Eight prominent historians and social scientists give their perspectives on the fate of Marxist approaches to history and the direction of the discipline in coming decades. The volume offers rigorous and approachable analysis from several political and intellectual positions and will be an important contribution to current historical debates.

The twelve essays in this book demonstrate the importance of bringing history back into historical materialism.

This magisterial analysis of human history combines the insights of earlier generations of Marxist historians with radical new ideas about the historical process. Reading history against the grain, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past was not predetermined. Choices were frequent and numerous. Different outcomes - liberation or barbarism - were often possible. Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives great events. At (...) the beginning of the 21st century - with economic disaster, war, climate catastrophe and deep class divisions - humans face perhaps the greatest crisis in the long history of our species. The lesson of A Marxist History of the World is that, since we created our past, we can also create a better future. (shrink)

Offers a historical study of the world that contends that history is continually created and recreated by conscious, collective human action. Faulkner argues that the struggles of the common people--slaves, serfs, handloom weavers, mine workers, women fighting oppression, black people fighting racism, colonized people fighting imperialism--these struggles, occasionally fusing into mass revolutionary upsurges, drive the historical process. He states that this is an approach to history that emphasizes agency, contingency, and the existence of alternatives; an approach that rejects (...) the view that war and empire are inevitable, that there is no alternative to the market, and that greed, bullying, and violence are universal. In other words, Faulkner contends that the course of history is not predetermined, its outcome is not inevitable; it can go in different directions according to what human beings do. (shrink)

The first of the new Theory and History series, Matt Perry's punchy andaccessible volume examines Marxism's enormous impact on the way historians approach their subject. Perry offers both a concise introduction to the Marxist view of history and Marxism historical writing, and a guide to its relevance to students' own work.

This magisterial analysis of human history combines the insights of earlier generations of Marxist historians with radical new ideas about the historical process. Reading history against the grain, Neil Faulkner reveals that what happened in the past was not predetermined. Choices were frequent and numerous. Different outcomes - liberation or barbarism - were often possible. Rejecting the top-down approach of conventional history, Faulkner contends that it is the mass action of ordinary people that drives great events. At (...) the beginning of the 21st century - with economic disaster, war, climate catastrophe and deep class divisions - humans face perhaps the greatest crisis in the long history of our species. The lesson of A Marxist History of the World is that, since we created our past, we can also create a better future. (shrink)

A Hard-Hitting Critique... Brings Together Fine Essays That Speak Directly To The Underlying Assumptions Of Postmodernism And Offer A Stunning Critique Of Its Usefulness In Both Understanding And Critiquing The Current Historical Epoch. Contemporary Sociology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 33.1 (2003) 3-22 [Access article in PDF] Rationalism in History Steven Crowell Mark Bevir. The Logic of the History of Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. [L] When Hegel spoke of history as the "slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed" [27], he wished his hearers to find satisfaction in the contemplation of a (...) "reason" in history that would redeem those sacrifices by explaining their necessity. A "logic" of history in this sense—a logic of the events themselves (res gestae) and not merely of discourses about them (historia rerum gestarum)—does not merely relate events to one another by means of a narrative in which they can be seen to make sense, but, going further, attributes necessity to these events by relating them to the (absolute) Idea. That this "Idea or Reason is the True," that "nothing but it... manifests itself in the world," is not, Hegel reminds us, something established historically but "has been proved in philosophy" [11]. Seen thus, post-Hegelian historicism begins the moment that the Idea of history becomes the "history of ideas"—that is, the moment when reason becomes merely the thematic object, rather than the generative subject, of history. In its many forms—Begriffsgeschichte, intellectual history, history of worldviews, Ideologiekritik, history of mentalités, and so on—the history of ideas bears the traces of its birth in the retreat of speculative philosophy of history's robust rationalism, whether of the idealistic Hegelian or the materialist Marxian variety. Under such conditions, to announce a "logic" of the history of ideas is to link historiography with philosophy in a way that might surprise those many who have grown accustomed to thinking that the latter is dead and the former is anything but logical.For "history" has been the shibboleth under which contemporary critical discourse has sought to free itself from the "philosophical" model of knowing that dominated earlier times. If at the outset of the twentieth century the new currents in European philosophy—Husserlian phenomenology and Russellian analysis—were militantly antihistorical, by century's end only the latter remained so. The former very quickly spawned or influenced a host of offshoots (existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, genealogy) with little in common but the belief that philosophy is thoroughly historical. When, in the guise of "theory," critical discourse in fields such as literature, cultural studies, feminism, or postcolonial studies draws close to philosophy, then, it is generally a philosophy that sees itself entangled in history, no longer capable of "master narratives" or logics because suspicious of its own past. Significantly, this skepticism has made itself felt in the discipline of history itself, where the theory of historiography is increasingly integrated into a general postmodern, postphilosophical, model of cultural production that emphasizes politics or poetics over reason, rhetoric over cognition.1 Mark Bevir's proposal for a logic of the history of ideas is a protest against such [End Page 3] integration: historical inquiry—whose principles provide the basis not only for a "general logic of history" but also for a "theory of culture" as such [L 316]—is a rational enterprise that yields objective knowledge guided by the regulative idea of truth as correspondence to a fixed historical reality.There is scarcely a debate in historiography—and in the philosophy of mind, language, and science, as it pertains to such debates—about which Bevir does not have something important to say, but reduced to its bare outline Bevir's book lays out the elements, modes of justification, and modes of explanation that are normative for the practice of the history of ideas. At its basis is the philosophical view, introduced in chapter one and successively developed in subsequent chapters, that the "folk-psychological" concepts we use to understand and explain human behavior—above all, the concept of rationality—are indispensable in the history of ideas as well. A central element of the practice of intellectual history, for example, is the concept of "meaning," and in chapter two, against challenges from contextualists, conventionalists, and others who reject intentionalism, Bevir argues that... (shrink)

Presents a response to the Paul Burkett's review of the book ``Ecology and Historical Materialism.'' Overview of the book; Details of the criticisms presented by Burkett; Information on sociologist Karl Marx's theory of history.

本书对历史主体及其选择活动的本质,历史选择中的自由与必然,历史选择与历史规律的关系等理论问题进行富有新意探讨和论述。.

A study of the relationship between African political theory and the politics of liberation. It elucidates the dialectical inter-relationship between the political philosophical views of these thinkers and the political, social and economic contexts of their respective countries.

Drawing on a wide range of texts and using an interdisciplinary approach, this volume shows how Chinese and Japanese intellectuals mobilized the past to create a better future. It is especially significant today given a world where, amidst tensions within Asia and the rise of China, East Asian intellectuals and governments constantly find new political meanings in their traditions. The essays illuminate how throughout Chinese and Japanese history, thinkers constantly weaved together nationalism, internationalism and a politics of time. This (...) volume explores a broad range of subjects such as premodern and early modern attempts to conjure a politics of Confucianism, twentieth century Japanese Marxist interpretations of Buddhism and Japanese and Chinese endeavors to imagine a new world order. In sum, this book shows us why understanding East Asian pasts are essential to making sense of ideological trends in contemporary China and Japan. For example, without understanding Confucianism and how modern intellectuals in China grappled with this body of thought, we would be unable to make sense of the Chinese government's current promotion of the Chinese classics. This book will interest students and scholars of political science, history and Asian Studies, sociology and philosophy. (shrink)

The sixteen essays in this volume confront the current debate about the relationship between philosophy and its history. On the one hand intellectual historians commonly accuse philosophers of writing bad - anachronistic - history of philosophy, and on the other, philosophers have accused intellectual historians of writing bad - antiquarian - history of philosophy. The essays here address this controversy and ask what purpose the history of philosophy should serve. Part I contains more purely theoretical and (...) methodological discussion, of such questions as whether there are 'timeless' philosophical problems, whether the issues of one epoch are commensurable with those of another, and what style is appropriate to the historiography of the subject. The essays in Part II consider a number of case-histories. They present important revisionist scholarship and original contributions on topics drawn from ancient, early modern and more recent philosophy. All the essays have been specially commissioned, and the contributors include many of the leading figures in the field. The volume as a whole will be of vital interest to everyone concerned with the study of philosophy and of its history. (shrink)

‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it,’ Winston Churchill is famously said to have quipped. That he never seems to have actually made this comment is beside the point, since the message is important: past events never speak for themselves. Facts do not settle like rocks in a dry river, but are moved, displaced, and replaced by waters that continue to gush. The currents and their temperates are sensetative to mores, signs of their times. (...) And the keepers of the waters, more often than not, are historians. This special issue is devoted to new directions in the historiography of genetics, a field that has seen particularly lively drift, swirl, and surge in recent decades. (shrink)

A scholar of Hellenistic and Prussian history, Droysen developed a historical theory that at the time was unprecedented in range and depth, and which remains to the present day a valuable key for understanding history as both an idea and a professional practice. Arthur Alfaix Assis interprets Droysen’s theoretical project as an attempt to redefine the function of historiography within the context of a rising criticism of exemplar theories of history, and focuses on Droysen’s claim that (...) the goal underlying historical writing and reading should be the development of the subjective capacity to think historically. In addition, Assis examines the connections and disconnections between Droysen’s theory of historical thinking, his practice of historical thought, and his political activism. Ultimately, Assis not only shows how Droysen helped reinvent the relationship between historical knowledge and human agency, but also traces some of the contradictions and limitations inherent to that project. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 24 This article has three main interconnected aims. First, I illustrate the historiographical conceptions of three early analytic philosophers: Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. Second, I consider some of the historiographical debates that have been generated by the recent historical turn in analytic philosophy, looking at the work of Scott Soames and Hans-Johann Glock, in particular. Third, I discuss Arthur Danto’s _Analytic Philosophy of History_, published 50 years ago, and argue for a reinvigorated analytic philosophy of (...) class='Hi'>history. (shrink)

The paper aims to disclosure of key points in the development of the German tradition of historiography of philosophy after the 90s of the 18th century. The starting point was the so-called «dispute about the method» of historiography, which erupted in the last decade of the 18th century not without the influence of Kant’s «critical philosophy». Its participants (Reinhold, Fülleborn, Goess, Grohmann, Tennemann, and others) put forward different theses, but they agreed that it is Kant’s philosophy that makes (...) it possible to create a «philosophical history of philosophy». A type of historiography was formed, which was based on the criterion of «progress of philosophy» and Kant’s position was considered as a standard for any historiography. Subsequently, other types of historiography were formed, which followed either the opposite criterion of «regress» or «decadence», or tried to combine both of these criteria (Hegel). In the second half of the 19th century «history of problems» becomes widespread as a principle of research and presentation of the history of philosophy, its main representatives were W. Windelband, N. Hartmann, H. Heimsoeth. Instead, in the second half of the 20th century the dominant type of historiography is the «history of concepts», which finds linguistic and philosophical justification in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. In recent decades, the German tradition of historiography has been enriched by K. Flasсh’s project «historical philosophy» and by D. Henrich program «constellation research». In both of these projects, there is a noticeable attraction to microhistory, going beyond the «classic» texts, discovering hitherto unknown figures and sources that significantly expand the established practice of the historiography of philosophy. (shrink)

Although the treatment of history in late nineteenth-century American legal scholarship remains largely unexplored, two recent areas of research have discussed this subject tangentially. Historiographical critiques of the emphasis on doctrine by American legal historians typically maintain that late nineteenth-century legal scholars viewed history as disclosing an inevitable evolutionary progression from primitive to civilized forms. This "whiggish" approach, the critiques add, ignored the context and function of past law while apologetically justifying conservative existing law as autonomous scientific truth. (...) Without addressing the historiographical critiques, scholarship about late nineteenth-century legal thinkers has touched on their historical research and assumptions, mostly in passing as part of inquiries about other subjects. Designed primarily to convey how both areas of research have contributed to the historiography of late nineteenth-century American legal history, this article concludes by drawing on my own extensive reading of the original sources. Sometimes in support but often in refutation of the existing secondary literature, my findings reveal that the late nineteenth-century scholars formed a distinctive and sophisticated American school of historical jurisprudence that merits further study. Often warning against the very faults ascribed to them by dismissive subsequent scholars, many viewed legal evolution as a contingent response to social change and urged substantial reform of existing law. The American school of historical jurisprudence, moreover, provides an important intellectual context for new insights into two giants of American legal thought, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Roscoe Pound. (shrink)

In this article I explore Maimon’s role in the evolution of Kant’s understanding of the function of the history of philosophy in philosophical enquiry. Kant is often viewed as holding an ambivalent...

This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which (...) the term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us. (shrink)

Although in philosophical dictionaries and the like, Alfred North Whitehead is often praised as one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, his work has been virtually ignored. The articles and books that are concerned with Whitehead’s philosophy, with the exception of the work of Dale H. Porter, hardly ever mention the relevance that it has for the philosophy of history and for historiography. I intend to demonstrate this relevance in this article. For this purpose, I (...) will explore three themes: 1) the self-evidence of certain kinds of forgetting by historians; 2) the fallacy of the view that the occurrence of these kinds of forgetting in historiography must necessarily lead to truth-relativism; and 3) continuity in history, which persists even when certain ruptures occur. My treatment of these themes will in part be a response to Frank Ankersmit, who took up some of them from a different perspective in the October issue of History and Theory in 2001. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 24 This article has three main interconnected aims. First, I illustrate the historiographical conceptions of three early analytic philosophers: Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. Second, I consider some of the historiographical debates that have been generated by the recent historical turn in analytic philosophy, looking at the work of Scott Soames and Hans-Johann Glock, in particular. Third, I discuss Arthur Danto’s _Analytic Philosophy of History_, published 50 years ago, and argue for a reinvigorated analytic philosophy of (...) class='Hi'>history. (shrink)

This article explains the History (past reality), the Historiology (the theories and methods to study the past), and the Historiography (the academic literature) about Cross-Cultural Studies in the U.S.A., from traditional and native subjects (i.e. American Studies), until the current version. It pays attention to religion, as a relevant factor in the evolution of U.S. culture and its model of social relations. En este artículo se explica la Historia (la realidad pasada), la Historiología (las teorías y métodos con (...) los que se estudia dicho pasado), y la Historiografía (la literatura académica al respecto) de los estudios interculturales en los EE.UU., desde las primeras disciplinas tradicionales y nativistas (e.g. Estudios Estadounidenses), hasta los actuales estudios interculturales. Se presta especial atención al factor religioso, pues ha sido muy influyente en el devenir de la cultura estadounidense y en sus relaciones sociales. (shrink)

Along with utilitarianism, British idealism was the most important philosophical and practical movement in Britain and its Empire during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Even though the British idealists have regained some of their standing in the history of philosophy, their own historical theories still fail to receive the deserved scholarly attention. This article helps to fill that major gap in the literature. Understanding historiography as concerning the appropriate modes of enquiring into the recorded past, this article analyses (...) the key historiographical commitments that underpin the writings of the early T.H. Green (section two), Edward Caird (section three), and F.H. Bradley (sections four and five). Section six explores the influence of Bradley's historiography. These approaches are linked by the belief that all thought can be properly understood only by critical historians who possess the appropriate tools with which to distinguish permanently valid truths from the transient imperfections with which those truths are mixed. A crucial division between them is the invocation of a neo-Hegelian Geist by the early Green and Caird, and Bradley's reliance on a progressive human nature. Moreover, the article establishes that R.G. Collingwood's highly influential theories of “absolute presuppositions” and “re-enactment” were taken largely from Bradley's historiography. (shrink)

The use of general and universal laws in historiography has been the subject of debate ever since the end of the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s there has been a growing consensus that general laws such as those in the natural sciences are not applicable in the scientific writing of history. We will argue against this consensus view, not by claiming that the underlying conception of what historiography is—or should be—is wrong, but by contending that it is (...) based on a misconception of what general laws such as those of the natural sciences are. We will show that a revised notion of law, one inspired by the work of Sandra D. Mitchell, in tandem with Jim Woodward’s notion of “invariance,” is indeed applicable to historiography, much in the same way as it is to most other scientific disciplines. Having developed a more adequate account of general laws, we then show, by means of three examples, that what are called “pragmatic laws” and “invariance” do in fact play a role in history in several interesting ways. These examples—from cultural history, economic history, and the history of religion—have been selected on the basis of their diversity in order to illustrate the widespread use of pragmatic laws in history. (shrink)

Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography. By Yuri Pines. New York: Columbia UniversitY Press, 2020. Pp. 352. $120 ; $30.

Historiography in a metaphysical mode Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-17 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9524-6 Authors Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, CETCOPRA/Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, 17 Rue de la Sorbonne, 75231 Paris Cedex05, France Jan Golinski, Department of History, University of New Hampshire, 20 Academic Way, Durham, NH 03824, USA Lissa L. Roberts, Department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS), University of Twente, Postbox 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands John McEvoy, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Journal Metascience (...) Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

Marxist Historiographies is the first book to examine the ebb and flow of Marxist historiography from a global and cross-cultural perspective. Since the eighteenth century, few schools of historical thought have exerted a more lasting impact than Marxism, and this impact extends far beyond the Western world within which it is most commonly analysed. Edited by two highly respected authors in the field and taking a truly global perspective on this topic, Marxist Historiographies demonstrates clearly the breadth and depth (...) of Marxism's influence in historical writing throughout the world and is essential reading for all students of historiography. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ: La pragmatique et la sémantique de l’historiographie révèlent une fragmentation croissante qui s’étend par-delà les écoles jusqu’aux historiens individuels. Alors que les scientifiques normalisent les données pour qu’elles s’ajustent aux théories, les historiens interprètent leurs théories, de manières incompatibles entre elles, pour qu’elles s’ajustent aux différents cas historiques. Les difficultés qui en découlent dans la communication historiographique remettent en cause les philosophies herméneutiques de l’historiographie et redonnent un nouvel intérêt à la question d’une historiographie scientifique. Mais les réponses existantes (...) sont philosophiquement obsolètes. Une façon de reformuler le problème est de partir de la complexité du chaos et de l’unicité de l’histoire. Seule la science peut évaluer si les propriétés d’un domaine donné en interdisent une approche scientifique. Or la science s’étend par réductions méthodologiques explicatives, en ramenant des propriétés d’événements complexes, chaotiques et uniques, qui sont familières, mais d’un niveau plus élevé, à des propriétés ou interrelations non familières et d’un niveau moins élevé. La culture disciplinaire de l’historiographie, cependant, empêche le développement par essais et erreurs de telles tentatives de réductions scientifiques, qui seules permettraient d’évaluer les possibilités d’une historiographie scientifique, laquelle, dans la situation présente, relève de la science-fiction. (shrink)

This short preface is meant to explain the purpose of the present volume and point to the diverse approaches and lines of argument pursued by the contributors.

This essay examines how and why historiography—defined to mean the study of the history of historical writing—first emerged as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry in the United States during the period from 1890 to the 1930s by focusing on the practice of historiography by three of the most influential American historiographers whose work spans this period: J. Franklin Jameson, John Spencer Bassett, and Harry Elmer Barnes. Whereas the development of historiography as a field of study (...) signified a recognition that historians and historical writing are themselves products of the historical process, American historiographers in this period at the same time used historiography to further a scientific ideal of objectivity that was premised on the belief in the ability of historians to separate themselves from that process. Modern scholars have attributed to scientific historians like Jameson and Bassett a simplistic and naïve positivism; but the ability of these historiographers to recognize the subjective character of historical writing and yet affirm a belief in objectivity reveals that their understanding of historical truth was more complex than modern scholars have acknowledged. In turn, by questioning the belief that the historical profession was originally founded on a naïve faith in the ideal of objective truth, I demonstrate that New Historians like Barnes were more similar to their predecessors, the scientific historians, than they acknowledged. Thus, rather than portraying the shift from scientific history to the New History as a linear trajectory of development from objectivity to a more relativist viewpoint, I argue that New Historians like Barnes at once expressed a greater recognition than his scientific predecessors of how historical writing was the product of its context, while still insisting on his commitment to an ideal of objectivity that divorced the historian from that context. (shrink)

This book introduces students to ethics in historiography through an exploration of how historians in different times and places have explained how history ought to be written and how those views relate to different understandings of ethics. No two histories are the same. The book argues that this is a good thing because the differences between histories are largely a matter of ethics. Looking to histories made across the world and from ancient times until today, readers are introduced (...) to a wide variety of approaches to the ethics of history, including well-known ethical approaches, such as the virtue ethics of universal historians, and utilitarian approaches to collective biography writing while also discovering new and emerging ideas in the ethics of history. Through these approaches, readers are encouraged to challenge their ideas about whether humans are separate from other living and non-living things and whether machines and animals can write histories. The book looks to the fundamental questions posed about the nature of history making by Indigenous history makers and asks whether the ethics at play in the global variety of histories might be better appreciated in professional codes of conduct and approaches to research ethics management. Opening up the topic of ethics to show how historians might have viewed ethics differently in the past, the book requires no background in ethics or history theory and is open to all of those with an interest in how we think about good histories. (shrink)

The Against Apion of Josephus is not only a defense of Judaism and Jewish history, but also an essay in historiography and historical criticism, as an outline of the work reveals. Josephus explains how history should and should not be written, and attempts to prove that certain versions of the past are truer than others. The Against Apion may attack the reliability and integrity of Greek historiography as being divisive and instable, but it is from the (...) Greeks that Josephus learned the idea and techniques of historical criticism. He develops his argument by appeal to the superiority of Jewish history, canon, and community, but all these pro-Jewish and anti-Greek arguments have Greek origins. The Greek argument from consensus shaped the historical and theological argumentation of the Against Apion, and Greek precedents provided the basis for the ahistorical or antihistorical view of Judaism that Josephus proposes. Josephus' polemic proves weakest in his argument from canon, and in his contrasting Jewish stability with Greek restiveness. (shrink)

This article offers the outlines of a historically-informed conception of critical inquiry herein named genealogical pragmatism. This conception of critical inquiry combines the genealogical emphasis on problematization featured in Michel Foucault's work with the pragmatist emphasis on reconstruction featured in John Dewey's work. The two forms of critical inquiry featured by these thinkers are not opposed, as is too commonly supposed. Genealogical problematization and pragmatist reconstruction fit together for reason of their mutual emphasis on the importance of history for (...) philosophy. In so fitting together they repair crucial deficits in both traditions as they currently stand on their own. The resulting conception of critical inquiry as simultaneously problematizational and reconstructive is offered as a first step toward a crucial philosophical task we face today: articulating normativity without foundations. (shrink)

The volume is a collection of papers on certain aspects of Indian history, historiography and culture. The papers are fundamental, insightful and path-breaking to some extent. Combining literary, archaeological, scientific and other perspectives, they cover a range of subjects stretching from ancient to modern India. The volume deals with the Greek historians, the Indian epic and Puranic tradition of historiography, colonial and cultural expansion of the Aryans, the early history of north-west India, society, trade and commerce (...) in ancient India, economic, political and cultural contacts of India with other parts of Asia in ancient and medieval periods, and the 1857 War of Independence in India. It takes up some very interesting and new subjects like role of Brahmanas in the anti-Alexander movement in north-west India and the concept of national integration in ancient India. It explores the sources of history of Uttar Pradesh and the antiquity of Ayodhya and historicity of Rama in an interesting study. The volume will be of immense use to historians and scholars of philosophy. (shrink)

Winckelmann’s work inhabits an ambivalent place in the history of historiography. His Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764) is often referred to as the foundational document of art history, but almost never without the obligatory mention of its rather unhistorical dimension. The aim of the following discussion is to evaluate Winckelmann’s position in the history of eighteenth-century European historiography, especially with regard to the early phase of his career as a historian, i.e. the decisive period (...) between his studies in Halle and his stay in Nöthnitz (1738–1754). During these years, Winckelmann carefully excerpted historiographical literature and dealt intensively with the model of universal history, whose structural patterns deeply influenced his reflection on art historiography. (shrink)

Almost no trace of the eleventh-century Tibetan kingdom of Tsongkha remains in extant Tibetan materials; to write its history, scholars have therefore had to rely almost exclusively on Chinese sources written during the Song dynasty. This paper identifies a hitherto undiscovered colophon preserved in the Tibetan Bud- dhist canon as belonging to a translation that was produced through the patronage of the Tsongkha royal court in 1068 or 1080. This colophon provides the Tibetan versions of the names of the (...) Tsongkha king Dongzhan, the queen Xinmu, and their capital/palace. Not only does this new source offer us a valuable local insight into this mysterious Tibetan kingdom, it also raises questions concerning the perception of Tsongkha by Song Chinese literati and Central Tibetan clerics during and after the eleventh century. The paper proffers a description and interpretation of the ambivalent status held by this border region among its two neighboring regions. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Scientific Method of Yore The Structure and Research Practices of Scientific Historiography of Nature Explanation and Confirmation in Scientific Historiography Narrative Explanation Common Cause Explanation References.

Recently, many historians of science have chosen to present their historical narratives from the ‘actors’-eye view’. Scientific knowledge not available within the actors’ culture is not permitted to do explanatory work. Proponents of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge purport to ground this historiography on epistemological relativism. I argue that they are making an unnecessary mistake: unnecessary because the historiographical genre in question can be defended on aesthetic and didactic grounds; and a mistake because the argument from relativism is in (...) any case incoherent.The argument of the present article is self-contained, but steers clear of metaphysical debates in the philosophy of science. To allay fears of hidden assumptions, the sequel, to be published in the following issue, will consider SSK’s prospects of succour from scientific realism, instrumentalism, and a metaphysical system of Bruno Latour’s own devising. (shrink)