Theory of History - Lectures and Seminars (notes)

Theory of History, 2018-2019
Lectures.................................................................................................................................................2
1. Introductory lecture.......................................................................................................................2
2. Philosophy of science in the 20th century.......................................................................................4
3. Philosophy of the Humanities........................................................................................................8
4. Historiography and the political relation.....................................................................................12
5. Explaining in history....................................................................................................................15
6. Historical knowledge...................................................................................................................18
7. Overview and reflection...............................................................................................................21
Seminars..............................................................................................................................................25
Week 1.............................................................................................................................................25
Week 2.............................................................................................................................................25
Week 3.............................................................................................................................................26
Week 4.............................................................................................................................................26
Library Exercise (in Dutch).........................................................................................................26
Preparation for the debate............................................................................................................27
Notes............................................................................................................................................27
Week 5.............................................................................................................................................28
Week 6.............................................................................................................................................29

,Lectures
1. Introductory lecture

What is Theory of History?
 Philosophy of science
o What is science?
 Depends on language
 English: Science – men, microscopes etc.
 German: Wissenschaft (wetenschap) – more than laboratory;
more encompassing
o It needs to be philosophically and historically adequate
o How can we justify scientific knowledge? (PHILOSOPICAL)
 Important because we believe science to be reliable
 Type of epistemology
 What is knowledge and how can we justify it?
o Philosophy of science needs to describe what scientists do (HISTORICAL)
 From the 1960s more interest in this
o Two contexts:
 Discovery: historical
 Justification: philosophical
 This is an old division; the way you discover is not the same as
justifying what you’ve discovered
 Philosophy of history
o Two meanings which relate to the concepts of history
 Historia res gestae: history as the past
 Substantive philosophy of history
 Karl Marx performed this version
 Where are we going to?
 Historia rerum gestarum: stories about what happened in the past
 Analytical philosophy of history
 What can we know about the past?
 What are good explanations of the past?
 How should we write/study the past?
 Close to the philosophy of science
 But this division is not as easy; you should have an idea about what
history is before being able to say what you should do with it
 Substantive and analytical philosophy of history are linked; you have a
substantive historical idea which influences your analytical philosophy
o You could disregard the division in the use of the term of theory of history;
moving on
o We can have several relations with the past; economic, epistemic, political etc.

Standard image of science
 Science deal with theories that are based on empirical observation
 Theories and laws which describe a fixed way of nature

,  The laws are always universally valid and formulated in mathematical formulas
 The theory should correspond with reality, which is why it is true
 It describes reality as it truly is
 This standard image was born during the scientific revolution
 Before the revolution the Aristotelian image was dominant
o Everyday experience can lead to knowledge
o Formulating in ordinary language
 After the revolution:
o Experimenting can lead to knowledge
o Formulating in mathematics
 The revolution provided a more mechanical view on the world; the world ticks like a
machine so you would need mathematics to describe it
 This has become the normal way; we have obtained a different worldview
o The worldview now consists of fundamental divisions;
 OBJECT: body, nature, matter
 Empiricism: we get knowledge, the object leaves an impression
(observations), through the observations you get to
generalizations and this leads to theories
 Inductive reasoning
 SUBJECT: mind, reason, consciousness
 Rationalism: the base of knowledge can be found in ratio;
perception is problematic because you can be deceived by
impressions
 Starting with the subject; the most certain form of knowledge
comes from reason
 Deductive reasoning
o Before people believed in a closed worldview where there were no divisions
between mind and body

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
 Transcendental question: there is something as reliable knowledge, but how can that
be?
 We have knowledge of the objective, but how do we obtain it?
 Transcendental subject
o The subject is not problematic; it is what makes knowledge possible
o Problem of causality
 We think a lot of causality
 We cannot observe causal connections
 How do we get the knowledge of causality?
 We know this because of habit
 Kant believed it to be a pure category that we possess which is prior to
experience – we are hardwired to make causal connections
o Pure categories and forms of intuition
 Like causality
 They offer us to gain knowledge of the world
 We are hardwired to understand the world as ordered in time and space
o Our knowledge rests on two sources