ABSTRACT
I don’t know why historians by and large have little interest in philosophy of history. I suspect it is because their interests are historical and ours are philosophical. I first suspected this when I was introduced to my PhD supervisor in history and raised some basic philosophical concerns with him. I wanted to know what standards were expected of professional historians, more specifically how one justifies descriptions of the past, how one interprets past events, and how one is meant to explain them. Not only was he unable to answer these questions, but it seemed to me he had never seriously considered them. I expect he enjoyed getting into the evidence and drawing conclusions from it, without reflecting upon the logic of what he was doing.
