Lesson 1

Meaning of History
Key Concepts:

 Positivism – the philosophy that a particular
knowledge can only be true if it can be observed in a
sensorial manner.
 Historiography – the study of history as a historical
discipline.
 Historicism – the belief that history should be
studied only for its own sake.
 Definition and Subject
Matter

 History was derived from the Greek word historia,
which means knowledge acquired through inquiry
or investigation.
 History as a discipline has existed for 2,400 years and
is as old as mathematics and philosophy.
 This term was then adopted to classical Latin, where
it acquired a new definition.
 Historia became known as the account of the past of
a person or a group of people through written
documents and historical evidence.
History can refer two things:


 First, history relates to everything that had happened
in the past.
 Second, history also refers to a kind of research or
inquiry.
 History is a discipline or a field of study and
investigation that is primarily concerned with
human activities done in the past. This meaning can
be broken down into three dimensions.
The Three Dimensions of
history:

 History’s focus on human activities.
- This focus makes it different from, say, theology, because
theology is concerned with the divine and not with human beings.
 History, as a field of inquiry, generally falls in the
sciences, particularly to the social sciences.
- It aims to find out and make sense of what is previously
unknown.
 History is concerned with the past.
- This characteristic makes history different from other social
science disciplines, which are more concerned with the present,
such as political science, economics, and sociology.
Herodotus

 He was pioneered by recording the past through
historical sources.
 He is recognized as the Father of History because he
was the one who established History as a science.
 Herodotus’ purpose in writing his work Histories
was to describe the deeds of men in the past for
posterity or future use.
Thucydides

 Another Greek historian whose magnum opus was
the History of the Peloponnesian War.
 He was known as the Father of Scientific History.
 He was the first one who highlighted the importance
of the systematic and impartial collection of evidence
as an essential prerequisite in writing history.
 In his History of the Peloponnesian War, his
method was what modern historians would call oral
history.
 Issues and Questions

 By the nineteenth century, a particular school of
thought would emerge and dominate various
scientific disciplines for many generations:
positivism.
 Positivism is an essential philosophy that would
serve as a vital anchor of the scientific method. It
asserts that real knowledge lies in the actual
observation of facts.
 In history, positivism created the mantra of “no
document, no history.”
Historiography

 It is the history of history.
 The former’s object of study is the past, the events
that happened in the past, and the causes of such
events.
 Examples of historiographical questions are:
1. How was a specific historical text written?
2. Who wrote it?
3. What was the context of its publication?
4. What was the particular historical method
employed? What were the sources used?
 Medieval Period

 Christianity and the Church became the most
powerful institutions, history ceased to be a record of
man’s deeds.
 It started to be a record of how man became
instrumental in the fulfillment of the divine plan. In
this sense, history was no longer written to enable
man to control his destiny because God already
predetermined his destiny.
 Instead, history became a crucial part of the
endeavor to discover and expound on this divine
plan.
Historicism

 It is an approach to explaining the existence of
phenomena, especially social and cultural practices
(including ideas and beliefs), by studying their
history.
 Leopold von Ranke, the leading positivist historian
of the nineteenth century, was the primary advocate
of this idea.
 He argued that the task of the historian is neither to
guard certain values nor to judge certain pasts.
 R.G. Collingwood

He elegantly put it, “ Knowing yourself means
knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows
what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man
can do is what man has done. The value of history,
then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus
what man what is.”