Method
Historical method
Overview
Historical method is the collection of techniques and guidelines that historians use to research and write histories of the past. Secondary sources, primary sources and material evidence such as that derived from archaeology may all be drawn on. The historian's skill lies in identifying these sources, evaluating their relative authority, and combining their testimony appropriately in order to construct an accurate and reliable picture of past events and environments.
In the philosophy of history, the question of the nature, and the possibility, of a sound historical method is raised within the sub-field of epistemology. The study of historical method and of different ways of writing history is known as historiography.
Though historians agree in very general and basic principles, in practice "specific canons of historical proof are neither widely observed nor generally agreed upon" among professional historians. Some scholars of history have observed that there are no particular standards for historical fields such as religion, art, science, democracy, and social justice as these are by their nature 'essentially contested' fields, such that they require diverse tools particular to each field beforehand in order to interpret topics from those fields.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Yet his ideas were speculative in spirit; whereas the system of Wolf, who carried the method out to the height of pedantry, was even in subject-matter a metaphysic of the understanding. The abuses which these methods with their formalism once led to in philosophy and science have in modern times been followed by the abuses of what is called 'Construction.' Kant brought into vogue the phrase that mathematics…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Historical method is; the author is tied to Historical method in the knowledge graph.
The most universal of the forms in which this difference of method is accustomed to present itself, is the ancient feud between what is called theory, and what is called practice or experience. There are, on social and political questions, two kinds of reasoners: there is one portion who term themselves practical men, and call the others theorists; a title which the latter do not reject, though they by no…
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
States what Historical method is.
What is actually done is rather to make the contrary presupposition. Histories with such an object as religion or philosophy are understood to have only subjective aims for their theme, i.e. only opinions and mere ideas, not an essential and realised object like the truth. And that with the mere excuse that there is no truth.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
States what Historical method is; the author is tied to Historical method in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Historical method
Related ideas
- Muqaddimah
- History
- Feminism
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Historiography
- Herodotus
- Historian
- Philosophy
- Western philosophy
- Hugh Trevor-Roper
- Marxists Internet Archive
- Herbert Butterfield
- Karl Marx
- Philosophy of history
- Shiji
- Law
- Archaeology
- East Asia
- Ibn Khaldun
- Augustine of Hippo
- Evidence
- Hypothesis
- Superstition
- Nazi Germany
Place in the tradition
Part of Philosophy of history.