The Philosophy of History

Dr. Benedict Beckeld discusses why the philosophy of history is still an important sub-discipline.
@BenedictBeckeld
Link to the "Charlottesville and American Tribalism and Reason" video:

[fatherduck]

He is stuck in the library of babel and is recording a youtube video to share his unending knowledge thanks mate!

[turtuy]

Found your channel by accident, and really impressed how informative and good your videos are. Keep doing great work!

[CanRep]

Great video. Thank you the info.



I find Leo Tolstoy's understanding of history to be quite interesting. He seemed to appreciate the multiplicity of forces at play (personal initiative, historical spirit, and cycles).

[jessicainnocent]

Please do more lessons on the various views on philosophy of history. And also, videos on the types of philosophy of history. Thanks for this background knowledge

[daber]

Very interesting. Thank you. I deal a lot with local government boards that claim to preserve history in the built environment. Can you suggest any readings or videos that can help me evaluate the tenets of conserving physical objects as part of preserving history?

[davidlawson]

I’m not a philosopher but I did study history and political science. Now maybe I’m misunderstanding but I was under the impression that Hegel didn’t think there would be an end to history. He thought there would be an ongoing cycle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

[lordstronghold]

Great video. Would love to hear your discussion of the internal contradictions of Foucault as I know nothing about that. Sounds fascinating!

[artemisentriri]

Who first conceptualized the helical pattern - was it Dr. Bekeld?

[simeonsimeonov]

Insightful and informative as always! Keep up the great work, Dr. Beckeld.

On another note, I would like to know more about your opinion on Marxian teleology. While you don't seem to be a great fan of it, I think it is obvious that it has had (and continues to have) a great impact on Western thought (and by this I mean both philosophy and history). So I am curious as to what you, as a philosopher, make of the place--or importance, if you will--of truth in the philosophy of history. That's certainly a question many of the philosophers you mention in your video have had to grapple with; and it is also a question of equal, if not greater, purchase to historians.

Here is my own perspective as a historian. Dialectically speaking, it may be that some of the most philosophies of history have yielded some of the most important breakthroughs in the history of philosophy. (And here we may be thinking not only of Marx but also Kant and St. Augustine.) So, therefore, I believe that as long as we make the stakes of the way we practice any philosophy of history clear, we (qua philosophers) should be fine with speculation. This can perhaps rehabilitate this important branch of philosophy, which, as you point out, has not really kept up with developments in other branches of the field.

[elijahnixey-paton]

In regards to your statement about there being no end of history, I would consider this to be something endorsed by Christianity and Judaism. In Exodus 4 ( where God is a burning bush ), God says to Moses to convey that His name is "I will be what I will be" - that He will be now, and he will also Be later. This seems to encompass both the idea that one will require God now, but also that one will require God into the future. Aside from other pitfalls you may see in belief in God, do you think this story could work to convey this idea?

[oliverd.shields]

I think you're making a category error in this video! XD Namely that you oppose Popper's rejection of teleology in history with what you describe as the "cyclical" view. Popper calls Heraclitus' view "cyclical" and thus differentiates himself from it. But it would be wrong to call your view Heraclitean, since you don't actually hold that "the Golden Age" is going to return every ten thousand years or any such sort of thing. You merely take a kind of (nuanced) evolutionary psychology view of the recurrence of certain behaviours in certain circumstances: and that's why we can learn from history at all (which Popper advocates!), e.g. we can reject a command economy on the basis of what kind of social structures it has when implemented in practice, thus, also, the history of communism discredits communism as a philosophy and so on. The error is: you have this notion of a development of human society spiralling in time, being both a continuous (deterministic) line and a cycle of recurring "structures" (if that's vague enough); whereas there is no reason to believe in the prior part, i.e. that history is deterministic (that's actually what Popper rejects, while he fully embraces the second part, i.e. learning from history, cp. Popper's theory of totalitarianism, which Popper believes happened both in Plato's days and Hitler's!). Two further remarks: the "spiral" view is also, in a sense, that of Marx and his dialectical materialism, that posits the return of certain patterns in the history of civilisations, e.g. class struggle; + I disagree with your assessment "our democracy has pushed further ahead than the Greeks' did" (this is too vague and false if you consider what democracy in ancient Greece actually was like.
Thanks for considering my comment as criticism.

[PSIR_Kumud]

@greek democratization, USA democratization -- helical movement

[musicaccount]

I think the cyclical or spiral pattern of history is mostly a human cognitive mistake - trying to look for patterns, finding the facts that suit them and ignoring the facts that don't. There is no reason for event to occur in similar ways or with similar timelines throughout human existence. That is if I correctly understand the idea of cyclicity.