Historical Knowledge

Vladimir Jankovic


	The seminar deals with philosophical foundations of historical knowledge 
developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Issues under consderation 
include the notion of historical evidence, uses and rewriting of the past, theoretical 
foundation of the historical judgment, historical explanation, and the accessability of the 
past.
	
	In the main part of the course we focus on the German philosophical ideal of 
constructing history as a true knowledge of the individual. The starting point in our 
discussion will be the foundation of the early-nineteenth century German Historical School 
and the critical method developed by Humboldt, Ranke, and Mommsen in a response to the 
schematization of Hegel's Philosophy of History. Under closer investigation will be the 
origins (philology, hermeneutics, ethnography) of the historicists'  call for an autonomy of 
historical understanding and the newly developed concern for the particular and changing 
as opposed to the linear and universal. We will then move on to consider Georg Gervinus's 
concept of Historik ('Historics') and its influence on the thinking of the liberal 'Casino' 
group and, more specifically, on Gustav Droysen's vision of history as a phenomenology 
of historical reading. Droysen project is particularly important because of its Vichian 
assumption of the inapplicability of the methods of natural sciences to historical study and a 
belief in history as a mode of understanding (Verstehen) of its subject matter rather than its 
causal explanation and abstract cognition (Erkennen). 
	We will then examine Wilhelm Dilthey's hermeneutical approach to history and his 
ontological argument for the possibility of historical judgment made in the context of his 
projected 'critique of historical reason.' Discussed will be his ideas about the role of Life-
Nexus, as well as the notion of the private mode of intuition in the development of 
Verstehen. We will proceed with the Neo-Kantian criticisms of Dilthey's project by 
analyzing the methodological grounding of history in work of Wilhelm Windelband and 
Heinrich Rickert. The issues under consideration will include the understanding of history 
as knowledge of the individual, the analysis of the individual concept of value, the 
nomothetic conception of the limits of natural science, and the ideal of idiographic 
knowledge. The course will conclude with an examination of the quasi-Hegelian 
perspectives of Benedetto Croce, Friedrich Meinecke, and Ernst Troeltsch and a discussion 
on the nature of historical understanding based on the readings of Michael Oakeshott, Paul 
Ricoeur, and Agnes Heller. 
	 In this survey we will be led by Robin Collingwood's The Idea of History, Hans- 
George Gadamer's Truth and Method and George Iggers's The German Conception of 
History. These texts will be required, while the nineteenth-century sources and additional 
secondary materials will be on reserve. Requirements: presentations, historiographic 
exercises, and a term paper. 

Readings (preliminary)

Robin Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1993).
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
George Iggers, The German Conception of History (Middletown, 1968).

Georg W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York, 1991). 
Lepold von Ranke, The Secret of World History (New York, 1981).
Johann Gustav Droysen, Outline of the Principles of History (Boston, 1893).
Heinrich Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science 	(Cambridge, 
1986)
Wilhelm Dilthey, Hermeneutics and the Study of History (Princeton, 1996). 
Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences (Detroit, 1988).
Friedrich Meinecke, Historism (London, 1972).
Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty (New York, 1955).
 Hayden White, 'Droysen's Historik: Historical Writing as a Bourgeois Science,' chapter 
	Four in his The Content of the Form (Baltimore, 1987).
Leonard Krieger, 'Hegel and History,' in his Ideas and Events (Chicago, 1992). 
Jacob Owensby, Dilthey and the Narrative of History (Ithaca, 1994). 
Leon Pompa, 'Historical Consciousness and Historical Knowledge,' chapter Four in his 
	Human Nature and Historical Knowledge (Cambridge, 1990).
Agnes Heller, A Theory of History (London, 1982). 
Donald Kelley, 'Mythistory in the Age of Ranke,' in Iggers and Powell (eds.), 
	Leopold von Ranke (Syracuse, 1990), 3-21.
Paul Ricoeur, The Reality of the Historical Past (Milwaukee, 1984).
W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York, 1964).
Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge, 1933).

Schedule:

Week 1: Classical Heritage and the Enlightenment Ideal
		Collingwood, 1-85; Meinecke, 3-54; Pompa. 
Week 2: Hegel's Philosophy of History
		Hegel, 1-102; Krieger; 
Week 3: Hermeneutics, Philology, and the Romantic Historicism.
		Collingwood, 86-134; Gadamer, Iggers, 44-90, Meinecke, 295-373
Week 4: Ranke and the Historical School
		Ranke, 53-156; Kelley
Week 5: Droysen and the Prussian School
		Gadamer, Droysen, Iggers, 90-124
Week 6: The Critical School 1: Dilthey
		Dilthey, Owensby, 1-79; Iggers, 124-174, Gadamer
Week 7: The Critical School 2: Windelband and Rickert
		Windelband, Rickert, 1-61; Collingwood, 165-183.
Week 8: The Crisis of Historicism
		Iggers, 174-229
Week 9: Croce's Project
		Croce, Collingwood, 190-205
Week 10: Re-enactment stories
		Collingwood, 205-282
Week 11: The Nature of the Past
		Ricoeur,  Oakeshott; Gallie, 11-71.
Week 12: History as epistémé
		Heller, 73-211.