Abstract This article analyses the concept of “survival” and its uses in the philosophy of history of R.G. Collingwood ( An Autobiography, The Idea of History ). Indeed, if we can find occurrences of this notion in the work of British philosophers from the second half of the 20th century, like G.E.M. Anscombe and A. MacIntyre, it seems that Collingwood is the first philosopher who introduces this concept in the philosophical method, extracting it from its anthropological background. When a concept, or practice, is described as survival, it is to manifest a lack of rationality, and the logical way of treating a survival concept would be to suppress it, or to refuse to use it anymore. However, in Collingwood’s philosophy of history, the concept of survival is crucial because it is a necessary condition for our understanding of the past. Thus, this concept, which is often neglected in Collingwood’s studies, is nevertheless important in his method of approaching philosophical problems.
“World War One was inevitable.” What sense can we make of such claims? I use recent work in philosophy of science to define historical necessity in terms of causal sensitivity. This implies that it must be understood in a relativized way, and that it is a property of historical explanations rather than of history itself. I then explore how historical necessity relates to chance and determinism, how it relates to predictability, and how the concept can be used by historians, social scientists, and others.
This essay proposes the field of speech acts as a framework for analyzing how utterances with the same locutionary content can realize different illocutionary functions across distinct communicative fields. The argument develops in three parts. The first section introduces the concept through a contemporary classroom example, demonstrating how a single utterance can realize multiple illocutionary acts across overlapping fields. The second section analyzes nineteenth-century legal utterances, first showing how the same utterance performs different acts as it circulates through settings such as diplomacy, religious authority, and imperial administration, then showing how different utterances articulated within a shared legal field may be strategically oriented toward shaping external fields. The final section positions the framework in relation to existing methodologies, including J. G. A. Pocock’s theory of linguistic paradigms, Quentin Skinner’s linguistic contextualism, and Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history. While drawing on these traditions, the essay argues that the field of speech acts provides a finer-grained unit of analysis that captures the dynamic interplay of utterances across coexisting communicative fields defined by local roles, norms, and orientations.
The article aims to illustrate the Dantian roots of Ankersmit’s representational philosophy of history. The parallel between the two philosophers is explored in J. M. Kuukkanen’s Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (2015) and M. Tamm and E. Zeleňak’s “In a Parallel World” (2018). This relationship is also evident in Ankersmit’s essays “Danto, History, and The Tragedy of Human Existence” (2007) and “Danto’s Philosophy of History in Retrospective” (2009). This connection highlights Ankersmit’s development of the logic of representation, expressed as a ‘three-place’ operational function, which leads to a narrative approach to history grounded in a conception that acknowledges both the role of the past and the retrospective nature of historical accounts.
How can philosophers of history contribute to the debate on what historians’ responsibilities entail, without falling into the trap of telling historians what to do? This article identifies four ways in which philosophers of history might engage with historians’ own sense of responsibility: (1) asking for clarification, (2) pointing out inconsistencies, (3) drawing attention to alternatives, and (4) offering conceptual tools for understanding what responsibilities are, or how historians come to accept them. To illustrate the last of these four points, the article discusses Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance. While the concept may capture something important about how historians adjust their sense of responsibility in light of transformative experiences (“trigger events”), some of its assumptions are open to debate. Philosophers of history may therefore want to further develop the concept, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the grounds on which responsibilities are accepted or rejected.
How far back must we go before we can write intellectual history? If I am working on a particular author, must that author be dead for me to investigate them as a historian? Must their private papers be available? This article argues that the tendency to respond “Yes” to these questions mistakenly assumes that it is not possible to write intellectual histories of contemporary thinkers. I make an argument for what I call contemporary intellectual history as a form of inquiry, and I claim that contemporary intellectual history is one way of doing theory. To explain these positions and build a case for them, I engage with the work of the contemporary philosopher Robert Brandom. I focus on his most recent book, A Spirit of Trust (2019), which adds crucial new elements to his decades-long project of articulating inferentialism and grapples directly with how historical inquiry and philosophical work can collaborate.
Should historians studying mass crimes set aside the emotions that these crimes evoke? Positive and negative responses to this question can be referred to as methodological objectivism and subjectivism, respectively. This paper addresses this debate based on a case study: Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioner’s methodological sentimentalism. First, I reconstruct Goldhagen’s position and then criticize its central assumption. The upshot of this case study is that methodological sentimentalists should decide between two conceptions of inferential self-knowledge, esthetic and scientific.
Revered as the founding father of Chinese historiography, Sima Qian (sic)(sic)(sic) (?145-86 BCE) has been an exemplar of the frustrated author in Chinese literary history. Despite the monumental position of his Shiji (Records of the Historian), Sima's background story has long overshadowed the interpretations of the book. This biographical method, which has dominated the Chinese historiographical tradition, obscures the complex relationships among a historical text, the historian, and the reader. As the narratologist, Gerald Prince, has proposed, different readers do not process narratives in exactly the same manner. Applying Prince's analysis to the interpretations of Shiji, I argue that, even though numerous readers have consistently adopted the biographical approach, their individualized reading processes yield dissimilar interpretations of Shiji. The current study highlights the value of narratological theories in understanding the reception of Chinese historical works, illustrating the promise of opening Chinese historiography to narrative analysis.
In this Letter to the Editor, I argue that Danto’s Ideal Chronicler thought experiment in philosophy of history conflates the properties of events with the relations between events. This oversight leads to misunderstandings regarding the nature of historical knowledge and historical events. The experiment fails to establish any non-trivial conclusions about the retrospective nature of historical truths or the constitution of historical events.
If the bridge between the dimensions of past, present, and future has become as uncertain as the very notion that history follows a linear trajectory, alternative ways of engaging with the past are gaining increasing significance. This essay explores how non-(uni)linear conceptions of time can offer a more nuanced understanding of historical and contemporary worlds. Rather than adhering to monolithic categories of past, present, and future connected by a single developmental line, it proposes metaphors such as the fold, the loop, or the swirl and their respective verbs - each reflecting distinct temporal experiences. By linking these metaphorical perspectives to the everyday practice of historians, the essay examines how such non-(uni)linear approaches not only add value to historiography but may also offer a way out of the uncertain terrain of historicity, thereby stimulating praxeological reflections on historiography in the 21st century.
In light of the recent efforts to resuscitate a form of historical realism by Branko Mitrovic and others, this essay situates their efforts in between past and present debates not only about historical realism and anti-realism, but also about the scientific status of historiography. In the conviction that we can and should learn from our past, we present a genealogy of the idea of Universal History, starting from Kant, as it is also here where a certain dualism between empirical and philosophical historiography was introduced. Our analysis eventually brings us to the radical rejection of Universal History by Louis Mink, and especially then Paul Roth, who draws substantial epistemological and metaphysical conclusions from this rejection. Roth's work is often considered to be controversial since he makes a case not only for the plurality of historiographical methods, but for the very plurality of pasts, too. So, we show that Roth's often misinterpreted appeals to methodological intersectionality and metaphysical multiplicity must be always understood from within his naturalism. We moreover show that Roth, contra the realists in question, constructively works with the adaptive shifts that the theory and philosophy of history made in the 20th century, namely we identify three Rothian starting points or steps: restrospectivism, irrealism, and the already-mentioned naturalism. So, when taken altogether, our essay points at a possible new path which the future philosophy of history might take as its own - a path beyond the beaten paths of historical realism.
Debates between realists and anti-realists or constructivists have reappeared in philosophy of history several times. The most recent controversy between these authors has been contributing to discussions within what is sometimes called analytical philosophy of history. In the paper, I provide an overview of this controversy. I try to make explicit crucial presuppositions of the two positions and, more importantly, I argue that some realist interpretations and arguments directed against constructivism are based on misunderstanding. I offer a diagnosis as to why this is the case and suggest that the principal point of the controversy concerns the correspondence approach to historical knowledge.
The future of the philosophy of history is inescapably intertwined with the future of history and historiography itself. Thus, philosophers of history should be ready to explore new approaches to structuring and gaining historical knowledge that are stirring passions among historians and theoreticians. By doing so, philosophers of history may hone their theories and tools. This paper focuses on the Big History project initiated by David Christian. Rather than discussing its possible historical ties, the paper analyses its narrative structure and epistemological and ontological assumptions. It addresses the description of Big History as a modern creation myth, its posthumanist features, synergies with an originary approach to historical knowledge, and its use of complexity theories.
I offer a hypothesis about the origins and persistence of pervasive mistakes concerning causes of the so-called "crisis of narratives." These mistakes help explain why doubts persist to this day regarding whether or not narrative form can be made amenable to scientific norms. One error involves the assumption that this crisis roots in factual claims that a narrative may make. Another arises due to narrative theorizing within philosophy of history having fallen into and remained caught in what I term the "positivist trap." In the course of the discussion, I explore some unappreciated consequences of Danto's Gedankenexperiment regarding an Ideal Chronicle developed by Louis Mink. My hope is to reorient debate about narrative explanations away from idle metaphysical concerns and back to core epistemic and logical ones.
Methodologism outlines a new pragmatist approach to knowing and meaning. While knowing is typically defined as a state of some kind, such as possessing a true justified belief, I shall propose that knowing can, in general, be defined as a correct way of doing. This view applies to both the sciences and more mundane ways of knowing in our various forms of life. Also in historiography, knowing is understood as doing. The main focus in the methodologist philosophy of historiography should be to identify good and responsible ways of maintaining and advancing the conversation about the past, without an expectation of a settlement to any one view about the past. We need to ask: What are epistemologically responsible ways of practicing historiography? More specifically, what are the conditions and rules under which claims in historiography may be made, accepted, or rejected
