• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Yale
    • Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Yale
    • Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of openYLSCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Display statistics

    Quentin Skinner v. Charles Taylor: Explanation and Practical Reasoning in History, Philosophy, and Law

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    3_Barzun_Quentin_Skinner_v._Ch ...
    Size:
    259.7Kb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Barzun, Charles
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/7575
    Abstract
    One can ask two different questions about a given social, political, or legal practice. First, one can ask whether, and if so how, the ideas embodied in that practice explain its development or current prevalence. Second, one can ask whether the practice should be advanced, abandoned, or altered in some way. According to today’s disciplinary conventions, the first question is an historical or explanatory one, whereas the second is a philosophical or normative one. This essay is about the relationship between these two questions. In particular, it asks the following: How, if at all, do the answers to these questions depend on each other? That is, to what degree, if any, must one evaluate or assess a practice in order to explain its social acceptance? And conversely, how, if at all, should the historical explanation of a practice bear on our normative evaluation of it? These latter questions – which are really questions about questions – are large and deep ones. They have been long debated by philosophers and historians and are thus ones to which I cannot give conclusive answers. The task of the essay is therefore less to answer them definitively than to suggest what certain answers to them reveal about the modes of reasoning in the disciplines of history and philosophy—and law. It does so by examining a dialogue that took place over several years between the historian Quentin Skinner and the philosopher Charles Taylor. That dialogue nicely illustrates the assumptions of each scholar’s home discipline because both scholars give voice to, yet also challenge, those assumptions. Indeed, I will argue that Skinner and Taylor end up forging common methodological ground with respect to the relevance of historical explanation to philosophical evaluation and vice versa. More specifically, both scholars end up seeing a closer connection between the two disciplines than either historians or philosophers typically do.
    Collections
    Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2023)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.