The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation

The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation PDF Author: Paul A. Roth
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810140896
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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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.

The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation

The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation PDF Author: Paul A. Roth
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810140896
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

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.

Logic of Historical Explanation

Logic of Historical Explanation PDF Author: Clayton Roberts
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271042992
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description


Logics of History

Logics of History PDF Author: William H. Sewell Jr.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226749193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
While social scientists and historians have been exchanging ideas for a long time, they have never developed a proper dialogue about social theory. William H. Sewell Jr. observes that on questions of theory the communication has been mostly one way: from social science to history. Logics of History argues that both history and the social sciences have something crucial to offer each other. While historians do not think of themselves as theorists, they know something social scientists do not: how to think about the temporalities of social life. On the other hand, while social scientists’ treatments of temporality are usually clumsy, their theoretical sophistication and penchant for structural accounts of social life could offer much to historians. Renowned for his work at the crossroads of history, sociology, political science, and anthropology, Sewell argues that only by combining a more sophisticated understanding of historical time with a concern for larger theoretical questions can a satisfying social theory emerge. In Logics of History, he reveals the shape such an engagement could take, some of the topics it could illuminate, and how it might affect both sides of the disciplinary divide.

Laws and Explanation in History

Laws and Explanation in History PDF Author: William H. Dray
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN: 0313207909
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Evidence Explained

Evidence Explained PDF Author: Elizabeth S Mills
Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Company
ISBN: 9780806321370
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Citation style manual for every type of source record and media.

Historical Explanation

Historical Explanation PDF Author: Gunnar Schumann
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000997960
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This book is concerned with the appropriate form of explanations in historiography and the social sciences. It combines action theory and philosophy of historiography and develops a theory of teleological explanations of human actions based on late-Wittgensteinian and Ordinary Language Philosophy insights. In philosophy of action, many philosophers favor causal theories of human action. Additionally, in current philosophy of historiography the majority view is that historians should explain historical phenomena by their causes. This book pushes back against these mainstream views by reviving an anti-causal view of explanation of current and past human actions. The author argues that disciplines that deal with human actions require a certain form of explanation, namely a teleological or intentional explanation. This means that past human actions and their results will have to be explained by reasons of agents, not by causes. Therefore, historiography employs a method of explanation which is in stark contrast to the sciences. The author thus proposes a Verstehen (understanding) approach in historiography and the social sciences. Historical Explanation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of action, philosophy of history, and philosophy of the social sciences.

The Fourth Turning

The Fourth Turning PDF Author: William Strauss
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767900464
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Discover the game-changing theory of the cycles of history and what past generations can teach us about living through times of upheaval—with deep insights into the roles that Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials have to play—now with a new preface by Neil Howe. First comes a High, a period of confident expansion. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion. Then comes an Unraveling, in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world—and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy about how America’s past will predict what comes next. Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four twenty-year eras—or “turnings”—that comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth. Illustrating this cycle through a brilliant analysis of the post–World War II period, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for this rendezvous with destiny.

The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies

The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies PDF Author: Alun Munslow
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 9780415385770
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
With twenty-nine new entries, and updated existing ones, this new edition provides a much-needed critical introduction to the key issues, historians and philosophers and their ideas and theories which have prompted the rethinking of history.

American Historical Explanations

American Historical Explanations PDF Author: Gene Wise
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452909342
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
American Historical Explanations was first published in 1980. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. In this new edition of American Historical Explanations,Gene Wise expands his examination of historical thinking to include the latest work in American Studies, the new social history, ethnography, and psychohistory. Wise asserts that historians address their subjects through an intervening set of assumptions, or what he calls "explanation forms," similar to the philosophical paradigms that Thomas Kuhn has found in scientific inquiry. Through analysis of historical-cultural texts (including the work of V. L. Parrington, Lionel Trilling, and Perry Miller) he defines the forms used by several groups of American historians and traces the process by which an old form breaks down and is replaced by a new set of assumptions. Throughout, he aims to study the process of change in the history of ideas. His conclusions extend beyond historiography and will be useful for those interested in literature, social sciences, and the arts.

The Nature of Historical Explanation

The Nature of Historical Explanation PDF Author: Patrick L. Gardiner
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN: 9780313249761
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
Gardiner approaches the idea of a philosophy of history by first giving an outline of the regularity interpretation of explanation. How far it is possible to regard all historical explanations, or even some, as approximating this pattern, how far the objections philosophers have marshalled against such an assimilation are justified, how far the alternative interpretations suggested correspond to the historian's actual procedure in certain cases; these represent the kind of questions that will have to be considered. By keeping the actual practice of historians constantly in view, he believes that the reader will be able to see some of the disputes that have raged concerning the philosophy of historyin better perspective.