A sharp distinction between the notions of explanation and understanding is more than relevant for contemporary philosophy. However, it is difficult to understand the current state and prospects of this terminological distinction without considering its origins. The author finds such origins in the field of philosophy and methodology of science of the nineteenth century. One cannot grasp the meaning of explanation and understanding in philosophy without considering the ordinary meanings since both notions are also actively used in the ordinary language. (...) Hence, this paper has a twofold aim. Firstly, it investigates the meaning of explanation and understanding in everyday use. Secondly, it considers the origin of the distinction between the notions in philosophy. It is proven that the origin of the explanation in philosophy can be seen in Auguste Comte’s philosophy of science, namely in the first volume of The Course in Positive Philosophy published in 1830. There Comte introduces the notion of explanation in the context of the law of three stages, as well as the notion of positive explanation which makes positive knowledge or science different from the previous stages of knowledge. As for the origin of understanding in philosophy, it is found in Droysen’s philosophy of history, namely in The Outline of the Principles of History, where Droysen makes a distinction between understanding, which is used in history, and explanation that was discussed by Comte. Consequently, explanation and understanding, after being introduced to philosophy by Comte and Droysen, become the central notions of Dilthey’s well-known methodological distinction between natural sciences and humanities. Manuscript received 16.02.2020. (shrink)

Understanding and explanation are usually considered in the context of continental philosophy in Ukraine, based on Wilhelm Dilthey’s distinction between understanding and explanation as the opposite methods for humanities and natural science respectively as well as relying heavily on hermeneutical philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer when it comes to understanding. However, this is not an exclusive feature of continental philosophy, and this article aims to show that the terms are actively used in English-speaking philosophy. This is done by (...) focusing on philosophy of history and philosophy of science which are the areas that actively use such terms. Considering the number of works within these areas helps to outline the general situation in the English-speaking philosophy and demonstrates that the opposition of explanation and understanding is quite artificial now. The first part of the article regards the two-sidedness of the English-speaking philosophy of history, which means that history seeks to be both science and art. The second part of the article analyses understanding and explanation as they are used in philosophy of science. Particularly, it has been shown that such a classic of analytical philosophy as Georg von Wright considered understanding of the humanities to be a continuation of a teleological explanation as well as explanation within natural science to be a different type of explanation: a causal one. It is also shown that a contemporary researcher Kareem Khalifa introduces an important term ‘explanatory understanding’ which appears in the case of a correct scientific explanation within natural science. Based on the materials involved, the author of the article demonstrates that both areas of contemporary English-language philosophy view explanation and understanding not as antipodes but as co-dependent notions.Manuscript received 10.08.2020. (shrink)

Пояснення і розуміння традиційно вважають методами, які властиві різним галузям наукового пізнання – природознавству та гуманітаристиці відповідно. Натомість у межах цієї статті обидва – пояснення і розуміння – розглянуто як методи гуманітарного пізнання. А саме, звернуто увагу на функціонування пояснення і розуміння як в історії загалом, так і в рамках такого специфічного різновиду історичного пізнання, як біографія. Звернення до біографічного виміру допомагає унаочнити специфіку пояснення і розуміння та розширити уявлення щодо їх застосування в гуманітарних науках. У першій частині статті автор (...) аналізує функціонування пояснення і розуміння в історичному пізнанні загалом. Зокрема, розглянуто каузальне пояснення (пояснювальний нарис за Карлом Гемпелем) та раціональне пояснення (історія ідей за Марком Бевіром), а також розглянуто, як вони співвідносяться із герменевтичними уявленнями щодо розуміння. У другій частині статті висвітлено, як функціонує пояснення і розуміння в біографічних дослідженнях. Проаналізовано біографічне розуміння за Тільманом Габермасом та Неше Гатібоглу, а також випадки каузального та раціонального пояснення у біографічних розвідках. Зокрема показано, що каузальне пояснення не є самостійним поняттям, хоча його й наводять у біографії як пояснювальний нарис. Зауважено, що раціональне пояснення також використовують у біографічних реконструкціях із метою прояснення впливу конкретних подій на переконання особистостей. Аналізуючи залучені матеріали, автор статті демонструє своєрідність пояснення і розуміння в біографії порівняно з їх застосуванням в історичному пізнанні загалом. (shrink)

What is history about? This Element shows that answers centred on the keyword 'past events' are incomplete, even if they are not simply wrong. Interweaving theoretical and historical perspectives, it provides an abstract overview of the thematic plurality that characterizes contemporary academic historiography. The reflection on different sorts of pasts that can be at focus in historical research and writing encompasses events as well as non-events, especially recursive social structures and cultural webs. Some consequences of such plurality for discussions concerning (...) historical methodology, explanation, exemplification, and representation are also outlined. The basic message, reinforced throughout, is that the great relevance of non-event-centred approaches should prompt us to talk more about “histories” in the plural and less about “history” in the singular. (shrink)

A scholar of Hellenistic and Prussian history, Droysen developed a historical theory that at the time was unprecedented in range and depth, and which remains to the present day a valuable key for understanding history as both an idea and a professional practice. Arthur Alfaix Assis interprets Droysen’s theoretical project as an attempt to redefine the function of historiography within the context of a rising criticism of exemplar theories of history, and focuses on Droysen’s claim that the goal underlying historical (...) writing and reading should be the development of the subjective capacity to think historically. In addition, Assis examines the connections and disconnections between Droysen’s theory of historical thinking, his practice of historical thought, and his political activism. Ultimately, Assis not only shows how Droysen helped reinvent the relationship between historical knowledge and human agency, but also traces some of the contradictions and limitations inherent to that project. (shrink)

At the end of the 19th century, most professional historians – wherever they existed – deemed history to be a form of knowledge ruled by a method that bears no resemblance with those most commonly traceable in the natural sciences. The bulk of the historian’s task was then frequently regarded as being the application of procedures frequently referred to as ‘historical method’. In the context of such an emerging interest on historical methods and methodology, at least three textbooks stand out: (...) Johann Gustav Droysen’s Grundriss der Historik (Outline of the Theory of History), Ernst Bernheim’s Lehrbuch der historischen Methode (Handbook of Historical Method), and Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos’s Introduction aux études historiques (Introduction to the Study of History). These books were quite influential in Germany, France, and elsewhere, and they very much helped promote a general idea of historical method that would become relatively consensual among historians of many nationalities by the early 20th century. Such a relative agreement on historical method sponsored both the communication and the development of a sense of disciplinary identity among historians trained within different and sometimes conflicting national traditions. It was then partially extended, partially challenged, and surely made more complex when, from the 1920s on, social and economic historians became a good part of the historiographical establishment in many countries. -/- The three books by Droysen, Bernheim, and Langlois and Seignobos were already pieced together by Rolf Torstendahl, who studied them as a group of texts that, despite their differences, contributed to shape the developments outlined above. However, Torstendahl’s primary aim was to show how Droysen, Bernheim, and Seignobos all resorted to ‘method’ as a way to circumvent skepticism against the possibility of historical knowledge, rather than investigate the internal interrelationships between the three texts. In this chapter I follow precisely this latter, not yet taken, road, focusing on crucial cross-references between the Grundriss, the Lehrbuch, and the Introduction. I intend to show that, at a general level, the schemes of historical method found in these texts are largely convergent, and that this convergence is due to Bernheim’s reading of Droysen and to Langlois and Seignobos’s reading of Bernheim. I will attempt to do it through a regressive approach that starts with an analysis of the Introduction. Aspects of the editorial history and circulation of the three texts will also be briefly addressed, as a way to illustrate their special importance within the framework of early 20th century historical theory. Because my argument calls for a focus on the most general lines of Droysen’s, Bernheim’s, and Langlois and Seignobos’s schemes of historical method, I will, for the sake of consistency, refrain from analysing in-depth the complex epistemological and ontological arguments in which those schemes are nested. (shrink)

This article investigates the emergence of the archive as the primary venue for the production of historical knowledge in the 19thcentury. The turn to archival research, the article argues, may be considered as a response to the discussions about the problems of testimony that dominated 18th- and early 19th-century German writings on the methodology and epistemology of historical research. These discussions, especially regarding the epistemic virtues of witnesses, also helped create the particular culture of knowledge-making within German historical scholarship that (...) enabled the archival turn. The article illustrates these developments through the examples of Johann Peter von Ludewig, who was one of the most prominent historians of the early German Enlightenment, and Leopold von Ranke, who is normally considered the founder of the modern historical discipline and the most important advocate of the 19th-century archival turn. (shrink)

Despite its linguistic roots in ancient Greek, the concept of empathy is of recent intellectual heritage. Yet its history has been varied and colorful, a fact that is also mirrored in the multiplicity of definitions associated with the empathy concept in a number of different scientific and non-scientific discourses. In its philosophical heyday at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, empathy had been hailed as the primary means for gaining knowledge of other minds and as the method (...) uniquely suited for the human sciences, only to be almost entirely neglected philosophically for the rest of the century. Only recently have philosophers become again interested in empathy in light of the debate about our folk psychological mindreading capacities. In the second half of the last century, the task of addressing empathy was mainly left to psychologists who thematized it as a psychological phenomenon and process to be studied by the method of the empirical sciences. Particularly, it has been studied by social psychologists as a phenomenon assumed to be causally involved in creating prosocial attitudes and behavior. Nevertheless, within psychology it is at times difficult to find agreement of how exactly one should understand empathy; a fact of which psychologists themselves have become increasingly aware. The purpose of this entry is to clarify the concept of empathy by surveying its history in various philosophical and psychological discussions and by indicating why empathy was and should be regarded to be of such central importance in understanding human agency in ordinary contexts, in the human sciences and for the constitution of ourselves as social and moral agents. (shrink)

Droysen’s Grundriss der Historik is one of the most important nineteenth-century texts on history, historiography, and historical research. An English version of the work, published in 1893 as Outline of the Principles of History, is the translation reproduced here, with some glosses on the text. A more literal, and also more adequate, rendering of the title is Outline of the Theory of History. “History” in “theory of history” is more closely tied to Historie than to Geschichte—the two German words normally (...) used as equivalent to it. This is in keeping with Droysen’s predominant focus on history as a form of knowledge. However, as will be shown, Droysen’s theory is no pure epistemology, since it addresses not only methodical or representational issues attached to “history” but also material and normative ones. Contemporary and later commentators acknowledged Droysen’s reflections as synthesizing and elaborating the presuppositions of classical German historicism. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer Droysen was the “sharpest methodologist” of the nineteenth-century German “historical school,” whose theory of history had “groundbreaking significance” for the philosophy of the human sciences. As this suggests, the Outline is part of an inquiry on historical method that went far beyond the technicalities of historical research and deep into its epistemic, ontological, moral, political, and religious roots. Many of the Outline’s arguments tackle problems still important within early twenty-first century historical cultures. To a large extent, Droysen’s questions on history and historiography are still our questions. He explored aesthetical and representational issues pertaining to history writing and reception. He strongly contested the single-mindedness of many of his fellow historians about source criticism, calling attention to other important methodical operations in the process of historical knowledge, and to sources other than written, official texts. He insisted that research should be conducted according to a logic of questions and answers, a point now established as part of our methodological common sense. Furthermore, he argued that research questions are embedded in cultural and political dynamics, and accordingly that whatever historical objectivity is, it cannot presuppose the extinction of subjectivity. In Droysen’s Outline, knowledge of the past is depicted as an essentially interpretative way of cognition which is full of ethical potential for the present. By developing a hermeneutical approach that was very explicit about its ethical implications, Droysen illuminated—perhaps like no one else in his century—the enigmatic problem of the nature of the “historical.” . (shrink)