THE THORN OF HISTORY: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES AND SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-214
Author(s):  
FRANK ANKERSMIT
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Speculative Philosophy

Between Philosophy and History. The Resurrection of Speculative Philosophy of History within the Analytic Tradition.

1971 ◽  
Vol 21 (84) ◽  
pp. 278
Author(s):  
Robert Stover ◽  
Haskell Fain
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
Analytic Tradition

Hegel and the speculative philosophy of history

Kleio ◽  
1972 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
E.H. Wainwright
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Speculative Philosophy

scholarly journals Peter Munz and Historical Thought

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 378-394
Author(s):  
Frank Ankersmit
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Interpretation ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scientific Laws ◽  
Covering Law ◽  
Historical Thought

Abstract Few philosophers of history ever recognized the profundity of Peter Munz’s The Shapes of Time that came out in 1977. In this book Munz upheld the view that no part or aspect of the past itself provides us with the solid fundament of all historical knowledge. For him, the historian’s most fundamental logical entity is what he calls the Sinngebild. The Sinngebild consists of two events defined and held together by a covering law. These CL’s can be anything from simple truisms, the regularities we know from daily life to truly scientific laws. But ‘underneath’ these Sinngebilde there is nothing. Hence, Munz’s bold assertation: ‘the truth of the matter is that there is no ascertainable face behind the various masks every story-teller is creating’ and his claim that his philosophy of history is ‘an idealism writ small’. Next, Munz distinguishes between ‘explanation’ and ‘interpretation’. We ‘explain’ the past by taking seriously the historical agent’s self-description and ‘interpret’ it by stating what it looks like from our present perspective. ‘Explanation’ and ‘interpretation’ may ‘typologically’ be more or less similar. Relying on a number of very well-chosen examples from his own field (Munz was a medievalist), this enables Munz to argue why one historical interpretation may be superior to another. In his later life Munz developed a speculative philosophy of history inspired by Popper’s fallibilism.

The Idea of Philosophical History

Dialogue ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Peter Loptson
Keyword(s):  
World History ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Philosophy ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Auguste Comte ◽  
The One

In W. H. Walsh's widely read book, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1951) there is set out a distinction which became virtually classic, or canonical, between two kinds of philosophy of history. On the one hand, there is critical philosophy of history, which investigates, in what is supposed to be a more or less neutral and objective way, the actual practices of historians, with a view to determining their methods, the character of their cognitive and explanatory claims, resemblances to other kinds of inquiry, differences, and other matters of allied type. Critical philosophers of history are supposed to have a relation to their subject at least similar to that of philosophers of science to theirs. Walsh approved of critical philosophy of history, and pointed to directions of its future progress. On the other hand, there is speculative philosophy of history, which seeks to give philosophie content and structure to the actual course of history, typically, world history. This was the sort of thing engaged in by people like Hegel, and Auguste Comte, and Spengler and Toynbee; Walsh did not approve of it at all. Walsh's distinction, and similar if different perspectives on it, appear among other places in William Dray's Philosophy of History and in articles on philosophy of history in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Toynbee, Arnold Joseph (1889–1975)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
U.P. Burke
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Speculative Philosophy

Arnold Toynbee’s controversial reputation rests on the multi-volume A Study of History that he published between 1934 and 1961. Rejected by some scholars as overly schematic, this wide-ranging work has been welcomed by others for its attempt to make Western historians (indeed, Westerners in general), less parochial and to inject a larger dose of empiricism into the speculative philosophy of history.

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