Today in Philosophy of History
Discussions of persons, events, ideas, and books related to philosophy of history. What is philosophy of history? According to Hegel, it is "nothing other than the thoughtful consideration of history." The philosophical study of history, and the analysis of history from a philosophical perspective, might involve epistemology (How do we know what we know about history?), metaphysics (Is the past real?), methodology (Is history an empirical science?), logic (problems in the philosophical logic of history), and so on.
Episodes
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Paul Veyne and the Gap between Trans-Historical Ideas and Verifiable Facts
Thursday 13 June 2024 is the 94th anniversary of the birth of Paul Veyne (13 June 1930 – 29 September 2022), who was born in Aix-en-Provence on this date in 1930.
Veyne brought the divergent influences of Raymond Aron and Michel Foucault together in his enigmatic vision of the past in which the constitutive imagi...
PHILOSOPHICAL SIDE QUEST: Al-Ghazali’s Spiritual Crisis
Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ṭūsiyy al-Ghazali, better known to posterity of Al-Ghazali, fits neatly between Avicenna, who died before he was born, and Averroes, who was born after he died, but al-Ghazali made a point of criticizing the use that Avicenna (and later Averroes) made of Greek philosophy. Al-Ghazali experienced a spiritual crisis as a result of being appoint...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Isaiah Berlin’s Enlightenment Apologetics
Thursday 06 June 2024 is the 115th anniversary of the birth of Isaiah Berlin (06 June 1909 - 5 November 1997), who was born in Riga, then part of the Russian Empire, the only son of a timber baron of the Baltic, on this date in 1909.
Berlin began as an Oxford linguistic philosopher but abandoned this for history of ideas, which, as he pursued it, was freque...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Carl von Clausewitz’s Moral Science of Warfare
Saturday 01 June 2024 is the 244th anniversary of the birth of Carl von Clausewitz (01 June 1780 to 16 November 1831), who was born on this date in Burg bei Magdeburg in 1780.
Clausewitz is remembered as the philosopher of war. He came of age during the Napoleonic Wars, experienced catastrophic defeats, and ultimately lived to see Napoleon’s defeat. His...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Giovanni Gentile and the Identification of res gestae with historia rerum gestarum
Thursday 30 May 2024 is the 149th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Gentile (30 May 1875 - 15 April 1944), who was born in Castelvetrano, Italy on this date in 1875. He was assassinated by communist partisans on 15 April 1944.
Gentile was an idealist in the philosophy of history who arguably pursued idealism furthe...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Oswald Spengler and the Incommensurability of Civilizations
It is the 144th anniversary of the birth of Oswald Spengler (29 May 1880 – 08 May 1936), who was born in Blankenburg, Germany, on this date in 1880.
Spengler’s The Decline of the West was a sensation in its time, making Spengler briefly famous with the public, and notorious among historians and philosophers, who largely rejected his work....
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: ibn Khaldūn and the Introduction to History
Monday 27 May 2024 is the 692nd anniversary of the birth of Abū Zayd 'Abd ar-Raḥmān ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldūn al-Ḥaḍramī, better known to posterity as Ibn Khaldūn (27 May 1332 – 17 March 1406), who was born in Tunis, under the Hafsid Sultanate, on this date in 1332 AD. His dates in the Islamic lunar calendar are 732 to 808 of the Hejira Era.
The Maqq...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Heinrich Rickert and the Logical Concept of the Historical
Saturday 25 May 2024 is the 161st anniversary of the birth of Heinrich Rickert (25 May 1863 – 25 July 1936), who was born in Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland) on this date in 1863.
Rickert built on the work of Windelband, formulating the idea of idiographical sciences in terms of the difference between concept formation in nature science and conc...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Jacob Burckhardt and the Elusiveness of Historical Understanding
Saturday 25 May 2024 is the 206th anniversary of the birth of Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt (25 May 1818 to 08 August 1897), who was born in Basel, Switzerland, on this date in 1818.
Burckhardt was an historian, but also an elusive thinker who seemed to capture something more than history while explicitly foreswearing any engagemen...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Paul Oskar Kristeller and the Status of Historical Knowledge
Wednesday 22 May 2024 is the 119th anniversary of the birth of Paul Oskar Kristeller (22 May 1905 – 07 June 1999), who was born in Berlin on this date in 1905.
Kristeller was an historian of renown of renaissance thought, which gives his reflections on the philosophy of history a particular edge. Being himself an historian, we should not b...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: J. G. Fichte and a priori Providentialism
Sunday 19 May 2024 is the 262nd anniversary of the birth of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (19 May 1762 – 29 January 1814), who was born in Rammenau, Saxony, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, on this day in 1762.
Fichte is often understood to be a transitional figure in German idealism between Kant and Hegel, and Fichte’s philosophy of history is not as...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Further Elaborations on the Coming Coeval Age
An essay of mine, The Coming Coeval Age, has just appeared in Isonomia Quarterly for summer 2024. This essay isn’t specifically about philosophy of history, but it does touch on some philosophical problems, so I will consider some of these problems in the context of philosophy of history. In particular, I will discuss the relative complexity of terr...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Wilhelm Windelband and the Place of History among the Sciences
Saturday 11 May 2024 is the 176th anniversary of the birth of Wilhelm Windelband (11 May 1848 – 22 October 1915), who was born in Potsdam on this date in 1848.
Windelband formulated a distinction between nomothetic sciences and idiographic sciences, placing history in the latter category with its own distinctive methodology. T...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Edward Gibbon and the Civilizational Perspective
Wednesday 08 May 2024 is the 287th anniversary of the birth of Edward Gibbon (08 May 1737 to 16 January 1794), who was born on this date in 1737.
Gibbon is possibly the greatest Anglophone historian to date, and his monumental Enlightenment history of the decline and fall of Rome has influenced all subsequent history. What philosophical th...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: David Hume and a Deflationary Philosophy of History
Tuesday 07 May 2024 is the 313th anniversary of the birth of David Hume (07 May 1711 New Style, 26 April 1711 Old Style, to 25 August 1776), who was born in Edinburgh on this date in 1711.
Hume’s reputation as a philosopher only continues to grow with time, but during his life he was a failure as a philosopher though found success as an ...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Karl Marx and the Permutations of Historical Materialism
Sunday 05 May 2024 is the 206th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx (05 May 1818 – 14 March 1883), who was born in Trier on this date in 1818.
Marx, like Kant, didn’t write explicitly on the philosophy of history, but he left enough clues across many books and manuscripts to allow us to reconstruct a Marxian philosophy of history. S...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Niccolò Machiavelli and the Vicissitudes of Fortune
Friday 03 May 2024 is the 555th anniversary of the birth of Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (03 May 1469 – 21 June 1527), who was born in Florence on this date in 1469.
Machiavelli’s influential political thought shocked his contemporaries and those who followed him with his honesty and directness, but no one could neglect him. Even w...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Morton White and the Regularity Theory of Historical Explanation
Monday 29 April 2024 is the 107th anniversary of the birth of Morton White (29 April 1917 – 27 May 2016), who was born in New York City on this date in 1917.
White was an analytical philosopher of history who rejected speculative philosophy of history, but in rejecting historical generalizations while accepting a form of Hempel’s...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Francesco Petrarca’s ascent of Mount Ventoux
On Thursday 26 April 1336—688 years ago today—the Italian poet Petrarch climbed Mount Ventoux, and, when he returned from his hike, he wrote a letter about it to his father that is still extant. Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux has been described as the first modern instance of climbing a mountain simply to enjoy the view, and Petrarch himself has bee...
TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Franciscus Patricius and Historical Pyrrhonism
Thursday 25 April 2024 is the 495th anniversary of the birth of Franciscus Patricius (25 April 1529 – 6 February 1597), who was born on this day in 1529. Patricius is known in Italian as Francesco Patrizi of Cherso (sometimes spelled with one “z” and sometimes with two), and known in Croatian as Franjo Petriš or Frane Petrić (he came from the island ...
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