This paper revisits the issue of whether responsibility is essentially historical. Roughly, the leading question here is this: Do ways in which we can acquire pertinent antecedents of action, such as beliefs, desires, and values, have an essential bearing on whether we are responsible for actions that are suitably related to these antecedents? I argue, first, that Michael McKenna’s interesting case for nonhistoricism is indecisive, and, second, his brand of modest historicism, while highly insightful, yields results concerning responsibility that (...) ought to be resisted. I conclude by motivating a hybrid view: it implies that responsibility does not require that one have a past, but should one have a past, it must be a past of a certain sort. (shrink)

Did people in early modern Europe have a concept of an inner self? Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor have brought together an outstanding group of literary, cultural, and history scholars to answer this intriguing question. Through a synthesis of historicism and psychoanalytic criticism, the contributors explore the complicated, nuanced, and often surprising union of history and subjectivity in Europe centuries before psychoanalytic theory. Addressing such topics as "fetishes and Renaissances," "the cartographic unconscious," and "the topographic imaginary," these essays move (...) beyond the strict boundaries of historicism and psychoanalysis to carve out new histories of interiority in early modern Europe. Contributors: Ann Rosalind Jones, Peter Stallybrass, James R. Siemon, John Guillory, Eric Wilson, Karen Newman, Tom Conley, Jeffrey Masten, Carla Mazzio, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Jonathan Goldberg, Douglas Trevor, Kathryn Schwarz, David Hillman, Marjorie Garber. (shrink)

W. V. Quine famously argues that though all knowledge is empirical, mathematics is entrenched relative to physics and the special sciences. Further, entrenchment accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Michael Friedman challenges Quine’s view by appealing to historicism, the thesis that the nature of science is illuminated by taking into account its historical development. Friedman argues on historicist grounds that mathematical claims serve as principles constitutive of languages within which empirical claims in physics and (...) the special sciences can be formulated and tested, where these mathematical claims are themselves not empirical but conventional. For Friedman, their conventional, constitutive status accounts for the necessity of mathematics relative to these other disciplines. Here I evaluate Friedman’s challenge to Quine and Quine’s likely response. I then show that though we have reason to find Friedman’s challenge successful, his positive project requires further development before we can endorse it. (shrink)

The phrase 'beyond historicism' is usually associated with Bielefeld historians like Hans Ulrich Wehler and Jürgen Kocka, who attempted to turn the study of history into a social science, but a better candidate would be the sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who happened to teach as well in Bielefeld during the 1970's and 1980's. Luhmann had little affinity with the project of his colleagues from the history department. He took the opposite view that the social sciences suffered from a naive enlightenment (...) view and should become more history minded. Like the historicists of the early nineteenth century Luhmann was indirectly inspired by the philosophy of Leibniz. Although Luhmann's theory of social systems may seem miles away from the daily interests of most historians, it can be interpreted as an Aufhebung of historicism. This will be demonstrated for two important concepts, the autopoietic system which incorporates the historicist notion of individuality and the concept of second order observation which can be read as an abstract redescription of what historicists meant by the historical method. (shrink)

This is the first full study in English of the German historicist tradition. Frederick C. Beiser surveys the major German thinkers on history from the middle of the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, providing an introduction to each thinker and the main issues in interpreting and appraising his thought. The volume offers new interpretations of well-known philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Max Weber, and introduces others who are scarcely known at all, including J. A. Chladenius, Justus (...) Möser, Heinrich Rickert, and Emil Lask. Beyond an exploration of the historical and intellectual context of each thinker, Beiser illuminates the sources and reasons for the movement of German historicism—one of the great revolutions in modern Western thought, and the source of our historical understanding of the human world. (shrink)

Abstract: Pragmatism involves simultaneous commitments to modes of inquiry that are philosophical and historical. This article begins by demonstrating this point as it is evidenced in the historicist pragmatisms of William James and John Dewey. Having shown that pragmatism focuses philosophical attention on concrete historical processes, the article turns to a discussion of the specific historiographical commitments consistent with this focus. This focus here is on a pragmatist version of historical inquiry in terms of the central historiographical categories of the (...) object of historical inquiry and mode of historical periodization. After describing the basic historiographical consequences of pragmatism's historicism, the article moves to a discussion of the philosophical results of this historicism. The focus here is on the role that historical inquiry can play in the general philosophical perspective of pragmatism as well as on some recent texts that exemplify the dual pragmatist commitment to philosophy and history. (shrink)

In this volume, Ernst Troeltsch embraces historical relativity while rejecting historical relativism, and thereby provides a model for the philosophy of history. The volume remains as relevant as it was in 1923.

Hidden in Historicism considers how the nineteenth-century philosophy of historicism depicts three "forgotten time regimes": a time of rise and fall, an ambiguous time of synchronicity of the non-synchronous, and a time in which decisive moments dominate. Before the eighteenth century, time was past-oriented. This inversed in the Enlightenment, when the future became dominating. Today, this time of progress continues to be embraced as a "time of the modern". Yet, inequality, increasing violence and climate change lead to doubts (...) over a bright future. In this book, Harry Jansen moves away from the heritage of Reinhart Koselleck and his single time of the modern towards a historicist, threefold temporal approach to history writing. In the time regime of the twenty-first century past, present and future coexist. It is a heterogeneous time that takeson the three forms of historicism. Jansen's study shows how all three times exist together in current historiography and contribute to a better understanding of the world today. Based on the idea that an incarnated time rules everything that happens it reality, the book offers a fresh perspective on the ongoing discussion about time and time regimes in contemporary philosophy and theory of history for students and scholars, both time specialists and the non-specialist. (shrink)

Historicism is often regarded as a distortion of properly "historical" understanding; but if one attends to the rhetorical aspects of historical discourse, it appears that ordinary historical narrative prefigures its subject by the language chosen for description no less than historicism does by its generalizing and theoretical interests. Descriptive language is, in fact, figurative and emplots events to suit one or another type of story. Rhetorical analysis shows even an apparently straightforward passage to be an encodation of events (...) in the form of pseudo-tragedy. Generic story-types constitute the latent meaning of narratives and are understood by readers, often subliminally, through the figurative language of the story. The acknowledgement of linguistic determinism resolves a number of problems of historical theory and entails a qualified relativism of historical accounts. (shrink)

L’œuvre du Péruvien José Carlos Mariátegui place au cœur de ses analyses les catégories de praxis et de lutte des classes. Pour ce faire, il intègre de manière originale un marxisme de tradition historiciste. Cet article revient dans un premier temps sur les questions qui traversent ce courant, pour ensuite opérer une revue de la réception du terme historicisme dans les textes de Mariátegui. Dans un troisième temps, il propose de relire sa proposition stratégique révolutionnaire à l’aune d’une mobilisation des (...) catégories de tradition, de mythe et d’histoire. (shrink)

Many writers who have discussed the Singularity have treated it not only as the inevitable outcome of advancements in cybernetic technology, but also as natural consequence of broader patterns in the development of human knowledge, or of human history itself. In this paper I examine these claims in light of Karl Popper’s famous philosophical critique of historicism. I argue that, because the Singularity is regarded as both a product of human ingenuity and a reflection of the permanent limitations of (...) our rational capacities, speculation about its likelihood occupies an interesting border zone between what Popper referred to as “technological prediction” and what he lambasted as “prophecy.” I go on to examine representations of a post-singularity world in the novels of Iain M. Banks, as well as in Bruce Sterling’s short story “The Beautiful and the Sublime.” These narratives demonstrate how trying to imagine what human life might be like in the presence of intellectually superior AIs requires a more aggressively skeptical attitude toward the human capacity to understand our own history than even Popper was prepared to allow for. (shrink)

A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births, both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present (...) condition of the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. As competing ideas of historical change, they both entail a comparison between past and present conditions of their investigated subjects, but their practices of temporal comparison are irreconcilable and represent two distinct ways of historicization. (shrink)

This article seeks to reconcile a historicist sensitivity to how intellectually virtuous behavior is shaped by historical contexts with a non-relativist account of historical scholarship. To that end, it distinguishes between hierarchies of intellectual virtues and hierarchies of intellectual goods . The first hierarchy rejects a one-size-fits-all model of historical virtuousness in favor of a model that allows for significant varieties between the relative weight that historians must assign to intellectual virtues in order to acquire justified historical understanding. It grounds (...) such differences, not on the historians’ interests or preferences, but on their historiographical situations, so that hierarchies of virtues are a function of the demands that historiographical situations (defined as interplays of genre, research question, and state of scholarship) make upon historians. Likewise, the second hierarchy allows for the pursuit of various intellectual goods, but banishes the specter of relativism by treating historical understanding as an intellectual good that is constitutive of historical scholarship and therefore deserves priority over alternative goods. The position that emerges from this is classified as a form of weak historicism. (shrink)

This article treats the conflict between historicism and neo-Kantianism in the late nineteenth century by a careful examination of the writings of Wilhelm Windelband, the leader of the Southwestern neo-Kantians. Historicism was a profound challenge to the fundamental principles of Kant’s philosophy because it seemed to imply that there are no universal and necessary principles of science, ethics or aesthetics. Since all such principles are determined by their social and historical context, they differ with each culture and epoch. (...) Windelband attempted to respond to the challenge of this relativism by either broadening Kantian principles, so that they could accommodate the results of historicism, or by reformulating Kantian principles, so that they were impregnable to historical change. The article examines both aspects of Windelband’s strategy in some detail, noting the many changes and different formulations in his views. A final section considers some of the difficulties of Windelband’s strategy and concludes that, despite its heroic efforts, it was a failure.Keywords: Historicism; Normativity; Weltanschauung; Hegelianism; Relativism; Wilhelm Windelband; Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

A critical account of the case for historicism from Popper to Foucault, this volume, originally published in 1989, shows the viability of an historicist account of knowledge by replying to traditional objections and the need for defenses of realism and reference at the heart of most alternatives to historicism. The book provides insights to those in philosophy as well as literary criticism, intellectual history, history of science, and cultural criticism.

Mediation and the standard model of romantic historicism -- Gothic mediation & history's two materialisms -- History's body and the historicist's dilemma -- Freedom and the minimum conditions of historicity -- Randomness, romantic historicism, & Walter Scott -- Romantic temporality and queer revolution.

A revisionist view incorrectly identifies a growing awareness of historical and cultural relativity by scholars of Roman law in sixteenth-century France with a modern historical consciousness. Friedrich Meinecke more correctly identified historicism as the juncture of the ideas of individuality and development. The perception by these Renaissance scholars of successive changes in language and law only constitutes an awareness of individuality, not of an idea of development. They conceived of an entity as unfolding from a germ or essence, an (...) essential quality which defined it as an individuality. They could not conceive of an entity as developing in relation to its circumstances. (shrink)

The recent emergence, among philosophers, of the view that the activity of human reason in all its possible modes must also be historicized, including the activity of philosophizing itself, may be found in writers as diverse as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, and Alasdair MacIntyre. This contemporary view of human reason contrasts with the traditional commitments of "First Philosophy," Aristotle's name for the knowledge of things through their ultimate causes and principles. This book challenges the prevailing historicist orthodoxies about (...) the nature of reason and philosophy and offers the first comprehensive analysis and critique of historicism in its current philosophical form. Can philosophical historicism reasonably justify the interpretation of human reason on which its own objections to First Philosophy are based? While Carl Page ultimately concludes that it cannot, he also seeks to rehabilitate historicism's motivating insights by showing how they derive from questions Hegel and Heidegger raised about reason's relation to history. (shrink)

A critical account of the case for historicism from Popper to Foucault, this volume, originally published in 1989, shows the viability of an historicist account of knowledge by replying to traditional objections and the need for defenses of realism and reference at the heart of most alternatives to historicism. The book provides insights to those in philosophy as well as literary criticism, intellectual history, history of science, and cultural criticism.

On its publication in 1957, _The Poverty of Historicism_ was hailed by Arthur Koestler as 'probably the only book published this year which will outlive the century.' A devastating criticism of fixed and predictable laws in history, Popper dedicated the book to all those 'who fell victim to the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny.' Short and beautifully written, it has inspired generations of readers, intellectuals and policy makers. One of the most important books on the (...) social sciences since the Second World War, it is a searing insight into the ideas of this great thinker. (shrink)

According to German theorists historicism was the result of a dynamization of the static world-view of the Enlightenment. According to contemporary Anglo-Saxon theorists historicism resulted from a de-rhetoricization of Enlightenment historical writing. It is argued that, contrary to appearances, these two views do not exclude but support each other. This can be explained if the account of change implicit in Enlightenment historical writing is compared to that suggested by historicism and, more specifically, by the historicist notion of (...) the "historical idea." Aspects of the contemporary debate about the nature and the task of historical writing can be clarified from the perspective of the differences between Enlightenment and historicist historical writing. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars, artists and politicians have accused each other of "historicism." But what exactly did this mean? Judging by existing scholarship, the answers varied enormously. Like many other "isms," historicism could mean nearly everything, to the point of becoming meaningless. Yet the questions remain: What made generations of scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences worry about historicism? Why did even musicians and members of parliament warn against historicism? And what explains this remarkable (...) career of the term across generations, fields, regions, and languages? Focusing on the "travels" that historicism made, this volume uses historicism as a prism for exploring connections between disciplines and intellectual traditions usually studied in isolation from each other. It shows how generations of sociologists, theologians, and historians tried to avoid pitfalls associated with historicism and explains why the term was heavily charged with emotions like anxiety, anger, and worry. While offering fresh interpretations of classic authors such as Friedrich Meinecke, Karl Löwith, and Leo Strauss, this volume highlights how historicism took on new meanings, connotations, and emotional baggage in the course of its travels through time and place. (shrink)

Although philosophers have explored several connections between neuroscience and moral responsibility, the issue of how real-world neurological modifications, such as Deep Brain Stimulation, impact moral responsibility has received little attention. In this article, we draw on debates about the relevance of history and manipulation to moral responsibility to argue that certain kinds of neurological modification can diminish the responsibility of the agents so modified. We argue for a historicist position - a version of the history-sensitive reflection view - and defend (...) that account against a rival, relational view of responsibility. We conclude that DBS can, under certain conditions, diminish responsibility, and explore the circumstances under which this might be so. We conclude by suggesting that philosophical debates about moral responsibility, manipulation, and history have greater practical relevance than is sometimes thought, and that attention to practical cases can help inform and deepen this body of scholarship. (shrink)

The Crisis of German Historicism Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss - two major political thinkers of the twentieth century, both of German- Jewish background and forced into exile in America - were never friends or intellectual interlocutors. Yet they shared a radical critique of contemporary idioms of politically oriented discourses and a lifelong effort to modify reflective approaches to political experience. Liisi Keedus reveals how Arendt's and Strauss's thinking about political modernity was the product of a common intellectual formation (...) in Weimar Germany, by examining the cross-disciplinary debates guiding their early work. Through a historical reconstruction of their shared interrogative horizons - comprising questions regarding the possibility of an ethically engaged political philosophy after two world wars, the political fate of Jewry, the implications of modern conceptions of freedom, and the relation between theoria and praxis - Keedus unravels striking similarities, as well as genuine antagonisms, between the two thinkers. (shrink)

In a recent article P. Henle gave an analysis of the notion of emergence. His inquiry deals with what he calls, quite appropriately, the emergence of characteristics. Such emergence, that is, the emergence of qualities and relations is undoubtedly the primary connotation of the term, and I feel that Henle has been very successful in clarifying it. The purpose of the present paper is to discuss in some detail one special aspect of Henle's analysis. This is done because the precise (...) formulation of this particular aspect sheds light on the notion of elementarism. And the opposite of this notion, holism or organicism, belongs undoubtedly to the variety of fused and confused meanings the idea of emergence has come to cover. (shrink)

This article examines historicism as the expansion of historiography beyond its bounds, analogous to Physicalism, Naturalism, Psychologism, and Scientism. Five senses of historicism are distinguished: Ontological Historicism claims ultimate reality is, and only is, historical. Idiographic historicism considers historiography an empirical science that results in observational descriptions of unique singular events. Introspective historicism considers the epistemology of historiography to be founded on self-knowledge. Scientistic historicism considers historiography an applied psychology or social science that can (...) expand to overtake the social sciences. Methodological historicism extends the use of historiographic methodologies to unreliable or dependent evidence. The first four historicisms are inconsistent with historiography within bounds and implode. Methodological historicism describes proper historiographic methodologies that are applied out of their proper bounds, but are used in historiography based on the epistemology of testimony and the tracing of the transmission of information from historical event to historiographic evidence. (shrink)

The authors discuss two interpretations of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology: by Lev Shestov and by Gustav Shpet. While each of these thinkers followed his own path, they shared an idea of historicism typical of Russian philosophy, a historicism related to the existential dimension of the human being. This article suggests that the interpretation of historicism in the tradition of “positive philosophy on Russian soil” was fruitful for the development of phenomenological topics in Shpet’s and Shestov’s hermeneutics.

Comment la transformation révolutionnaire du monde peut-elle être l'œuvre des hommes, c'est-à-dire le produit réel et conscient de leur histoire? Par l'usage de la dialectique en tant qu'elle constitue la méthode de la théorie pratique, c'est-à-dire le processus historique effectif par lequel la critique théorique se fait consubstantielle au renversement pratique, soit la transformation réelle et concrète du monde à l'origine de l'émancipation collective. La dialectique est donc la méthode propre à une science théorico-pratique, la science de l'histoire appelée pour (...) cette raison dialectique historiciste, et dont le modèle relève de l'art de la guerre, plus précisément de la stratégie militaire : science dont l'objet et le cœur ne sont pas la loi naturelle, mais la lutte politique. L'objet de cet article est ainsi de mettre au jour les sources historiques et conceptuelles, essentiellement hégéliennes, marxiennes et clauswitziennes de la théorie pratique de Guy Debord. (shrink)

According to German theorists historicism was the result of a dynamization of the static world-view of the Enlightenment. According to contemporary Anglo-Saxon theorists historicism resulted from a de-rhetoricization of Enlightenment historical writing. It is argued that, contrary to appearances, these two views do not exclude but support each other. This can be explained if the account of change implicit in Enlightenment historical writing is compared to that suggested by historicism and, more specifically, by the historicist notion of (...) the "historical idea." Aspects of the contemporary debate about the nature and the task of historical writing can be clarified from the perspective of the differences between Enlightenment and historicist historical writing. (shrink)

The study of literary texts appears at the moment to stand at a decisive juncture. Trends in critical thinking over the last decades have questioned the possibility of recovering a text's historical meaning. At the same time, there is a newly insistent plea for a return to “history” in the interpretation of literature. Before a rapprochement can occur, however, we need to have a clearer understanding of how both historians and critics understand “history” and of the ways in which postmodernist (...) thought positions history and the role of the historian with respect to issues of literary interpretation at the forefront of contemporary critical debate. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Historiographic Concepts Historical Laws Historiographic Interpretations Conclusion References.

Epistemology as traditionally conceived seems to have fallen upon hard times. Not only has the cry arisen from diverse philosophical quarters that epistemology is dead, but we have even been offered a plethora of suggestions as to how best fill the vacuum left by her sudden demise. Thus Quine, for example, has recently urged that epistemology be “naturalized” and replaced by empirical psychology and an empirical semantics. Others suggest that epistemology be “historicized” and replaced by a study of the history (...) of ideas, and especially by a study of the history of science. Still others have argued that epistemology be “sociologized” and replaced by a sociology of scientific knowledge and/or a sociology of the scientific community. Finally, we have even been told, in a rather delightful Viennese manner, that epistemology must be “radicalized” and replaced by a kind of opportunistic anarchism, marching under the banner of “Anything Goes!” to the tune of a Dadaist waltz. (shrink)

Revisionists such as Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, and John Dunn argue that in order to understand an historical text, one must recover the particularity of intended meaning. According to this view, in the sphere of political/ social reality, thought has no universal truth, no independence of its context, no significance for the present, and no meaning beyond the author's intentions. Although this is a variant of classic historicism, it goes far beyond the latter. A study of Gramsci's (...) historicism shows that only the first of the above claims is entailed by historicism or justifiable in its own terms. The revisionist program would prevent us from understanding our own political ideas as they are founded upon our philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Na tentativa de tornar compreensível o processo vintista nas suas componentes ideológicas ao nível das estruturas orgânicas da Nação, analisamos um caso – o do município do Horta. Utilizando as categorias do liberalismo historicista, de matriz inglesa, e as do radicalismo libe­ral, de coloração racionalista à francesa, procuramos demonstrar como o liberalismo vintista se estabelece entre o balanceamento dos dois modelos. A teoria do municipalismo, levada a cabo por Alexandre Herculano, mais não faz do que elevar ao nível da conceptualização (...) uma consciência que os "corpos intermédios" manifestaram na adesão ao vintismo, quando a ideia da "soberania da Nação" tendia a afirmar-se como absoluta. (shrink)

This paper argues that historicism can provide substantive philosophical grounds for critical theory and various modes of critique. Unlike the developmental historicism that dominated the nineteenth century, we start from a radical historicism tied to nominalism, contingency, and contestability. This radical historicism is compatible with a commitment to truth claims, including the truth of historicism and the truth of particular genealogies and other accounts of the world. Genealogy can be viewed as radical historicism in (...) its critical guise, denaturalizing the ideas it targets. In addition, however, radical historicism provides possible grounds for both historical ontology and a revised version of ideology critique. Ideology is conceived here in relation to failures in consciousness itself rather than the alleged conflicts of a material base. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: With this article, I advance a historicist and relativist feminist philosophy of disability. I argue that Foucault’s insights offer the most astute tools with which to engage in this intellectual enterprise. Genealogy, the technique of investigation that Friedrich Nietzsche famously introduced and that Foucault took up and adapted in his own work, demonstrates that Foucault’s historicist approach has greater explanatory power and transgressive potential for analyses of disability than his critics in disability studies have thus far recognized. I show (...) how a feminist philosophy of disability that employs Foucault’s technique of genealogy avoids ahistorical, teleological, and transcultural assumptions that beleaguer much work in disability studies. The article also situates feminist philosophical work on disability squarely in age-old debates in (Eurocentric) Western philosophy about universalism vs. relativism, materialism vs. idealism, realism vs. nominalism, and freewill vs. determinism, as well as contributes to ongoing discussions in (Western) feminist philosophy and theory about (among other things) essentialism vs. constructivism, identity, race, sexuality, agency, and experience. (shrink)

What is the basis for the enormous success of Historicism? In my paper I attempt to answer this question by deploying the concept of the cultural pattern. A 'cultural pattern' may be defined as the connection of concepts and practices which have gained a relative perpetuity through cultural habitualization. Cultural patterns include a combination of interpretative schemes according to which the world can be categorized, structured and interpreted with individual or social practices which either develop out of, or follow (...) these schemes. Because they combine concepts and practices in a significant manner they gain a contour which enables the creation of communicative addressability, practical appropriation and discursive analysis and hence the creation of a long-term exemplary status. A cultural pattern according to this definition has a relative stability and an observable effect over a long period of time, but which is simultaneously liable to permanent actualization and adaption. Historicism has been considered to be a basic thought-pattern of modernity since Troeltsch, Meinecke and Koselleck; defining Historicism as a cultural pattern can help to explain its long-term effectiveness and its continuing productivity to the present day. (shrink)

Unlike the radical historicist and the radical logicist, the moderate historicist in the philosophy of science adopts the position that neither purely a priori (i.e., logical or philosophical) nor purely historical considerations alone determine the acceptability of a philosophical analysis of science. A dilemma arising from the nature of this position is first described and then it is argued that what is perhaps the most plausible way of avoiding this dilemma is doomed to failure. A particular example of this attempt (...) at escaping the dilemma is considered in some detail, and along the way evidence is amassed in support of the view that no non-trivial statement of moderate historicism will be coherent. (shrink)

Heidegger’s thought, particularly in the middle and late periods, is often characterized—and criticized—as historicist. The strands of reflection constituting Heidegger’s historicism lead to the core of his most profound contributions to fundamental questions concerning the structure of Being. We should expect therefore that understanding this historicism will be as complicated as it is important, and that suitable criticism of his position should be attempted only when this understanding has been approximated, if not achieved.