Post-Analytic Historicism

In this essay I reply to five friendly critics of my book The Logic of the History of Ideas—Martyn P. Thompson, Al P. Martinich, Sara R. Jordan, Amit Ron, and Daniel O’Neill. I want to comment on their amendments and extensions to my arguments, but also to suggest my ideas may have rougher edges than they recognize. The Logic described and defended a post-analytic historicism. As a historicist, I argued that human life was ineluctably historical, so explanations of ideas, texts, actions, and practices should rely on historical narratives, not appeals to formal classifications, correlations, systems, or models. As a post-analytic philosopher, I thought of my task as clarifying the implications of our concepts for historical reasoning.