TERM USED FOR DIFFERENT AND INDEED INCOMPATIBLE THEORIES.
It has two main senses. First, that historical events must be seen in their uniqueness and can only be understood against the background of their context. In this sense it is akin to the emphasis on Verstehen in Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutics.
The second sense is that of Karl Raimund Popper (1902-1994) who uses ‘historism’ for the above sense. Historicism for Popper is the view that history is governed by inexorable laws, which the historian tries to predict, and is thus assimilated to science in a way quite incompatible with any appeal to Verstehen.
Popper’s historicism (which he was concerned vigorously to oppose) also gives corporate wholes a life of their own which cannot be explained in terms of the individuals composing them.
Also see: holism
Source:
K R Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (1957)
Table of Contents
- 1 Videos
- 2 Related Products
- 2.1 The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics)
- 2.2 Practicing New Historicism
- 2.3 The German Historicist Tradition
- 2.4 Historicism
- 2.5 The New Historicism
- 2.6 Religion within the Limits of History Alone: Pragmatic Historicism and the Future of Theology
- 2.7 The New Historicism
- 2.8 Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics Book 1)
- 2.9 The New Historicism
- 2.10 Leo Strauss on Political Philosophy: Responding to the Challenge of Positivism and Historicism (The Leo Strauss Transcript Series)
- propensity theory of probability
- falsificationism
- hypothetico-deductive method
- Karl Popper
- negative utilitarianism
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