Nominalism and History

doi:10.4236/ojpp.2013.33060

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Open Journal of Philosophy

2013. Vol.3, No.3, 401-412

Published Online August 2013 in SciRes (http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojpp) http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojpp.2013.33060

Nominalism and History

Cody Franchetti

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Columbia Universit y, New York, USA

Email: history@codyfranchetti.com

Received March 23rd, 2013; revised April 23rd, 2013; accept ed May 1st, 2013

tribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the

original work is properly cited.

The paper focuses on Nominalism in history, its application, and its historiographical implications. By

engaging with recent scholarship as well as classic works, a survey of Nominalism’s role in the discipline

of history is made; such examination is timely, since it has been done but scantily in a purely historical

context. In the light of recent theoretical works, which often display aporias over the nature and method of

historical enquiry, the paper offers new considerations on historical theory, which in the author’s view

may solve some of the contradictions that have surfaced in recent times. The Nominalistic stance is ar-

gued against by disputing theorists such as Paul Veyne, who has made a case for Nominalism in history.

A brief philosophical section introduces Nominalism in its metaphysical dimension and the discussion is

speedily brought to its significance for history. The paper also proposes a solution to the misconstrued yet

too often vague application of scientism in history, and offers theoretical grounds that might solve some

of the ‘stormy grounds’ historiography finds itself today. Articles by Marcel Gauchet and History and

Theory’s Anton Froeyman and Bert Leuridan are engaged with, as well as Murray Murphy’s books on the

philosophy of history. Works by Georg Gadamer, Marc Bloch, Benedetto Croce, Hyppolite Taine, and

Anthony Grafton crucially inform the discussion and brace the consequential conclusion.

Keywords: Nominalism; Particulars & Universals in History; Nomothetic History; Empiricism;

Hermeneutics; History as Humanity vs Science; Historical Narrative

Introduction

The role of Nominalism in history has been seldom discussed,

seldom considered, and even more seldom analyzed. Surely if

asked, any historian would tender an opinion on the Nominal-

ist/Realist antithesis, and favor one persuasion over the other as

it relates their convictions about what is sound historical meth-

odology. But most, I venture to say, would recognize that they

have not given deep thought about how this crucial philosophi-

cal argument applies to their historical thinking. The dispute

between Realists and Nominalists has raged in metaphysics for

over two millennia—and is still the source of animated de-

bates—but in historical circles the argument, save a few in-

stances, has not been confronted directly on its own, diametri-

cal terms. The aim of this essay is to present the reader with an

assessment of the role of Nominalism in history, which, as far

as I know, has not yet been wholly laid out for an outright his-

torical readership. Although I shall present the various pertinent

sources and their theories in order for readers to form an opin-

ion of their own, I should like to point out that this essay’s ob-

jective is to discredit the idea that strict Nominalism alone be

an apposite stance in conceiving history. Still, I believe particu-

lars to be the cornerstone for historical understanding; and yet, I

am also convinced that historians who ignore universals and

exclusively scrutinize particulars will find their work wanting

of characteristics, which if overlooked, shall fatally compro-

mise their historical apprehension. In other words, I wish to

show that though particulars have a vital place in history—and

we shall see why—Nominalism is epistemologically deficient,

especially in history, for universals are an inalienable aspect of

human understanding, a n d t h u s are essential for a thorough con-

ception of history and a comprehensive historical grasp: his-

tory’s singularly extensive compass requires a broad vision that

accepts both universals and particulars.

Robert Hume appositely stated that, “[t]he philosophy of his-

tory has long been a stormy ground, and it will probably remain

so.” (Hume, 1999: p. 13) In fact, philosophers of history are

continuously examining and arguing over the ontology of his-

tory; its fractious, hybrid nature is ultimately an endless source

of speculation and fervid discussion. The main point of conten-

tion—which is also fundamental for our analysis—seems to me

the question of whether history is a science or a humanistic

pursuit, and, if it is the latter, how and in what way does it dif-

fer from other humanistic disciplines, due to its para-scientific

slant. While it is not the task of this essay—providentially—to

enter this acerbic dispute, our study of Nominalism and history

must necessarily include a discussion of history as science and

history as a humanity, because those who favor the Nominalis-

tic stance tend toward the persuasion of history as a form of

empirical knowledge, and thus view it through scientific lenses;

on the other hand, Realists envision history as a discipline un-

der the aegis of the humanities, whose epistemic tools are her-

meneutics rather than Method.1

I will show that despite the quagmire of opinions, currents,

and theories, whether one regards history as a science or as a

1As has been shown by Gadamer in Truth and Method. Gadamer, however,

did not write about Nominalism at all.

C. FRANCHETTI

humanistic pursuit strict Nominalism is fatally reductive to

either conviction: it is in serious philosophical tension with the

former and irreconcilable with the latter.

Since Nominalism and Realism’s connection to history can

best be judged with a clear understanding of their more abstract,

philosophical perspective, I will first present the Nominal-

ist/Realist antithesis in its purely philosophical dimension; this

should provide the necessary understanding when the argument

is applied to history. Next, I will cover the few, meaningful

sources that pertain to our discussion; these shall be from dif-

ferent philosophies of history, which examine the question on a

purely historiographical basis. I have already stated that the

sources dealing directly with Nominalism and history are

scanty: philosophers of history who labor either for the scien-

tific or the humanistic view often do not confront Nominalism

and Realism directly, and thus some degree of inference shall

be required to locate their stance from their arguments.2 I will

then cover the most heated and productive dispute—that between

Paul Veyne and Marcel Gauchet, over the legitimacy of his-

torical Nominalism—which is the only modern debate directly

centered on the philosophical and historiographical positions

we are examining. Lastly, I will both attempt to present what

seems to me the most sensible solution to the tendentious,

Nominalist/Realist polemic and provide a sound argument

against these unnecessarily polarized tenets and their role in

history. I hope to provide at the very least, a certain degree of

mental order—of food for thought—rarely furnished to the

practicing historian, on the relation of Nominalism and history.

A Brief Philosophical Preparation

It is a well-known fact that the first to posit the theory of

universals was Plato. This epistemological theory is of cardinal

importance: it has engaged metaphysical speculation since its

inception; its claims have been as fecund as any great question

in philosophy. In fact, whether we know the world through its

intelligible manifestations, through direct perception, or, whe-

ther we only really know the world through Forms, the unintel-

ligible, is really the marrow of epistemology. Throughout his

dialogues, Plato continuously alludes to what he refers to as

“Forms”. The Republic is the classic, most quoted example:

“shall we proceed as usual and begin by assuming the existence

of a single nature or Form for every set of things which we call

by the same name?” (Plato, 1961: p. 820) These words, pro-

nounced by Socrates in the dialogue, are as ambiguous as they

are famous. David Armstrong, who has devoted the most com-

prehensive modern survey of Nominalism and Realism in his

two-volume work, Universals & Scientific Realism, points out

the ambiguity of this passage: “But is Plato here arguing that

the Form is required for the name to be meaningful? That is the

way in which he is often interpreted. However, it is at least as

plausible to suggest that the underlying argument is that same-

ness of name requires sameness of nature in the things named.”

(Armstrong, 1978: Vol. 1, p. 98) Despite the ambiguity of the

act of naming things3 in the statement quoted from Repub-

lic—whether sameness of name requires sameness of nature in

the things named or whether Forms are a prerequisite for the

ability to name things—particulars are understood by Plato to

be a subset of Forms (“the existence of a single nature or Form

for every set of things which we call by the same name”). In

Parmenides, Plato is more specific in detailing the discrete

existence of Forms: “Do you believe that there is such a thing

as likeness itself apart from the likeness that we possess? Cer-

tainly I do, said Socrates.” (Plato, 1961: p. 924) Here Plato is

positing that universals and particulars exist as separate entities.

The Platonic theory of Forms is very complex due to the al-

lusive, almost epigrammatic way which Plato scatters his dia-

logues with his references to them; Plato’s idea of universals is

open to a number of interpretations, which may lead to rather

different conclusions. It is not our concern here to examine the

theory of universals in all its metaphysical ramifications, but to

lay the basic philosophical principles which will be engaged

when discussing Nominalism and Realism and their role in

historical perception; the reader must merely be made aware of

the choices offered by this vital epistemological dilemma: does

our knowledge stem exclusively through our direct perception

of particulars or as an emanation of Forms? Do we accept or

reject the existence of universals? This is the question which

has fomented endless discussion—and in some cases derision:

Wittgenstein famously claimed this problem to be a non-issue.

But let us now define with as much clarity as possible what

Nominalists and Realists believe. I shall call upon David Arm-

strong’s definition for both terms:

There are those philosophers who hold that when we say

truly that two tokens are of the same type, then sameness

is to be understood in terms of strict identity. The two

different tokens have something strictly identical. […] If,

for instance, two different things have the same color,

then this must be taken strictly. One and the same thing,

the color, is a constituent of the two things. Historically,

these philosophers are called Realists and are said to be-

lieve in the reality of universals.

On the other side there are philosophers who think that

when we say that a number of tokens are all of the same

type, then all that we are saying is that the different tokens

are non-overlapping parts of some larger whole or unity

(the tokens are all member of one class, or they all resem-

ble each other in a certain way, or some other such for-

mula). The sameness of the tokens is only loose and

popular.

These philosophers hold with John Locke, that “all things

that exist are only particulars”. There are no strict identi-

ties reaching across different tokens; there are no univer-

sals. Philosophers who hold such a view are traditionally

called Nominalists. (Armstrong, 1989: p. 5)

In other words, Nominalism is the rejection of universals,

while Realism is the belief in their existence. There are various

forms of Nominalism—Concept Nominalism, Class Nominal-

ism, Resemblance Nominalism, which all fall under the so-

called heading of Predicate Nominalism—as well as various

kinds of Realism: Immanent Realism and Scientific Realism.

These distinctions are immaterial to our discussion and I shall

relegate them to broader, strictly metaphysical discussions. It is

now time to speak of the concepts outlined above in relation to

history and see how they affect our conceiving history.

2Such inferences shall not unmotivated and neither discretionary nor arbi-

trary.

3Plato dedicated his Cratylus to discussing the implications of naming

things (especially at the end of the dialogue from sections 438 to 440), man

as a name- gi ving cre ature, and language’s relationship to truth.

402

C. FRANCHETTI

Particulars and History

The first to proclaim that historians dealt above all with par-

ticulars, or “singulars”, as he referred to them, was Aristotle. In

Poetics Aristotle distinguished the historian from the poet as

follows:

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the

one writing prose and the other verse—you might put the

work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a spe-

cies of history; it consists really in this, that the one de-

scribes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of

thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more phi-

losophic and of graver import than history, since its

statements are of the nature rather of universals; the

statements of history are singulars. (Aristotle, 1946: p.

1451b)

Aristotle thus inaugurated the Nominalist viewpoint in the

discipline of history. This persuasion had enough thrust to per-

severe until today and has been the source of many fruitful

debates in historiography, though most debates are not always

conscious of the Nominalism/Realism antithesis at their root

nor its implications when applied to the discipline of history;

furthermore, the friction between universals and particulars is

aggravated, when, as historians, we apply the indefeasible ele-

ment of our discipline—temporality—in our consideration. For

example, when we say that, “a certain person whom we saw

today is the very same person that we saw yesterday […] does

that mean that the person today and the person yesterday are

actually identical?” (Armstrong, 1989: p. 3) Thus we can see

how temporality complicates particulars and their perception,

for we can say with some confidence that the person yesterday

is the same as the person today. But only loosely. Strictly

speaking, “they are different temporal parts of a single four-

dimensional entity, the person.” (Armstrong, 1989: p. 4) This

ties itself to a principle—controversial in philosophy—called

the Identity of Indiscernibles, which holds that “if a and b have

all their properties in common, then a is identical with b. In

other words, sameness of properties gives sameness of thing.”

(Armstrong, 1989: p. 3) Universals, too, are affected by this

principle, for in order to recognize them—just as we do par-

ticulars—we must apply the principle of Identity of Indis-

cernibles. In history, this involves the recognition of sameness

through time for universals—if we believe in them, of course.

But since history is the study of the change of human practices,

particulars clearly bear greater significance for the historian, for

it is by analyzing particulars that we can readily recognize

change: temporality makes particulars dependent on their tem-

porary instant, and therefore significant inasmuch as they reveal

the historical moment we are examining. On the other hand, in

the animated debate between Paul Veyne and Marcel Gauchet,

we shall see that universals are not to be discounted. The dis-

pute was centered on particulars—how, why, and to what ex-

tent they are meaningful in historical inquiry. In examining

their claims, I think what should transpire is that particulars

alone and the refutation of universals—Nominalism—severely

limits the historian’s gaze.

Paul Veyne and the Chimera of the

Nominalist Historian

Paul Veyne is the modern historian who wrote explicitly

about Nominalism and history, and who argued for a Nominal-

ist outlook. He wrote about it in his theoretical writings on his-

tory. His first book, Writing History, is full of driving ideas

about historical methodology as well as fruitful considerations

about the ways a historian crafts his work. Though throughout

the book Veyne offers a number of stimulating insights, he

often stumbles in contradictions that mar the coherence of his

thought: Veyne’s view of history is staunchly Nominalist, yet

his statements are often incongruous with the implications of

Nominalism. Very early he states that, “nothing is more rea-

sonable than a Nominalist conception of history” (Veyne, 1984:

p. 43) and explains the legitimacy of this position by stating

that “we know historical types do not exist in themselves, that

events are not reproduced with the constancy of living species,

that the typical in history is a choice […] in short, the types are

infinite in number, since they exist only through us. Once again,

we have to come to the conclusion of historical Nominalism.”

(Veyne, 1984: p. 121) Veyne’s argument is essentially that the

historian ought to look to particulars and reject universals

—which here he calls “historical types”—sin ce only the former

can reveal the historical moment in its uniqueness, thus imply-

ing that the belief in universals hampers a historian’s under-

standing. In his most well known essay, Foucault Revolution-

izes History, Veyne further expanded this idea:

In short, in any given era the set of practices gives rise, on

a given material point, to a unique historical countenance

in which we think we recognize what is called, in vague

terms, historical science or religion; but what takes shape

at that same point in another era will have its own unique

and very different countenance and, conversely, a coun-

tenance vaguely similar to the earlier one will take shape

at a some other point. This is what denying the existence

of natural objects means: across the ages we do not en-

counter the evolution or modification of a single object

that always appears in the same place. (Veyne, 1997: p.

171)

Again, Veyne makes a powerful and convincing case for the

uniqueness of any historical moment, but he is less persuasive

when he argues that across the ages we never encounter the

same things. A few pages later, Veyne drives this point further:

“there is no concrete trans-historical truth.” (Veyne, 1997: p.

174)

Marcel Gauchet fulminated Veyne for his extreme Nominal-

ist position. In an article called Le nominalisme historien. A

propos de “Foucault révolutionne l’histoire” de Paul Veyne,

Gauchet faulted Veyne for the stringent Nominalism he dis-

played in his essay on Foucault, and claimed Veyne’s ideas to

be the result of a naïve skepticism “scepticisme naïf” (Gauchet,

1984: p. 409), reminiscent of a second-degree scientism that

could never allow authentic historicity. For Gauchet, the

Nominalist epistemology is a “nullifying” philosophy: “[with

his] strange epistemology, no time is seriously considered by

Veyne to historical conditions of formation of this knowledge

of historical fact according to standards of accuracy. This gen-

eralized genealogy excludes but one genealogy: its own. In

other words, everything is historical, except history.” (Gauchet,

1986: p. 407)4 Furthermore, according to Gauchet, Veyne is

ignorant of the foundations of historical methodology. He refers

4Or, étrange épistémologie, à aucun moment il n’est sérieusement réfléchi

chez Veyne aux conditions historiques de constitution de cette connaissance

du fait historique selon des normes d’exactitude. Cette vision généalogique

généralisée n’exclut qu’une généalogie: la sienne propre. Tout est hiostori-

ue, en somme, sauf l’histoire.

C. FRANCHETTI

to Veyne’s “authentic misunderstanding” citing Veyne’s claim

that historians of antiquity and the Middle Ages were a-critical,

because they built their histories upon their predecessors’. Ac-

cording to Gauchet, this view is summary and erroneous, since

Gauchet points out that historians before historicism were in-

deed critical5 but were so with completely different criteria

from our own. For Gauchet, Veyne’s ignorance creates a fatal

blind spot in Veyne’s historical epistemology; it is that spot,

which accounts for the Nominalist’s fortune.

The main task which an authentic epistemology of today

must provide: dissolve the sophisms that naturally result

in this renewed version of universal mobility. The fact

that everything is historical does not mean that everything

is relative, that history is made of nothing but radical het-

erogeneities and woven by singular, incomparable emer-

gences. But it is precisely this challenge, that all is his-

torical, that must be met. What does it mean, exactly?

That death, tears, childhood, dreams, sexuality, folly are

historical in their essence and not like natural objects al-

ways identical with themselves; but what does that truly

mean? Since there is uncertainty about this point, skeptic-

cism and historical Nominalism arise and thrive. (Gauchet,

1986: p. 406)6

However Gauchet did explain particulars’ own, rightful place

in conceiving history, and wrote about it exemplarily: “History

[is] the emergence, the advent of forms than cannot be ex-

plained, except by missing what matters in them, that is, what

these forms have that is incomparable. From this comes the

necessity of the historian’s Nominalism, the only position that

can adequately open him to the inexplicable singularities of a

process of permanent innovation.” (Gauchet, 1986: p. 403)7

Paying close attention to particulars to make the historian

“open to the singularities” of a period is a process which we

shall examine in its metaphysical dimension; but after Gau-

chet’s sensible statement we have established particulars’ exi-

gency and that universals alone are insufficient for conceiving

history. For example, if we consider the idea of “the State” we

surely cannot find much in common among the Roman State in

the first century AD, the State under Louis XIV, and, say, the

bureaucratic Napoleonic State.8 Clearly, if we were to look

exclusively through the lens of forms we’d make historically

insignificant statements. (However, further on I shall present a

more sophisticated concept of universals that discounts Nomi-

nalism in every epistem o log ical maneuver.)

Gauchet thus expounded brilliantly on the need to concen-

trate on particulars in historical enquiry. But the benefits of a

composed Nominalism in conceiving history surely are not new:

“Herder set a universal historical worldview against the En-

lightenment’s teleological view of history […] to acknowledge

that each period has its own right to exist, in its own perfec-

tion.” (Gadamer, 2004: p. 198) I think it should now be evident

that particulars do have a fundamental role in our understanding

of a historical moment.

And yet, as Fustel de Coulanges said, “History is not the ac-

cumulation of facts and events of every sort that have been

produced in the past: it is the science of human societies”

(Bloch, 2005: p. 71)9 and as such, one must be aware that, as

we saw above, contrary to Veyne’s stating the contrary, “trans-

historical truths” exist, because there are constants in human

nature—vanity, rapacity, the wish for a better position in soci-

ety, love, lust, etc. And the historian who disregards timeless

human traits inevitably shall not set them against the period he

is studying—which is of course exemplary and unrepeat-

able—thus finding his compass of vision considerably dimin-

ished by such heedlessness. Furthermore, Veyne’s negation of

trans-historical truths presents another, perhaps greater problem,

especially for historians: a generation inherits certain beliefs

and practices from a previous one; as that transference occurs,

these beliefs and practices gradually change. By denying these

constants the effects of temporality on man are ignored. That is

nonsensical for an historian, whose charge is to be a most sen-

sitive needle on the scale of change over time.

Let us remember Dilthey’s precept that “we can explain

things but we understand men”. This important distinction

shoulders us to what is probably the most insightful quote from

Marc Bloch’s The Historian’s Craft, that undisputed master-

piece of twentieth-century historical methodology: “If men,

who are the object of our study, fail to understand us, how can

we feel that we have accomplished more than half our mis-

sion?” (Bloch, 1953: p. 86-87) Therefore, if we be understand-

ing of men, how could we discount universals, which inexora-

bly constitute his nature? And furthermore, the rightful insis-

tence that these two great historians placed on understanding

over explanation is really a charge that explanation in history

has scientific inclinations, either by virtue of an unobtainable

law-covering model, or by impossible empiricism for the causal

explanations of events. And so, a crucial aporia rises before us

here: a choice must be made between hermeneutic and scien-

tific knowledge, for a hermeneut cannot be an empiricist. This

was demonstrated most powerfully by Gadamer in Truth and

Method: Gadamer revealed hermeneutics to be an ulterior form

of knowledge bearing truth outside Method—the indefeasible

foundation of natural science.

5He is quite right in saying so: see Nadel, 1964.

6[…] la tâche prioritaire que doit se proposer une authentique épistémologie

historique ajourd’hui: dissoudre les sophismes qui paraissent naturellement

découler de cette version renouvelée de l’universelle mobilité. Le fait que

tout est historique ne signifie aucunement que tout est relatif, que l’histoire

n’est fait que d’hétérogénéités radicals et tissé que des surgissements in-

comparables. Mais c’est très précisément à ce défi du tout est historique

qu’il s’agit de répondre. Qu’est-ce au juste que cela veut dire? Que la mort,

les larmes, l’enfance, la rêve, la sexualité, la folie soient d’essence histori-

que et non pas autant d’objets naturels toujours identiques à eux-mêmes,

qu’est-ce que cela véritablement signifie? Car c’est de l’incertitude sur ce

point que naissent et prospérent le scepticisme et le nominalisme histori-

ques.

7L’histoire qui est le surgissement, l’avénement de formes qui ne saurient

s’expliquer , sauf à manquer ce qui compte en elles, à savoir ce que’elles

comportent d’incomparable. D’où le nécessaire nominalisme de l’historien,

seul à meme de l’ouvrir adéquatement aux singularités inexplicables d’un

processus d’innovation permane nte.

8The example is Gauchet’s.

With this in mind, Veyne’s contradictions begin to emerge,

and they reveal to be problematic. Two contradictions in

Veyne’s Writing History, which diminish the efficacy of his

theory considerably, are most pertinent to our discussion. The

first is his statement that “[t]he historical explanation is not

nomologic, it is casual; as casual, it contains something gen-

eral”. Is Veyne flirting here with Realism (“it contains some-

thing general”) and contradicting his purported Nominalism

9La storia non è l’accumulazione degli avvenimenti d’ogni tipo che si sono

prodotti nel passato: essa è la scienza delle società umane.

Marc Bloch cited de Coulages’s affirmation in his last, scattered papers on

history, written just bef or e being sho t in 1944 by the Gestapo.

404

C. FRANCHETTI

with the irruption of universals in historical explanation? Sec-

ondly, Veyne, argues that “history is not a science.” (Veyne,

1884: p. 144) But Veyne, in his essay on Foucault, praised him

for his empiricism—for statements such as, “history becomes

an empirical science of events and that radical mode of being

that prescribes their destiny to all empirical beings, to those

particular beings that we are” (Foucault, 1994: p. 219)—which

according to Veyne made Foucault a better kind of historian.

We have already seen the ontological tension that arises from

these two positions standing side by side, for it is impossible

for them to be bridged in any way.

Even in his most defensible apology for Nominalism Veyne

finds himself hampered by this single-handed theoretical con-

cern: “[…] historical Nominalism, the vague character of sub-

lunary causality, makes it that no order of causes constantly

imposes itself as more decisive than the others.” (Veyne, 1984:

p. 280) I think Veyne’s insistence on Nominalism, is the mani-

festation of a natural and widespread fear among historians

—the fear of being faulted for not being sufficiently analytical.

But analytical acumen is but one ingredient that makes a great

historian. And so, Gauchet’s charge of Veyne’s relative igno-

rance of historical methodology seems correct to me: Veyne’s

statement above, which upon its first reading seems sound, is

really only valid for attempts at causal explanations of histori-

cal events, but it is utterly useless for broader notions of history,

which as I suggested above, must also understand man, and,

gauge with great accuracy the change in human practices. It is

worthwhile here to remember Vico’s celebrated dictum that

history “discloses the realm of culture, not nature”: and so, the

historian who handles culture must take into account human

temperament, and the latter—it should be stressed again—has

universals and forms that ought not to be dismissed. In addition,

Vico’s statement is an excellent refutation—on its own—for

using natural science’s practices (contra Veyne and his empiri-

cal stance).

Despite my quibbles with Veyne’s theoretical writing, I

should like to point out that when he actually writes history,

Veyne is a great historian, and practices history in the most

integral fashion. But in his theoretical writings there is an un-

derlying philosophical uneasiness, which stands in the way of

his speculations. However, this should not diminish Veyne’s

accomplishments in our eyes, since often people do something

very well even if the theory they use to explain what they do is

flawed.

Nominalism’s Attempts at a View of History

Conforming to Scientific Knowledge

An interesting yet defective attempt for a philosophy of his-

tory analogous to science and that brims with sharp Nominalis-

tic positions is offered by Murray Murphy. In his book, Phi-

losophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge, Murphy seeks

rather hopelessly to reconcile the theories of historical causal

explanation put forth by Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim in

their Deductive-Nomological model for scientific explanation

—with which they sought to explain any given historical event

with a series of “logically deductive premises” (Murphy, 1994:

p. 98)—and the concept of “culture”, which according to Mur-

phy must also be considered as an explanation for human ac-

tions. Murphy casts eight propositions about historical knowl-

edge, which he believes to be verifiable; the last is also the

thorniest, for it states that “human actions are casually explain-

able.” (Murphy, 1994: p. x)

For human actions to be casually explainable, Murphy up-

holds to the so-called “covering law”:

This […] model of explanation [is] from the metaphorical

idea that the general law “covers” the particular case. It

involves certain presuppositions that should be noted. One

is that all laws are general, that is, the law cannot contain

any reference to a particular. This was seen as necessary

to rule out “general” statements such as “All chairs in this

room are made of wood”. For the same reason, Hempel

and Oppenheim stipulated that laws could contain only

purely qualitative properties, so that properties referring to

particulars (e.g., “earthly”) are proscribed. (Murphy, 1994:

p. 98)

At first this may seem to be a Realist position, since laws

evince some form of ‘generality’ and are meant to be universal.

But Nominalists hold that only physical particulars in space and

time exist, and that universals, which do not, are at best subse-

quent to particular things; therefore general laws are brought

into being by particulars, and, in the case of history, laws would

provide predictability, which of course is unfeasible. Robert

Hume, who, in his excellent book, Reconstructing Contexts:

The Aims and Principles of Archaeo-Historicism labels himself

an empiricist, attacks Murphy’s view by saying, “I think Mur-

phy is overstating his case. To say that human action has causes

is one thing; to say that we can identify them is something else”

(Hume, 1999: p. 15). The last clause is apodictic: it is disarm-

ingly obvious that every historian who has attempted to predict

the future by using casual explanations for past events to forge

laws for events, such as, say, revolutions, has always failed.

Obviously, the covering law refutes universals categorically

and places Murphy firmly in the Nominalist camp; Murphy

accepts the covering law as an explanation for causality of

events as well as action in history: “I believe there is no real

doubt that the covering law model provides an explanation for

an action […]” (Murphy, 1994: p. 155). Hume expounds on the

reasons for the mania of giving history a scientific footing to

give it epistemological certainty as well as the deriving distor-

tions of such attempts brilliantly.

Historians have long suffered from a dangerous hankering

to be as precise and rigorous as physicists, and more than

half a century ago history took a terrible turn when Hem-

pel published “The Function of General Laws in History”.

Historians spent the next thirty years trying to get out

from under the demands that follow from Hempel’s at-

tempt to impose on history the logical structure of expla-

nation he found in physics. The gist of the “covering law

model” is simplicity itself: explanation can be achieved

“by subsuming what is to be explained under a general

law”.

In the cold aftermath of repentance at leisure, this is mani-

festly a lunatic idea. If history has general “laws”, they are

not of the sort to be found in classical physics. Physical

science attempts to deal with something more or less avai-

lable in the present; history attempts to explain the past

now unrecapturable except via extrapolation from traces.

The degree to which billiard balls can be used to explain

human behaviour is evidently limited. More than a cen-

tury ago Dilthey rightly distinguished between physical

science (concerned with causal explanation of present

C. FRANCHETTI

phenomena) and history (concerned with comprehension

of a vanished past). (Hume, 1999: pp. 15-16)

That a self-proclaimed empiricist like Robert Hume states

unequivocally the fatal pitfalls of scientism applied to history is

significant; and lunacy is indeed what incites a statement by

Michael Scriven, which Murphy quotes in defense of his eighth

proposition, which as we saw above states that “human actions

are casually explainable”, and which Scriven drives to its par-

oxistic locus: “causality is the most important explanatory func-

tion in history.” (Murphy, 1994: p. 102) Now I should like to

know which historian, in Scriven’s or Murphy’s view, has fully

explained the cause(s) of, say, the French Revolution, which is

about the most written event in history. Can an arsenal of “sci-

entists” redact a nomological system for the Revolution? Com-

pared to these desiccated attempts, Hyppolite Taine’s overem-

phasized and infinitely figurative concept of “l’esprit classique”

is indeed a tonic—for the comprehension of the spirit which

animated the Revolution:

[Taine’s] thesis is that the philosophy of the eighteenth

century was the product of the “classic spirit”, which was

invented by Descartes and the essence of which was to

pursue the absolute, and worship uniformity. When the

French mind turned to politics it proceeded to prescribe

according to the dictates of pure reason. This neglect of

the individual, the concrete, the real, was the mark alike in

literature, of the Philosophes and of the Revolution, and

its predominance was the main cause of the tragedies of

modern France. (Gooch, 1952: p. 228)10

Taine, like most historians of the nineteenth century, be-

lieved that history had both scientific and literary claims, which

lent his history to a number of critical approaches. In his great

work, Les Origines de la France Contemporaine, Taine had

mastered the lessons of the august German school of history of

the nineteenth century—that great efflorescence, which had

produced unparalleled works written by men who engaged in

the rigorous praxis of basing their histories on primary sources,

as well as the necessity of understanding the reasons behind the

actions of men. Accordingly, Taine employed a monumental

archival knowledge with an almost unique, insightful psycho-

logical understanding; his great work is thus at the same time

political philosophy, psychological history, social ethics, and,

owing to its unique literary focus, literary criticism as well. For

Taine, history was both an art and a science; his concept of the

“esprit classique” sought—as Dilthey urged—also to compre-

hend, not just to explain. Bloch’s reiteration of this is thus note-

worthy: “This faculty of understanding the living is, in very

truth, the master quality of the historian.” (Bloch, 1953: p. 43)

The rich idea of “l’esprit classique” opposes Veyne’s much

vaunted idea that Foucault’s merit—and supposed superior-

ity—was that he was both an empiricist and a profoundly skep-

tical thinker “who believed only in the truth of facts […] never

in the truth of ideas” (Veyne, 2010: p. 1)11 and that thanks to

this supposedly sharpened, empiricist gaze, he managed to

“peel away the banalities and notice that there is more to ex-

plain” (Veyne, 1997: p. 156) than what was previously under-

stood about a period. But in arguing that Foucault revolution-

ized history Veyne forced the issue.12 Again, the example of the

French Revolution stands before us: if we are to explain it

through facts, such as, among others, the failure of France to

reflect “the change of the distribution of property and wealth

[that] ceased to be the prerogative of a few” (Acton, 2000: p. 1),

or the 1788 drought, we shall find that facts are not at all

enough: I can think of a number of droughts and food shortages

in numerous principalities in the eighteenth century, non of

which resulted in a revolution, as neither did the iniquitous and

anachronistic socio-economic conditions of the Kingdom of the

Two Sicilies in the nineteenth century. Taine’s argument of the

thought that permeated France has much import and cannot be

discounted: unquestionably, ideas do exist and possess a truth

just as facts do, much to Veyne’s discomfiture.

The imposing—and slanted—theoretical structure that Mur-

phy is elevating, is irretrievably weakened by a fatal contradict-

tion, which is his latest work, Truth and History, is most fla-

grantly evident:

History, as all historians agree [sic], is a form of empirical

knowledge. Accordingly, the logic of history is similar to

that of other forms of empirical knowledge. The basis of

historical work is evidence, which as every philosopher of

history, from Collingwood on, has agreed, consists of ob-

servations made on artifacts from the past. […] It follows

that the historian’s basic task is the finding and the inter-

pretation of such artifacts. (Murphy, 2009: p. 177)

Interpretation? Is Murphy stretching his hand to hermeneu-

tics? Again, as with Veyne, the empirically-leaning historian is

faced with the irreconcilable, logical disjunction of being both

an empiricist and a hermeneutist—a hopeless desire. Murphy

also manifests a serious epistemological inconsistency when at

first he states, “as an empiricist, I do not believe there is any

way of knowing reality except through the theory that best ex-

plains our data, and I see nothing to be gained by the belief in

an unknowable metaphysical entity.” (Murphy, 2009: p. 12)

But only a page later, Murphy takes umbrage with Bas van

Fraassen, whom he considers too severe an empiricist, due to

his intransigence,13 which he considers it to be “an extreme

form of empiricism that denies reality to anything not directly

observable by us with our unaided senses.” (Murphy, 2009: p.

14) But empiricism is severe in that it must obey rigorous rules

and it does not allow unobservable data to be admitted for

theoretical purposes. It need be so: if we were to betray its

framework—Method—our entire scientific knowledge would

collapse.

Let me address Murphy’s statement that “History, as all his-

torians agree, is a form of empirical knowledge”. Can empiri-

cism, explanation, causality, and all these conceptual ingredi-

ents of the scientifically minded, yield statements of such pro-

fundity as the following by Johann Huizinga?

The great divide in the perception of the beauty of life

comes much more between the Renaissance and the mod-

ern period than between the Middle Ages and the Renais-

sance. The turnabout occurs at the point where art and life

10For Taine’ s own, extensi ve presentatio n of “l’espri t classique”, s ee Chap-

ter 2 of Book 3 in: Taine, 1986.

11Here Veyne is projecting his thought onto Foucault’s: in The Order o

Things, Foucault evinces a clear regard for ideas and their veracity (See

next footnote).

12Veyne misrepresents his interpretation of Foucault in a number of ways.

For a closer look at Veyne’s flawed interpretation of Foucault, see

Franchetti, 2011.

13See Fraassen, 1980.

406

C. FRANCHETTI

begin to diverge. It is the point where art begins to be no

longer in the midst of life, as a noble part of the joy of life

itself, but outside of life as something to be highly vener-

ated, as something to turn to in moments of edification or

rest. The old dualism separating God and the world has

thus returned in another form, that of the separation of art

and life. Now a line has been drawn right through the en-

joyments offered by life. Henceforth they are separated

into two halves—one lower, one higher. For medieval

man they were all sinful without exception; now they are

all considered permissible, but their ethical evaluation

differs according to their greater or lesser degree of spiri-

tuality.

[…] For the medieval man enjoyment per se is sinful. The

Renaissance had managed to free itself from the rejection

of all the joy of life as something sinful, but had not yet

found a new way of separating the higher and lower en-

joyments of life; the Renaissance wanted an unencum-

bered enjoyment of all of life. The new distinction is the

compromise between the Renaissance and Puritanism that

is at the base of modern spiritual attitudes. It amounted to

a mutual capitulation in which one side insisted on saving

beauty while the other insisted on the condemnation of sin.

[…] Only after the Puritan worldview lost its intensity did

the Renaissance receptiveness to all the joys of life gain

ground again; perhaps even more ground than before, be-

cause beginning the eighteenth century there is a tendency

to regard the natural per se as an element of the ethically

good. Anyone attempting to draw the dividing line be-

tween the higher and lower enjoyments of life according

to the dictates of ethical consciousness would no longer

separate art from sensuous enjoyment, the enjoyment of

nature from the cult of the body, the elevated from the

natural, but would only separate egotism, lies, and vanity

from purity. (Huizinga, 1996: pp. 40-41)

Can logical induction yield insights into human nature such

as this by Fernand Braudel?

Pius V was inde ed one of these “upstarts”, n ot a “ pr i nc el y”

pope, not a man familiar with the ways of the world and

prepared to make those compromises without which ‘the

world’ would not go round. He had the passion, rigour

and intransigence of the poor. (Braudel, 1995: p. 1027)

These excerpts whose breadth reveal a singular comprehen-

sion of the past and of the human spirit is not based on mere

particulars: it is an understanding that springs from the pro-

found knowledge of a period’s facts inspirited with the impulse

of universality and a deep understanding of a specific culture,

which undoubtedly includes particulars, but goes beyond them.

(Reading the work of such historians reveals Collingwood’s

notion that history is really the history of thought applied to

history as bracing.) These remarkable excerpts come from his-

torical masterworks of the twentieth century; both works are

still source of admiration—and discussion. Is it possible that a

Nominalist outlook by itself power such statements? Could the

rejection of universals ever produce such singularly penetrating

insights? I do not think so. A view that sees no strict identities

reaching across different tokens—particulars—as the sole

source of knowledge could never achieve what a Huzinga or a

Braudel has. Surely, I am obviously not concerned with resolv-

ing the dispute—it never shall be—over whether history is a

form of knowledge that is attained through Method, or whether

its knowledge is hermeneutic, different and autonomous from

science, and thus belonging to the field of the humanities, but, I

am concerned about arguing against Nominalism’s inadequacy,

whatever persuasion a historian may hold about the nature of

the knowledge of history.

Murphy is a potent thinker, but he is trapped by an episte-

mology “that is an empirical discipline located within science,

rather than an a priori discipline prior to science” (Murphy,

1994, p. xii)14 and as such, he has an ax to grind, the ax of em-

piricism—a most encumbering ax—and after reading his lucid

but overwrought ruminations one parts from his books feeling

that the ideologue has exerted himself far too much to wield

this ax, which may just be too grueling for history.

The reason for a number of philosophers of history’s case for

Nominalism—and there are a number of them—is, I think, the

fear of the specter of arbitrariness. And so, to avoid being la-

beled relativistic, the insecure historian legitimizes his method-

ology behind a gray scientism. I hope this essay be a warning to

lesser historians who are not a Veyne, and do not possess his

capability of immersing himself in a period’s specificity—

regardless of the way he says one must go about it—and take

refuge in a clerical empiricism which shears all beauty, effect,

and meaning to their writing: the rejection of anything universal

is the death of anything really historical, because it circumvents

the human element—through time, of course—the paramount

object of the historian’s gaze.

Let us examine more closely the claim that predictive laws

and the generalizations they allow, be they casual or non-casual,

are functional or indeed even possible in history. I wish to look

at this more closely, because so much literature has been de-

voted to devise some kind of lawfulness in history. In a recent

article in History and Theory, Bert Leuridan and Anton Froey-

man argue for the use of general laws in historiography without

the more extreme leanings of a Hempel or a Murphy: in no

place do they claim history to be an empirical science. However,

they insist that “laws in history can be made […] clear and

fruitful” (Leuridan; Froeyman, 2012: p. 182) by applying

“pragmatic laws”, a “milder” form of lawfulness developed by

Sandra Mitchell, which essentially holds that “evaluation is

context-dependent” (Leuridan; Froeyman, 2012: p. 177) and

thus “scientific generalizations […] will seldom be completely

universal […]; the important question is how and to what extent

they are contingent. This means that if we want to use a gener-

alization, we need to assess the st ability of these conditions. […]

Stability is a very important parameter for the evaluation of a

generalization’s usefulness.” (Leuridan; Froeyman, 2012: p.

177) Through this context-dependent view Leuridan and Froey-

man believe a scientific generalization resembling a law is be-

lieved to be possible in history.

This argument is astute but it suffers from an ontological fal-

lacy—as we’ve seen repeatedly, that of using scientific prac-

tices to define, delineate, and delimit historical apprehension.

These stilted and somewhat artificial efforts are again the result

of the fear of relativism, as if without some scientifically pos-

tured grounding history would cease to be a sound form of

knowledge, like the natural sciences. These strained efforts

seem to me unnecessary. The sibylline pretensions of causality

in history are the result of a confusion about the epistemology

of history, which in my view is hermeneutics and not scientific

14Murphy fol lows Quine’s view of epistemology and plainly states so.

C. FRANCHETTI

method. If historiographers and philosophers of history did not

have misconceptions about historical knowledge, or if they did

not harbor any uncertainty of any other form of truth that is not

scientific, it seems to me that they would not keep spearheading

historical theory down a spurious path; and a lot of intellectual

energy would not be dissipated.

It is perhaps for this reason, too, that footnotes became such

an essential part of historical writing in modern times; as An-

thony Grafton admirably put it, “footnotes are the outward and

visible signs of this kind of history’s inward grace—the grace

infused into history when it was transformed from an eloquent

narrative into a critical discipline.” (Grafton, 1997: p. 24) In

other words, footnotes are the underpinning of a discipline that

its practitioners and theorists are often fearful could drift into

mendacious waters. Grafton explains that the origin of history’s

uncertainty was, in fact, “the vogue for Cartesian philosophy

and experimental science. That, in turn, explains why Bayl e felt

it necessary to argue, at length, against the fashionable view

that mathematics had an advantage over historical knowledge,

in that ‘it leads to truths not susceptible to doubt’.” (Grafton,

1997: p. 208) We ought to keep in mind that a number of

thinkers, of no less caliber than a Pascal, a Liebnitz, a Spinoza,

a Bayle, a Vico all reacted against this constricting view of

knowledge and argued “that those pure mathematicians and

physicists, who are ignorant of and despise all other forms of

knowledge, are wrong” (Grafton, 1997: p. 210)15 and that “cer-

titudes of history, though different from those of mathematics,

were far more concrete, more applicable to human life, and

even more certain in a metaphysical sense than the profound

abstractions of mathematics.” (Grafton, 1997: p. 208)16

That it was an illustrious scientist, who in modern times

peremptorily contrasted between the two forms of knowledge

we have been discussing is ironic: in a lecture given at the

commencement of the academic year at the University of Hei-

delberg in 1862, Herman von Helmholtz made the historic dis-

tinction between the natural sciences and the human sciences,

declaring the latter to be of superior and humane significance.

It is not easy for a scientific man to convey to the scholar

or a jurist a clear idea of a complicated process of nature;

he must demand of them a great power of abstraction

from the phenomena, as well as a certain skill in the use

of geometrical and mechanical conceptions, in which it is

difficult for them to follow him. On the other hand an art-

ist will perhaps find the natural philosopher too much in-

clined to mechanical and material explanations, which

seem to him commonplace, and chilling as his feeling and

enthusiasm. Nor will the scholar or the historian, who

have some common ground with the theologian or the ju-

rist, fare better with the natural philosopher. They will

find him shockingly indifferent to literary treasures, per-

haps even more indifferent than he ought to be to the his-

tory of his own science. In short, there is no denying that,

while the moral sciences deal directly with the nearest and

dearest interests of the human mind, and with the institu-

tions it has brought into being, the natural sciences are

concerned with dead, indifferent matter, obviously indis-

pensable for the sake of its practical utility, but apparently

without any immediate bearing on the cultivation of the

intellect. (Helmholtz, 1873: p. 9)

Helmholtz also argued against employing natural sciences’

epistemological parameters—what he called “logical induc-

tion”—in the human sciences:

We might possibly, in opposition to logical induction

which reduces a question to clearly-defined universal

propositions, call the moral science’s kind of reasoning

aesthetic induction, because it is most conspicuous in the

higher class of works of art. It is an essential part of an

artist’s talent to reproduce by words, by form, by colour,

or by music, the external indications of a character or a

state of mind, and by a kind of instinctive intuition, un-

controlled by any definable rule, to seize the necessary

steps which we pass from one mood to another. If we do

find that the artist has consciously worked after general

rules and abstractions, we think his work poor and com-

monplace, and cease to admire. On the contrary, the

works of great artists bring before us characters with such

a lifelikeness, with such a wealth of individual traits and

such an overwhelming conviction of truth, that they al-

most seem to be more real than the reality itself, because

all disturbing influences are eliminated. (Helmholtz, 1873:

p. 16)

Finally, Helmholtz made an unequivocal statement about

“aesthetic induction”: “This latter kind of induction, which can

never be perfectly assimilated to forms of logical reasoning, nor

pressed so far as to establish universal laws, plays a most im-

portant part in human life.” (Helmholtz, 1873: p. 15) That a

man who was first and foremost a scientist, a physicist of no

less caliber than the teacher of Max Plank, the pioneer of

Quantum Physics, wrote such resounding words emphasizing

the humanities’ superior importance is a lesson to all of us,

especially to those who doubt the truth that the humanities re-

veal. But Helmholtz was a man of immense breadth of vision

and is a figure in a class of his own who transcended the

boundaries of science and art.17

If we compare Helmholtz’s idea that “logical induction” is

not applicable to human sciences with Veyne’s theory of “ret-

rodiction”, Helmholtz’s superior footing from which he is look-

ing at the humanities is evident: Veyne wrote that, “[h]istorical

synthesis is nothing but this operation of filling in; we shall call

it ‘retrodiction’, borrowing the word from the theory of income-

plete knowledge that is the theory of probabilities. […] So all

‘retrodiction’ calls into play a causal explanation and perhaps

even a true law. To study historical synthesis, or ‘retrodiction’,

is to study the part played in history by induction and in what

‘historical causality’ consists.” (Veyne, 1984: pp. 144-145)

Once again, these statements are spurred from the view that

“logical induction” yields a superior form of knowledge to that

of “aesthetic induction”. But Helmholtz annulled this fallacy. If

Veyne had been acquainted with the modern German school of

17In addition to the countless and fundamental contributions to science—

the law of conservation of energy, the electromagnetic equation, the inven-

tion of the acoustics resonator, the invention of the ophthalmoscope, and

much more—Helmholtz laid out ideas, which were later developed by

Freud that were indispensible for his forming of the concept of the uncon-

scious. Furthermore, this authentic polymath developed the “Helmholtz

resonator”, which was able to identify the pitch and the frequency of any

sound; this machine as well as the book he wrote called On the Sensatio ns

of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music influenced musi-

cologists up until the twentieth century.

15The quote is from Spinoza.

16The quote is from Bayle.

408

C. FRANCHETTI

hermeneutics, which was commenced by Schleiermacher in the

early nineteenth century and culminated with Gadamer18 in the

late twentieth, who knows what interesting flowering of ideas

for historiography would have flourished from his pen!

A Broader Concept of Universals

I wish to show that universals are not an incongruity in his-

tory—and neither in science—if we look at them from a wider

perspective.

I cannot understand these other ingenious theories of cau-

sation. If someone tells me that the reason why a given

object is beautiful is that it has a gorgeous color or shape

or any such attribute, I disregard all these explanations—I

find them all confusing—and I cling simply and straight-

forwardly and no doubt foolishly to the explanation that

the one thing that makes that object beautiful is the pres-

ence in it or association with it, in whatever way the rela-

tion comes about, of absolute beauty. I do not go so far as

to insist upon the precise details—only upon the fact that

it is by beauty that beautiful things are beautiful. (Plato,

1961: pp. 81-82)

In this excerpt from Phaedo, Plato postulates that universals

are capable of acting upon particulars (“it is by beauty that

beautiful things are beautiful”): “In Phaedo, Plato endowed his

Forms with casual power. They act upon particulars, giving the

latter their nature, to the extent that they have a nature.” (Arm-

strong, 1978: Vol. 1, p. 128) Armstrong’s just observation

brings him to theorize that universals and particulars may be

conciliated even in empirical sciences, “since universals match

up with the fundamental particles that science tells us about.”

(Armstrong, 1989: p. 88) That should settle the case for the

importance of universals in history with those, like Veyne, who

tirelessly advocate for Nominalism for conceiving history. Fur-

thermore, Armstrong rightly notes that “particulars have prop-

erties that stand in relations” (Armstrong, 1978: Vol. 2, p. 133)

thus echoing Plato’s Parmenides, “I see nothing strange in […]

a proof that all things are one by having a share in unity and at

the same time many by sharing in plurality.” (Plato, 1961: p.

923) Throughout his two volumes, Armstrong’s thorough dis-

cussion of Nominalism and Realism has the aim of accounting

for universals’ existence as well as their having a role compati-

ble with empiricism; by having shown that universals them-

selves possess properties and relations, which constitute laws of

nature,19 he revoked the incompatibility of universals with

empirical knowledge.

That is a tonic against the most skeptical philosophical

thinkers, and, for what concerns us, the skeptical historiogra-

phers whom we have been examining.

So if an ideal is responsible for a manifestation of a particu-

lar, how would that manifest itself in practice—in conceiving

history? For example, the idea of a unified Christian Empire

existed from Charlemagne to Charles V; but in 800 AD what

was achieved was very different from what the empire came to

be under emperor Frederick II; and that, too, was different dur-

ing Charles V’s rule. Frances Yates, for example, pointed out

that Charles’ abdication in 1555 was an implicit realization that

the figure of an emperor under whom a unified Christianity

could exist was anachronistic: the ideal of a Christian Empire

had vanished.20 In fact, the only real case for the existence of a

Christian empire may be made for the fourth century AD, as

André Piganiol persuasively outlined in his L’Empire Chré-

tien.21 According to him, for seventy years, from 325—the year

of the Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical council of the

Church (promoted by Constantine the Great), in which the

Trinity, the relationship between God the Father and The Son,

the drafting of the Credo Niceum, as well as other fundaments

of doctrinal orthodoxy where settled—to 395—when Theodo-

sius, the last emperor to rule over both halves of the Christian-

ized Roman Empire died and the empire splintered forever in

East and West, with the latter soon disintegrating with the Goth

invasions—according to Piganiol a unified, Christian empire

did exist. The perspective of such works, so rich in historical

comprehension, is certainly the consequence of a regard for

universals as well as particulars. And that seems to me under-

standing of a vanished past of the utmost value, just like the

magisterial examples of Huizinga and Braudel.

With this concept of “powered” universals, even Gauchet’s

justification for Nominalism can be criticized. If history is the

study of change of human practices through time, and if, as

Gauchet suggests, we understand historical events or practice

merely as particulars, and thus Nominalism is “the only posi-

tion that can adequately open him to the inexplicable singulari-

ties of a process of permanent innovation”, how are we to com-

pare these singularities with another, if we do not see particu-

lars as standing in relations? Would it be possible to set, using

our example above, the Council of Nicaea in relation to the

idea of empire? How could we make historical conclusions, if

not against the necessary, immovable fixity of the universal

which the particular we are examining is a set of? And even in

the differentiation of particulars themselves—a fundamental

task of the historian, as we’ve seen in the examples of “the

State” in different epochs—how can one do so without univer-

sals? “Lacking universals, a Nominalist cannot relate them! So

he is nailed to the Humean or the Singularist cross.” (Arm-

strong, 1978: Vol. 2, p. 151)

Dilthey spoke most convincingly of the relationship, and

consequently of the existence of universals when he wrote that,

“The individual always experiences, thinks, and acts in a sphere

of commonality, and only in such a sphere does he understand.

Everything that has been understood carries, as it were, the

mark of familiarity derived from such common features. We

live in this atmosphere; it surrounds us constantly; […] we

ourselves are woven into this common sphere. This results in a

reciprocal dependence the way we apprehend each particular of

the human sciences within the communal, historical whole of

which it is a part […] In the progress of the human sciences,

[…] we apprehend the human world around us [from] the re-

ciprocal dependence of universal and singular knowledge.”

(Dilthey, 2002: pp. 168, 174)

Conclusion

In closing this essay I wish to sum up briefly the conclusions

we can draw about Nominalism in history, and, as a result of

my discussion, offer a view of history that may settle the

18For a discussion of the progre ssion of hermeneutics’ gradual appropriation

of its foundational role in history, see Franchetti, 2013.

19See Armstrong, 1978: Vol. 2, p. 4

20See Yates, 1975: pp. 20-28.

21See Piganiol, 1947.

C. FRANCHETTI

“stormy grounds” of historiography.

Particulars, we have seen, are fundamental for the historian

to decipher, discern, and distinguish the period or the event he

is scrutinizing; but, the consciousness of universals, too, is es-

sential for the apprehension of any human occurrence. Nomi-

nalism or Nominalistic stances are upheld in historiography due

to the disquieting but false pretense that accepting universals

will induce haziness to the historian’s gaze: it is time that histo-

rians lose this fear, for the historian recreates a tapestry of the

past through many “a ‘track’, as it were—the mark, perceptible

to the senses, which some phenomenon, in itself inaccessible,

has left behind.” (Bloch, 1953: p. 55) And so, both particulars

and universals are essential for us to make sense of the

world—even more so for historians who have to make sense of

a world that no longer exists except in traces of it. Armstrong

stated it perfectly when he said that, “[t]he conclusion drawn is

that particularity and universality, irreducible to each other, are

both involved in all existence.” (Armstrong, 1978: Vol. 1, p. xiv)

This statement relates just as well to history.

Therefore particulars are absolutely indispensable, but the

rejection of universals, Nominalism, is absolutely dispensable.

Especially if we accept Armstrong’s wider view of universals

that I have presented above, which makes universals reconcile-

able with empiricism. And that buries Nominalism for a

Veyne—who not only stresses empiricism in historical appre-

hension, but also openly reject universals—but also for a Fou-

cault and a Murphy, whom we have seen fixed on a view of

history as an empir ical discipline.

As to the status of history as an empirical discipline, we have

seen that even if we were to accept the foolish idea that history

is nothing but empirical knowledge, universals still could not

be discounted. I hope to have shown to some extent that Nomi-

nalism in history is a misconstrual of the historian’s methodol-

ogy, since, though essential, the scrutiny of particulars cannot

occur without the awareness of universals. The historian must

therefore harmonize both an empirical stance—especially when

sources from the past are faced—and hermeneutical under-

standing. It is for this reason that history is an enormously dif-

ficult discipline, which Macaulay justly acknowledged to have

but few masters; and it is for this reason that we historians must

constantly be able to shift our thought from a macro to a micro

degree of understanding; historical knowledge is just that.

It is true that history is indeed a form of factual knowledge,

but since it pertains to occurrences in the past that cannot be

tested, it cannot be considered a purely empirical discipline; yet,

of course, there is factual evidence that forbids statements such

as, “Louis XIV waged war against China in the tenth century”.

That satisfies one of history’s offices—that of making accurate,

discernible statements about the past. But obviously history has

—justly—much wider contentions. Where the latter lie, inter-

pretation enters the historian’s arsenal. And it is here that we

are faced with a crux, which has cast an endless conceptual

proble m of hi story ’s natu re: Murp hy has justly sta ted that, “it is

fair to say that the philosophy of history is currently something

of a mess.” (Murphy, 1994: p. x) This “mess” is principally due

to the difficulty for minds grounded in an age which accepts

scientific facts as the only source of truth to bridge the gap

between Method and hermeneutics.22 I think it is precisely here

that the fulcrum of the problem—and the solution—of the phi-

losophy of history lies.

Salient examples are the texts we have examined: Veyne and

Murphy all proclaim in their introductions that “history is not a

science”, but in their discussion of “historical truth” they cannot

hold back from Nominalism or logical formulae with lots of P’s

and Q’s. This rather clearly shows that these historiographers

have not bridged the gap between Method and hermeneutics,

our discipline’s most equivocal aspect, which Anthony Grafton

so rightly defined as “that strange hybrid of science and art.”

(Grafton, 1997: p. 235)

So why are so many theoreticians so attached to a Nominalist

position? As I have already noted, I think it is because in their

eyes the spect er of arbitrarine ss is raised every time we make a

statement that employs universals, for it seems to them that

calling upon universals leads down the relativistic path.

“The generations just prior to our own, in the last decades of

the nineteenth century and even in the first years of the twenti-

eth, were as if mesmerized by the Comtian conception of phy-

sical science. This hypnotic schema, extending to every prov-

ince of the intellect, seemed to them to prove that no authentic

discipline could exist which did not lead, by immediate and

irrefutable demonstrations, to the formulation of absolute cer-

tainties in the form of sovereign and universal laws.” (Bloch,

1953: p. 14)

I believe along with Bloch and many others, that there is no

need to apply scientism to history for fear of not being taken

seriously; I have read endless, dispiriting volumes23 that not

only blindly defend Nominalism but advance even more radical

and misconceived ideas of empirical strictures and law-cover-

ing models for history. The Nominalist view restricts from a

complete and exhaustive understanding of history, because no

matter which view one has of history, Nominalism is deficient,

since it is irreconcilable from a humanistic perspective, and,

from a scientific standpoint, Armstrong has convincingly noted

that “where there are laws there exist universals.” (Armstrong,

1978: Vol. 2, p. 151) But such attempts to apply natural sci-

ences’ systems to history imply that history is incapable of un-

veiling or unveiling truths opposed to scientific understanding.

[…] the human sciences are a long way from regarding

themselves as simply inferior to the natural sciences. In-

stead, possessed of the intellectual heritage of German

classicism, they carried forward the proud awareness that

they were the true representatives of humanism. The pe-

riod of German classicism had not only brought about a

renewal of literature and aesthetic criticism, which over-

came the outmoded baroque ideal of taste and of Enlight-

enment rationalism; it had also given the idea of humanity,

and the ideal of enlightened reason, a fundamentally new

content. More than anyone, Herder transcended the per-

fectionism of the Enlightenment with this new ideal of

“cultivating the human” and thus prepared the ground for

the growth of the historical sciences in the nineteenth

century. The concept of self-formation, education, or cul-

tivation (Bildung), which became supremely important at

the time, was perhaps the greatest idea of the eighteenth

century […] (Gadamer, 2004: p. 8).

I should like to offer at this point a most compelling example

of the untenability of strictly empirical views of history, which

23Mark Day’s The Philosophy of History; Georg Iggers’s Historiography in

the Twentieth Century; What is History Now? Edited by David Carradine; to

cite just a few.

22Here lies Gadamer’s invaluable contribution to our field: the persevering

and patient elucidat ion that hermeneutics is a practi ce and not a method.

410

C. FRANCHETTI

touches ever so closely upon history’s essence itself. Say, for

example, that historian a has read exactly the same texts per-

taining to the Renaissance as historian b. Their vision and un-

derstanding of that period shall inevitably differ considerably.

How can a view of history as an empirical form of knowledge

withstand, let alone explain any discrepancy at all? Here, in my

view, lies the marrow of history’s dilemma: that different ac-

counts would spring from sources identical with each other is

the ever fascinating aspect of history, for history is but the

thought of different men. The very root itself of the word “his-

tory” points to this: its root “his” is the Indo-European “vid”

which simply means “view”, suggesting that the cardinal factor

in history-making is indeed a historian’s own, particular out-

look.

The latter is achieved by integrating judiciously history’s

singular, three main elements, which are unique to it: philology,

hermeneutics, narrative. These are, according to me, the critical,

constitutive elements of history. The first element is the most

scientific in nature. Peculiarly though, it did not have historical

pretensions at first, or, as some would rightly claim, it did not

propose—or expect—to inaugurate modern historiography:

when Lorenzo Valla wrote his devastating On the Donation of

Constantine in 1440, he did not expect that what was intended

mainly as a linguistic feat aimed at proving the Vatican’s for-

gery24 of a document purporting the Church to be the inheritor

of the Roman Empire by the hands of emperor Constantine the

Great would lead to a fundamental branch of modern historiog-

raphy. But it did and from a philological endeavor modern his-

tory sprung into being.25 The second, hermeneutics, is, as I have

been suggesting throughout this essay, the practice through

which an historian understands history and is able to articulate

it. Narrative is the third element of history, which a history

inevitably calls for in writing it. Despite the Annales school of

history displaced for a while a strictly narrative focus—which

was the cornerstone of the vast, synthetic historical works until

the nineteenth century—I agree with Paul Ricoeur that “the nar-

rativist interpretation is correct in its clear perception that the

specifically historical property of history is preserved only by

the ties, which continue to connect historical explanation to our

narrative understanding.” (Ricoeur, 1984: Vol. 1, p. 228) And

even Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean

World in the Age of Philip II which is perhaps the greatest work

to come out of the Annales school, as well as the most argu-

mentative work against narrative in history, in its entirety is

experienced as “a grand narrative of the retreat of the Mediter-

ranean from general history.” (Ricoeur, 1984: Vol. 1, p. 217)

Yet, the narrativist claim is quickly returned in favor and does

not need much defense today: through Arthur Danto, Paul Ri-

coeur and the postmodernist stance of Hayden White, narra-

tive in history has been restored, though, at times, with some

gross exaggerations.

If we were to acknowledge that the historian’s task is to co-

ordinate this triangulation I have outlined, I think many misun-

derstandings and their resulting abuses, which disorient current

historiography would be avoided.

Lastly, I should like to mention Benedetto Croce, who of late

is overlooked in English-speaking historiography. Croce was an

authentic philosopher as well as an historian, who did not ex-

hibit aporias in his thought; he elicited Collingwood’s admira-

tion, who said of him that “it was the clean cut wh ich he [Croce]

made in 1893 between the idea of history and the idea of sci-

ence that enabled him to develop the conception of history so

much farther than any philosopher of his generation.” (Coll-

ingwood, 1946: p. 193)

Croce’s argument toward an identity of history completely

independent from empiricism was to unhinge it from the idea of

“universal history”. Universal history was an inheritance of

German idealism; it was an ideal shared by the German histori-

cal school of the nineteenth century, which believed there was a

history that existed in itself that was an objective act of

self-consciousness part of a wider, collective consciousness.

This was a manifestation of a concept that had originated in the

eighteenth century with Voltaire’s Essai sur les Moeurs, but

which sprouted fully in Germany with Hegel’s concept of

Weltgeist; its effects persisted in historians’ thought throughout

the nineteenth century. Ranke was a paradigmatic example, for

he believed history to be composed of “spiritual beings” which

in their totality would constitute “world history”; Droysen

sought to understand the “inner essence” of things; Dilthey

conceived of the historical world as a text to be deciphered. But

Croce thought that “unless there is some way of knowing the

real that is independent of our data, the postulation of such an

independent reality leaves us with an unknowable ding-an-

sich.” (Croce, 1923: p. 14) Croce then spoke crucially on the

“thing-in-itself” in history: “we know at every moment all the

history that we need to know […] that ‘remaining’ history is the

eternal phantom of the ‘ding-an-sich’, which is neither the

‘thing’ nor ‘in-itself’, but only the imaginative projection of the

infinity of our action and of our knowledge.” (Croce, 1923: p.

55) This statement was Croce’s way of dispelling the notion of

universal history. But Croce made sure to add that “to negate

universal history does not mean to negate the universal in his-

tory.” (Croce, 1923: p. 59)

Nominalism—the rejection of universals—again just seems

to be an unsuitable stance in any sound philosophy of history.

I do not believe that we live in a Fukuyama-like moment (at

the “end of history”) but I do believe that if we continue to

abuse and stretch history’s fabric with theoretical forcings,

Marc Bloch’s warning may come true:

It is not itself inconceivable that our civilization may, one

day, turn away from history, and historians could do well

to reflect upon this possibility. If they do not take care,

there is danger that badly understood history could in-

volve good history in its disrepute. But should we come to

this, it would be at the cost of a serious rupture with our

most unvarying intellectual traditions. (Bloch, 1954: p. 5)

It is our task to see that this not be so.

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