Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography

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 new approach to historiography and will be read by philosophers, historians and social scientists interested in the methodological foundations of their disciplines.

Aviezer Tucker teaches at Queen's University Belfast. He has held research fellowships at the Australian National University, New York University, Columbia University and the Central European University. He has taught at New York University, Long Island University, Trinity College and Palacky University, and he is past president of the Society for Philosophy of History. He works on epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of history and social and political philosophy. In addition to Our Knowledge of the Past Professor Tucker has also published The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence: From Patocka to Havel (Pittsburgh University Press, 2000) and numerous articles in journals like Philosophy, Inquiry, Erkenntnis, Studies in History, Philosophy of Science, History and Theory and Philosophy of the Social Sciences.

'This is an important work on a topic - the development of a scientific approach to historical knowledge. Tucker treats this problem both historically (tracing the emergence of a scientific approach back to early nineteenth-century historians such as Ranke) and also conceptually (grappling with the probabilistic nature of inferences about the past). He also identifies parallel developments in other disciplines including textual criticism and evolutionary biology. The book reminds me of Ian Hacking's work on the history of probability theory, in that both combine history and conceptual analysis in a fruitful way.' Elliott Sober, Stanford University 'This is an important book ... Tucker importantly attends also to the non-scientific and underdetermined nature of historiographic interpretation ... I affirm the importance of Tucker's book. His is a question worth asking.' Journal of Philosophy '... a well-informed and accessible guide to the main modern approaches to the key questions that underlie the writing of history ...'. Historiographia Linguistica