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given set of ideas. A view of the American Civil War, for instance,
is not usually overtly philosophical: a historian working with such
a limited series of events can confine himself to analyzing the
evidence within the framework of what is considered important in
Ms society. In our society the meaningful framework is ordinarily
a combination of political, social, and economic history, with
occasional excursions into the history of ideas. Most historians do
not consider the abstract implications of this context to be a
problem for their work, and most philosophers until quite recently
did not consider the problem important enough to justify their
efforts. This book will attempt to suggest, among other things,
that the framework of meaning is at least as important as the
facts used in determining what these facts will show.It should be clear, then, that ordinary historiography implicitly,
and philosophy of history explicitly, always involves a relation-
ship. On one side of the relationship is always a series of facts;
what changes is what is on the other side. The problem of what
"history" means can thus be divided into three kinds of questions:
1. What is the meaning of history when it is conceived as a
series of past events? In this case the series of events is considered
as having a kind of reality of its own, and the relationship is thus
one to another objective reality with reference to which the events
are ordered. The assumption of people who state the problem
this way is almost always that history really does show something,
and the usual name for this kind of history is "speculative" or
"metaphysical."
2. What does the word "history" mean? What sort of activity is
historical thinking? This changes the meaning of "meaning," and
is the semantic approach preferred at present among philosophers
of history; it is usually called "analytical" or "critical." The rela-
tionship is now not one between an observer and historical data
at all, but between a critic and concepts (which are also facts).
But it does not answer the problem of why history is worth study-
ing. Where metaphysicians are invariably to some extent system-
builders, critics are usually system-destroyers.
3. What is the meaning of history when it is conceived as an
ordering of past events that takes place in our minds here andnow?

-x-

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Publication Information: Book Title: Approaches to History: Selections in the Philosophy of History from the Greeks to Hegel. Contributors: Pardon E. Tillinghast - author. Publisher: Prentice Hall. Place of Publication: Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Publication Year: 1963. Page Number: x.
    
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