causal explanation; the status of empirical knowledge about the past; and the status of assertionsabout the “meaning” of large historical events. Each of these formulations raises new anddifficult issues for philosophical clarification.But our relationship to the past is not only cognitive, but also expressive or performative. Wecreate, interpret, fictionalize, mythologize, and valorize the past. And we use some of our storiesabout the past—our “histories”—to represent the right way of acting, good and bad political behavior, the character of one nationality as opposed to another, and to justify our conduct in thefuture. This feature of historical representation too raises philosophical problems. Do thesestories have epistemic standing? Are some of these value-laden interpretations more justifiedthan others? And can we sharply distinguish between the two kinds of representation of the past?A third important thread within philosophical reflections on history concerns the relation between history and the constitution of humanity. In what sense are human beings “historical”creations? How do human beings relate to our historical origins? How do human culture andhuman nature reflect and embody history? Historicism is the view that human creations— meanings, values, language, institutions, and culture—are historical products, the results of previous historical circumstances, and that historical change is in turn the result of historicallyconstructed persons. So human beings are both historically constructed and historically creative.Universalism, by contrast, maintains that people are essentially the same, whether in ancientEgypt or contemporary Brooklyn; so the task of historical explanation is to discover how peoplemuch like us might have been led to act as they did.It will be noted that the concept of “meaning” comes into discussions of history in at least threedifferent ways: the meaning of individual actions within historical events; the meaning of a set of historical events within the broad sweep of history; and the meanings created in later actors asthey thematize and represent the narratives of their past. It is important to distinguish thesedifferent aspects of meaning, since the processes of investigating and understanding thesemeanings are quite different. But the interpenetration of the concepts of meaning and history inturn gives validity to the emphasis of the tradition of continental philosophy on the distinction between the human sciences and the natural sciences and the importance of using methods of investigation that shed light on the meaning of actions and ensembles.Finally, it is worth noticing that historical questions can be posed at a wide range of levels of scope and scale. For example, if we are interested in the French Revolution, we can ask questions of rising generality: What was the standard of living in the French countryside in thethird quarter of the eighteenth century? Why did aristocrats, artisans, and peasants act as they didin the crisis of 1789? What political and economic circumstances caused the French Revolution?What is the meaning of the French Revolution within the arc of European civilization? And wecan pose historical inquiries at various levels of geography and population. Thus we can focus onthe economic history of the English midlands, Britain, Western Europe, or Eurasia—with units of ascending geographical scope and complexity encompassed by the various frames of analysis. Sothe choice of the units and frame of historical analysis is itself historiographically significant anddeserves philosophical attention.
2. Continental philosophy of history
The topic of history has been treated frequently in modern European philosophy. A long, largelyGerman, tradition of thought looks at history as a total and comprehensible process of events,structures, and processes, for which the philosophy of history can serve as an interpretive tool.This approach, speculative and meta-historical, aims to discern large, embracing patterns and
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