Concept

Philosophy of history

Overview

Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and its discipline. The term was coined by the French philosopher Voltaire.

In contemporary philosophy a distinction has developed between the speculative philosophy of history and the critical philosophy of history, now referred to as analytic. The split between these approaches may be approximately compared, by analogy and on the strength of regional and academic influences, to the schism in commitments between analytic and continental philosophy wherein the analytic approach is pragmatic and the speculative approach attends more closely to a metaphysics (or anti-metaphysics) of determining forces like language or the phenomenology of perception at the level of background assumptions.

At the level of practice, the analytic approach questions the meaning and purpose of the historical process whereas the speculative approach studies the foundations and implications of history and the historical method. The names of these are derived from C. D. Broad's distinction between critical philosophy and speculative philosophy.

The divergence between these approaches crystallizes in the disagreements between Hume and Kant on the question of causality. Hume and Kant may be viewed in retrospect—by expressive anachronism—as analytic and speculative, respectively. Historians like Foucault or Hannah Arendt, who tend to be spoken of as theorists or philosophers before they are acknowledged as historians, may largely be identified with the speculative approach whereas generic academic history tends to be cleave to analytic and narrative approaches.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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But neither this account nor the bare outline which our final chapter gives of the beginnings of the development to humanity must pretend to be a substitute for, or in any way to represent, a philosophy of history. The difference between an investigation such as ours and a philosophy of history is precisely the same as that which distinguishes a psychological description of mental life in general from a…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Philosophy of history is; names Philosophy of history several times.
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History is the recital of facts given as true, in contradistinction to the fable, which is the recital of facts given as false. There is the history of opinions which is hardly anything but a collection of human errors. The history of the arts can be the most useful of all when it joins to the knowledge of the invention and the progress of the arts the description of their mechanism. Natural history, improperly…
Voltaire, Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary
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But the notion is the truth of necessity, which it contains in suspension in itself; just as, conversely, necessity is the notion implicit. Necessity is blind only so long as it is not understood. There is nothing therefore more mistaken than the charge of blind fatalism made against the Philosophy of History, when it takes for its problem to understand the necessity of every event. The philosophy of history rightly…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
The author is tied to Philosophy of history in the knowledge graph; names Philosophy of history twice.
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