Knowledge and Explanation in History PDF Download

Author: Ronald F. Atkinson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349159654
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Author: Susanna Fellman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144383484X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
Historical Knowledge approaches the topic of historical knowledge in depth and from various angles. It seeks to offer theoretical and methodological building blocks for the use of anyone pursuing historical research. This book brings novel insights into classic and topical issues currently under debate: the importance of theory in historical thinking, the dialectic of “text” and “annotation”, the actor and observer levels, the relationship between the general and the individual, the issue of comparison, and the problem of sporadic sources and of understanding the singularity of each one. The overall theme of the book, the possibility of historical knowledge, reflects the very issue that makes historical research distinctive: the challenges of evidence and the problems, both concrete and conceptual, with deciphering and interpreting remnants of the past. This book refreshes the discussion about sources and proper evidence, two issues that the linguistic turn and the postmodern challenge pushed into the background. The book addresses these issues in an easily accessible way and serves as an introduction and guide to the role of theory, method and evidence in historical research not only for students and scholars of history, but also for anyone outside the field with an interest in the topic. Historical Knowledge is the first book to include texts by the three eminent historians, Professors Natalie Zemon Davis, Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi. The other contributors, Professors Risto Alapuro, Janken Myrdal and Matti Peltonen, are active debaters in current theoretical and methodo-logical discussion.

Author: Paul A. Roth
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810140896
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. Roth situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework and develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. The book includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.

Author: Murray G. Murphey
Publisher: Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Dealing with the nature of historical knowledge, this book is concerned with both philosophical and historical questions. It involves considerations as various as statistical hypothesis testing, componential analysis and the problem of the Synoptic Gospels. --

Author: Michael Stanford
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631152910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In this original argument, Michael Stanford proposes a single structure to incorporate all aspects of history -events, evidence, interpretations, books and lectures, popular ideas and social effects - into one comprehensive whole. Stanford grounds his study in the common-sense meaning of the word, 'structure'; he then composes one paradigm encompassing the organization of history as a whole and the organization of each of its parts. Dr Stanford locates the poblems of studying story, both philosophical and practical. He clarifies the issues and exemplifies the current thinking of both historians and philosophers.

Author: Allan Megill
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226518302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In the past thirty years, historians have broadened the scope of their discipline to include many previously neglected topics and perspectives. They have chronicled language, madness, gender, and sexuality and have experimented with new forms of presentation. They have turned to the histories of non-Western peoples and to the troubled relations between “the West” and the rest. Allan Megill welcomes these developments, but he also suggests that there is now confusion among historians about what counts as a justified account of the past. In Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, Megill dispels some of the confusion. Here, he discusses issues of narrative, objectivity, and memory. He attacks what he sees as irresponsible uses of evidence while accepting the art of speculation, which incomplete evidence forces upon historians. Along the way, he offers succinct accounts of the epistemological road historians have traveled from Herodotus and Thucydides through Leopold von Ranke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and on to Hayden White, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Lynn Hunt.

Author: Maurice Mandelbaum
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421431971
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Originally published in 1977. In this major work, an overview of the structure of historical writing, Maurice Mandelbaum clarifies some of the problems concerning the nature of history as a discipline, of what constitutes explanation in history, and whether historical knowledge is as reliable as other forms of knowledge. The work is divided into three parts. The first part provides an analytic account of different types of historical inquiry. The second treats at length the nature of causal explanation in everyday life and in science and considers the relation between causes and laws. The final part analyzes the concept of objectivity and estimates both the extent to which the inquiries of historians can be said to be objective and the limits of that objectivity in some types of historical accounts.

Author: Francesca Rochberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022640627X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
In the modern West, we take for granted that what we call the “natural world” confronts us all and always has—but Before Nature explores that almost unimaginable time when there was no such conception of “nature”—no word, reference, or sense for it. Before the concept of nature formed over the long history of European philosophy and science, our ancestors in ancient Assyria and Babylonia developed an inquiry into the world in a way that is kindred to our modern science. With Before Nature, Francesca Rochberg explores that Assyro-Babylonian knowledge tradition and shows how it relates to the entire history of science. From a modern, Western perspective, a world not conceived somehow within the framework of physical nature is difficult—if not impossible—to imagine. Yet, as Rochberg lays out, ancient investigations of regularity and irregularity, norms and anomalies clearly established an axis of knowledge between the knower and an intelligible, ordered world. Rochberg is the first scholar to make a case for how exactly we can understand cuneiform knowledge, observation, prediction, and explanation in relation to science—without recourse to later ideas of nature. Systematically examining the whole of Mesopotamian science with a distinctive historical and methodological approach, Before Nature will open up surprising new pathways for studying the history of science.

Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Author: Aviezer Tucker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139452258
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
How do historians, comparative linguists, biblical and textual critics and evolutionary biologists establish beliefs about the past? How do they know the past? This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that offer scientific knowledge of the past. Using the analytic tools of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science the book covers such topics as evidence, theory, methodology, explanation, determination and underdetermination, coincidence, contingency and counterfactuals in historiography. Aviezer Tucker's central claim is that historiography as a scientific discipline should be thought of as an effort to explain the evidence of past events. He also emphasizes the similarity between historiographic methodology to Darwinian evolutionary biology. This is an important, fresh approach to historiography and will be read by philosophers, historians and social scientists interested in the methodological foundations of their disciplines.