ANGLO-AMERICAN

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY
 A. Anglo-American Philosophy of History

The traditions of empiricism and Anglo-American

philosophy have focused on the logic and epistemology
of historical knowledge. David Hume's empiricism cast
a dominant key for all subsequent Anglo-American
philosophy, and this influence extends to the
interpretation of human behavior and the human
sciences.
W. H. Walsh's Philosophy of History is an open-
minded and well-grounded effort to provide an in-
depth presentation of the field that crosses the
separation between continental and analytical
philosophy.
It attempts to treat both major questions driving much of
the philosophy of history: the nature of historical
knowledge and the possibility of gaining "metaphysical"
knowledge about history. Walsh draws the distinction
between these traditions along the lines of "critical" and
"speculative" philosophy of history. He proposes a
framework within which the main questions about history
can be addressed, including both major traditions.
Walsh accepts Collingwood's premise that history
is the science of the mind, and suggests that the
key intellectual task for the historian is to
reconstruct the reasons or motives that actors had
at various points in history. He suggests that the
philosophical content of the philosophy of history
falls into two different sorts of inquiry:
metaphysical questions about the reality of history
as a whole and epistemic issues that arise in the
pursuit and formulation of knowledge of history.
Anglo-American philosophy, also known as analytic
philosophy, is largely an import from European thinkers
who immigrated to the United States during the first
half of the twentieth century and their followers. It
focuses on rigorous argumentation, is typically
amenable to scientific evidence and concerns, and tends
to primarily address linguistic, logical, epistemological,
and metaphysical issues.
 B. Causation in History
Analytic philosophers of
history discussed the role of
causal ascriptions in historical explanations. They often
approached these issues
on the basis of a theory of
causation drawn from positivist philosophy of science.
However, this approach is flawed in the social sciences due
to lack of universal causal regularities. A second approach
was to define causes in terms of a set of causally relevant
conditions. Counterfactual reasoning is an important
element of discovery of necessary and/or sufficient
conditions.
Historical causes are often the effect of
deliberate human action, and it is feasible to
identify a concrete action as the cause of a
particular event. Causal realism is crucial for
current understanding of historical causality,
and research in the philosophy of the social
sciences has provided substantial support for
historical explanations that depend on tracing
a series of causal mechanisms.
 C. Recent topics in the philosophy of history

English-speaking philosophy of history shifted significantly in

the 1970s, beginning with the publication of Hayden White's

Metahistory (1973) and Louis Mink's writings (1966; Mink et

by hermeneutic philosophy,
al. 1987). This shift was influenced
post-modernism, and French literary theory, which
emphasized the rhetoric of historical writing, the non-
reducibility of historical narrative to a sequence of "facts", and
the degree of construction involved in historical
representation.
This "new" philosophy of history is
distinguished from analytic philosophy of
history in several important respects. It
emphasizes historical narrative rather
than historical causation, and emphasizes
features of subjectivity and multiple
interpretation over those of objectivity,
truth, and correspondence to the facts.
 Historical ontology is an important topic for
historians and philosophers, as it poses the question
of whether large constructs like 'revolution','market
society', 'fascism', or 'Protestant religious identity'
should be included in our ontology. It also questions
the relationship between instances and categories in
the realm of history, and the answers will have
important consequences for how we conceptualize
and explain the past.