ABSTRACT
Historians and philosophers ordinarily interrogate the past in rather different ways. For historians, we might say, the objective is to find out about what happened in the past; the philosopher’s task, by contrast, is to make the best use of past discourses to shed light on contemporary problems. In the history and philosophy of geography these different aims have too often been confused. And the result is that many histories of the discipline are presentist in taste and Whiggish in tone; that is to say, they depict geography’s history as a story leading inexorably to present-day orthodoxy, suppressing themes that lack contemporary respectability and ignoring those blind alleys that putatively deviate from the ‘proper’ course of historical development. Such histories amount to little more than propaganda for some particular orthodoxy and it is no surprise that there are just about as many presentist histories of geography as there are definitions of the subject.
