hilosophy of history and history of philosophy of science make for an interesting case of “mutual containment”: the former is an object of inquiry for the latter, and the latter is subject to the demands of the former. This article discusses a seminal turn in past philosophy of history with an eye to the practice of historians of philosophy of science. The narrative turn by Danto and Mink represents both a liberation for historians and a new challenge to the objectivity (...) of their findings. I will claim that good sense can be made of “working historical veins of possibility” (contrary to how the phrase was originally intended) and that already Danto and Mink provided materials (although they did not quite advertise them as such) to assuage fears of a constructivist free-for-all. (shrink)

Along with utilitarianism, British idealism was the most important philosophical and practical movement in Britain and its Empire during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Even though the British idealists have regained some of their standing in the history of philosophy, their own historical theories still fail to receive the deserved scholarly attention. This article helps to fill that major gap in the literature. Understanding historiography as concerning the appropriate modes of enquiring into the recorded past, this article analyses the key (...) historiographical commitments that underpin the writings of the early T.H. Green (section two), Edward Caird (section three), and F.H. Bradley (sections four and five). Section six explores the influence of Bradley's historiography. These approaches are linked by the belief that all thought can be properly understood only by critical historians who possess the appropriate tools with which to distinguish permanently valid truths from the transient imperfections with which those truths are mixed. A crucial division between them is the invocation of a neo-Hegelian Geist by the early Green and Caird, and Bradley's reliance on a progressive human nature. Moreover, the article establishes that R.G. Collingwood's highly influential theories of “absolute presuppositions” and “re-enactment” were taken largely from Bradley's historiography. (shrink)

This critical review of Aviezer Tucker's Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography examines the character, scope, and limits of scientific historiography, the overall topic of Tucker's book. The review begins by arguing that the book both unwittingly juggles two criteria for scientific, as opposed to nonscientific, historiography - the production of knowledge and Kuhnian disciplinary matrices - and wrongly construes the subject matter of such historiography to be present evidence for the past as opposed to this evidence (...) in addition to the past itself. There ensues a lengthy discussion of the role of theories in scientific historiography that (1) contests Tucker's thesis that theories of information transmission and grand social theories are central to the enterprise, (2) criticizes his failure to distinguish technical from theoretical terms, and (3) claims that scholarly historiography is more of an art than a science. The review concludes by arguing that scientific historiography as Tucker conceives of it cannot meet the many needs society has vis- -vis the past. (shrink)

History and philosophy complement and overlap each other in subject matter, but the two disciplines exhibit conflict over methodology. Since Hempel's challenge to historians that they should adopt the covering law model of explanation, the methodological conflict has revolved around the respective roles of the general and the particular in each discipline. In recent years, the revival of narrativism in history, coupled with the trend in philosophy of science to rely upon case studies, joins the methodological conflict anew. So long (...) as contemporary philosophy of science relies upon history's methodology to construct its case studies, it subjects itself to a paradoxical situation: the better the history, the worse the philosophy. An example of the methodological conflict is presented in the case of Antoine Lavoisier. This example also serves our ultimateconclusion, which is that distinctively philosophical methods of case-study design promise enhanced prescriptive powers for philosophy of science. (shrink)

Philosophers of history posit a class of concepts known as colligatory concepts that contribute to historical consciousness and that refer specifically to historical events. Although analysis has identified colligatory concepts in historical discourse, these concepts have not yet been investigated empirically. We present a new methodology for studying these concepts and historical consciousness more broadly, as well as pilot data supporting the methodology. Our aim in the pilot study was to establish whether colligatory concepts are processed differently from control concepts (...) when subjects are asked to judge historical statements. We compared judgments of colligatory concepts in healthy participants and in a patient group with impaired working memory cognitive processing capacity. Forty healthy, college-educated participants and 25 patients with Parkinson's disease were asked to rate narrative sentences containing historical content and an equal number of identically constructed narrative sentences of equ.. (shrink)

I try to return the focus of the philosophy of history to the nature of understanding, with a particular emphasis on Louis Mink’s project of exploring how historical understanding compares to the understanding we find in the natural sciences. On the whole, I come to a conclusion that Mink almost certainly would not have liked: that the understanding offered by history has a very similar epistemic profile to the understanding offered by the sciences, a similarity that stems from the fact (...) that both are concerned with grasping how the objects of their study are structured, or how the various elements of the things they study depend upon and relate to one another. At the same time, however, I claim that historical inquiry naturally puts us in a position to acquire further epistemic goods, including the old-fashioned epistemic good of wisdom, which is plausibly constituted by knowledge of how to live well. This is something the natural sciences cannot offer, and it is part of the reason why history is such an important form of inquiry. (shrink)

This paper argues that the recent renewal of interest in the philosophy of Oswald Spengler, particularly concerning its warnings of the imminent demise of Western Civilisation, is misplaced. Arguments concerning the accuracy of his predictions or cultural analysis have overlooked the necessity of evaluating the coherence of the philosophical system that Spengler used to generate and justify his speculative declarations. Such an evaluation indicates a number of apparent contradictions at the heart of Spengler’s historical model. The attempt to resolve these (...) contradictions has resulted in a sharp division of interpretation amongst Spengler commentators, into positivist and relativist camps. Neither interpretation, I suggest, is capable of rendering Spengler’s historical system coherent. It is therefore argued that Spengler’s philosophy is fundamentally flawed. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the significant at all times and sounding anew in every epoch problem of the role of an individual (also a Hero, Great Man) in history, including such an aspect as the role of an individual in the process of state formation and progress. It is argued that in the age of globalization, when the humankind has found itself at the new developmental turning point, in the epoch when the influence of various individuals could affect dramatically (...) the further development of the whole world, there is an urgent necessity to return to the analysis of this issue. In the first part of this article the history of views on this problem from the antiquity to contemporary counterfactual history is considered. In the second part the author aims at presenting the complex of factors affecting the role of individuals as a conceptual system. He suggests that depending on various conditions and circumstances and with the account of specific features of historical place and time and personal characteristics, the historical role of an individual may fluctuate from the absolutely invisible up to the greatest one. A conclusion is made that the weaker and less stable is a society, the more destroyed are the old structures, the greater may be the personality's impact. In other words, the role of an individual is inversely correlated with society's stability and strength. The paper presents the model which includes four society’s state phases: 1) stable society of the monarchic type; 2) social pre-revolutionary crisis; 3) revolution; 4) creation of a new order. It is shown that a personality's greatest influence is observed at the third and fourth stages while at the first stage the influence is usually considerably weaker. (shrink)