Historicism and Its Crisis

The intellectual movement known as historicism dominated the nineteenth century. At its simplest, it is the view that history is an autonomous science. Practically, it holds that every historical epoch is unique and incomparable, thus implying skepticism about general laws or transcendent truths knowable through philosophy. Historicism is anti-philosophical in intent: unsurprisingly, its main proponents were Protestants. This course examines how historicism shapes our views of culture, science, and values. We shall also consider influential critiques by Troeltsch, Nietzsche, and Popper.