Georg Gangl

In this text, I deal with Universal History as a specific form of substantive philosophy of history that distinguishes itself from the historical sciences through certain ontological, epistemic, and formal principles. Ontologically, Universal History sees history as single whole that is unified by some unfolding principle that strives towards an end. This end is the Meaning of history, and the process towards it is to be represented in the form of a single interconnected story. Epistemically, universal historians use non-historiographic, a-priori, and introspective methods to establish these characteristics and the supposed Meaning of history. In particular, I discuss the theories of history of Saint Augustine and Bossuet, Kant and Schiller, and Big History as different forms of Universal History (theological, Enlightenment, supposedly scientific). What they all have in common is that as Universal History they are not based on the evidentiary methods of the modern historical sciences and therefore do not produce knowledge of the past. Big History, though, is not just a form of Universal History, it also constitutes a proper historiographic approach and research programme.

This thesis is concerned with historiographic knowledge, with its form, presuppositions, and justification. In the articles that form its backbone I argue that historiographic knowledge often takes the form of causal narratives, and that hindsight is an essential epistemic asset in the forging of those narratives. The articles further argue that historiographic knowledge is best understood through informational epistemology and a coherentist understanding of epistemic justification. The process of justification of historiographic knowledge claims, however, is also an intersubjective process in which different disciplinary practices play an essential role. The extended introduction of this thesis has three goals that come out of the articles: 1) to elucidate the nature and characteristics of the philosophy of scientific historiography; 2) to argue for an empirical turn in the discipline; and 3) to probe the relationship between historiography and other ways to relate to the past, and with that, the relationship between the philosophy of historiography and the theory of history. On the first issue, I argue for a broadly naturalist understanding of the discipline, and I define its main task as the philosophical reconstruction and explication of the scientific practices of (Rankean) historiography along with their limits. The determination of the reach and limits of these scientific practices is a fundamentally empirical task though, thus the call for an empirical turn. Having established the nature of scientific historiography, I ask what role a rational and truthful relation to the past should play in our individual lives and for society as a whole. The goal of chapter III is to delineate the relationship between (scientific) historiography and politics, and to defend the discipline against politicist usurpations. For these reasons, I talk about some basic agreement among historians concerning politics and the limits of its influence on their discipline, just as much as I identify the positive influence that politics can have on historiography. The nature and justification of historiographic method is apolitical though; anyone of any political persuasion has good reasons to use those methods, if they want to produce knowledge of the past. The chapter closes with reflections on the (political) limits of historiographic reason.

In this text I analyze the relationship between historiography, politics, and wider historical culture. Starting point for my argumentation are the organization “Historians without Borders” and a contentious resolution by the “Association of German Historians” from 2018. In a first step, I shortly reconstruct the relationship between politics, historical culture, and historiography that is presupposed by both the organization and the resolution. Next, I argue that historiography has a specific and unique role to play in historical culture and democracy as producer of historical knowledge and understanding and that there are legitimate political interests that directly stem from those activities. In particular, based on their professional activities historians have good grounds to stand in for the establishment or maintenance of deliberative democratic systems with which their professional endeavour shares many principles and commonalities.

In this article, I scrutinize knowledge as it operates in historiography. Historians find themselves in a peculiar position: they need to employ the tools available to them in their present in order to say true things about a past that might have been very different. I argue that our knowledge of the past is best understood through an informational account of knowledge and a coherentist account of justification. In this framework, knowledge claims about the past and anachronisms introduce no special epistemic problems for historiography, and once the logic of historical (re)description and evaluation is understood, historiography stands firm among the historical sciences in terms of the feasibility of its goal of speaking truthfully about the past.

In Towards a Realist Philosophy of History, Adam Timmins sets out to develop a non-naïve form of realism that can account for the majority of the practices and products of historiography. In particular, he claims that we should be realists about facts, colligations, and narrative. While being sympathetic to some form of realism about all of these, this review essay critically discusses both Timmins’ actual arguments for historiographic realism and the approach that should be taken to the philosophical issue itself. The wider argument is that realism in historiography is a question of justification and that we therefore must turn to the empirical analysis of actual historiographic texts and debates to make any real headway on this issue.

In this paper I argue that historiography employs causal narrative explanations just as other historical sciences such as evolutionary biology or paleontology do. There is a logic of explanation common to all these sciences that centers on causal explanation of unique and unrepeatable events. The explanandum of historiography can further be understood as mechanism in the sense developed by Stuart Glennan and others in recent years. However, causal explanation is not the only way historiography relates to the past. Arthur Danto has given us the theoretical tools to differentiate between causal narratives and conceptual colligations, with both playing a pivotal role in historiography even though Danto himself has not expressed that thought clearly.