Ya'qubi, the great 9th century Muslim historian and geographer, left significant works behind. However, his innovative approach to exploring history is what he is particularly famous for. He decided to correct, substantially and seriously, the historiographical method advocated by many generations of historians before him, as well as by some of his contemporaries, such as al-Tabari. He deemed that history could not be viewed in isolation from other related scientific disciplines. In his opinion, a historian must be well aware of (...) geographical and natural features of the region he wants to write about, to obtain thorough information of the conceptual and cognitive platform on which its inhabitants based their beliefs, the culture and demographic specificities of the people, and many other details. Only then will he be able to recognize the essence of historical events, and, above all, the purpose and direction of social trends. Ya'qubi paid close attention to political, financial, military and other social turmoil in history. He reported on them very accurately. Yet, he still believed that all those elements were in fact the consequence of a more serious and fundamental factor, cultural history. That is why cultural, thought and spiritual development in the history of different peoples, both before and after the advent of Islam, was the core and mainstay of his research. (shrink)

The aim of this research is to reconstruct a metaphysical interpretation of the philosophy of history with regard to the spirit of historical thinking. The spirit of historical thinking is to emphasize the relation between what happened in the past and historical thinking about the past in the present. However, current philosophies of history, which are largely epistemologically oriented, have not adequately explored this relation. In order to investigate the relation between past and present, I refer to an Aristotelian philosophy (...) of practice and politics, and adapt it to the domain of the philosophy of history, and argue the case for a metaphysical science of history. A metaphysical science of history contains two primary parts. They are the part on physis and the part on technê/phronēsis. With regard to physis that metaphysically investigates the natural generating progress of entities, I argue that the existence of historical events can be understood as a natural developing progress in which the events are ordered in a chronological sequence. Such chronological sequence is essentially the physis of history in the metaphysical sense. For the part on technê/phronēsis, I demonstrate that Aristotelian knowing is for itself an action of knowing, which is located beyond a given temporal position in the past to both the past and the thinking present, and indicates the fundamental Beingness of history. Finally I conclude that the historical eudaimonia, namely the pursuing of the completeness of historical knowledge, is the final presentation of actualizing Geschehenszeit, as it bridges the past and the present in accordance to the spirit of historical thinking. (shrink)

This essay pursues two goals: to argue that two fundamental types of time—the time of objective reality and “the time of the soul”—meet in human activity and history and to defend the legitimacy of calling a particular version of the second type a kind of time. The essay begins by criticizing Paul Ricoeur’s version of the claim that times of these two sorts meet in history. It then presents an account of human activity based on Heidegger’s Being and Time, according (...) to which certain times of the two types—existential temporality and succession—meet in human activity. The legitimacy of calling existential temporality a kind of time is then defended via an expanded analysis of activity that examines where the two times meet there. The concluding section briefly considers a conception of historical time due to David Carr before showing why history is a broader domain encompassing human activity where the two times meet. (shrink)