Speculative Philosophy Of History Research Articles

Peter Munz and Historical Thought

Abstract Few philosophers of history ever recognized the profundity of Peter Munz’s The Shapes of Time that came out in 1977. In this book Munz upheld the view that no part or aspect of the past itself provides us with the solid fundament of all historical knowledge. For him, the historian’s most fundamental logical entity is what he calls the Sinngebild. The Sinngebild consists of two events defined and held together by a covering law. These CL’s can be anything from simple truisms, the regularities we know from daily life to truly scientific laws. But ‘underneath’ these Sinngebilde there is nothing. Hence, Munz’s bold assertation: ‘the truth of the matter is that there is no ascertainable face behind the various masks every story-teller is creating’ and his claim that his philosophy of history is ‘an idealism writ small’. Next, Munz distinguishes between ‘explanation’ and ‘interpretation’. We ‘explain’ the past by taking seriously the historical agent’s self-description and ‘interpret’ it by stating what it looks like from our present perspective. ‘Explanation’ and ‘interpretation’ may ‘typologically’ be more or less similar. Relying on a number of very well-chosen examples from his own field (Munz was a medievalist), this enables Munz to argue why one historical interpretation may be superior to another. In his later life Munz developed a speculative philosophy of history inspired by Popper’s fallibilism.

THE THORN OF HISTORY: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES AND SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

ABSTRACTMost, if not all, readers of this journal will be familiar with Hegel's notion of “the Cunning of Reason,” which refers to the idea that the unintended consequences of human action should bring about the self‐realization of the Mind or the Spirit. What Hegel left to his reader's imagination was the question of how order could arise from the chaos of unintended consequences. Nevertheless, Hegel's notion of the unintended consequences of human action is a most fruitful one. In this article, I argue that unintended consequences are “the stuff” from which history is made and that a speculative philosophy of history can be built from them too. This argument infers a speculative philosophy of history from historical writing and not a variant of historical writing from a speculative philosophy of history, as is normally the case. Finally, I discuss how global warming and the impending climate catastrophe can be said to be the prototypical unintended consequences of human action, or to speak with Saddam Hussein, “the mother of all” unintended consequences. This article ends, therefore, with a discussion of how the notion of unintended consequences may contribute to a better understanding of what the Anthropocene must mean for our historical consciousness and for how we locate ourselves in the evolution of history since the dawn of humanity down to the present, in which dark clouds gather over our collective future.

The Transformation of Scientific Political Philosophy into a Speculative Philosophy of History

The paper presents an analysis of the three stages of the development of political philosophy since the 17th century. The rise of modern political theory was marked by attempts to develop a philosophy along the lines of natural sciences. These attempts lead to the development of highly speculative and abstract doctrines; political philosophy ceased being a practical discipline. The paper argues that an important aspect of the traditionalist political thought of the 18th century was an attempt to reestablish the link between theory and practice. In the 19th century, the interest in history was supplemented with new premises about the historical process. Political philosophy, which strived to become scientific, became highly dependent on the premises of various philosophies of history.

ВВЕДЕНИЕ В СПЕКУЛЯТИВНУЮ ФИЛОСОФИЮ ИСТОРИИ

The article is devoted to the formation of a speculative philosophy of history. The basic characteristics of linear and cyclic speculative schemes of history are considered. History is understood as the integrity, the totality of events, structures, subject to a unified ultimate process of historical development.

Technology and the End of Western Civilisation: Spengler’s and Heidegger’s Histories of Life/Being

Spengler’s work is typically represented as speculative philosophy of history. There is good reason, however, to consider much of his thought as preoccupied with existential and phenomenological questions about the nature and ends of human existence, rather than with history per se. In this paper, Spengler’s work is considered in comparison with Heidegger’s history of Being and analysis of technological modernity. It is argued that Spengler’s considerable proximity to much of Heidegger’s thought compels us to reconsider the nature and scope of Spengler’s philosophical project.

The Continuing Relevance of Speculative Philosophy of History

Speculative philosophy of history is concerned with history as a whole, which includes explicitly relating the past to the present and the present to the future. It proposes a philosophical appreciation of the importance of history in our lives and in our self-knowledge, but where history is understood not only as revealing to us what is past, but also as a shaping of the present, which itself sets the conditions for future developments. The notion of history-as-a-whole I propose to call, for the purposes of discussion, the past-present-future complex and it is this complex that is the explicit concern of the speculative philosopher of history. The speculative philosopher of history is never far from the historian and her work, whose concern is to elucidate the past and reveal its intelligibility, and in that sense, the past remains the privileged “object” of history, precisely because the past, as past, needs to be re-presented in order to be known, and is known through its re-presentations. I will here briefly discuss Frank Ankersmit’s account of the work of representation in his recent Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). Two things about this work of re-presentation will be noted: 1) because what is re-presented is a past reality, it provides a contrast to present reality, and 2) because the past re-presented is meant to be an account of the reality of the past, it gives us a sense of the necessity of what has been. For the speculative philosopher of history, taking these two features together raises the modal consideration of the relation between the necessity of what has come to pass (as re-presented) and the lived contingency of the present. Here I will briefly discuss the relevance of Michel Foucault’s work in relating past and present in terms of the contingent formations that shape our lives (including the histories we re-present). While Foucault’s focus on contingent formations privileges the notion of possibility within the historical field of the present, it does not systematically address how such possibility might relate to the future. For this last modal consideration, I will discuss briefly Ernst Bloch’s work, specifically the notions of Not-Yet- and What-Is- as discussed in the Principle of Hope (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986) as a way to address the future within the past-present-future complex that is the concern of speculative philosophy of history.

MOVING BEYOND BIOPOWER: HARDT AND NEGRI'S POST‐FOUCAULDIAN SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

ABSTRACTI argue in this paper that the attempt by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire and Multitude to “theorize empire” should be read both against the backdrop of speculative philosophy of history and as a development of the conception of a “principle of intelligibility” as this is discussed in Michel Foucault's recently published courses at the Collège de France. I also argue that Foucault's work in these courses (and elsewhere) can be read as implicitly providing what I call “prolegomena to any future speculative philosophy of history.” I define the latter as concerned with the intelligibility of the historical process considered as a whole. I further suggest, through a brief discussion of the classical figures of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, that the basic features of speculative philosophy of history concern the articulation of both the telos and dynamics of history. My claim is that Hardt and Negri provide an account of the telos and dynamics of history that respects the strictures imposed on speculative philosophy of history by Foucault's work, and thus can be considered as providing a post‐Foucauldian speculative philosophy of history. In doing so, they provide a challenge to other “theoretical” attempts to account for our changing world.

The Idea of Philosophical History

In W. H. Walsh's widely read book, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1951) there is set out a distinction which became virtually classic, or canonical, between two kinds of philosophy of history. On the one hand, there is critical philosophy of history, which investigates, in what is supposed to be a more or less neutral and objective way, the actual practices of historians, with a view to determining their methods, the character of their cognitive and explanatory claims, resemblances to other kinds of inquiry, differences, and other matters of allied type. Critical philosophers of history are supposed to have a relation to their subject at least similar to that of philosophers of science to theirs. Walsh approved of critical philosophy of history, and pointed to directions of its future progress. On the other hand, there is speculative philosophy of history, which seeks to give philosophie content and structure to the actual course of history, typically, world history. This was the sort of thing engaged in by people like Hegel, and Auguste Comte, and Spengler and Toynbee; Walsh did not approve of it at all. Walsh's distinction, and similar if different perspectives on it, appear among other places in William Dray's Philosophy of History and in articles on philosophy of history in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Transcendentalism and history: the problem of the history of philosophy and the sciences in the later philosophy of Husserl

This paper is an analysis of Husserl's theory of the nature of the sciences and of philosophy in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Husserl's position is shown to be structured around a central contradiction between his objective (a rational, non-subjectivist history of the sciences) and the problematic of transcendental empiricism in which that objective is to be realised. The effect of this contradiction is a discourse structured by a series of ‘discrepancies’ between its elements and a denegatory play on words which glosses over the discrepancies. Three major discrepancies appear in Husserl's discussion of: (1) the meaning of the pure geometry taken for granted by Galileo; (2) Galileo's mathematisation of the world; (3) the birth of scientific physics and its effect in the transformation of philosophy. Husserl's radical suppression of objectivism culminates in a speculative philosophy of history in which philosophy itself is represented as the self-conscious reflection of...

Hegel and the speculative philosophy of history

Hegel and the speculative philosophy of history

Between Philosophy and History: The Resurrection of Speculative Philosophy of History Within the Analytic Tradition.

Between Philosophy and History: The Resurrection of Speculative Philosophy of History Within the Analytic Tradition.

The Hegelian Concept of Political Freedom

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Hegelian Concept of Political FreedomIrving Louis HorowitzIrving Louis Horowitz Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Politics Volume 28, Number 1Feb., 1966 Sponsored by the Southern Political Science Association Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2127632 Views: 18Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1965 Southern Political Science AssociationPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:John A. Ferejohn, Frances McCall Rosenbluth Toward a Republican Liberalism, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2006).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1154097E.H. Wainwright Hegel and the speculative philosophy of history, Kleio 4, no.11 (Jun 1972): 1–24.https://doi.org/10.1080/00232087285310011