Philosophy History Pdf

[Nathen Paisley]

Incontemporary philosophy a distinction has developed between the speculative philosophy of history and the critical philosophy of history, now referred to as analytic.[3][4][5][6][7] The split between these approaches may be approximately compared, by analogy and on the strength of regional and academic influences, to the schism in commitments between analytic and continental philosophy wherein the analytic approach is pragmatic and the speculative approach attends more closely to a metaphysics (or anti-metaphysics) of determining forces like language or the phenomenology of perception at the level of background assumptions.

At the level of practice, the analytic approach questions the meaning and purpose of the historical process whereas the speculative approach studies the foundations and implications of history and the historical method.[8][9] The names of these are derived from C. D. Broad's distinction between critical philosophy and speculative philosophy.[10][11][verification needed]

Many ancient cultures held mythical and theological concepts of history and of time that were not linear. Such societies saw history as cyclical, with alternating Dark and Golden Ages. Plato taught the concept of the Great Year, and other Greeks spoke of aeons. Similar examples include the ancient doctrine of eternal return, which existed in Ancient Egypt, in the Indian religions, among the Greek Pythagoreans' and in the Stoics' conceptions. In his Works and Days, Hesiod described five Ages of Man: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age, and the Iron Age, which began with the Dorian invasion. Some scholars[which?] identify just four ages, corresponding to the four metals, with the Heroic age as a description of the Bronze Age. A four-age count would match the Vedic or Hindu ages known as Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dvapara Yuga and Kali Yuga, which together make one Yuga Cycle that repeats. According to Jainism, this world has no beginning or end but goes through cycles of upturns (utsarpini) and downturns (avasarpini) constantly. Many Greeks believed that just as mankind went through four stages of character during each rise and fall of history so did government. They considered democracy and monarchy as the healthy rgimes of the higher ages; and oligarchy and tyranny as corrupted rgimes common to the lower ages.[citation needed]

During the Age of Enlightenment, history began to be seen as both linear and irreversible. Condorcet's interpretations of the various "stages of humanity" and Auguste Comte's positivism were among the most important formulations of such conceptions of history, which trusted social progress. As in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile (1762) treatise on education (or the "art of training men"), the Enlightenment conceived the human species as perfectible: human nature could be infinitely developed through a well-thought pedagogy.

Much of the historical debate about causes has focused on the relationship between communicative and other actions, between singular and repeated ones, and between actions, structures of action or group and institutional contexts and wider sets of conditions.[20] John Gaddis has distinguished between exceptional and general causes (following Marc Bloch) and between "routine" and "distinctive links" in causal relationships: "in accounting for what happened at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, we attach greater importance to the fact that President Truman ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb than to the decision of the Army Air Force to carry out his orders."[21] He has also pointed to the difference between immediate, intermediate and distant causes. For his part, Christopher Lloyd puts forward four "general concepts of causation" used in history: the "metaphysical idealist concept, which asserts that the phenomena of the universe are products of or emanations from an omnipotent being or such final cause"; "the empiricist (or Humean) regularity concept, which is based on the idea of causation being a matter of constant conjunctions of events"; "the functional/teleological/consequential concept", which is "goal-directed, so that goals are causes"; and the "realist, structurist and dispositional approach, which sees relational structures and internal dispositions as the causes of phenomena".[22]

There is disagreement about the extent to which history is ultimately deterministic. Some argue that geography, economic systems, or culture prescribe laws that determine the events of history. Others see history as a sequence of consequential processes that act upon each other. Even determinists do not rule out that, from time to time, certain cataclysmic events occur to change the course of history. Their main point is, however, that such events are rare and that even apparently large shocks like wars and revolutions often have no more than temporary effects on the evolution of the society.

The question of neutrality concerns itself foremost with analysis of historiography and the biases of historical sources. One prominent manifestation of this analysis is the idea that "history is written by the victors".

G. W. F. Hegel adopts the expression "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht" ("World history is a tribunal that judges the world", a quote from Friedrich Schiller's poem Resignation, published in 1786) and asserts that history is what judges men and women, their actions, and their opinions.[23] Since the twentieth century, Western historians have disavowed the aspiration to provide a judgement of history.[24][25] The goals of historical judgements or interpretations are separate from those of legal judgements, which need to be formulated quickly after the events and be final.[26]

In his Collge de France lectures published as Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault posits that the victors of a social struggle use their political dominance to suppress a defeated adversary's version of historical events in favor of their own propaganda, which may go so far as historical negationism. Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Culture of Defeat takes an opposing approach that defeat is a major driver for the defeated to reinvent himself, while the victor, confirmed in his attitudes and methods, dissatisfied by the high losses and paltry gains made, may be less creative and fall back.

Related to the issues of historical judgement are those of the pretension to neutrality and objectivity.[27][28] Analytic and critical philosophers of history have debated whether historians should express judgements on historical figures, or if this would infringe on their supposed role.[25] In general, positivists and neopositivists oppose any value-judgement as unscientific.[25]

G. W. F. Hegel may represent the epitome of teleological philosophy of history.[29] Hegel's teleology was taken up by Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History and the Last Man. Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Althusser, or Deleuze deny any teleological sense to history, claiming that it is best characterized by discontinuities, ruptures, and various time-scales,[citation needed] which the Annales School claimed to have demonstrated.

Schools of thought influenced by Hegel also see history as progressive, but they see progress as the outcome of a dialectic in which factors working in opposite directions are over time reconciled. History was best seen as directed by a Zeitgeist, and traces of the Zeitgeist could be seen by looking backward. Hegel believed that history was moving man toward civilization, and some also claim he thought that the Prussian state incarnated the end of history. In his Lessons on the History of Philosophy, he explains that each epochal philosophy is in a way the whole of philosophy; it is not a subdivision of the Whole but this Whole itself apprehended in a specific modality.

Hegel's philosophy of history aimed for a philosophical reflection on world history, thinking about the history of humanity in all its spatial and temporal breadth. This Hegelian particularity, versus the works of historians, rests on the fact that the German philosopher sought to determine what the teleology of history was, particularly what the end of history was, and how that process would develop.[31] With this end in mind, Hegel applied his philosophical system, both metaphysical and logical, to develop the thesis that the history of humanity consists of a rational process of constant progress towards freedom.[32]

According to Hegelian philosophy, reason made a spatial transition from east to west, that is, from Asia to Europe. This transition of reason, says Hegel, is made explicit in the concept of freedom that each civilization developed in these spaces has had. Thus, in the east, the Chinese civilization, India, and the various civilizations of Mesopotamia were characterized by considering that freedom belonged to a single subject, that person being understood as the emperor or empress, the king or queen. The rest of the individuals in these civilizations are, according to Hegel, like children under the tutelage of a father. The second stage of this transition of freedom overcame the paternal stage. Greece and Rome, civilizations where freedom no longer belonged only to the head of the state, but also to a limited number of people who met certain requirements, that is, the citizens. Finally, the third stage, German-Christian Europe, reached a level of consciousness about freedom that maintains that it no longer belonged to one or a few; on the contrary, freedom was good for all human beings.[33]

The reactions that Hegel's thesis generated have been diverse. On the one hand, it is argued that Hegel's contribution consisted of consolidating the philosophy of history as an independent and formal discipline of philosophy.[29][34] On the other hand, it is argued that Hegel's philosophy of history is an example of totalitarianism, racism, and Eurocentrism, widely debated criticisms.[35][36][37][38][39]

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