Gordon Graham

This chapter discusses the first of specific types of the construction of grand narrative, that is ‘progress’. The desire for, and belief in, historical progress has always been found in human societies. This reached its height in the 19th century in the thoughts of thinkers as diverse a Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. In the 19th century the progressivism was often accompanied by additional contentions about the superiority of European culture and the Christian religion, and for this reason it also came to be associated with the justification of imperialism. Progressivism, however, does not necessarily has to invoke anything in the way of a teleology or grand design.

The study of history with the aim to understand the human past with some sense of detachment is a recent intellectual trend. In the past, a knowledge of history was aimed at ascertaining within history some hidden meaning: cosmic significance, general direction, or providential purpose. This chapter gives an overview of both the religious and secular philosophy of history including looking at Jewish, Christian, Hegelian, and Marxist ideas, and Idealism and Realism. The belief in historical development conceived as a philosophical history provides substantial material for conceptual elaboration and examination. The chapter evaluates the attitude of continental and analytical philosophical traditions toward the concept of grand historical narrative. The combination of the continental and analytical techniques for the purpose of philosophical history is still rare.

Vico believed in the historical importance of Divine Providence. His writings give considerable importance to theological conceptions and he himself was a religious person. The question of God's existence is crucial to the truth of most of the sacred histories because if He does not exist sacred histories are all false. Jewish and Christian sacred histories take it for granted that the Bible is the revealed word of God. Without this, the enterprise would appear to be baseless. Christian sacred history is the story of salvation. The Book of Job or the Psalms, for instance, though not wholly without historical overtones, are largely works of spiritual meditation and reflection.

This chapter is concerned with fundamental objections to the logical possibility of philosophical history. Philosophical history is a combination of two disciplines which are often conceived to be distinct. This results in the scepticism that the formulation of such a discipline is not plausible. Immanuel Kant was the most prominent philosopher who formulated the idea of a universal history. According to Kant, though, the empirical study of historical phenomena is essential to the understanding of the human past, in itself it is insufficient because the plans of individuals taken on their own cannot explain the emergence of developing forms of thought and civil association.

A distinction has long been drawn between the desire to have knowledge of the past entirely for its own sake and a more practical attitude which aims to uncover hidden meanings of relevance to the conduct of life. The idea that humanity might learn from its mistakes is an old one. The chapter also discuses views of Italian political theorist Machiavelli, and English philosopher David Hume. While it is necessary for historical narratives to be built out of fact, factuality is not a sufficient condition of a successful narrative, which must also operate with a principle or principles picking out of the mass of facts those that are relevant to the telos.

According to the philosopher Lurcretius, ‘Some races wax and other wane’. The history of the world, at any one point in its past, has seen remarkable civilizations of which there is hardly any trace left now. The 18th-century philosophers of history J. G. Herder's views on historical recurrence are also discussed in this chapter. According to him historical discontinuity means that it is inappropriate for one culture to pass judgment on another. The belief that the past consists of discrete cultural episodes does not exclude the possibility that these episodes have a common structure. The conception explored in this chapter is sometimes referred to as historical cycles.

The concept of decline has been a constant in the historical thinking of all societies. This chapter discusses this concept, the possible socio-psychological reasons for this concept, and the implications for the understanding of history. Though a belief in a Golden Age is often caused by and sustained by pessimism or nostalgia, it does not follow that there is no truth in such beliefs. The chapter presents some secular counterparts which also harbor same nostalgia for a remote past when everything was perfect. It is also not necessary to believe that the past was a period of absolute perfection in order to hold that the present is in important ways a period of decline.

The concept of collapse in history is one of the normative conceptions through which human past gets a shape. There is no necessary incompatibility between progress and decline, because the decline of some things can itself be interpreted as a mark of progress. This chapter provides an overview of philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Darwin on this issue. This chapter tries to illustrate through an example the differences between Christian morality and Nietzsche's concept of morality. Nietzsche claimed that the cultural dominance of the Christian ascetic ideal in which self-negation is cultivated at the expense of the aristocratic virtue of self-assertion has come to an end.

This is a revised and expanded version of the much praised short book _Universities: The Recovery of An Idea_. It contains chapters on the history of universities; the value of university education; the nature of research; the management and funding of universities plus additional essays on such subjects as human nature and the study of the humanities, interdisciplinary versus multidisciplinary study, information systems and the concept of a library, the prospects for e-learning, reforming universities, intellectual integrity and the realities of funding, and spiritual values and the knowledge economy.

This chapter investigates the question of how a “philosophy” of emerging technologies should be conceived. Part 1 distinguishes between prediction and explanation as the end goal of such a philosophy, and explores empirical social science and idealist philosophy as alternative approaches to explanation. It uses the basic ideas of actor network theory to uncover weaknesses in both. Part 2 sets out a third possibility, namely the empirical-cum-normative philosophical method that underlies the writings of two foundational figures in the history of the social sciences—the Scottish Enlightenment philosophers Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. Part 3 applies this method to the philosophy of technology, and introduces the concept of “transformative technologies.” Part 4 considers briefly the extent to which the “emergent media” of the present time could be regarded as transformative.