The Philosophy of History

The Leakey Foundation | Five Fun Facts About Gibbons

What can or should philosophers say about history as a field of study?

History in the first instance is as I understand the term simply the human past, especially in the millennia subsequent to the invention of writing. But history in the second instance is the name we give to the systematic study of that vast subject. And the "philosophy of history" encompasses both of those, it is analogous both to the philosophy of nature AND to the philosophy of science.

There are three major questions that the philosophy of history asks. The first two concern each half of the distinction I just made: the third cuts across that distinction. Here they are:

what are the key units we should invoke in studying or discussing this past: individual lives and actions? social classes? ethnic/racial identities? civilizations? sovereigns? faiths and churches? something else? [If “all of the above,” or some combination of the above, we still may have to rank them in centrality.]
does history (the human past) as a whole have meaning and direction? If so, can we determine and describe that rationally or might we have to take it on faith that it is there somewhere, even if it looks like a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
What is implied, in terms of broader epistemological and even metaphysical commitments, when we claim to have knowledge of a historic fact?

FTR, my own answers are these:

Individuals, and concomitant to that families and the passing of generations
Yes, it probably has direction, and we can get a rough sense of that by reason, although in this we have to take much on faith
there ARE many commitments involved in taking history seriously — we should willingly adopt all that baggage.

The image above, by the way, is a gibbon, I went looking for an illustration of Gibbon, a philosophically inclined historian, and ended up with a lot of pics of gibbons.

There might be some karmic point there.

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