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It has recently been argued that the philosophical study of professional history constitutes a subfield of epistemology. Consequently, the philosophy of history is cast as only one particular species of the general study of the relationship between evidence and theory in scientific practice. This view is based upon an absolute separation between substantive and critical philosophy of history. By such a separation, substantive philosophy of history is dismissed as speculative metaphysics, while critical philosophy of history is vindicated as a respectable branch of epistemology. The attempt to delineate a strictly epistemological realm of history was a central part of the programme for analytically styled philosophy of history in the 1950–1970s era. This programme has been resurrected by contemporary empiricist trends. In this essay, I will argue against the basic ideas of this programme through a reassessment of Hayden White’s so-called narrativist philosophy of history. As I will show, criticizing the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology in history is an essential and important feature of White’s contribution to the philosophy of history. This feature has, I claim, been overshadowed by formalist interpretations of White’s ‘narrativism’. In conclusion, I argue that White’s concept of prefiguration will fundamentally question the viability of current attempts to develop a purely epistemological philosophy of history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Deploying the autobiographical form in this essay, Alun Munslow addresses both a reading of the nature of the text Metahistory and offers a personal contextualised history of his reading and deployment of the text in his own work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its publication 40 years ago, Hayden White's Metahistory has been recognized as a foundational work for the literary analysis of historical writing. Long thought to be primarily concerned with questions of narrative, new interpretations have recently revised our understanding of White's principal aims as a theorist and philosopher of history. What has emerged from these works is a novel view of the status and meaning of tropes in Metahistory, the underlying existentialist engagements that guided White's thinking about them, and the ways in which both served his encompassing goal not only to critique the reigning Rankean paradigm of ‘history’ but to free contemporary historians and historiography altogether from the ‘burden of history’ for the sake of a morally responsible future. The article analyses the ways in which these new interpretations of White alter our understanding of the corpus of his work, from his early article on the ‘burden of history’ to his most recent writings on ‘the practical past’, with a principal focus on the re-readings of Metahistory itself. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My first engagement with the past was prompted by philosophical and political commitments to Plato and Marx and their theories of historical development. But these commitments were soon dislodged by the study of the history of the ideas of historical development of Burke, Locke and Hooker. Prompted by Hooker's intellectual background, these studies, in turn, led to further but different engagements with medieval history--first with the history of medieval philosophy and, from there, with the socio-political formative centuries of the Middle Ages. And then, taking religion as seriously as medieval people had done, but myself not being a believer, I was obliged to ponder problems of the philosophy of religion. Each engagement raised further problems rather than provided solutions and therefore led to the next, which usually differed in kind. The one steady thread was the realisation that since the past has led to the present, these events must have been causally related. According to Popper, causal links are relative to generalisations. But since the generalisations used vary according to times and circumstances, events are linked in endlessly different ways so that one gets a plethora of narratives. The conclusion that all these metahistorical preoccupations required a meta-narrative, or what used to be called a philosophy of history, was logically inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reply to a criticism of an essay by the author found in the same issue. The author states that the critic, Keith Jenkins, only reinforced his arguments concerning how the study of history should be approached. The author explains that Jenkins simply recanted his own statements, including those concerning metonymy and external reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]