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Post-Analytic Historicism
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 73, Number 4, October 2012
- pp. 657-665
- 10.1353/jhi.2012.0043
- Article
- Additional Information
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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.