Abstract:
Prof. Gorman will give an outline history of analytical philosophy of history and contrast it with other traditions: so-called “speculative” philosophy of history, idealist contributions and historians’ approaches to theorising about history. On the whole members of these different traditions were unaware of alternative approaches. Analytical philosophers mostly concentrated on reasons and causes in historical explanation, largely ignored by historians. But by the 1960s analytical philosophers offered analyses of historical narratives and historians noticed. However, they did not accept the science-sourced causal structures on offer. Using empathetic understanding Gorman analyses the original attempt on the part of historians to engage with analytical philosophy of history, complaints which led to the response that historians had a “fancy view of truth”.
He argue that the thought-world that empathetic understanding requires and that historical narratives characteristically express is temporally extended, but the analytical philosophers’ original approach could not allow for this. He draws on American pragmatism to work with historical accounts “as a whole”. Such accounts are understood as shareable with others in a shared historical consciousness. An account sorts the shared world it describes, and that includes the past, present and pragmatically foreseeable future in which we actually live. Pragmatic choices of reference and description are available to us so that, within limits, we can discover how far we have made, and can make in future, the world in which we understand ourselves to live.
The Speaker:
Jonathan Gorman is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He is on the editorial committees of the Journal of the Philosophy of History, History and Theory and Rethinking History. He is the author of The Expression of Historical Knowledge (1982), Understanding History (1992), Rights and Reason (2003) and Historical Judgement (2007), in addition to many articles and reviews mainly in the philosophy of history and the philosophy of law, beginning with “Objectivity and truth in history” in 1974.