Cognition and Temporality

Mark E. Blum has served in the Department of History at the University of Louisville since 1976 and has been a professor in the department for almost twenty years. He received his MA and PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the University of Louisville faculty, he was Visiting Fellow at the Carl Rogers Center for Studies of the Person. His previous book, Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic: The Foundational Logics of Western Historical Thinking, was published by Peter Lang in 2006.

• List of Illustrations – Acknowledgements – Introduction – Discerning the Attentional Episteme in Its Verbal and Figural Grammar – The Problematic Modality of Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic – The Assertoric Modality of Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic – The Apodeictic Modality of Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic – An Evolutionary Myth of the Development of Differing Forms of Historical Judgment – The Argument for the Psycho-genetic Cause of Historical Logics – Ergon and Energeia in Verbal and Figurative Judgment: The Ushenko and the Pepper Family.

“Mark E. Blum addresses a rarely asked yet central question underpinning modern thought: what are the preconditions for our predominant paradigm for subjectivity, a paradigm that is determinative in both the natural sciences and the human sciences? Blum addresses the issue of how creatures who are genetically almost identical can have individual experiences, from which they then can distill a common and binding discourse. Instead of a psychological approach to subjectivity, Blum analyzes grammar and style to show how the objective emerges from the unstated but ever-present subjective. His treatment of art is exceptionally illuminating, making concrete the Kantian idea of a pre-objective universal subjectivity. Cognition and Temporality: The Genesis of Historical Thought in Perception and Reasoning will become necessary reading for anyone thinking about the places of the subject and the self in modernity, showing how modernity is rooted in universal context-free assumptions about the world that go back to our origin as a species.”—Gabriel Motzkin, Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem