ABSTRACT
In this chapter I offer a short review of the key thinkers that influenced the structure of historical thinking between the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries. I do this to establish the basis for the historian’s engagement with the concept of epistemology surveying its development from the Enlightenment to its expression as Positivism. The reason I do this is to establish how and why the empirical-analytical model became the dominant modernist framework for study of the past even though it was constantly challenged by a metaphysical inclination toward emphasising the role of the mind and aesthetics in turning the past into history.
