the philosophical study of human history and of attempts to record and interpret it. ‘History’ in English (and its equivalent in most modern European languages) has two primary senses: (1) the temporal progression of large-scale human events and actions, primarily but not exclusively in the past; and (2) the discipline or inquiry in which knowledge of the human past is acquired or sought. This has led to two senses of ‘philosophy of history’, depending on which ‘history’ has been the object of philosophers’ attentions. Philosophy of history in the first sense is often called substantive (or speculative), and placed under metaphysics. Philosophy of history in the second sense is called critical (or analytic) and can be placed in epistemology. Substantive philosophy of history. In the West, substantive philosophy of history is thought to begin only in the Christian era. In the City of God, Augustine wonders why Rome flourished while pagan, yet fell into disgrace after its conversion to Christiantity. Divine reward and punishment should apply to whole peoples, not just to individuals. The unfolding of events in history should exhibit a plan that is intelligible rationally, morally, and (for Augustine) theologically. As a believer Augustine is convinced that there is such a plan, though it may not always be evident. In the modern period, philosophers such as Vico and Herder also sought such intelligibility in history. They also believed in a long-term direction or purpose of history that is often opposed to and makes use of the purposes of individuals. The most elaborate and best-known example of this approach is found in Hegel, who thought that the gradual realization of human freedom could be discerned in history even if much slavery, tyranny, and suffering are necessary in the process. Marx, too, claimed to know the laws – in his case economic – according to which history unfolds. Similar searches for overall ‘meaning’ in human history have been undertaken in the twentieth century, notably by Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), author of the twelve-volume Study of History, and Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), author of Decline of the West. But the whole enterprise was denounced by the positivists and neo-Kantians of the late nineteenth century as irresponsible metaphysical speculation. This attitude was shared by twentieth-century neopositivists and some of their heirs in the analytic tradition. There is some irony in this, since positivism, explicitly in thinkers like Comte and implicitly in others, involves belief in progressively enlightened stages of human history crowned by the modern age of science.
Critical philosophy of history. The critical philosophy of history, i.e., the epistemology of historical knowledge, can be traced to the late nineteenth century and has been dominated by the paradigm of the natural sciences. Those in the positivist, neopositivist, and postpositivist tradition, in keeping with the idea of the unity of science, believe that to know the historical past is to explain events causally, and all causal explanation is ultimately of the same sort. To explain human events is to derive them from laws, which may be social, psychological, and perhaps ultimately biological and physical. Against this reductionism, the neo-Kantians and Dilthey argued that history, like other humanistic disciplines (Geisteswissenschaften), follows irreducible rules of its own. It is concerned with particular events or developments for their own sake, not as instances of general laws, and its aim is to understand, rather than explain, human actions. This debate was resurrected in the twentieth century in the English-speaking world. Philosophers like Hempel and Morton White (b.1917) elaborated on the notion of causal explanation in history, while Collingwood and William Dray (b.1921) described the ‘understanding’ of historical agents as grasping the thought behind an action or discovering its reasons rather than its causes. The comparison with natural science, and the debate between reductionists and antireductionists, dominated other questions as well: Can or should history be objective and valuefree, as science purportedly is? What is the significance of the fact that historians can never perceive the events that interest them, since they are in the past? Are they not limited by their point of view, their place in history, in a way scientists are not? Some positivists were inclined to exclude history from science, rather than make it into one, relegating it to ‘literature’ because it could never meet the standards of objectivity and genuine explanation; it was often the anti-positivists who defended the cognitive legitimacy of our knowledge of the past. In the non-reductionist tradition, philosophers have increasingly stressed the narrative character of history: to understand human actions generally, and past actions in particular, is to tell a coherent story about them. History, according to W. B. Gallie (b.1912), is a species of the genus Story. History does not thereby become fiction: narrative remains a ‘cognitive instrument’ (Louis Mink, 1921–83) just as appropriate to its domain as theory construction is to science. Nevertheless, concepts previously associated with fictional narratives, such as plot structure and beginning-middle-end, are seen as applying to historical narratives as well. This tradition is carried further by Hayden White (b.1928), who analyzes classical nineteenth-century histories (and even substantive philosophies of history such as Hegel’s) as instances of romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. In White’s work this mode of analysis leads him to some skepticism about history’s capacity to ‘represent’ the reality of the past: narratives seem to be imposed upon the data, often for ideological reasons, rather than drawn from them. To some extent White’s view joins that of some positivists who believe that history’s literary character excludes it from the realm of science. But for White this is hardly a defect. Some philosophers have criticized the emphasis on narrative in discussions of history, since it neglects search and discovery, deciphering and evaluating sources, etc., which is more important to historians than the way they ‘write up’ their results. Furthermore, not all history is presented in narrative form. The debate between pro- and anti-narrativists among philosophers of history has its parallel in a similar debate among historians themselves. Academic history in recent times has seen a strong turn away from traditional political history toward social, cultural, and economic analyses of the human past. Narrative is associated with the supposedly outmoded focus on the doings of kings, popes, and generals. These are considered (e.g. by the French historian Fernand Braudel, 1902–85) merely surface ripples compared to the deeper-lying and slower-moving currents of social and economic change. It is the methods and concepts of the social sciences, not the art of the storyteller, on which the historian must draw. This debate has now lost some of its steam and narrative history has made something of a comeback among historians. Among philosophers Paul Ricoeur has tried to show that even ostensibly non-narrative history retains narrative features.
Historicity. Historicity (or historicality: Geschichtlichkeit) is a term used in the phenomenological and hermeneutic tradition (from Dilthey and Husserl through Heidegger and Gadamer) to indicate an essential feature of human existence. Persons are not merely in history; their past, including their social past, figures in their conception of themselves and their future possibilities. Some awareness of the past is thus constitutive of the self, prior to being formed into a cognitive discipine.
Modernism and the postmodern. It is possible to view some of the debates over the modern and postmodern in recent Continental philosophy as a new kind of philosophy of history. Philosophers like Lyotard and Foucault see the modern as the period from the Enlightenment and Romanticism to the present, characterized chiefly by belief in ‘grand narratives’ of historical progress, whether capitalist, Marxist, or positivist, with ‘man’ as the triumphant hero of the story. Such belief is now being (or should be) abandoned, bringing modernism to an end. In one sense this is like earlier attacks on the substantive philosophy of history, since it unmasks as unjustified moralizing certain beliefs about large-scale patterns in history. It goes even further than the earlier attack, since it finds these beliefs at work even where they are not explicitly expressed. In another sense this is a continuation of the substantive philosophy of history, since it makes its own grand claims about largescale historical patterns. In this it joins hands with other philosophers of our day in a general historicization of knowledge (e.g., the philosophy of science merges with the history of science) and even of philosophy itself. Thus the later Heidegger – and more recently Richard Rorty – view philosophy itself as a large-scale episode in Western history that is nearing or has reached its end. Philosophy thus merges with the history of philosophy, but only thanks to a philosophical reflection on this history as part of history as a whole.
See also EXPLANATION, HEGEL, HISTORI- CISM , PHILOSOPHY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES , VERSTEHE. D.C. philosophy of language, the philosophical study of natural language and its workings, particularly of linguistic meaning and the use of language. A natural language is any one of the thousands of various tongues that have developed historically among populations of human beings and have been used for everyday purposes – including English, Italian, Swahili, and Latin – as opposed to the formal and other artificial ‘languages’ invented by mathematicians, logicians, and computer scientists, such as arithmetic, the predicate calculus, and LISP or COBOL. There are intermediate cases, e.g., Esperanto, Pig Latin, and the sort of ‘philosophese’ that mixes English words with logical symbols. Contemporary philosophy of language centers on the theory of meaning, but also