ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the main argument of the book, namely that there is a primacy of method for understanding historical relations to the past. Against current trends in theory of history, the present book claims that all relations to the past in historical research are most fundamentally mediated by the logical commitments of history as method, not by concepts of time and literary form. Contrary to revisionary projects for offering psychologistic or empiricist theories for explaining historical relations to the past, this book understands the task of philosophy of history as a descriptive one of explicating the presuppositions, conditions and a priori concepts of the historical method. In addition, and perhaps most controversially, the book claims that contemporary philosophy of history still has much to learn from classical work in the field by R. G. Collingwood, Michael Oakeshott and Peter Winch. In conclusion, this chapter claims that understanding historical relations to the past requires a proper understanding of history as method.
