Introduction:

Four different meanings of the Philosophy of History

1) Voltaire a critical or scientific history in which the historian makes up his own mind
instead of taking sources at face value.
2) Hegel universal history.
3) Nineteenth century positivists discovery of general laws which govern history.
4) Collingwoods definition inquiry into the nature of history.

The definition of history History is an inquiry.

The object of history actions of human beings that have been done in the past.
How does history proceed? By the interpretation of evidence, where evidence is a
collective name for things which singly are called documents.
What is history for It is for human self-knowledge. The value of history is that it teaches
us what man has done and thus what man is.

Theocratic history presence of the divine element. Humanity is not an agent but partly an
instrument and partly a patient of the actions regarded. Dated.
Myth presence only of the divine element. Undated.

Creation of Scientific history Herodotus. History is a science, has to do with human actions.
Humanistic, not theocratic. Dated. Based on research and inquiry. Thucydides emphasised self-
revelatory and humanistic nature of history and also the importance of evidence.

Anti-historical tendency of Greek thought substantialism. That which is transitory cannot be

known. Only perceptions.

The temporal and changing nature of Greek existence was reflected in their conception of
history. Their historical consciousness was not a consciousness of age-long tradition moulding
the life of one generation after the other into a uniform pattern; it was a consciousness of violent,
catastrophic changed from one state of things to another, from smallness to greatness etc.

The Greeks believed that the value of history was inasmuch as its teachings were useful for
human life; simply because the rhythm of its changes is likely to repeat itself, similar antecedents
leading to similar consequences; the history of notable events is worth remembering in order to
serve as a basis for prognostic judgments, not demonstrable but probable, laying down not what
will happen but what is likely to happen, indicating the points of danger in the rhythm now going
on.

Non-deterministic view that human will can change the course of history.

Greek historical method and its limitations Herodotus conceived of evidence and method
depended mainly on the testimony of eyewitnesses cross-questioning the eyewitnesses until he
had called up in the informants own mind an historical picture of those events far fuller and
more coherent than any he could have volunteered for himself. Lent the narratives a solidity and
consistency.
Limitations:
1) Shortness of historical perspective field is narrow, but secure.
2) Method precludes the historian from choosing his subject the subject chooses the
historian.
3) Various particular histories cannot be gathered up into one all-embracing history.

Herodotus and Thucydides Difference in style. The style of Herodotus is easy, spontaneous,
convincing. That of Thucydides is harsh, artificial, repellent. Herodotus is interested in the event,
Thucydides in the laws that govern the event. Thucydides writing is smothered by anti-historical
motives, and the substantialist ideas that governed Greek thought at that time.

The Hellenistic Period Expansion of the Grecian empire. Assimilation of barbarians.

Conquests of Alexander all led to the conception of a universal history. Yet world history goes
a long way back, nor can it be written on eyewitness testimony hence the conception of history
changed. It became necessary to construct a patchwork history whose materials were drawn
from authorities.

Polybius For Romans, history meant continuity: the inheritance from the past of institutions
scrupulously preserved in the form in which they were received; the moulding of life according
to ancestral custom. Preserved memorials. Polybius begins narrative where his authorities, in
his opinion, become trustworthy. Always critical and philosophical. History is a training ground
for political life. Also leads to victory over the inner self, and teaches us to bear tragedies with
fortitude. Idea of fortune as the canvas grows larger, mans control grows less his fate is the
master of him.

Livy and Tacitus Livys whole body of work is constructed by the scissor and paste method. An
entire history of Rome. Emphasised the literary quality of history. History has a moral purpose
to show contemporary Romans the nobility of ancient Rome. History is humanistic. Critical
approach repeats legends with caution.
Tacitus not critical, very biased. Professed purpose in writing history is to hold up signal
examples of political vice and virtue for posterity to execrate or to admire. Leads him to
distort history, make it a clash of characters, exaggeratedly good and exaggeratedly bad.
(Link). Guided by the Stoic and Epicurean philosophies, he looks at characters in abstraction and
in isolation from their environment.

Characteristics of Greco-Roman Historiography:

1) Humanism narrative of human history, history of mans deeds, mans purposes, mans
successes and failures. It admits a divine agency, but the function of this agency is strictly
limited. The cause of historical events is sought in the personality, whether individual or
corporate, of human agents. Human will can freely choose its own path. Weakness
imagined man as essentially a rational individual, wholly and directly responsible for
everything he did. Did not take into account that human characters change, and excludes
the role of change in history.
2) Substantialism: The substance is eternal, unchanging what is historical is only a
transitory event. Led to the distinction between act and agent. The historians business is
the act, which comes into being in time, develops in time through phases and terminates
 in time. The agent from which is flows, being a substance, is eternal and unchanging, and
consequently stands outside history. History cannot explain how any agent came into
being or underwent any change of nature.
E.g., Livy did not look at the foundation of Rome, and the coming into being of
institutions like the augury and the senate, but assumed that they had always existed.
Tacitus refused to acknowledge that human personality/character can change. If
Tiberius broke down beneath the strain of managing the empire, he represented the
process not as a change in the structure or conformation of a personality, but as the
revelation of features in it which had been hitherto hypocritically concealed.

Chapter 2 The Influence of Christianity

Christian ideas According to Christian doctrine, it is inevitable that man should act in the dark
without knowing what will come of his action. Human action is not designed in view of
preconceived ends by the intellect; it is actuated by immediate and blind desire. The
achievements of man are due not to his own proper forces of will and intellect, but to something
other than himself, causing him to desire ends that are worth pursuing. He therefore behaves,
from the point of view of the historian, that he were the wise architect of his own fortunes but
the wisdom is not his, it is the wisdom of God.
Doctrine of substantialism was also challenged. Nothing is eternal except God, everything else is
transitory. What God has created He can modify by reorientation of its nature towards fresh ends.
The human soul is still a substance, but a substance created by God, and depending upon Him for
its continued existence.
Effect on history
1) A new attitude towards history grew up, according to which the historical process is the
working out not of mans purposes, but of Gods; in one sense man is the agent, in
another sense God is the sole agent.
2) Not only the actions of historical agents, but their very nature was seen as a vehicle of
Gods process; hence historical change was no longer flowing over the surface of things
and living the substance unchanged, but involving the substance and thus entailing real
creation and real destruction.
3) Universalism all men equal in the sight of God therefore historical process is
everywhere, and a universal world history is needed.

Characteristics of Christian Historiography

1) Universal history going back to the creation of man, and then chronologically rise and
fall from civilisations no particular centre of gravity.
2) It will ascribe events not to the wisdom of their human agents but to the workings of
Providence preordaining their course.
3) It will set itself to detect an intelligible pattern in this general course of events, and in
particular it will attach a central importance in this pattern to the historical live of Christ.
The narrative will crystallise itself around that event. It will therefore divide history at the
birth of Christ into two parts the first a forward-looking character, consisting in blind
 preparation for an event not yet revealed; the second a backward looking character
depending on the fact that the revelation has now been made.
4) Having once divided, it will further divide so history will be series of epochs.

Medieval Historiography dependence on sources much like Livy. However, the focus was
Universalist. The task of medieval historiography was the task of discovering and expounding
the objective or divine plan of God. Medieval historiography also looked to the future through
revelation. Also, because of the belief that the plan was Gods, they tended to look for the
essence of history outside history by itself, by looking away from mans actions in order to detect
the plan of God; and consequently, the actual detail of human actions became relatively
unimportant. Hence medieval historiography is very weak in critical method.

Renaissance historians A return to the humanistic view of history. Accurate scholarship became
important, because human actions were no longer felt to be dwarfed into insignificance in
comparison with a divine plan. Man was no regarded as a creature of passion and impulse
history thus became the history of human passions, regarded as necessary manifestations of
human nature.

Descartes History could not claim truth for the events it described never happened exactly as it
described them. Historical escapism the historian is a traveller who by living away from home
becomes a stranger to his own age. Historical pyrrhonism historical narratives are not
trustworthy accounts of the past. Anti-utilitarian idea untrustworthy narratives cannot really
assist us to understand what is possible and thus to act effectively in the present. History as
fantasy building the way in which historians distort the past by making it more splendid than it
really was.

Cartesian historiography Systematic scepticism and thoroughgoing recognition of critical

principles. Rules of criticism
1) No authority must induce us to believe what we know cannot have happened.
2) The rule that different authorities must be confronted with each other and harmonised.
3) The rule that written authorities must be checked by the use of non-literary evidence.
In spite of all this, had severely anti-historical tendencies.

Anti-Cartesianism: Vico Truth tends to be subjective. The only way of knowing anything
truly, to understand it as opposed to merely perceiving it, is that the knower himself should have
made it. History is made by the human mind, and is especially adapted to be an object of
human knowledge. History is the history of the genesis and development of human societies
and their institutions. The plan of history is a wholly human plan, but it does not pre-exist in
the shape of an unrealised intention to its own gradual realisation. No distinction between the
idea of historical reality and reality itself. Rules of method:
 1) Certain periods of history have a general character, colouring every detail, which
reappear in other periods, so that two different periods might have the same general
character, and it is possible to argue analogically from one to the other. E.g., Homeric
period and the middle ages.
2) These similar periods tend to recur in the same order. Every heroic period is followed by
a classical period where thought prevails over imagination, prose over poetry, peace over
war etc. This is followed by a decline into new barbarism. Brute strength heroic
strength valiant justice brilliant originality constructive reflection wasteful
opulence.
3) Cylindrical movement not a mere rotation of history through a cycle of fixed phases not
a circle but a spiral, for history never repeats itself but comes around to each new phase
in a form differentiated by what has gone before.

Enumeration of certain prejudices against which the historian must be on his guard
1) Magnificent opinions concerning antiquity.
2) The conceit of nations.
3) The conceit of the learned.
4) The fallacy of sources the idea that when two nations have a similar idea or institution
one must have learnt it from the other.
5) Prejudice of thinking the ancients better informed than ourselves about the times that lay
nearer to them.

More rules on method:

1) Linguistic study can throw light on history. Stock of words indicates stock of ideas.
2) Mythology can throw light on history.
3) Tradition can throw light on history but not by taking it literally but as a confused
memory of facts distorted through a medium whose refractive index we can, to a certain
extent, define.

Anti-Cartesianism: Locke, Berkeley and Hume:

Lockeian philosophy:
1) The denial of innate ideas and the insistence that knowledge comes through experience.
2) The denial of any argument intended to bridge an alleged gulf between ideas and things,
the denial being grounded on the doctrine that knowledge is concerned no with a reality
distinct from our ideas but with the agreement and disagreement of our ideas themselves.
3) The denial of abstract ideas and the insistence that all ideas are concrete.
4) The conception of human knowledge as falling necessarily short of absolute truth and
certainty, but capable of attaining such certainty as our condition needs.

Hume Historical knowledge is a system of reasonable beliefs based on testimony. Moreover, no

other kind of knowledge is more than a system of reasonable beliefs. Hence, the claim of history
to a place on the map of knowledge is vindicated.
The Enlightenment endeavour to secularise every department of human life and thought. Main
motive not genuinely historical, but polemical and anti-historical. (Destruction of religion).
Interest only in the rational part of history.
Development of a backward looking history which exhibits the past as the play of irrational
forces Montesquieu and Gibbon. Montesquieu man is regarded as a part of nature, and the
explanation of historical events is sought in the facts of the natural world. Institutions are not the
free inventions of human reason in the course of its development, but as the necessary effects of
natural causes. Gibbon the motive force of history lies in human irrationality itself.
Narrative displays the triumph of barbarism and religion over the rational period of the
Antonines.
Therefore, the central point of history for the Enlightenment historians is the sunrise of the
modern scientific spirit. Before that, everything was superstition and darkness, error and
imposture. And of these things there can be no history, not only because they are unworthy of
historical study, but because there is in them no rational or necessary development.
No principle of causation.
Benefits argued for tolerance, wrote from the point of view of the subject, although they did
not find the causes, they at least searched for them. Deep down beneath the surface of their work
lay a conception of the historical process as a process developing neither by the will of
enlightened despots nor by the rigid plans of a transcendent God, but by a necessity of its own,
an immanent necessity in which unreason itself is only a disguised form of reason.

Science of human nature the eighteenth century historians made the mistake of viewing human
nature as something eternal and unchanging, and this led to problems.

Chapter 3 The Threshold of Scientific History

Romanticism Rousseaus concept of the general will could explain the history of all races and
all times as the history of human will, unlike the Enlightenment historians. Moreover, past ages
should be looked at sympathetically, and one should find in them the expression of genuine and
valuable human achievements.
On the other hand, history was also viewed as progress, a development of human reason or the
education of mankind.
Thus the scope of history was widened, and historians began to think of the entire history of man
as a single process of development from a beginning in savagery to an end in a perfectly rational
and civilised society.

Herder Saw human life closely related to its setting in the natural world. The general character
of the world is that of an organism so designed as to develop within itself higher organisms.
Teleological view of nature each stage in evolution is designed by nature to prepare for the
next. None is an end in itself but with man, the process reaches a culmination, because man is
an end in himself. Doctrine of races Europe the most favourable for men to grow and evolve.
Recognised that human nature is not uniform but diversified, and plays a great role in that
particular races history.
Kant Philosophy of history:
1) Universal history is a feasible ideal, but demands a union of historical and political
thought: the facts must be understood as well as narrated, seen from within and not only
from outside.
2) It presupposes a plan, i.e. it exhibits a progress, or shows something as coming
progressively into being.
3) That which is thus coming into existence is human rationality, i.e., intelligence, moral
freedom.
4) The means by which it is being brought into existence is human irrationality, i.e. passion,
ignorance, selfishness.

Schiller Enter sympathetically into the actions you describe, and feel them as
imaginatively as experiences of your own. Unlike Kant, he is based in the present and looks as
history as a means of explaining the present.

Fichte The fundamental task of the historian is to understand the period of history in which he
lives. Logical structure of history fundamental concepts of different ages form a sequence.
Every concept has three parts thesis, antithesis and synthesis. For Fichte, the primary concept
of history is rational freedom. Thesis uncontrolled freedom, antithesis ruler, synthesis
rational freedom, the governed govern themselves.

Schelling All that exists is knowable. Opposites are embodiments of the Absolute.

Hegel History distinct from merely the empirical. History not merely ascertains facts but also
understands by apprehending the reasons why the facts happened.
Idea of universal history. History as a form of progress.
Nature and history are different things. Nature is cyclical, while History takes place in the form
of spirals.
All history is the history of thought. Not knowing what people did as much as understanding
what they thought.
The force which is the mainspring of the historical process is reason everything that happens in
history happens by the will of man, for the historical process consists of human actions, and the
will of man is nothing by mans thought expressing itself outwardly in action. Every historical
character in every historical situation thinks and acts as rationally as that person in that situation
can think and act, and nobody can do more. The reality is that man is both rational and
passionate; his passion are those of a rational being, and his thoughts those of a passionate being.
Since all history is the history of thought and exhibits the self-development of reason, the
historical process is a logical process.
History consists of empirical events which are the outward expressions of thought, and thoughts
behind the events not the events themselves form a chain of logically connected concepts.
Hegel and Marx Marxs view of history has both the strength and the weakness of Hegels its
strength, in penetrating behind the facts to the logical nexus of underlying concepts; its
weakness, in selecting only one aspect of human life. For Hegel it was political, for Marx it
was economic. Economics is the single thread running through history everything has an
economic reason.
Patterns should be drawn out of the world of nature rather than thought.
Dialectical materialism.

Positivism Ascertaining facts and framing laws. The facts were immediately ascertained
through sensuous perceptions. The laws were framed by generalising from these facts through
induction.
Nineteenth century historiography accepted the first part of the positivist programme, and
declined the second. Facts, however, were still conceived in a positivistic manner: separate or
atomic. Two rules of method:
1) Each fact was to be regarded as a thing capable of being ascertained by a separate act of
cognition or process of research, and thus the total field of the historically knowable was
cut up into an infinity of minute facts each to be separately considered.
2) Each fact was to be thought of not only as independent of all the rest but as independent
of the knower, so that all the subjective elements in the historians point of view had to be
eliminated. The historian must pass no judgment on the facts: he must only say what they
were. (Carr and Jenkins critique).

Benefits trained historians to attend accurately to matters of detail and trained them to avoid
colouring their subject matter with their own emotional reactions.
Demerits The first led to the corollary that nothing was a legitimate problem for history unless
it was either a microscopic problem or else capable of being treated as a group of microscopic
problems. Hence, unprecedented mastery over small-scale problems coupled with unprecedented
weakness in dealing with large-scale problems.
The second was also crippling questions as Was this policy a wise one? Was this system
sound? prevented. It also prevented historians from sharing or criticising the judgments made
by people in the past about events or institutions contemporary with themselves.
History could only be the history of external events, not the history of the thought out of which
these events grew. Hence all history became political history.
Positivist fallacy based on the false analogy between scientific facts and historical facts
historical facts themselves dependent on interpretation according to a complicated system of
rules and interpretations. Positivists never inquired into the nature of these rules and
interpretations.