ABSTRACT

Professor King's concept of the philosophy of history leads him to offer this demonstration of the incoherence, even absurdity, of the notion that the past can have nothing to teach us - whether posed by those who argue that history is "unique" or that it is merely "contextual".

chapter 1|24 pages

Introduction

chapter 2|43 pages

Thinking Past a Problem

chapter 3|16 pages

The Twentieth Century

A History of the History of Ideas

chapter 5|30 pages

Skinner

The Theory of Context and the Case of Hobbes

chapter 6|33 pages

Hobbes

Texts and Contexts

chapter 7|30 pages

Historical Contextualism

The New Historicism?

chapter 9|15 pages

Alasdair MacIntyre

Rationalism and Tradition

chapter 10|6 pages

History via Hypothesis

chapter 11|56 pages

An Ideological Fallacy

chapter 12|8 pages

Ideology as Politics