ABSTRACT
This chapter considers “historicism” as a vital truth practice that arises out of several nineteenth-century philosophers and that is then taken over by several contemporary expressions of Continental and Analytic philosophy. As philosophers carry out their practices of truth, I argue, they employ four distinct modal relations: history is helpful, necessary, sufficient, or prohibitory to the practice of pursuing truth. After elucidating these modalities, I lay out their philosophical implementation specifically in phenomenology, genealogy, existentialism, and anti-realism.
