Philosophy of history
Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and its discipline. The term was coined by the French philosopher Voltaire.
In contemporary philosophy a distinction has developed between the speculative philosophy of history and the critical philosophy of history, now referred to as analytic. 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 wherein the analytic approach is pragmatic and the speculative approach attends more closely to a 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. The names of these are derived from C. D. Broad's distinction between critical philosophy and speculative philosophy.
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.
Origins
In his Poetics, Aristotle maintained the superiority of poetry over history because poetry speaks of what ought or must be true rather than merely what is true.Herodotus, a fifth-century BCE contemporary of Socrates, broke from the Homeric tradition of passing narrative from generation to generation in his work "Investigations", also known as Histories. Herodotus, regarded by some as the first systematic historian, and, later, Plutarch freely invented speeches for their historical figures and chose their historical subjects with an eye toward morally improving the reader. History was supposed to teach good examples for one to follow. The assumption that history "should teach good examples" influenced how writers produced history.
From the Classical period to the Renaissance, historians' focus alternated between subjects designed to improve mankind and a devotion to fact. History was composed mainly of hagiographies of monarchs and epic poetry describing heroic deeds such as The Song of Roland—about the Battle of Roncevaux Pass during Charlemagne's first campaign to conquer the Iberian Peninsula.
In the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun, whom George Sarton considered one of the first philosophers of history, discussed his philosophy of history and society in detail in his Muqaddimah. His work represents a culmination of earlier works by medieval Islamic sociologists in the spheres of Islamic ethics, political science, and historiography, such as those of al-Farabi, Ibn Miskawayh, al-Dawani, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Ibn Khaldun often criticized "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data". He introduced a scientific method to the philosophy of history and he often referred to it as his "new science",
which is now associated with historiography. His historical method also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of the state, communication, propaganda, and systematic bias in history.
By the eighteenth century historians had turned toward a more positivist approach—focusing on fact as much as possible, but still with an eye on telling histories that could instruct and improve. Starting with Fustel de Coulanges and Theodor Mommsen, historical studies began to move towards a more modern scientific form. In the Victorian era, historiographers debated less whether history was intended to improve the reader, and more on what causes turned history and how one could understand historical change.
Concepts
Philosophy of chronology
Many ancient cultures held mythical and theological concepts of history and of time that were not linear. Such societies saw history as cyclical, with alternating Dark and Golden Ages. Plato taught the concept of the Great Year, and other Greeks spoke of aeons. Similar examples include the ancient doctrine of eternal return, which existed in Ancient Egypt, in the Indian religions, among the Greek Pythagoreans' and in the Stoics' conceptions. In his Works and Days, Hesiod described five Ages of Man: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age, and the Iron Age, which began with the Dorian invasion. Some scholars identify just four ages, corresponding to the four metals, with the Heroic age as a description of the Bronze Age. A four-age count would match the Vedic or Hindu ages known as Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga and Kali Yuga, which together make one Yuga Cycle that repeats. According to Jainism, this world has no beginning or end but goes through cycles of upturns and downturns constantly. Many Greeks believed that just as mankind went through four stages of character during each rise and fall of history so did government. They considered democracy and monarchy as the healthy régimes of the higher ages; and oligarchy and tyranny as corrupted régimes common to the lower ages.In the East, cyclical theories of history developed in China and in the Islamic world in the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun.
During the Renaissance, cyclical conceptions of history would become common, with proponents illustrating decay and rebirth by pointing to the decline of the Roman Empire. Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy provide an example. The notion of Empire contained in itself ascendance and decadence, as in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which the Roman Catholic Church placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
During the Age of Enlightenment, history began to be seen as both linear and irreversible. Condorcet's interpretations of the various "stages of humanity" and Auguste Comte's positivism were among the most important formulations of such conceptions of history, which trusted social progress. As in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile treatise on education, the Enlightenment conceived the human species as perfectible: human nature could be infinitely developed through a well-thought pedagogy.
Cyclical conceptions continued in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the works of authors such as Oswald Spengler, Correa Moylan Walsh, Nikolay Danilevsky, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Paul Kennedy, who conceived the human past as a series of repetitive rises and falls. Spengler, like Butterfield, when writing in reaction to the carnage of the First World War of 1914–1918, believed that a civilization enters upon an era of Caesarism
after its soul dies. Spengler thought that the soul of the West was dead and that Caesarism was about to begin.
Philosophy of causality
Narrative and causal approaches to history have often been contrasted or even opposed to one another, yet they can also be viewed as complementary. Some philosophers of history such as Arthur Danto have claimed that "explanations in history and elsewhere" describe "not simply an event—something that happens—but a change". Like many practicing historians, they treat causes as intersecting actions and sets of actions which bring about "larger changes", in Danto's words: to decide "what are the elements which persist through a change" is "rather simple" when treating an individual's "shift in attitude", but "it is considerably more complex and metaphysically challenging when we are interested in such a change as, say, the break-up of feudalism or the emergence of nationalism".Much of the historical debate about causes has focused on the relationship between communicative and other actions, between singular and repeated ones, and between actions, structures of action or group and institutional contexts and wider sets of conditions. John Gaddis has distinguished between exceptional and general causes and between "routine" and "distinctive links" in causal relationships: "in accounting for what happened at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, we attach greater importance to the fact that President Truman ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb than to the decision of the Army Air Force to carry out his orders." He has also pointed to the difference between immediate, intermediate and distant causes. For his part, Christopher Lloyd puts forward four "general concepts of causation" used in history: the "metaphysical idealist concept, which asserts that the phenomena of the universe are products of or emanations from an omnipotent being or such final cause"; "the empiricist regularity concept, which is based on the idea of causation being a matter of constant conjunctions of events"; "the functional/teleological/consequential concept", which is "goal-directed, so that goals are causes"; and the "realist, structurist and dispositional approach, which sees relational structures and internal dispositions as the causes of phenomena".
There is disagreement about the extent to which history is ultimately deterministic. Some argue that geography, economic systems, or culture prescribe laws that determine the events of history. Others see history as a sequence of consequential processes that act upon each other. Even determinists do not rule out that, from time to time, certain cataclysmic events occur to change the course of history. Their main point is, however, that such events are rare and that even apparently large shocks like wars and revolutions often have no more than temporary effects on the evolution of the society.