Historicism [addendum] | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Historicism [addendum]

The debate over the nature of historicism has not yet been resolved, and perhaps never will be; for historicism is a broad, multifaceted phenomenon with highly diverse and often conflicting manifestations. Indeed, the only relationship between the myriad meanings of the term "historicism" seems to be that of family resemblance (i.e. constantly shifting patterns of similarities and differences across the multiple instantiations of the concept).

Nevertheless, it is possible to identify, within the historicist family, one strand that has been significant for the history of philosophy more than any of its counterparts: namely, that which reached its apex in the enormous impact of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer on the human sciences over the second half of the twentieth century. In this light, historicism's most crucial and enduring legacy appears to be the insistence that the historical character of human existence sets it apart from the world of nature, both in its ontological features and in the epistemological exigencies deriving therefrom. At the ontological level, this worldview unpacks the historicity of the human world in terms of the finitude, temporality, uniqueness, and the meaning-laden character of all human phenomena. At the epistemological level, these ontological features render erroneous and futile any attempt to understand historical existence through the prism of universal laws, timeless causal mechanisms, or theoretical abstractions.

Historicism [addendum] article

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