Abstract

This study is a conceptual and historical analysis of how modern philosophies of history can be understood in terms of a diminishing emphasis on the eternal and universal. It is argued that philosophies of history since the Renaissance have become increasingly historicized and that this has made it extremely difficult to sketch the broad pattern of history. The author concludes that the traditional aspects of philosophy as absolute and eternal must be integrated into a theory that reciprocally interrelates the historical and the transhistorical. The Introduction and Chapter One give a conceptual account of a theory of the absolute and of a series of categorical oppositions both of which serve as the logical foundation of the study. Chapter Two commences the historical segment of the work. It demonstrates that the humanistic historiography of the Italian and French Renaissances laid the foundation for philosophies of history that were distinct from the theological and cosmological histories of pre-Renaissance thought. Chapter Three shows how both transhistorical and historical elements commingled in the thought of Giambattista Vico and the French "philosophes." Chapter Four is primarily a detailed analysis of Hegel's philosophy of history, which concludes that history is predominant in his system of philosophy. It also situates Hegel generally with the context of the development of philosophies of history in the German Enlightenment and German Idealism. The first part of Chapter Five analyzes the emphasis on history and historical determinants in the utopian thought of the early nineteenth century. The second part of Chapter Five shows how history was influenced by science and vice versa throughout the nineteenth century. The study concludes in Chapter Six that the transhistorical and the historical must be differentiated yet reciprocally interrelated in the philosophy of history if it is to have any viability