Of all the patterns that occur at many different scales, the most fundamental is the existence of pattern itself. –David Christian David Christian (1946– ) is an Australian-American historian and public intellectual who is best known for his work on behalf of Big History—a name that is something of an understatement, as Big Historians intend nothing less than a grand synthesis Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History Part XXXII: Peter Novick—That Noble Dream (Part II)
This article continues an earlier discussion of Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question in the American Historical Profession. If the collapse of liberalism and the Great Depression provided powerful motivations for insurgent historians to question the time-honored ideals of the profession, the moral certainty of the Second World War, and then by (the early Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History Part XXXII: Peter Novick—That Noble Dream
Peter Novick (1934–2012) was an American intellectual historian who is probably best remembered today for That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (1988.) Though controversial (then and now), it is a standard text for American graduate students in history, and is therefore worth spending some time with, both for its history and its Continue Reading …
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 Although his legacy has been controversial, Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) was probably the most important historian of religion in the twentieth century. He studied in Bucharest and Continue Reading …
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 William McNeill (1917– ) is an American historian best known for his books The Rise of the West (1963) and Plagues and Peoples (1977). He spent most of his career at the Continue Reading …
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 Hayden White (1928– ) is an American literary theorist and historiographer whose work is strongly associated with the Continue Reading …
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 Arthur Danto (1924–2013) was an American artist and analytic philosopher who is best known for his work in the philosophy of aesthetics. He also made an important contribution to the philosophy of history, however, in his Continue Reading …
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 Marshall G.S. Hodgson (1922–1968) was a World historian and Islamicist who has had a secondary but persistent and insightful influence on the development of both disciplines. He was a vegetarian, pacifist Quaker from a middle-class Continue Reading …
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. Continue Reading …
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 In The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (1932) the famous American historian Carl Becker (1873–1945) offered an influential interpretation of the Continue Reading …
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 Will Durant (1885–1981) was an American philosopher and historian who is best remembered for his still-classic introduction to philosophy, The Story of Philosophy (1926), and an 11-volume history of Eurasia, The Story of Civilization (1935–1975), which he wrote Continue Reading …
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 Karl Popper (1902 – 1994) was one of the most famous, and probably the most influential, philosopher of science of the twentieth century. He grew up in the Vienna of Freud, Wittgenstein, the Logical Continue Reading …
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 Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) was a French historian and a leader of the Annales School (c. Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History Part XXIII: R.G. Collingwood and Neo-Idealism
All history is the history of thought. –R.G. Collingwood R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943) was an English philosopher, archeologist, and historian of Roman Britain whose views, expressed in The Idea of History (1946) have dominated much historical thinking in the twentieth century. Along with his contemporary, Benedetto Croce, and other philosophers of the “Neo-Idealist” school, Continue Reading …
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 Carl Gustav Hempel (1905–1997) was a German-American philosopher of science and a prominent member of the Vienna Circle. These philosophers were called logical positivists—“logical” because they argued that scientific laws could and should be reformulated as logically necessary deductions from a given set of Continue Reading …
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 Edward Hallett Carr (1892–1982), “the Red Professor of Clearinghouse Square,” was a British diplomat-turned-historian Continue Reading …
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 Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) was a British historian and philosopher who is best remembered for his monumental Study of History, released in twelve volumes between 1934 and 1961. In this work he traced the rise and fall of twenty-one civilizations, which he defined as the self-contained Continue Reading …
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 Carl Becker (1873–1945) was an American intellectual historian and a member of the Progressive School in American historical thought. Along with his mentor Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History Part XVIII: Herbert Butterfield and the Whig Interpretation of History
The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. –Herbert Butterfield Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) was a British historian of science and religion who is probably best remembered for his essay The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). In it he made several important and closely related points about Continue Reading …
Philosophy of History Part XVII: Oswald Spengler and the Decline of the West
One day the last portrait of Rembrandt and the last bar of Mozart will have ceased to be—though possibly a colored canvas and a sheet of notes will remain—because the last eye and the last ear accessible to their message will have gone. –Oswald Spengler Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was one of the last great voices of literary history. Like Gibbon and Michelet, he had no formal Continue Reading …