Online research in philosophy

A collection of papers dealing with history as a way of knowing, not a mode of discourse.

Present-day interest in history among philosophers seems largely limited to a debate over the nature of historical explanation among those who for Humean reasons insist that all explanations must rest upon general laws and history cannot be an exception to this, and those who say the historians do explain and since they do not use general laws the Humean claim is obviously mistaken. Like the latter, the present paper takes the explanations of historians seriously, but unlike the latter it is (...) not willing to limit the role of philosophy of history merely to the elucidation of the language in which historians give final expression of their work. Rather it recognizes that those explanations themselves set the stage for further inquiry in that they are required to be justified. It is here that the theories or general laws demanded by Humean analysis come in. After examining examples of general laws offered by way of example of what the "Humean" philosophers are supposed to have in mind, each of which is an immediate generalization of the explanation it is called upon to explain and is, hence, an instance of what has been called "the dogma of universality," some examples of more promising prospects of theory in history are examined. (shrink)

The first part of the paper distinguishes between a real past which has nothing to do with historical events and an historical past made up of hypothetical events introduced for the purpose of explaining historical evidence. Attention is next paid to those so-called ancillary historical disciplines which study historical evidence, and it is noted that the historical event is brought in to explain the particular constellation of different kinds of historical evidence which are judged to belong together. The problem of (...) explaining events is then taken up, and an attempt is made to defend the view that such explanation must presuppose general laws. And this is followed by a discussion, partly speculative, of social-historical laws. The final section of the paper tries to argue that the subjective intentions of individuals are irrelevant to historical explanation. (shrink)

Though many would prefer to have nothing to do with teleological explanations, it is evident that the writings of biologists and social scientists abound with them, and it is worth paying attention to the conditions under which they may be made responsibly. It emerges that responsible teleological statements would have to be made about instances of recurrent structures having specifiable characteristics, a situation which is patently the case for biology but still unsettled in, say, anthropology. In the final part of (...) the paper it is shown that satisfying this condition provides a basis for formulating general laws of the more orthodox kind. (shrink)