ABSTRACT
The issue of what general method to use in historical explanations is of particular interest to historical theorists and historians interested in the theoretical foundations of their discipline, for it is central to the question of whether there is a difference between the sciences and historiography. This chapter gives an overview of the debate about historical explanations in analytical philosophy of history and critically discusses the presented views. The starting point will be C.G. Hempel’s famous Deductive-Nomological Model of historical explanation, followed by A.C. Danto’s model of narrative explanation. Both views are causalist models of historical explanations according to which the historian’s task of explaining consists in identifying the causes of historical phenomena – in an analogous sense to the sciences. This general view (and its more recent updates) will then be critically discussed, especially from the perspective of a further alternative: the model of rational explanation of human actions defended by such authors as R.G. Collingwood, W. Dray, and G.H. von Wright. According to this view, the historian’s task of explaining historical phenomena consists in identifying the reasons for, not the causes of, actions of historical agents, be they singular or collective. It will be shown why and in what way the subject matter of history can be viewed as consisting of human actions and that human actions are appropriately explained by rational or teleological explanations. Historical explanation is teleological rather than causal, and this marks a decisive difference between historiography and the sciences.
