- Branko Mitrovic
- Unpublished response to the articles by Eugen Zeleňák, Michal Hubálek and Piotr Kowalewski Jahromi published in the Journal of the Philosophy of History 19 (2024), 281-302 and 319-345.
- The December 2025 issue of JPH included a series of articles that attack realism in philosophy of history. A couple of these articles that extensively and critically discuss my work are particularly marked by flawed and defective reasoning. Since the Journal of the Philosophy of History has refused to publish my response, I am making it public here. Those interested in academic standards and editorial practices might notice that the Journal of the Philosophy of History would publish criticism of an author by one of their editors but refuse to let that author respond. Some of them could even contemplate whether a refusal to publish a response by an author who was referred to thirty-five times in the volume (not counting footnotes) should count as censorship.
- Branko Mitrović
- Journal of the Philosophy of History 18 (2024) 113-124 and 173-186.
- I present here the original versions of my articles that were published in the Journal of the Philosophy of History 18 (2024) as part of a polemic about the implications of historical anti-realism. In the first article I argued that prominent formulations of historical anti-realism entail the view that no past events ever happened. The responses to this thesis by Frank Ankersmit, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen and Paul Roth were published in the same issue. Obviously, I cannot include here these articles that I have not authored, but they can be obtained at https://brill.com/view/journals/jph/18/2/jph.18.issue-2.xml . My second article analyses their responses, and shows that they fail to refute the reductio to the absurd view that no past events ever happened.
- Branko Mitrović
- Conference talk at the Past-the-Post conference at Oslo University, 6 May 2024.
- The paper discusses the latest developments in philosophy of history in the post-postmodernist era.
- Branko Mitrović
- Journal of the Philosophy of History, 16 (2022), 295-307.
- The paper presents a realist perspective on the recent exchange in the Journal of the Philosophy of History between Adrian Currie and David Swaim on the one side and Paul Roth and Fons Dewulf on the other. The first part presents a critique of Currie’s and Swaim’s view that the past is not determinate and can be changed. The second part states a series of arguments against Roth’s view that events exist only under description. The third part discusses the ontological problems that Roth’s irrealism about the past fails to address.
Individualism-Holism Debate in the Social Sciences: Political Implications and Disciplinary Politics
- Branko Mitrović
- Nathalie Boulle and Francesco Di Iorio (eds), Palgrave Handbook of Methodological Individualism, Cham: Palgrave, 2023.
- The debate between the individualist and the holist understanding of social items (social entities, events, institutions, phenomena and so on) has a long history and potentially a wide range of political implications. Political positions and political assumptions often play a significant role in the debate and it is not rare that participants in the discussion seek to associate the positions they oppose with unpopular political views, instead of providing actual theoretical arguments. The tendency to associate individualist positions in the social sciences with political libertarianism and neo-liberal economic agendas are particularly common. At the same time, disciplinary politics and concerns about the integrity of the social sciences (especially in the form of fears from their reducibility to psychology) also play an important role in the debate. In this paper I analyse such political assumptions that often motivate, or are stated to motivate, the debate.
- Branko Mitrović
- History and Theory, 58 (2019), 313-323.
- This is a review article of Tor Egil Førland’s book Values, Objectivity and Explanation in Historiography, New York: Routledge, 2017. The book challenges the appropriateness of the association of anti-objectivism in historiography with left-wing politics and by defending objectivist perspectives on historical research takes a strong stance against cultural relativism and theories of situated truth. Førland also analyzes the implications of dilemmas about ontological and methodological individualism for historical research and proposes an interesting application of the views of Margaret Gilbert to the problem of the explanation of contradictory beliefs of historical figures. The book has been published in a very appropriate moment, and it will help open questions and dilemmas that have received insufficient attention in the past due to the domination of postmodernist perspectives.
- Branko Mitrović
- History and Theory, 55 (2016), 141-153.
- A review of two books by Tim Crane: Aspects of Psychologism, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014 and The Objects of Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
- Branko Mitrović
- Journal of Art Historiography, 14 (2016)
- A review of John Searle’s book “Seeing Things as They Are”, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Branko Mitrović
- British Journal of Aesthetics 58 (2018), 147-163.
- In the philosophy and psychology of perception there exists a long-standing debate about the detachability of the visual from the conceptual contents of perception. The article analyses the implications of this dilemma for the attribution of aesthetic properties independent of the classification of aesthetic objects and the possibility of (moderate) aesthetic formalism.
- Branko Mitrović
- Originally published on www.academia.edu.
- A response to Harald Kincaid’s and Julia Zahle’s article against methodological individualism, originally published as a discussion piece on www.academia.edu.
- Branko Mitrović
- Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 47 (2017) 28-43.
- In recent decades a number of authors have relied on the multiple realizability argument in order to reject methodological individualism. In this paper I argue that this strategy results in serious difficulties and makes it impossible to identify social entities and phenomena.
- Branko Mitrović
- Journal of Art Historiography, 15 (2016)
- The paper analyses the implications of different positions on free will for historical explanations and social-historical ontology. I argue that Erwin Panofsky’s introduction of the problem of free will in the debate about social determinism presents a crucial argument against attempts to provide collectivist historical explanations.
- Branko Mitrović
- Journal of Art Historiography, 15 (2016)
- A review of Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, including a substantial discussion of Christopher Clark’s book, The Sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914, London: Penguin, 2012 that Kuukkanen endorses and that is indeed, I point out in the review, a masterpiece of postmodernist history writing.
- Branko Mitrović
- Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 76 (2013), 71-89.
- The paper analyses the changes in the understanding of visuality and their implications on (art) historiography since the times of Ernst Gombrich.
- Branko Mitrovic
- My presentation at the Nexus Network Conference, Milan, 2012. A revised version of the talk was published in Nexus Network Journal 15 (2013), 51-62.
- Nelson Goodman’s argumentation in his book Languages of Art is largely based on his analysis of perspective, that is meant to justify his claim that visual perception is conventional. In this paper I analyse his claims about perspective and demonstrate that it is based on fundamental failure to understand the concept of the picture plane.
- Branko Mitrović
- History and Theory 53 (2014) 277-294
- The article is a review of Frank Ankersmit’s book “Meaning, Truth, and Reference”, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012.
- Branko Mitrović
- History and Theory, 54 (2015), 311‐333.
- The paper discusses the theoretical problems pertaining to the relationship between historical contextualization and historical understanding and interpretation. On the one hand, there is the view that documents need to be understood in relation to their historical context; on the other, it is not clear how a historian can get out of his or her own historical context in order to be able to engage with the conceptual frameworks, beliefs or ways of reasoning that are radically different from his or her own. The paper proposes a resolution to this dilemma; its upshot is that historical understanding is constituted by contextualization.
- Branko Mitrović
- Journal of Art Historiography 9 (2013)
- The paper seeks to explains motivations behind collectivist positions on social ontology in the history of German art historiography.
- Branko Mitrović
- History and Theory, 50 (2011), 303‐327
- In this paper I argue that many longstanding debates about anachronism in history writing derive from an essentialist understanding of concepts that is difficult to sustain for metaphysical and epistemological reasons. The paper articulates an intentionalist alternative to the essentialist approaches to concept attribution that successfully clarifies and avoids many standard problems with anachronism.
- Branko Mitrović
- Journal of Art Historiography 3(2010)
- The paper analyses Gombrich’s polemics with his postmodernist critics in the context of his views on perception and social ontology.
- Branko Mitrović
- History and Theory, 48 (2009), 180-198.
- The dominant view of twentieth century analytic philosophy has been that all thinking is always in a language; that languages are vehicles of thought. In recent decades, however, the opposite view, that languages merely serve to express language‐independent thought‐contents or propositions, has been more widely accepted. The debate has a direct equivalent in the philosophy of history: when historians report the beliefs of historical figures, do they report the sentences or propositions that these historical figures believed to be true or false? In this paper I argue in favor of the latter, intentionalist, view. My arguments mostly center on the problems with translations that are likely to arise when a historian reports the beliefs of historical figures who expressed them in languages other than the one in which the historian is writing. In discussing these problems the paper presents an application of John Searle’s theory of intentionality on the philosophy of history.
- Branko Mitrović
- History and Theory, 46 (2007), 29-47
- The debate between individualism and holism in the philosophy of history pertains to the nature of the entities relied on in historical explanations. The question is whether explanations of historical items (e.g. events, actions, artifacts) require the assumption that the collective historical entities (e.g. civilizations, cultures etc.) used in these explanations are (sometimes) conceived of as irreducible to the actions, thoughts and beliefs of individual human beings. In this paper I analyze two methodological problems that holist explanations face in the writing of intellectual history. The first problem derives from the fact that holistic explanations in intellectual history have to rely on the claim that certain beliefs were inconceivable to some individuals because they were members of specific collectives, whereas it is unclear how historical research can justify such claims. The second problem pertains to the difficulties the holist position faces when it has to account for the novel properties of artifacts studied by intellectual history.
- Branko Mitrović
- Archiv f̈ür die Geschichte der Philosophie, 2009
- The work of the Paduan Aristotelian philosopher Iacopo Zabarella (1533- 1589) has attracted the attention of historians of philosophy mainly for his contributions to logic, scientific methodology and because of his possible influence on Galileo. At the same time, Zabarella’s views on Aristotelian psychology have been little studied so far; even those historians of Renaissance philosophy who have discussed them, have based their analysis mainly on the psychological essays included in Zabarella’s De rebus naturalibus, but have avoided Zabarella’s commentary on Aristotle’s De anima. This has led to an inaccurate, but widespread, understanding of Zabarella’s views. The intention of this article is to provide a systematic analysis of Zabarella’s arguments about the (im)mortality of the soul in the context of Aristotelian psychology. Zabarella’s view that the soul is mortal according to Aristotle is remarkable for his time, while his elaboration of this position is far more comprehensive than that of Pietro Pomponazzi, the other significant Renaissance thinker who shared the same view.