Philosophy of history

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Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and its discipline.^[1] The term was coined by the French philosopher Voltaire.^[2]

In contemporary philosophy a distinction has developed between the speculative philosophy of history and the critical philosophy of history, now referred to as analytic.^{[3][4][5][6][7]} The split between these approaches may be approximately compared, by analogy and on the strength of regional and academic influences, to the schism in commitments between analytic and continental philosophy wherein the analytic approach is pragmatic and the speculative approach attends more closely to a metaphysics (or anti-metaphysics) of determining forces like language or the phenomenology of perception at the level of background assumptions.

At the level of practice, the analytic approach questions the meaning and purpose of the historical process whereas the speculative approach studies the foundations and implications of history and the historical method.^[8][9] The names of these are derived from C. D. Broad's distinction between critical philosophy and speculative philosophy.^{[10][11][verification needed]}

The divergence between these approaches crystallizes in the disagreements between Hume and Kant on the question of causality. Hume and Kant may be viewed in retrospect—by expressive anachronism—as analytic and speculative, respectively. Historians like Foucault or Hannah Arendt, who tend to be spoken of as theorists or philosophers before they are acknowledged as historians, may largely be identified with the speculative approach whereas generic academic history tends to be cleave to analytic and narrative approaches.