No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
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.
1 Walsh, W. H., An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (London: Hutchinson, 1951). The book went through two revisions (in 1958 and 1967) and was reprinted at least seven times.Google Scholar
2 Dray, William, Philosophy of History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 1–3.Google Scholar
3 The term ‘philosophical history’ appears earlier, in conjunction with Kant's “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784). (This essay is reprinted in Theories of History, edited by Patrick Gardiner [Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959].) The idea is substantially earlier. It appears first with Vico, whose New Science (in successive editions of 1725, 1730 and 1744) is the first, as it remains still in its way among the most impressive, representatives of the genre.
4 Hegel's, Philosophy of Right, translated by Knox, T. M. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Hegel, , The Logic of Hegel, translated byWallace, W. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1873), p. 10. Oddly, in the latter, Hegel seems to deny that literally everything is rational. His view appears to be that while everything real is explicable, only what he calls the Actual (a proper part of the existent) has the special rational structure that history manifests, and that Hegel's philosophy revealsGoogle Scholar.
5 This same challenge, of fundamental explanation of the human past, affording some possibility of predicting our future, is posed by Vico. (See Vico, Giovanni Battista, The Mew Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Bergin, T. G. and Fisch, M. H., rev. trans, of the 3rd ed. [1744] [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968], p. xxxvif., 104 [section 349]). Vico reaches a response to this challenge not unlike the one advocated in the present paper.Google Scholar
6 Herder, the second major original philosophical historian, affirmed the Protean elusiveness of actual history at a very early stage of the enterprise's development. See Johann Gottfried Herder, “Yet Another Philosophy of History” (1774), section I, v, 501f., reprinted in Herder, J. G.on Social and Political Culture, edited by Barnard, F. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 181fGoogle Scholar.
7 Among post-Hegelian thinkers embracing neither cognitive dualism nor anti-libertarian naturalism is Tolstoy, wirose philosophical history is set out, implicitly throughout the novel and explicitly often (especially in the concluding Epilogue) in War and Peace. Tolstoy's chief influence would seem to be, interestingly, Schopenhauer — in spite of the fact that the author of The World as Will and Representation was explicitly and repeatedly opposed tothe very possibility of philosophical history.
8 Cognitive dualism is also styled, for example by Markovic, Mihailo (in The Philosophy of Georg Henrik von Wright, edited by Schilpp, P. A. and Hahn, L. E. [La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989] p. 446), the “separatist” approach to the natural and human sciences—in contrast to the “unity of science” approachGoogle Scholar.
9 Cf. Putnam, Hilary, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1987), p. 12: “[Descartes'] view was that there are two fundamental substances —mind and matter —not one, and correspondingly there should be two fundamental sciences: physics and psychology.” As a believing Catholic Christian, Descartes paid at least lip service to some form of compatibilism, i.e., to the idea that human freedom and complete predetermination of the world as a closed, law-governed system (in this case with God as governor) are compatible principles. But, as Descartes discloses with self-revealing candor (see Principles of Philosophy, I, section 41), his intuitions are deeply and completely incompatibilist He has absolutely no idea how freedom and determinism might be reconciled. The psychology envisaged, then, is a psychology of freedom, and it must be fundamentally unlike physics.Google Scholar
10 For an idea similar to dualism, see Hilary Putnam's discussion (“Reason and History,” in Putnam, Reason, Truth and History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], p. 150CrossRefGoogle Scholar) of what he calls species of “double-entry bookkeeping” responses to the great successes of the exact sciences, and the challenge of what to think, say, and do about “human”topics. Cognitive dualism will be a special variety of double-entry bookkeeping, and will contrast with other options that respond to this challenge mentioned by Putnam. “Others —e.g., the Marxist philosophers and the religious philosophers —adopt a sortof double-entry bookkeeping, leaving technical questions to the exact sciences and engineering and ideological or ethical questions to a different tribunal: the Party, the Utopian future, the church. But few can feel comfortable with any of these stances —with extreme scientism in either its positivist or materialist forms, with sub-jectivism and radical relativism, or with any of the speciesof double-entry bookkeeping” (ibid.). Unless Putnam means few of the rational, this last remark must be taken to be hyperbole, for even if few ought to feel comfortable with these options, considerable contingents of philosophers seem to manage to feel perfectly content with each.
11 See Hahn, Schilpp and, The Philosophy ofGeorg Henrik von Wright, p. 447, 833–43 and passim.Google Scholar
12 Homans, Georg e C., The Nature of Social Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967).Google Scholar
13 Among members of the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too school I would certainly include Daniel Dennett, Wesley Salmon, Keith Lehrer, D. M. Armstrong, Fred Dretske, J. J. C. Smart and others. One is a member of this school if and only if one believes that there are mental states, including states of “prepositional attitude” (whatever may be believed about their analysis, causal or logical); that all such states are also brain states or functional states of physical organisms; that there is genuine social science, some of it, at least, already on the scene; that human behaviour is in general predetermined, and lawlike, and that human actions are quite frequently free, under the power or within the control of the persons performing them. Some members of this school — Dennett, apparently among them (note the subtitle of Elbow Room: “The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting” [my emphasis]) —believe also in the objectivity and reality of values.(It is important to stress that the have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too school is quite distinct from that of the eliminative materialists. The latter dismiss mentalism as “folk psychology.” The non-eliminativists I am thinking of mean to be synoptic, and ecumenical. They want to insist that there is thought and action and rationality and freedom; and that all of them are [more or less] all we have ever, or rationally could ever have, wanted them to be; and that these familiar and prized states are also physical states of physical systems.)
14 Vico says that he seeks, and claims that he has found, “universal and eternal principles (such as every science must have)” (The New Science, section 332). Vico evidently sent a copy of The New Science to Newton. See Burke, P., Vico, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 28Google Scholar.
15 The attempt by philosophical historians and anthropologists to develop predictive blueprints for the human story provides the basis for Karl Popper's largely idiosyncratic conception of historicism, which he felt a missionary imperative to oppose (notably in The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies). Nothing in Popper's case against historicism seems to me to provide a serious ground of objection for anything argued here. But it would certainly take more space than I wish to devote to it to show this.
16 Dennett discusses the limits of real world predictability in Room, Elbow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Books, 1984), p. 32–33, 112-20.Google Scholar
17 Among William H. McNeill's books, Greek Dilemma: War and Aftermath (1947), History Handbook of Western Civilization (1948), America, Britain, and Russia: Their Cooperation and Conflict, 1941–46 (1954), Past and Future (1954), Greece: American Aid in Action, 1947–56 (1957), The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (1963), Europe's Steppe Frontier, 1500–1800 (1964), A World History (1967), Plagues and Peoples (1976), The Metamorphosis of Greece Since World War II (1978), The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View (1980), The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (1982), Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History (1986) and Mythistory and Other Essays (1986).
18 McNeill, W. H., The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).Google Scholar
19 The following passage effectively illustrates McNeill's cognitive monism: “the means by which physicists arrive at…summaries of observed and believed behavior does not seem to me to differ in the slightest from the ways in which historians —or artists for that matter —arrive at their insights. Inall instances of intellectual activity, I believe, an intuitive leapallows the thinker to perceive a pattern he had not recognized before and if he is lucky, his newly glimpsed pattern will fit new data as well as cases he may have had immediately in mind at the moment ofillumination. “Science as a discipline of mind and process of discovery, in short, seems to me not to differ in the least from other intellectual pursuits, including historical study” (Review Essay of Arthur Marwick's The Nature of History and Veyne's, PaulComment on écrit I'histoire in History and Theory, 11, 1 [1972]: 106; hereafter cited a s Review Essay)Google Scholar.
20 As Vico's translator-editors T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch point out, ideas importantly resembling Hegel's cunning of reason appear earlier, in Mandeville, Vico and Adam Smith.
21 McNeill, William H., Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 51f.Google Scholar
22 “[The] denial of large-scale patternings in human affairs —seems to me simply untrue.I do not claim that all the patternings discerned by one observer will coincide with the patternings apparent to a different observer, especially when they live in different times and places. But surely there are some patterns that all men everywhere will agree upon once the data are available. Who, for instance, is likely to deny that human technology has been generally cumulative throughout recorded history, despite local and temporary setbacks and the utter loss of some specialized skill? And who is likely to deny that this accumulation has been important to human history, inasmuch as it has altered the means by which men interact? “It seems to me, also, that there are patterns of encounter between strangers that recur whenever men of sharply different cultures confront one another. To be sure, each case is unique unto itself, but so is each leaf and each human being” (Review Essay, p. 107).
23 “Law, McNeill's” is discussed in Crosby, Alfred W., Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 32 and inGoogle ScholarDobyns, Henry F., Their Numbers Become Thinned, Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville: University of Tennes see Press, 1983), p. 9, 11Google Scholar.
24 Another McNeill “nomic proposal” appears in a footnote in The Rise of the West (p. 603). McNeill's theme is the development of virulent patterns of racial discrimination in the Western world, especially in the form of a so-called colour bar. A colour bar —or similar principle of ethnic discriminatio n—correlates systematically, and causally, McNeill asserts, with the presence, in significant numbers, of females of the ruling group whosemarital competitive advantage would be at risk if males of the ruling group were permitted (without penalty) to (continue to) marry females of dominated groups. So: no dominant-group females present as potential spouse, no appreciable colour bar; an appreciable colour bar, a solid corps of dominant-group females.
25 McNeill, , Mythistory and Other Essays, p. 37;Google Scholar emphasis mine. McNeill's conception of encounter between antithetical societies may be compared to Toynbee's fundamental and central notion of what he calls Challcnge-and-Response.
26 McNeill, W. H., The Pursuit of Power(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 21.Google Scholar
27 Review Essay, p. 108f.
28 See Trevor-Roper's, H. R.reviewof McNeill's biography of Toynbee (“The Prophet,” New YorkReview of Books, 36, 15 (10 12, 1989): 28.Google Scholar
29 McNeill's essay on Toynbee, reprinted as Chapter 9 of Mythistory and Other Essays, recounts the former's experience of discovering and interacting with A Study of History and subsequently its author.
30 Gargan, Edward T., ed., The Intent of Toynbee's History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961).Google Scholar
31 McNeill, W. H., Toynbee, Arnold J.: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
32 Toynbee, A., A Study of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), Vol. 12, p. 85, 305, 601.Google Scholar
33 Ibid., p. 43, 46, 246, 250, 646.
34 Ibid., p. 238, 254, 305, 519, 646.
35 Ibid., p. 43, 649.
36 Ibid., p. 239.
37 Ibid., p. 238, 257.
38 Ibid., p. 259.
39 The perspective is like that of Plato and Polybius —too like it, in McNeill's view, because the data too unsatisfactorily conform.
40 McNeill, W. H., “Some Basic Asumptions of Toynbee's A Study of History,” in Gargan, E. T., ed., The Intent of Toynbee's History, p. 36–38.Google Scholar
41 McNeill, W. H., A World History, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. vi.Google Scholar
42 Harris, Marvin, Cultural Materialism (New York: Random House, 1979).Google Scholar
43 And Professor McNeill has confirmed (in correspondence with the present writer, October 1989) that Marvin Harris's work is wholly unknown to him.
44 Harris, Cultural Materialism, p. 111.
45 I would like to express my gratitude to an anonymous jeferee for comments on an earlier version of the paper.
In the interval since the writing, revision and acceptance of this paper there has appeared—and I have reviewed —an important and original contribution to philosophical history: Blackburn, Richard James, The Vampire of Reason (London and New York: Verso Books, 1990). My review article (“Hegel Naturalized: Richard James Black-burn's The Vampire of Reason”) will appear in a forthcoming issue of the New Left Review (1992)Google Scholar.