Abstract
Whether one speaks of history (“the course of history”) or of story (“to tell a story”), one is invoking the same ancient word, ιστορία, which only later acquired these disparate meanings. “Historical” originally referred to information that cannot be inferred from known regularities and so defies prediction. We are reminded of this sense when certain subjects are referred to as “narrative arts,” i.e., as arts of story-telling. A polyhistor is one who is conversant in many subjects; a histor, then, is simply “conversant.” For the Greeks, history signified a literary genre — the art of telling tales, as opposed to the art of poetry — rather than a particular field of inquiry.1
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Notes
On this point and others, see G. Scholz, “Geschichte,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 3 (Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2007)
Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, rev. ed., tr. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 53
Descartes, Meditations, p. 12 [18], my emphasis. See also the following note by Merleau-Ponty to Descartes’ so-called “dream argument: “We would not know even what the false is, if there were not times when we had distinguished it from the true.” Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, tr. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968) 5
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith, unabridged ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965) 153 [B132-B133].
Cf. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, tr. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 16f
“Historical duration has a beforehand and afterward bound to it, which does not merely involve an intermediate span of time that is indifferent to it, as would a purely temporal earlier and later” (Elisabeth Ströker, “Geschichte und ihre Zeit. Erörterung einer offenen philosophischen Frage,” in Phänomenologische Studien (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1987) 187–215
Husserl, The Crisis, 372 [381n1]. Hegel, in his lectures on the philosophy of history, offers a nearly identical formulation for the Fall as “the eternal history of spirit.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004) 321
Cf. Derrida’s source: Alexandre Koyré, “Hegel à Iéna,” in Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) 147–189
Derrida, Le problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990) 123n31.
By François Wahl, in Philosophie, in Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? vol. 5 (Paris: Seuil, 1973) 139–141, etc.
Cf. Derrida, “Geschlecht. Différence sexuelle, différence ontologique,” in Psyché: inventions de l’autre (Paris: Galilée, 1987) 395–413
See Odo Marquard, “Wie irrational kann Geschichtsphilosophie sein?” in Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschichtsphilosophie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1982) 66–82
Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction, tr. John P. Leavey (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989) 42
Merleau-Ponty, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” in Signs, tr. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964) 159–181
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© 2013 Søren Gosvig Olesen
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Olesen, S.G. (2013). A Philosophical Concept of History. In: Transcendental History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277787_9
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