“Of all the patterns that occur at many different scales, the most fundamental is the existence of pattern itself.” –David Christian
Philosophy of History Part XXXII: Peter Novick—That Noble Dream (Part II)
Part two of a two-part discussion of Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question in the American Historical Profession.
Philosophy of History Part XXXII: Peter Novick—That Noble Dream
Part one of a two-part discussion of Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession.
The Poverty of Scientism
“If you drop a hammer on your foot, is it real or is it just your imagination? You can run that test, you know, a couple of times, and I hope you come to agree that it’s probably real.” –Bill Nye
Philosophy of History XXXI: Mircea Eliade—Cosmos and History
“This mythical drama reminded men that suffering is never final; that death is always followed by resurrection; that every defeat is annulled and transcended by the final victory.” –Mircea Eliade
Philosophy of History XXX: William McNeill and World History
“Historiography that aspires to get closer and closer to the documents—all the documents and nothing but the documents—is merely moving closer to incoherence, chaos, and meaninglessness.” –William McNeill
Philosophy of History XXIX: Hayden White: Postmodernism in History
“Knowledge is a product of wrestling not only with the ‘facts’ but with ourselves. Where alternative visions of reality are not entertained as genuine possibilities, the product of thought tends toward blandness and unearned self-confidence.” –Hayden White
Philosophy of History XXVIII: Arthur Danto’s Narrative and Knowledge
“Narrative structures penetrate our consciousness of events in ways parallel to those in which … theories penetrate observations in science.” –Arthur Danto
Philosophy of History Part XXVII: Marshall Hodgson: Conscience in History
“If the modern technical age is to remain human, it cannot overlook the truth that our ancestors have left with us.” –Marshall G.S. Hodgson
Jurgen Habermas and the Public Sphere
“The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” –Jurgen Habermas
Carl Becker: The Heavenly City of Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
“In a very real sense it may be said of the eighteenth century that it was an age of faith as well as of reason, and of the thirteenth century that it was an age of reason as well as of faith.” –Carl Becker
Philosophy of History Part XXVI: Will Durant: The Story of Civilization
“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding.” –Will Durant
Philosophy of History Part XXV: Karl Popper and Prophecy in the Social Sciences
“The belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition. There can be no prediction of the course of human history by scientific or any other rational methods.” –Karl Popper
Philosophy of History Part XXIV: Fernand Braudel and the Annales School
“I remember a night near Bahia when I was enveloped in a firework display or phosphorescent fireflies; their pale lights glowed, went out, shone again, all without piercing the night with any true illumination. So it is with events; beyond their glow, darkness prevails.” –Fernand Braudel
Philosophy of History Part XXIII: R.G. Collingwood and Neo-Idealism
“All history is the history of thought.” –R.G. Collingwood
The Open Society and Its Frenemies: Karl Popper’s Defense of Science and Liberalism for the 21st Century
While the world’s attention is focused on religious fundamentalism, there is a new tribalism, and a new revolt against reason, taking shape within liberalism. The name of this movement is New Atheism, but it would be more appropriate to call it Atheist Fundamentalism.
Philosophy of History Part XXII: Carl Gustav Hempel and the Return of Positivist History
“If you cannot predict, you have not explained.” –Carl Gustav Hempel
Philosophy of History Part XXI: Edward Hallett Carr and Totalitarian Historiography
“It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar’s crossing of that petty stream, the Rubicon, is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.” –Edward Hallett Carr
Philosophy of History Part XX: Arnold Toynbee and the Challenge of Civilization
“Civilization is a movement and not a condition; a voyage and not a harbor.” –Arnold Toynbee
Philosophy of History Part XIX: Carl Becker and Progressive History
“To establish the facts is always in order, and is indeed the first duty of the historian; but to suppose that the facts, once established in all their fullness, will ‘speak for themselves’ is an illusion.” –Carl Becker