Concept
Herbert Butterfield
Overview
Sir Herbert Butterfield (7 October 1900 – 20 July 1979) was an English historian and philosopher of history, who was Regius Professor of Modern History and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is remembered chiefly for a short volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and for his Origins of Modern Science (1949). Butterfield turned increasingly to historiography and man's developing view of the past. Butterfield was a devout Christian and reflected at length on Christian influences in historical perspectives.
Butterfield thought that individual personalities were more important than great systems of government or economics in historical study. His Christian beliefs in personal sin, salvation and providence were a great influence in his writings, a fact he freely admitted. At the same time, Butterfield's early works emphasised the limits of a historian's conclusions, including moral conclusions.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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One is tempted to choose Plato. For in spite of the mystic and transcendental coloring of his thought, it was he who defined philosophy as the science of the State, or the most complete and organized whole known to man; it is no accident that his chief work is termed the "Republic." In modern times, we are struck by the fact that English philosophy from Bacon to John Stuart Mill has been cultivated by men of affairs…
John Dewey, German philosophy and politics
States what Herbert Butterfield is.
In breaking away from antique and medieval thought, accordingly, early modern thought continued the older tradition of a Reason that creates and constitutes the world, but combined it with the notion that this Reason operates through the human mind, individual or collective. This is the common note of idealism sounded by all the philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whether belonging to the…
John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy
Close in meaning to Herbert Butterfield; the term itself is not named.
Much has been said and written for centuries past, by the practical or empirical school of politicians, in condemnation of theories founded on principles of human nature, without an historical basis; and the theorists, in their turn, have successfully retaliated on the practicalists. But we know not any thinker who, before M. Comte, had penetrated to the philosophy of the matter, and placed the necessity of…
John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
Close in meaning to Herbert Butterfield; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Herbert Butterfield
Related ideas
- History
- Historiography
- Philosophy
- History of science
- Philosophy of history
- Methodism
- Sir
- Renaissance
- Thomas Kuhn
- University of Cambridge
- Scientific Revolution
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
- Cold War
- Gifford Lectures
- University of Glasgow
- Intellectual history
- Christianity
- Charles Dickens
- Princeton, New Jersey
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of history.