João Ohara

The problem of historical realism has gained some new momentum recently, with a fresh challenge to what is taken to be an anti-realist hegemony in the theory and philosophy of history. Unfortunately, this has also provided the opportunity for the reheating of old polemics and lazy scholarship that characterized the 1990s reaction to “postmodernism.” Ill-defined questions distract us from more important issues. Here, I offer a map that aims to clarify the conceptual space. I distinguish between a metaphysical problem, which is the problem of historical realism proper, and an epistemological problem, which is sometimes treated under the same phrase but is more adequately called the problem of historical skepticism. I then consider what the targets of each of these discussions are and map the conceptual space of possibilities in them.

In Adrian Currie and Daniel Swaim’s “minimal realism”, the stories we tell about the world can grasp better or worse certain patterns that exist independently of us in the world. Accordingly, from their perspective, disagreements about these stories could at least sometimes be solved by empirical means – by “looking at the world”. In this paper, I offer some reasons why a Minkean narrativist would not be moved by Currie and Swaim’s “minimal realism”, at least when it comes to human history. In short, the Minkean narrativist sees no compelling reasons to assume that the beginnings, middles, and endings of the stories we tell about the world correspond to beginnings, middles, and endings that are inherent in the phenomena themselves. These are not properties of events, but parts of the narrative structure through which we understand certain entities or processes in the world.

Philosophy of history, theory of history, and historical theory are three existing labels that are sometimes, but not always, treated as synonyms.1 Each of these has been used by both historians and philosophers to define a specific field of inquiry, which entailed its own approaches, methods, concepts, and problems, as well as specific venues and audiences, though these often overlap each other. As such, it is difficult to state clearly which label has been used by which community for what ends.