This course aims at introducing certain major issues in the philosophy of history. This course will develop the students’ critical and analytical skills, and also challenge them to relate these ideas to broader philosophical and cultural questions over how human society views and understands itself within its own historical context.

This course will examine the use and development of the category of ‘History’ in western thought since the Enlightenment. Initially we will examine the construction and form of the ‘modernist’ account of history, through the close study of writings by, amongst others, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Dilthey. The remainder of the course will then examine how various thinkers have sought to criticize this modernist account of history, beginning with Nietzsche and moving onto twentieth century thinkers such as Carr and Collingwood.