The Institute of Philosophy of the Research Center for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences kindly invites you to the upcoming talk of its seminar series:

Paul Richard Blum (Loyola University Maryland, currently Palacký University Olomouc.)

"How to Think with Another's Head: Thinking Philosophical Problems Historically" 

Date and Venue of the lecture: 29th April 2014, 4.00 pm, Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 30. Országház Street, 2. floor, "Pepita" room.

R. G. Collingwood famously stated that, if something appears to be unreasonable, it is likely the answer to a question we have not yet understood. He therefore invited to think of philosophical theroems as answers to philosophical questions. In other words, every philosophy has its history. This also entails that, in order to understand a philosophical problem, one has to think with the head of the other philosopher. I will illustrate this with a number of examples, including Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, Michael Polanyi, and Friedrich Nietzsche with the paradigms of narrativity, internal and external aspects of thinking, and contextualization. I hope to show that the divide between history of philosophy and philosophy proper does not actually exist.