mark e. blum

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university of louisville department of history
function of history
Biography and/or project

My chief focus is 'historical logic,' which is a study of how individuals as well as differing cultures structure events.  I work at the level of sentential judgment for the individual, and at the level of narrative norms for the cultures.  My theoretical foundations include Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Franz Brentano, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, Leo Spitzer, Stephen C. Pepper, Noam Chomsky, and Hayden White.  My book Continuity, Quantum, Continuum, and Dialectic:  The Foundational Logics of Western HIstorical Thinking, published in 2006, continues as a basis for articles and book chapters on historical persons from this perspective.

Figural 'historical logic' is studied as the foundation for the grammar of verbal historical logic.  I currently am writing a book on the transformaton of perceptive judgment to sentential judgment.  My theoretical foundations for this line of thought include Stephen C. Pepper, and also the pioneering work of the early twentieth century of Johannes Itten and Kandinsky.

One sees that I am a historian of thought, as I choose to term it 'cultural history'.  German thought is my central field, which includes many publications.  I am currently translating the pertinent work of the Austro-Marxists--as a respite, as it were, from the engagement in my thought on historical logic.

I have also published recently a work on Franz Kafka--Kafka's Social Discourse:  An Aesthetic Search for Community.  The Austro-Marxists, Kafka, Husserl, Brentano, Sigmund Freud, Moreno, and others thrived in the period of what I see as the richest body of thought in the modern West.  Austria and its 'historical logic' as the framework for its individual lives furthered the importance of dialogical community, and left us a core of methodological approaches to mutual understanding that still thrives in the field of group dynamics.