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 themes, if any, do we find in Gibbon? Does he exemplify the deflationary history implied by Hume? Can Enlightenment history be objective, or must it impose its universalist template on all history, regardless of the scope of a given historical inquiry? In what way does Gibbon exhibit a civilizational perspective on history?

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
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#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory # Gibbon #EdwardGibbon #Rome #DeclineandFall

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 historian. Hume’s distinctively empiricist and skeptical philosophical views provide little in the way of a positive philosophy of history, but they can be understood as a deflationary philosophy of history that gives us a robust principle of selection for history.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory # DavidHume #empiricism #deflation #logicalpositivism #PhilosophicalHistory #Gibbon

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. Several elements enter into Marx’s conception of history, and we can see the many possible permutations of historical materialism as we consider alternative formulations of the elements that Marx combined into an organic whole. Prising apart this whole gives us greater philosophical insight into Marx than accepting the whole that has become entrenched in Marxist ideology.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory # KarlMarx #Marx #Marxism #HistoricalMaterialism #revolution #teleology #determinism

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 when Machiavelli was condemned, it was understood that he had written things that were relevant, even if repellant. It could be argued that Machiavelli’s thought was too powerful for his time, and it is only in subsequent centuries that he could be put in proper perspective—a process that we begin to see in the nineteenth century with Fichte and Clausewitz.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
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#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory # Machiavelli # NiccolòMachiavelli #fortune #modernity #RotaFortunae #

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 covering law model of historical explanation he created a problem for himself. How can we formulate regularities of historical explanation without approximating a speculative philosophy of history that sees regularity in the events that comprise history?

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory # MortonWhite #CoveringLaw #regularity #HistoricalExplanation

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 been called the first modern man. Both the claim that Petrarch was modern and that he was not at all modern have been made, and both claims have been disputed. So was Petrarch already modern in the early 14th century, or was he still a thoroughly medieval man?

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory #Petrarch #FrancescoPetrarca #Ventoux #periodization #medieval #modern

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 of Cres).

Franciscus Patricius was a literal renaissance man who wrote a number of treatises and dialogues on philosophical topics common to his time, distancing himself from Scholasticism by attacking the authority of Aristotle, and advocating a radical form of skepticism that has been called historical Pyrrhonism.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
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#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory # FranciscusPatricius #skepticism # Pyrrhonism #FranjoPetriš #FranePetrić #renaissance

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Reinhart Koselleck and the Role of Conceptual History

Tuesday 23 April 2024 is the 101st anniversary of the birth of Reinhart Koselleck (23 April 1923 to 03 February 2006), who was born in Görlitz, Germany on this date one hundred one years ago.

Koselleck’s historical thought is of a piece with late twentieth century historiography, in its conceptual sophistication coupled with a suspicion of explicitly formulated philosophies of history, which cannot but appear to be folly in hindsight. But, in the light of Hayden White’s influence, which is pervasive in this historiographical milieu, can we not find a philosophy of history implicit even within skeptical historiography, as White found a philosophy of history implicit in all history?

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #PhilosophyofHistory #Koselleck #historiography #ConceptualHistory

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Immanuel Kant and the Hope for Cosmological Progress

Monday 22 April 2024 is the tricentennial of the birth of Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 to 12 February 1804), who was born three hundred years ago today in Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, on this day in 1724.

Kant is counted among the greatest of philosophers, and his legacy is both large and complicated. Reconstructing his philosophy of history we find elements of providentialism, progressivism, and naturalism, all unified by Kant’s Enlightenment outlook. These several parallel influences in Kant’s thought yields a distinctive conception of historical progress in which human beings are a means to a cosmological end.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Kant #progress #Enlightenment

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: A Complexity Ladder for Big History

A paper of mine has just appeared in the Journal of Big History special issue on complexity. This paper 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 definitions and the use of scientific measurement in the increasing formalization of knowledge and what this could portend for history.

Nielsen, J. N. (2024). A Complexity Ladder for Big History. Journal of Big History, VII(2); 1-8.
DOI | https://doi.org/10.22339/jbh.v7i2.7202

Paper: https://jbh.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/JBH/article/view/2976/2780

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #emergence #complexity #BigHistory #definition #formalization #cliodynamics

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Leonard Woolley on Digging Up the Past

Wednesday 17 April 2024 is the 144th anniversary of the birth of Sir Charles Leonard Woolley, better known to posterity as C. Leonard Woolley (17 April 1880 – 20 February 1960), who was born on the outskirts of London on this day in 1880.

Woolley was the archaeologist who was chosen as Field Director for the joint University of Pennsylvania and British Museum excavation at Ur, and in this position he oversaw the recovery of some of the greatest treasures of the ancient world yet discovered. Woolley was an indefatigable worker, known for his long days and nights in the field, and his many popular books and lectures. He lacks the name recognition of Howard Carter, but his finds were of similar significance, and he stands at the head of archaeologists who have and are increasingly shaping our understanding of the past.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #LeonardWoolley #archaeology #Ur #prehistory #PennMuseum

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Arnold Toynbee and Thought Experiments in Civilization

Sunday 14 April 2024 is the 135th anniversary of the birth of Arnold Joseph Toynbee (14 April 1889 – 22 October 1975), who was born in London on this date in 1889.

Toynbee is one of the most influential figures in philosophy of history, though neither historians nor philosophers want to claim him for their own. His epic multi-volume A Study of History, which brought him fame during the mid-twentieth century, is now little more than a curiosity. His scholarship is both praised as epoch-making and condemned as shoddy. Do we still have something to learn from Toynbee today?

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Toynbee #civilization #ThoughtExperiment

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Husserl and Philosophy of History as a Crisis Discipline

Monday 08 April 2024 is the 165th anniversary of the birth of Edmund Husserl (08 April 1859 – 27 April 1938), who was born in Proßnitz, Moravia, on this date in 1859.

Husserl is known for developing the method of phenomenology, but in the final years of his life he turned to the problems of history as a philosophical response to contemporaneous crises. Husserl was an arch-rationalist who saw the pursuit of reason as the infinite task of humanity. I argue that there is a path that can be traced from Plato through Pelagius and Siger of Brabant to Husserl, and it is in this tradition that Husserl’s philosophy of history is to be located.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Husserl #phenomenology #teleology #crisis #Voegelin #Pelagianism

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Thinking Historically about the Future

A comment on my episode on Ernst Jünger made me aware of a statement by Friedrich Engels made in 1887 that anticipates some of the most surprising characteristics of the First World War, and this a generation prior to the war. This instance of historical prediction is an opportunity to discuss the relationship of prediction to history and philosophy of history.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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Podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nick-nielsen94/episodes/Thinking-Historically-about-the-Future-e2i30r6

#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Engels #future #futurism #Marxism #prediction

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: René Descartes and Non-philosophies of History

Today is the 428th anniversary of the birth of René Descartes (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650), who was born in La Haye en Touraine, in central France, on this date in 1596. The town where he was born has since been re-named for him.

Descartes was a skeptic of history, doubting (as he doubted most things) that history could be the basis of certain knowledge. However, Descartes’ skepticism about history was a spur to some historians to submit their discipline to Cartesian criticism, but Descartes also left a legacy of neglect of history, which was thus largely passed by during the scientific revolution.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Descartes #non-philosophy #Cartesianism

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Nathan Rotenstreich on Time in History

Sunday 31 March 2024 is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Nathan Rotenstreich (31 March 1914 to 11 October 1993), who was born in Sambir in the Ukraine on this date in 1914.

Rotenstreich wrote Between Past and Present: An Essay on History and Time and Meaning in History both specifically concerned with philosophy of history, and many other books and papers. He focused on the relationship between time and history, which constitutes an exception among philosophers of history.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Rotenstreich #time

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Ernst Jünger and Mechanized War as a Boundary Condition

Friday 29 March 2024 is the 129th anniversary of the birth of Ernst Jünger (29 March 1895 – 17 February 1998), who was born in Heidelberg on this date in 1895. He served in both world wars of the twentieth century and lived more than a century.

Jünger is mostly remembered for his memoir of the First World War, Storm of Steel, but during the inter-war period he also produced a number of controversial books and essays that prophesied the future conditions of mechanized war, and of society transformed by mechanized war. I argue that, for Jünger, mechanized war is a boundary condition from which other historical novelties emerge.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Jünger # Materialschlacht #war #warfare #industrialization #worker

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Robert Heilbronner on Human Agency in Social History

Sunday 24 March 2024 is the 105th anniversary of the birth of Robert L. Heilbronner (24 March 1919 – 04 January 2005), who was born in New York City on this date in 1919.

Heilbronner’s best known book is his history of economic thought The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers (1953). In addition to his books on economics, Heilbroner also wrote a couple of books that take an historical view of the future, The Future as History (1959) and Visions of the Future (1995). Heilbronner’s conception of social history is, in a sense, Arendt’s mass man seen through a more optimistic lens, with the possibility of human agency shaping the future.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Heilbronner #economics #futurism #time #SocialHistory #MassMan

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Wars and Rumors of Wars

A comment on my Ernst Troeltsch episode provoked me to thinking further about the wave of public enthusiasm that sometimes greets the outbreak of a war. In the case of the First World War, this wave of public enthusiasm has been given a name: the August Madness. How are we to understand the August Madness and those who participated in it?

Beyond the specifics of the First World War and the August Madness, public enthusiasm for war poses many conceptual problems. How and why does the individual respond to social contagion? Is it right to be enthusiastic for a just war? Why does public enthusiasm for war flag in longer conflicts? Ought measures to be taken to shape or modify public enthusiasm for war?

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #war #philosophyofwar #warrior #Troeltsch #Jünger #WWI

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Ankersmit on Linguistic Transcendentalism and Historical Experience

Wednesday 20 March 2024 is the 79th birthday of Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit (born 20 March 1945), who was born in Deventer, the Netherlands, on this date in 1945.

Ankersmit’s historical thought is enmeshed in contemporary issues and we find him engaging with Richard Rorty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson, Arthur Danto, Hayden White, Erich Auerbach, and Jörn Rüsen, inter alia. His book Sublime Historical Experience sets up a dichotomy between the linguistic transcendentalism of the linguistic turn in historical theory on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the attempt to find or to cultivate sublime (pre-linguistic, non-cognitive) historical experience.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Ankersmit #sublime #HistoricalRepresentation #HistoricalExperience #LinguisticTranscendentalism

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Nikolai Berdyaev and Eschatological Providentialism

Monday 18 March 2024 is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (Никола́й Алекса́ндрович Бердя́ев; 18 March, Old Style 06 March, 1874 – 24 March 1948), who was born in Obukhov, near Kiev, on this date in 1874.

Berdyaev was a Russian aristocrat who became a Marxist and then a Christian, and who always seemed to find himself on the wrong side of the authorities in his homeland. Berdyaev applied his Christian personalism to philosophical anthropology and produced a philosophy of history that raises eschatology over salvation history. Like the thought of Simone Weil, this is a providential philosophy of history with a difference.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Berdyaev #ChristianExistentialism #eschatology #providentialism

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Patrick Gardiner and the Many Meanings of Explanation

Sunday 17 March 2024 is the 102nd anniversary of the birth of Patrick Gardiner (17 March 1922 – 24 June 1997), who was born in Chelsea, London, on this date in 1922.

Gardiner was the editor of two influential collections of readings, the Oxford Readings in Philosophy volume on philosophy of history, and Theories of History: Readings from Classical and Contemporary Sources, and a book-length study on historical explanation. His work provides a meticulous analysis of explanation, recognizing many different forms of explanation, and the presuppositions of these various forms of explanation, he argued, have given us philosophies of history as diverse of Marx’s materialism and Collingwood’s idealism.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Gardiner #pluralism #explanation #HistoricalExplanation

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Raymond Aron on Tyrannical and Aimless History

Thursday 14 March 2024 is the 119th anniversary of the birth of Raymond Aron (14 March 1905 – 17 October 1983), who was born in Paris on this date in 1905.

Aron, like Georg Simmel and Robert M. MacIver, was a sociologist who was throughout his life also concerned with the problems of history and of philosophy of history, while also making forays into political philosophy at the intersection of sociology and philosophy. Aron’s conception of history is the antithesis of that of many philosophers who seek wholeness and unity in history, and claim to find it; for Aron, history is aimless, fragmentary, and pluralistic.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Aron #objectivity #pluralism

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Friedrich von Schlegel and Philosophical History

Sunday 10 March 2024 is the 252nd anniversary of the birth of Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel (10 March 1772 – 12 January 1829), who was born in Hanover on this date in 1772.

Schlegel knew all of the movers and shakers in the romantic movement, and his life was like the entire romantic movement in miniature. He was born into a Protestant family, became a freethinker in college, wrote a novel that was considered scandalous about his affair with an older woman whom he eventually married, and, after he married, he converted to Catholicism. In his young days as a romantic he said that, “The historian is a prophet facing backward,” and, while he eventually distanced himself from his early romanticism, his later work in philosophy of history embodied the spirit of this youthful aphorism.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
Discord: https://discord.gg/r3dudQvGxD
Links: https://jnnielsen.carrd.co/
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Podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/nick-nielsen94/episodes/Friedrich-von-Schlegel-and-Philosophical-History-e2gtm8i

#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Schlegel #romanticism #PhilosophicalHistory

TODAY IN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY: Landgrebe and Phenomenological Philosophy of History

Saturday 09 March 2024 is the 122nd anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Landgrebe (09 March 1902, Vienna – 14 August 1991), who was born in Vienna on this date in 1902.

Landgrebe was Husserl’s assistant, and so thoroughly conversant with phenomenology, but Kant and Heidegger may have been equally influential on his philosophy of history. As a phenomenological philosopher of history, Landgrebe sought to identify and free himself from the presuppositions of philosophy of history, hence the requirement to distance himself from traditional philosophies of history.

Quora: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/
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#philosophy #history #philosophyofhistory #Landgrebe #phenomenology #presuppositions