Abstract

This essay is written as an introductory essay to celebrate the third edition of Arthur Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History, first printed in 1965. It raises questions about what it means to write an introduction given Danto’s own philosophical theses on history. What does it mean to write before a book but after the fact? The essay also pays special attention to the connections between Danto’s philosophy of history, philosophy of art, and the other areas of his philosophy that he regards to be all of a piece. It considers the nature of analytical philosophy and its heyday in America in the postwar period, when, to some degree, it was used as an antidote to a ideology of history that had proved itself to be no more than an extreme perversion of some of the most influential claims in a philosophy of history developed in Germany around 1800