The necessity for restating the question of the essence of history is grounded in the concern that the question today has been forgotten. Since Antiquity, history has been inextricably bound up with the problem of truth. The earliest extant historiographical statement belongs to Hecataeus of Miletus, writing in the 6th Century BC, who wanted to establish the ‘truth’ (ἀληθέα) as a means of “resolving the numerous and often absurd stories (λόγοι) of the Greeks” (FGrHist 1F 1A). The foundations of the science of history were laid down in the 5th Century by Thucydides and subsequent Greek and Roman historiographies were often prefaced by programmatic statements emphasising a commitment to truth.

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In the 4th Century, Aristotle’s fulfilment of ancient metaphysics, initiated by Parmenides and formalised by Plato, prioritised theoretical knowledge (σοφία) over practical wisdom (φρόνησις) as the highest mode of truth (ἀληθεύειν). For Aristotle, though, history could never appeal to the highest mode of truth because it lacked universal substance (ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον λέγει) (Poetics. 1451b.5-9). History was episodic (ἐπεισόδιος) and prone to chance (τύχη) and accident (τὸ συμβεβηκός).

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However, the accomplishment of historical consciousness that awoke in the 18th Century AD was the universalisation of the historical process wherein humanity, emerging out of a state of primitive barbarism, reached its pinnacle. The Enlightenment saw itself as the perfection of history, grounded in natural mathematical science and rational thought. Conceptions of historical universality were cultivated through Vico, Voltaire, Kant, and Comte, and brought to fruition by Hegel. Since Hegel, the progress of history has been toward the consciousness of human freedom.

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The post-Hegelian landscape of the philosophy of history in the 19th Century was a battleground characterised by the fallout of Hegel’s pan-logical conception of historical destiny. Following Niebuhr and Wolf, Ranke strived toward empirical mastery as the mode of revealing the story of world history in its connection to universal history and thus provide direction for the future. Ranke’s positive methodology laid the groundwork for a philosophy of scientific historiography that would dominate the first half of the 20th Century. The founding of philology, the practice of comparative linguistics, folk psychology and ethnology, and empirical historical research gained tremendous ground. To misquote Nietzsche, it is not the victory of history that defines the 19th Century, but the victory of historical method over history.

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Between the 19th and 20th Centuries, the philosophy of history underwent significant growth and branched out in all directions. Hegel’s thesis of historical destiny found traction under Collingwood, Kojéve, and most famously, in Fukuyama’s End of History (1992). The establishment of hermeneutics by Schleiermacher was taken up in the historical thought of Dilthey, Rickert, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricouer. The philosophy of scientific history continued to grow, before collapsing under Hempel’s radical scientification of history in the 1940s and then re-emerging through the renovation of the philosophy of science in the 1980s. Hempel’s coup de grâce facilitated the induction of history into the emerging philosophy of language through White, Dray, Danto, and Mink.

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In the 21st Century, the manifold branches of the philosophy of history have proliferated beyond measure. Developments in the philosophy of scientific historiography, post-narrativism, historical experience advanced, while the prospect of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, instigated renewed interest in non-anthropocentric history, multiscalar history, and evolutionary history. Where the pursuit of knowledge inevitably tends toward greater and greater specialisation, such relentless complexity makes it impossible for historical thinkers to know anything outside of their own field. As Frank Ankersmit recently summarised the situation:

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Now, in contemporary philosophy of history the causalists talk to causalists, the hermeneuticists to hermeneuticists and the narrativists to narrativists. The preliminary question of who is right about historical knowledge is thus abandoned for the subsidiary question of who stands strongest in each individual paradigm (2020, 69).

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The relentless advancement of historical thought accomplished through an ever-expanding multivalent philosophy of history not only renders the question of the essence of history superfluous but sanctions its complete neglect.

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This research project aims at re-posing the question of the essence of history and asks, what is history? What, in the ‘progress’ of historical thought from antiquity to modernity, did we lose along the way? And what does it mean, if it means anything at all, to have history, to be historical?

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