The Philosophy of History

The Organic nature of all philosophic reflection can easily be obscured by the otherwise laudable efforts of specialists in such fields as the philosophies of ethics, political theory, and art. Granting the great speculative philosophers of the past, seeking a unified view of the totality of human experience, erred though an excess of undisciplined imagination, it is questionable whether the less ambitious, piecemeal work of the analytic specialist has saved philosophy from mysticism or has so truncated it that all vital connections with a humanity in search of meaning have been severed. The tendency to compartmentalize philosophy is not limited to any area of experience but in this article I should like to restrict myself to a consideration of the consequences of separating philosophy of history from inquiries into individual and political values. In order to appreciate these consequences we must first agree on the nature of a philosophy of history and the role it plays, or should play, in determining our estimation of human values

Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Humanity · Meaning (existential · Mysticism · Order (exchange · Philosophy of history · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Western philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought