Philosophy of history

Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and its discipline.[1] The term was coined by the French philosopher Voltaire.[2]

In contemporary philosophy a distinction has developed between the speculative philosophy of history and the critical philosophy of history, now referred to as analytic.[3][4][5][6][7] The split between these approaches may be approximately compared, by analogy and on the strength of regional and academic influences, to the schism in commitments between analytic and continental philosophy or (very roughly) between positivism and nihilism wherein the analytic approach is pragmatic and the speculative approach attends more closely to a metaphysics (or anti-metaphysics) of determining forces like language or the phenomenology of perception at the level of background assumptions.

At the level of practice, the analytic approach questions the meaning and purpose of the historical process whereas the speculative approach studies the foundations and implications of history and the historical method.[8][9] The names of these are derived from C. D. Broad's distinction between critical philosophy and speculative philosophy.[10][11][verification needed]

The divergence between these approaches crystallizes in the disagreements between Hume and Kant on the question of causality. Hume and Kant may be viewed in retrospect—by expressive anachronism—as analytic and speculative, respectively. Historians like Foucault or Hannah Arendt, who tend to be spoken of as theorists or philosophers before they are acknowledged as historians, may largely be identified with the speculative approach whereas generic academic history tends to be cleave to analytic and narrative approaches.

  1. ^ Tucker, Aviezer (2009). A companion to the philosophy of history and historiography. Blackwell companions to philosophy. Chichester Malden (Mass.): Wiley-Blackwell. p. 4. ISBN 978-1-4051-4908-2.
  2. ^ Voltaire, La philosophie de l'histoire, Changuion, 1765.
  3. ^ Walsh, William (1958). An Introduction to the Philosophy of History. London: Hutchinson University Library. pp. 13, 15. ISBN 9781855061705.
  4. ^ Danto, Arthur (1989). Historia y narración. Ensayos de filosofía analítica de la historia (in Spanish). Translated by Bustos, Eduardo. Barcelona: Paidós. p. 29. ISBN 84-7509-552-6.
  5. ^ Ricoeur, Paul (1995). Tiempo y narración. Configuración del tiempo en el relato histórico (in Spanish). Vol. 1. Ciudad de México: Siglo XXI. p. 169. ISBN 968-23-1966-8.
  6. ^ Kuukkanen, Jouni-Matti, ed. (2021). Philosophy of history: twenty-first-century perspectives. London New York Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic. p. 2. ISBN 978-1-350-11184-4.
  7. ^ Lemon, Michael C. (2003). Philosophy of history: a guide for students (1. publ ed.). London: Routledge. pp. 1–2, 7, 9, 281–283. ISBN 978-0-415-16204-3.
  8. ^ The Continuing Relevance of Speculative Philosophy of History, Journal of the Philosophy of History
  9. ^ Philosophy of History, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  10. ^ E.g. W. H. Walsh, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1951) ch. 1 p. 2.
  11. ^ Rolf Gruner, "The concept of the speculative philosophy of history," Metaphilosophy 3(4).