, at the fundamental level, the concept is not that similar to
the perceived time. Neither space nor time exists in the elementary
grammar of the world. Nothing ‘present is common to the whole
universe’ and ‘no difference is observed between the past and the
future in terms of the basic equations governing events in the world.’
We must be aware that the gravitational field dynamic itself – ‘a large
moving jelly’, Rovelli wrote – is a high-level approximation. In its
microscopic structure, the world is made of flows and processes, not
of things similar to material objects. In particular, the quantum world
can    be   characterised      through      three    fundamental         properties:
granularity, namely, discontinuity; time position indetermination for
‘particles’, each of them being in an indeterminate state, in

21
  The passage is from Rovelli (2007: 46). Consider also the entire third part of this
work and Rovelli (2014). Both books introduce the theme of the trace and often re-
turn to the subject.




                                                                                  XXVII
Editor’s Introduction




superposition of states, until it interacts with some other entities; and
relationality of physical variables, because any happening can be
concurrently before or after another one.
      Rovelli directly addressed the basic questions to look for
nonreductionist answers. How can our sensation of a continuous flow
emerge from such a timeless world? Certainly, a role is played by
some partiality and blurring given by our limits of interaction with the
world. However, he argued that the direction of time can be
considered a ‘local’ real element connected to the low entropy of the
cosmic region where we belong. It is ‘real but perspectival’. On the
contrary, the time variable is only one of the possible forms of
description of the world and we can reduce it to a rigid and uniform
board only for the slow (with respect to the light speed) velocities and
short distances we move in. It is a third-level approximation, which is
conditioned by our perspective of beings that are constrained by the
entropy growth horizon. Rovelli concluded that time is stratified as
much as a complex set of independent layers, which are differently
approximated in accordance with the physical scales being considered
(velocity and magnitude). The notion of cause with its temporal
asymmetry, which is important in our ordinary experience of a
change, loses strength and meaning in the description of quantum
phenomena. The laws of elementary physics describe smaller or
larger regularities, not causes.
      Furthermore, the landscape of theoretical physics (with all its
speculative aspects) is not uniform. For instance, the American
physicist Lee Smolin, a recognised authority in the field of quantum
gravity, wrote an essay in 2013 that differed from our topic. He
considered the background of the current physical research as
favouring a real rebirth of time (Smolin 2013).




XXVIII
                                                Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




6.
The attention to the neurological bases of the sense of time
represents another important aspect of our topic. Factors opposing
the   reduction    or   interpretation    of   time    as    a   merely      illusory
phenomenon are related to biology. For example, Arnaldo Benini’s
‘neurobiology of time’ takes advantage of the meeting of disciplines
such as biology, physiology and neurosciences to propose an innatist
interpretation in which time is firmly anchored to the functional
possibilities of the nervous system (Benini 2017)22.


      Given that the time sense mechanism is distributed in most
      of the brain and that they spontaneously work, we need to
      change the brain so that we can think of a timeless reality.
      A pointless enterprise, all the more so – here’s Benini’s final
      jab – since the brain should be the one that changes itself.
      […]
      The living matter follows the same principles as the lifeless
      one. […] Right, but, if psychology is biology and biology is
      based on physics, then physics cannot exclude the reality of
      time through mathematical calculations.


In such a view, time and space are natural categories that are
produced by a primitive mechanism without which animal survival
would not be possible. Time is neither illusory nor merely perceived,
but is in a certain sense doubly real because it is realised in nervous
systems and biologically specialised devices that are real components
of the evolving universe and because it is a mechanism governing the
becoming and interpreted as a life essential dimension in agreement
with neurosciences. With more ontologically committed terms, Benini

22
   I take into account in particular ch. 12 and 13 of Benini (2017), from which the
following quotations are drawn.



                                                                                  XXIX
Editor’s Introduction




wrote: ‘The brain created unidirectional time because the reality to
order is such […] nothing returns’. Even if it is not a structure of the
empirical world and is not perceived as an external event, time is
real; rather, it is ‘one of the nearest realities to the heart of nature’.
According to Benini, the scepticism about the reality of time, common
amongst physicists, stems from the fact that they do not adequately
consider studies on the biological and neuroscientific bases of time
itself.
      We have reached the end of our introductory journey. As seen
above, different and conflicting signals originate from the research
areas we have talked about. With the problem of time and its
features, our cultural universe appears to be broken by two deep
rifts. Undoubtedly, a line of strain is in the vertical gap between
common and specialised languages, which is a situation we can still
describe with Wilfrid Sellars’ word, i.e. a conflict between a ‘manifest’
image and a scientific image of things (see Sellars 1963). Regarding
the progresses of physics, the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington
exhibited the issue of an irreducible distance from the common-sense
experience. This distance is illustrated by his often cited example of
the ‘everyday’ table, whose features are unrelated to its microscopic
properties as physics describes them23. The other controversial rift is
horizontal in some sense and concerns the difficult reciprocal
relationships           between   vocabularies   and   conceptual   schemes
elaborated in the shadow of different specialistic cultures and
disciplinary matrices. The abovementioned divergences between the
biology and physics of time certainly fall into this category.
      We face a complex situation that requires a certain caution and
serious analysis to avoid hasty generalisations and precisely identify
concepts and arguments at stake. We tried to work with this spirit in

23
  Consider the Gifford Lectures (Eddington 1928) that he gave in Edinburgh in
1927.



XXX
                                              Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




the organisation of the conference and the present number. I think
that the methodological and conceptual outcomes emerging from the
published articles follow the lines exposed above. One cannot say a
priori whether the conflicts in question here are always unsolvable.
Firstly, one needs to understand how the tensional field of human
actions in time emerges from its physical environment and whether
the latter is a timeless world as some argue. Secondly, the specific
relations of interaction and dependence existing between the different
systems of description should be clarified. The landscape is quite
animated and the conflicts are not only between viewpoints of
different disciplines (physics vs biology or history) but also within the
single   disciplines.   Interdisciplinary   and   intradisciplinary       conflicts
intersect, as in the mentioned cases of physical time and memory. An
in-depth analysis may reveal that some controversies are unsolvable,
whilst other can be illusory.
    From a patient work of conceptual clarification, new unifying
keys could emerge and be useful to balance the fragmented
information coming from specialistic studies. I will finally mention
here a promising hypothesis that is oriented in this sense. The
metaphor of the trace is often repeated in the interdisciplinary
landscape we consider here. It is a heuristic working instrument, not
a mere stylistic or rhetorical suggestion, to explore such research
fields. We have seen that the image is quite important for historians,
neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists in studies on memory.
Notably, it can be relevant even in elementary physics. The notion of
trace can be legitimately the common thread overpassing the barriers
of specialisms and connecting somehow such different universes of
discourse    (e.g.   natural,   physical    and   biological     universe;      the
psychological universe of memory and the neural bases thereof;
historical and cultural universes). This concept can be also found in
Rovelli’s analyses (for what concerns the cited texts). Traces are



                                                                                XXXI
Editor’s Introduction




everywhere in the universe and they describe the past because
entropy was low in previous phases. Rovelli highlighted that
something should stop and energy should be degraded into heat so
that a trace can be formed. The sensation of determinacy of the past
in opposition to the openness of the future is derived precisely from
the abundant presence of traces of past events. Cerebral traces bring
about evolutionary advantageous maps, allowing the predictions
about the future. The brain is a time machine that can continuously
establish nexuses amongst past, present and future events, because
it is a structure regulated by evolution in such a functional
architecture. In this sense, Rovelli relied on Dean Buonomano’s
neurocognitive positions24.
        Maybe, but it is not given for granted, future studies will confirm
the fruitfulness of the notion of traces as a bridge concept and the
actual possibility of interdisciplinary connection25. As for now, we can
only take notice of the theoretical challenges derived from a context
that imposes to         compare, rethink        and improve methods and
languages irrespective of the different argumentative consistencies of
the existing forms of antirealism or alethic scepticism about the past.
One should not draw suggestions or hasty generalisations from the
plurality of time images. One should not also try to harmonise them
in a unified system. On the contrary, understanding the precise
differences and possible links in the multiplicity of languages is an
important work, but it is long, complex and difficult if one only
considers the extent and level of specialisation at stake. A powerful
criticism stems from the current debates. It raises awareness on the
complexity of the mechanism originating the images of the past in

24
  See Rovelli (2007: ch. 12-13) and Buonomano (2017).
25
  An interesting text to understand the difficulties of any interdisciplinary project
about the notion of trace is that by Changeaux and Ricoeur (1998). They clearly
and critically show the distance between a neuroscientific and psychological
perspective and a hermeneutical one, as well as the methodological, scientific and
philosophical difficulties of a meeting among them.



XXXII
                                            Critical Hermeneutics, special 2 (2020)




different kinds of studies. In such a perspective, we decide to create
a moment of interdisciplinary exchange by giving the floor to
philosophers   of   various   origins   (epistemological,      linguistic    and
ontological) and to authoritative representatives of the historical and
experimental research about past events or memories.
    The articles collected here provide a very interesting material
from different points of view and exclude simplifying shortcuts or
hypotheses such as the thesis of eliminating or reducing sequential
time in macroscopic phenomena and human action to an illusion or
the past to the more or less deformed (extra-cognitively conditioned)
human representations. Every essay seems to sustain the search for
an explanation of the emergence of the temporal determinations that
considers all the passages of the process in a conceptual and
empirical way. These passages include the layers of fundamental
physics and the stratifications of biology, psychology and history.
Every essay also acquires the articulate forms of increasingly complex
systems of phenomena.


Cagliari, March 2020
                                                               Pier Luigi Lecis




References
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