ABSTRACT
Judging from the contemporary debate in the philosophy of history, philosophers seem to think of history as an important but also a very peculiar discipline. They cannot make up their minds on how exactly to describe the epistemic status of historical knowledge or how exactly to situate history among human activities ranging from the arts to the natural sciences. The difficulty of philosophically accounting for the character of history goes back to the very beginning of history as a professional discipline within academia in the nineteenth century. Within the context of positivism these claims to show history to be a scientific subject were, however, never fully accepted. History’s claim to objectivity might have been expected to fare better in the context of a post-positivist and post-empiricist conception of the natural sciences in the aftermath of the publication of Kuhn’s pivotal The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. History is indeed equal to the sciences insofar as its truth and objectivity is concerned.
