Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Categories of Historical Thought

  • Published:
Philosophia Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper argues that the identity of history as a discipline derives from its distinctive combination of intellectual assumptions, or categories. Many of these categories are shared with other fields of thought, including science, literature, and common sense, but in history are understood in a unique way. This paper first examines the general notion of categories of historical understanding, then scrutinises some of the specific categories suggested by classic authors on the philosophy of history such as Dilthey and Collingwood. More recent works by Goldstein, Oakeshott, Bevir, and Tucker are treated as contributions to the same discussion. It concludes that the various categories these writers have proposed are neither trivial nor incompatible and that when collated they do indeed compose a framework capable of characterising historical thought.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Passmore argues history is ‘neither literature nor science, but [shares] some of the properties of both’: see Passmore, J. (1974). The Objectivity of History. (In P. Gardiner (Ed.) The Philosophy of History (p. 160) Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ankersmit claims philosophy of history should retain ‘what is right in both the scientistic and the literary approaches to history and [avoid] what is hyperbolic in both’: see Ankersmit, F.R. (2001). Six Theses on Narrativist Philosophy of History. (In G. Roberts (Ed.) The History and Narrative Reader (p. 237) (London: Routledge).

  2. Hempel, C. (1942). The Function of General Laws in History. Journal of Philosophy, 39, 35–48; White, H. (1973), Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press); Kellner, H. (1989), Language and Historical Representation Getting the Story Crooked (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).

  3. Walsh, W.H. (1974). Colligatory Concepts in History. (In Gardiner, op. cit., p. 132) refers to a ‘category of historical thought’; Berlin, I. (1974). Historical Inevitability. (In Gardiner, p. 163) to teleology as a ‘category or a framework in terms of which everything is…conceived’ in history; Nagel, E. (1974) Determinism in History (In Gardiner, p. 193) and (1959). The Logic of Historical Analysis. (In H. Meyerhoff (Ed.) The Philosophy of History in Our Time (pp. 203–16) (New York: Doubleday) refers to ‘the conceptual and logical articulation’ of history and to a ‘general regulative principle’ of history; Nowell-Smith, P.H. (1977). The Constructionist Theory of History. History and Theory, 16 (1977), Beiheft 16, The Constitution of the Historical Past, 2, to the ‘logic’ of history; and Bevir, M. (2002). The Logic of the History of Ideas (p. 9) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) to the ‘forms’ and the ‘grammar’ of history.

  4. Aristotle, Categories, Bk. I Ch. 4, proposed ten categories ‘that are in no way composite’, conventionally translated into English as substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and affection. There is some dispute over whether ‘where’ and ‘when’ would not be better translations for ‘place’ and ‘time’: see Lang, H. (2004). ‘Aristotle’s Categories “Where” and “When” (In M. Gorman and J. Sanford (Eds.) Categories Historical and Systematic Essays (pp. 21–32) Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press).

  5. Kant, I. Critique of Pure Reason, B, §§ 40, 46, 106, proposed space and time as well as four groups of three categories [categories (1) of quantity: unity, plurality, totality; (2) of quality; reality, negation, limitation; (3) of relation: inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, community; (4) of modality: possibility–impossibility; existence–non-exsistence, necessity–contingency). For a recent discussion of the historical relationship between the Kantian and Aristotelian categories see Longueness, B. (2006). ‘Kant on a priori concepts: The metaphysical deduction of the categories’. In P. Guyer (Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Kant and modern philosophy (pp. 129–68). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  6. Guy Oakes has introduced the work of these neo-Kantians to the Anglophone world via a number of important translations: see for example Simmel, G. (1977). The Problems of the Philosophy of History An Epistemological Essay (New York: The Free Press); Windelband, W. (1894). Rectorial Address, Strasbourg, 1894, History and Theory, 19 (1980), 169–85; Rickert, H. (1986). The limits of concept formation in natural science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  7. Windelband (1894) (p. 175).

  8. Windelband (1894) (p. 182); Rickert, H. (1986) (pp. 99–106); Simmel, G. (1977) (pp. 155–60).

  9. Windelband (1894) (p. 182).

  10. Quinn, T. (2004). ‘Kant: The Practical Categories’ In Gorman and Sanford, Categories (p. 83).

  11. Quine, W.V. (1951). Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Philosophical Review, 60, 20–43; Carnap. R. (1950). Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 4, 20–40.

  12. Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, Truth, and History (pp. 49–50). Cambridge: CUP, is quoted in Lorenz, C. (1998). Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality: A Plea for “Internal Realism” In B. Fay, P. Pomper, and R.T. Vann (Eds.), History and theory contemporary readings (pp. 342–76). Oxford: Blackwell at p. 343 n. 6 as part of an attempt to explain how the fundamental historical disagreements of the so-called German Historikerstreit of the late 1980s were possible.

  13. Gorman, J.L. (1998). Objectivity and Truth in History (In Fay, Pomper, and Vann, History and Theory (pp. 320–41) Oxford: Blackwell, 1998; Bevir, M. (2002).

  14. Rickman, H.P. (ed.) (1962). Meaning in History: W. Dilthey's Thoughts on History and Society (London: George Allen and Unwin).

  15. Collingwood, R.G. C. (1989). The idea of history. Oxford: OUP.

  16. Oakeshott, M. (1983) On history. Oxford: Blackwell; Passmore, J. (1987). ‘Narratives and Events’, History and Theory, 26, Beiheft 26, 68–74.

  17. The titles of works by J. Burckhardt, C.V. Wedgwood, and E.P. Thompson respectively.

  18. Ogden, C.K., and Richards, I.A. (2001). The meaning of meaning a study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism. In J. Constable (Ed.) (p. 30). London: Routledge.

  19. Tucker, A. (2004). Our knowledge of the past (p. 255). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; the reference is to Dummett, M. (1978). Truth and Other Enigmas (pp. 358–74). Boston: Harvard University Press.

  20. Collingwood (1989). (p. 282).

  21. Danto, A.C. (1965). Analytical philosophy of history (p. 61). Cambridge: CUP. Danto acknowledges, of course, that narrative sentences are not exclusive to historical works, and this means that they cannot, simply as such, be among the categories that define the framework of historical thought; presumably only those narrative sentences expressing an understanding of the past in terms of its own past are eligible.

  22. ‘The historian's business...is to create and construct’: Oakeshott, M. (1989). Experience and its Modes (p. 93). Cambridge: CUP.

  23. Dummett, M. (2004). Truth and the Past (p. 92). New York: Columbia University Press.

  24. Southern, R.W. (1993). The Making of the Middle Ages (p. 215). London: Pimlico.

  25. Dilthey, W. (1989). Introduction to the Human Sciences. In R.A. Makkreel and F. Rodi (Eds.) (pp. 448–50). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  26. Gombrich, E. (1995). The Story of Art (p. 418). London: Phaidon Press.

  27. Dilthey, W. (1996). Hermeneutics and the study of history. In R. A. Makkreel & F. Rodi (Eds.) (p. 236). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  28. Collingwood (1989) (p. 288).

  29. Tucker, A. (2004) (pp. 259–60).

  30. Ogden, C. K., and Richards, I. A. (2001), mention context and interpretation at pp. 73, 75, 78; they describe Kant as ‘constantly on the verge of approaching the central issues of interpretation’ at p. 94.

  31. Collingwood, R.G.C. (1967). An autobiography (pp. 29–43). Oxford: OUP.

  32. Skinner, Q. (1969). Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas. History and Theory 8, 3–53; (1970) Conventions and the understanding of speech acts. Philosophical Quarterly, 20, 118–38; (1971) Performing and explaining linguistic actions. Philosophical Quarterly 21, 1–21.

  33. Contextualism as a method must be distinguished from context as a category of historical thought. It is one thing to insist, when considering best practice, that historians must proceed by seeking out the context of their evidence; but the claim that there can be no history without the category of context being presupposed is another, and logically prior, claim.

  34. Goldstein, L. (1980). Against historical realism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 40, 426–9.

  35. See, for example, Oakeshott, (1983) (p. 57).

  36. Pompa, L. (1990). Human nature and historical knowledge Hume, Hegel and Vico (pp. 7, 223). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  37. Tucker (2004) (pp. 46–91).

  38. Oakeshott (1983) (pp. 53–62).

  39. Oakeshott (1983) (p. 94).

  40. Hempel, The Function of General Laws in History.

  41. For the probabilistic version of the covering law theory see Hempel, C. (1963). Reasons and covering laws in historical explanation. In S. Hook (Ed.) Philosophy and history: A symposium (pp. 146–63).

  42. Johnson, A. (1926). The Historian and Historical Evidence (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons), gives the example of Giesebrecht at p. 17. It was picked up in Goldstein (1962), ‘Evidence and events in history’, Philosophy of Science, 29, 175–94, at 181, and resurfaces in Tucker (2004) (p. 134).

  43. Tucker (2004) (pp. 92–140).

  44. For the gradual emergence of the critical sense of the past and of modern historiography see Grafton, A. (1997). The footnote a curious history. London: Faber and Faber and Kelley, D. (2003). Fortunes of history historical inquiry from Herder to Huizinga. New Haven: Yale University Press.

  45. See Koselleck, R. (2002). The Practice of Conceptual History (pp. 154–69) (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

  46. See White, H. (2001). The Historical Text as Literary Artefact. (pp. 221–36) In G. Roberts (ed.) 2001, and Kellner (1989) (pp. 244–245).

  47. See Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, IV. 104–108.

  48. See Von Leyden, W. (1984). Categories of historical understanding. History and Theory, 23, 53–77.

  49. Davidson, D. (1969). True to the facts. Journal of Philosophy, 66, 748–64. Davidson goes on: ‘To view [truth] thus is not to turn away from language to speechless eternal entities like propositions, statements, and assertions, but to relate language with the occasions of truth in a way that invites the construction of a theory’ (p. 754).

  50. Bevir (1999) (p. 311).

  51. For a recent detailed analysis of the causes of historical disagreement see Tucker, A. (2004), pp. 141–84.

  52. McTaggart, J.M.E. (1995). The unreality of time. In R.L. Poidevin and M. MacBeath (Eds.), The philosophy of time (p. 25). Oxford: OUP. McTaggart was of course arguing that nothing does really change because time is unreal, but we are talking now of a logical change in the properties of the world of historical ideas.

  53. For a history of the concept of fact itself see Poovey, M. (1998). A history of the modern fact problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society. London: University of Chicago Press.

  54. Dummett, M. (1959). Truth. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 59, 141–62, at p. 162.

  55. Von Leyden (1984), 54.

  56. St Augustine, Confessions, XI. 20.

  57. J. S. Mill and Butterfield quoted in Von Leyden (1984), 58, 65.

  58. Nietzsche, F. (1991). Untimely meditations (pp. 57–123). Cambridge: CUP.

  59. Heidegger, M. (1992). Being and time (pp. 444–49). Oxford: Blackwell. C Kellner, H. (1998). “Never Again” is Now. In Fay, Pomper, and Vann, History and Theory (pp. 225–44). Oxford: Blackwell, and Kellner, H. (1995). Introduction: Describing redescriptions. In H. Kellner and F. Ankersmit (Eds.), A new philosophy of history (pp. 1–18). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lukacs, J. (2002). At the end of an age. New Haven: Yale University Press, and Sartwell, C. (2000). End of story toward an annihilation of language and history. New York: State University of New York Press are other recent examples of systematic confusion between history as a process and as a form of thought.

  60. Passmore (1974). (pp. 145–60).

  61. Oakeshott, M. (1975). On human conduct (pp. 101–7). Oxford: Clarendon. See also Nardin, T. (2001). The philosophy of Michael Oakeshott (pp. 162–6). Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press.

  62. Marshall, D. (1982). Ideas and history: The case of “Imagination”, Boundary, 2, 343–59.

  63. Collingwood (1989). (p. 241).

  64. Casey, J. (1984). Emotion and imagination, Philosophical Quarterly, 34, 1–14.

  65. Moran, R. (1994). The expression of feeling in imagination. The Philosophical Review, 103, 75–106, at 106.

  66. Makkreel, R. (1984). Imagination and temporality in Kant’s theory of the sublime, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 42, 303–15, at 304.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Kent Ridge, Singapore

    Luke O’Sullivan

Authors
  1. Luke O’Sullivan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Luke O’Sullivan.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

O’Sullivan, L. Categories of Historical Thought. Philosophia 36, 429–452 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9120-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-008-9120-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation