A Brief Essay Concerning the Philosophy of History.
How can one define the philosophy of history? Hegel once said that the philosophy of history included little more than thoughtful reflection on the past. Although theorizing about history has been described in more general and ambiguous ways, the philosophy of history has come to represent far more than thoughtful reflections concerning history. In order to understand what is meant by the philosophical study of history, first it is important to reach some consensus as to what is meant by the word Ahistory.@ A distinction must be made between two senses of the term Ahistory.@In one sense, history represents the entirety of events in human experience, or history-as-event. In another sense, Ahistory@ refers to the human practice of collecting (usually through the act of writing) and interpreting these events, or history-as-discipline. Michael Stanford has referred to these two different conceptions (though not in the exact same terms) as Ahistory one@ and Ahistory two@ respectively.
History (in both senses) has been of interest to a number of notable philosophers and historians, and many of their works are included in the bibliography. Because there are two ways of conceptualizing history, there are two ways of conceptualizing the philosophy of history. The philosophy of history-as-event has tended to center around questions of a metaphysical nature, such as: is there a Aplot@ to history?, are there any definable Apatterns@ or Ashapes@, any ultimate ends or Agoals@ toward which events as a whole are developing? Some have seen the totality of history-as-event as a linear sequence of progress; others have attibuted to it patterns of recurrent cycles. Still others have denied that there is any overriding organization or logical order to be found in the morass of historical events and have emphasized the importance of contingency and chance in the playing out of events. Although metaphysical speculation about the shape or Ameaning@ of history has fallen into disrepute, one cannot dismiss the lasting effect some speculative theories have had on the actual practice of historians and philosophers alike. The distinction between two types of philosophy of history is by no means new. What Maurice Mandelbaum called the distinction between Amaterial@ and Aformal@ philosophies of history, W. H. Walsh called Aspeculative@ and Acritical@ philosophies of history.
The greater portion of philosophical reflection about history today focuses on the philosophy of history-as-discipline. While philosophy of history-as-event focuses on history as the totality of human experience, philosophy of history-as-discipline deals with philosophical questions pertaining to the human activity of recording and interpreting history-as-event. It eschews what are seen as the metaphysical issues of the past and deals more with epistemological and methodological concerns about the activities of historical research and the writing of history. Philosophy of history-as-discipline has also addressed concerns about the justification and limitations of historical objectivity, the truth of historical claims, and the nature of historical explanations. Are there any Aproper@ (formal/logical) methods that can be prescribed to the practice of history? What would such Aproper@ historical method look like? Can this question be answered in isolation of questions regarding the practical (i.e. political, ideological) purposes to which historical writing is applied? A good part of the twentieth century was devoted to a debate sparked by the philosopher of science Carl Hempel=s claim that historical explanations -- to be legitimate scientific ones -- must conform to the Acovering-law@ model developed from the physical sciences. In contrast with Hempel's thesis, some, such as R. G. Collingwood and William Dray, have insisted that the historian is more concerned with understanding the motives of historical agents than with predicting (or retrodicting) events.
Many who have concerned themselves with questions about the nature of historical knowledge and interpretation of the past have spent a good deal of time studying the history of various historical concepts and ideas; and in doing so some have concluded that there are no absolute ideals of historical method or truth which can be isolated from their own peculiar historical and social contexts. This is the problem of historicism, to which a section of the bibliography has been devoted.