Philosophy Of History, For The Time Being At Least.

Four essays by way of introduction.

1. What Is Philosophy of History

What is history? E.H. Carr’s question, but not only his, and not the only question of
philosophy of history. But what is the philosophy of history?
For a start, it is something expressed in popular culture. Entertained as it is by the tales of its
History Wars, by the sales pitch that history is fiction, by indulgence in the moral panic that the young
lack historical consciousness, pop philosophy of history is all very much of the times. That such things
are going on is a sign that philosophy is going on. That they can be labelled as issues is a sign that
their historical contingency is acutely sensed. For the familiar labels register a cartoon version of
philosophy of history, and maybe to that extent a self-objectified philosophy of history. Even if the
entertaining debates about history say little that is truly revealing about history, they are, as surviving
evidence of their times — of now— telling symptoms of the contemporary pathos of history and its
philosophical self understanding, symptoms which the times themselves read with acute historical
self-consciousness.
Those who worry about the lack of historical consciousness and feel the need to advocate,
defend or apologise for history, in doing so confirm that contemporary culture can scarcely stop itself
thinking historically, even if badly. The question for philosophy though is why we are so given to
explaining things by telling ourselves how they got to be that way. Are we fooling ourselves if we
think history explains things? Are we history mad?
If I ask why we are so historically conscious in the first place, I can come up with an historical
explanation, briefly: We are narrative animals who inherited a useful inclination to explain events
with a narrative. Subsequent cultural evolution has made historical inquiry second nature. Between
them evolutionary biology and cultural anthropology supply an historical narrative to answer a
philosophical question. Such has been the revolution of thought effected by historical consciousness
that philosophy itself can no longer avoid employing historical enquiry. No philosophical content
whether of aesthetics, ethics and politics, or even the sort of timeless stuff of epistemology and
metaphysics is free of historical qualities. History itself, philosophically considered, is historical.
When philosophy of history resorts to history of history we don’t blink. We expect it. Indeed history,
sharing the condition of all things under the sign of modernity, deliberately reinvents itself, for the
mind set of modernity, like that of progress, is fraught with historical self-consciousness.
Of course when we use the term historical consciousness we are referring to something that
we take to have its own history too. It’s a term that can be bandied about with the handy familiarity of
jargon, but that doesn’t mean it means anything in particular. It has a bet both ways. As consciousness
it suggests something subjective: an individual’s experience of history. But as something with a
history that exceeds any individual, it refers to the forms of life 1 — that is, the mostly unarticulated
cultural assumptions, expectations and attitudes — which supply the cognitive and affective condition
of an individual’s experience of history. Or rather, it refers to a type of experience of history,
reproduced throughout a population, so far as that type of experience is the effect of these historically
specific forms of life. That’s the best I can do to pin it down.
In the first sense, the subjective sense, historical consciousness could, to the empirically
minded, be the object of psychological investigation, but philosophical scruples, and distinctively
modern ones at that, recommend a phenomenological investigation in which the experiential character
of the investigator’s own experience of history is self-explored. Such scruples arise from the post-
Cartesian insight that I don’t experience history and the historical character of the world without my
being here and now to experience it as something here and now. Or something like that.
There is no such thing as historical consciousness in the second sense without the forms of life
that are its condition, that is, without its historical circumstances: the cultural forms and the documents
that make explicit or imply the assumptions and attitudes of the culture. No doubt historical
consciousness in this sense has a history, a history that we can observe so far as we can read it off the
surviving documents. As such it will clearly not be entirely consistent or unambiguous; indeed it will

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often be indicated by disagreements in the documents, and not be a unified consciousness, except at a
high level of abstraction. Even so, disagreement is still only possible within the limits of the mutual
understanding of a culture’s forms of life without which communication as such breaks down.
I am assuming that any particular experience of history reproduces, but only more or less, the
quality of the experience of history that is assumed, described or communicated in the documents of a
culture or a time. Thus I hear on radio that traditional Aboriginal consciousness of time did not
differentiate between past, present and future in the same way as contemporary scientific culture. This
claim, made from observing surviving traces of what were mostly oral cultures, clearly depends upon
modern historical consciousness. At some stage, perhaps already, a traditional consciousness may only
persist as a manifestation of modern consciousness. Strictly speaking traditional forms of
consciousness can only be preserved by modern consciousness as forms of modern consciousness.
Indeed one of the typical expressions of modern historical consciousness is the self-conscious
preservation of traditional forms, such self-consciousness being characteristic of the modern sense that
history has a history. Such a self-consciousness may have been unfamiliar, on the other hand, to the
European middle ages, which is said to have lacked ‘a conception of history as involving a continuous
discovery and rediscovery of what history is’ 2 . I can imagine the experience of these non-modern
forms of consciousness but only vaguely because these claims, like most descriptions of an historical
consciousness, are sketchy. Suspended between vague phenomenology and vague historical
anthropology, I am not at all sure that they are true, and at best they are only fleeting glimpses into
other forms of life anyway. In any case we can only preserve traditional Aboriginal or medieval
European forms of consciousness in forms that are mediated by modern consciousness. To that extent
they are less likely to be experienced with anything like the cognitive or affective character of a belief.
It becomes more likely that they can only be experienced in an objectified way and entertained only as
ideas. Perhaps such ideas could be entertained by an act of faith, thereby believed, and thereby
experienced as forms of consciousness. However faith used in this way is not a form of life familiar to
my consciousness; I can only imagine such faith as a sort forcing of quasi-belief. I should also say that
I would struggle to express my own sense of my historical consciousness in any detailed or
programmatic form not just because it is a matter of the quality of my experience, and not just because
it is something only fleetingly experienced in itself and never at any time in its detail and its entirety. I
would have to express it as a kind of credo even though such a credo would have to be inconsistent,
and even though what mattered were the forms of life of which the credo was the effect. Otherwise it
would be the provenance of phenomenology and to that extent disengaged from its historical context.
Because what matters are the forms of life, an historical consciousness is something better
read from between the lines of a society’s documents, conflicting ones at that, in which case we must
usually read it as we would read symptoms, and not only and not mostly from explicit formulations.
Without attempting a grand historical narrative of the genesis and development of historical
consciousness and without attempting an exhaustive, programmatic description of it, such a reading
can still attempt an analytical description of the forms of life that are the condition of our historical
consciousness, but if the description failed to analyse their historical character it would not be
describing them.
The idea of describing the symptoms of historical consciousness now brings me back to those
issues of pop philosophy of history. History Wars have been fought over questions about what really
happened, and how we should tell another about what happened. We could think about this it in terms
of a theory of historical method or a theory of knowledge: What and how can we know about past
events? Or in terms of ethics or politics: How do we or should we interpret and judge what has
happened and how should it affect our actions? However I think we need to know what we mean by
acts, processes and other events and we need to get a better idea of what we are doing when we
experience or observe events. To do this it might help to just take a long hard look at an event.
There have also been skirmishes in these Wars about the proper subject matter of history:
Why bother with social history when what really matters is politics, economics and war? Why waste
time on the history of gender if ‘the gender order can remain the same and a nation can be conquered
or liberated or fall into civil war or be convulsed by revolution’ 3 ? There are a big questions here, but
not about the truth of what is told. Those who say that history is the history of victors grant power
politics a kind of brute prestige, but the descriptions power records of itself are primarily adapted only
for survival limited to an environment which power itself must maintain. What has counted more

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tellingly in the survival of records, whether true or false, has been the medium of the record. The
prestige is with writing, print, film, audio and video, all properly historical. The big questions are what
survives of the past, why historians select certain events for the telling, and why certain records of
certain events last?
One of the old chestnuts of history considered philosophically is the idea that history, usually
on the grand scale, has a pattern or maybe even follows historical laws. Are there really laws of
history? Then there is the formula term ‘grand narrative’ which could have been coined just to nail any
idea that history is progressive, in decline, cyclical, or theological. It could also be levelled at all those
histories that synthesise their own original, speculative plots. Philosophy itself has resorted to the
historical approach, and is much given to telling big histories of ideas and about itself. It still does.
Calculating that the grander the scale of the story the more philosophical it must be, it is notorious for
spinning big speculative narratives from loose threads. It still is. We could just as well ask though why
there are so many histories and so many narratives and which ones we should tell. What on earth is
going on with all this contingency, all this one-damn-thing-after-another? And how can there be so
many different stories if there is only one past? Grand or modest, how valid are the narratives? Are
they no better than fictions? The underlying philosophical questions here are: What can we say about
the logic of narrative? Is a narrative the sort of thing that is valid or true or what? And what, for that
matter, is truth? The topic is: truth and historical narrative.

That historical consciousness is conscious of itself, and that it is also conscious of itself as an
historical phenomenon are both propositions whose insights mark stages in the history of history as it
is reflected upon by the philosophy of history. This reflexive turn of thought is now such a typical
philosophical move it almost automatically makes any history of history incipiently philosophical. The
sentiment that reflexivity is typically philosophical is also something that belongs to its own historical
circumstances. Though implicit in Greek philosophy, in its form as self-conscious history it seems
especially philosophical since the likes of Hegel recognised it to be so and made it so. Indeed the
recursive move from history to metahistory, reflection to metareflection, has become a formality.
Forget metaphysics. Everything now is metathis and metathat.
Yet for philosophical inquiry to be historical inquiry defies old philosophical habit. Driven by
the desire for the most general understanding attainable, philosophical reflection is always tempted to
step back and see things under the eyes of eternity. Once out of history philosophy expects to be able
scrutinize things not merely in their contingent actuality but as they would be in any possible world.
Metaphysical reflection on some phenomenon of interest has been known to caution: ‘Don’t ask how
it got to be this way. To think this matters is to misunderstand the issue.’ 4 That way it arrives at an
understanding of the matter at hand unencumbered by the particulars of its embodiment and its history.
Such metaphysical thought persists especially in phenomenology, where epistemological doubt about
anything historical or empirical turns for reassurance to the being of experience in itself, the
immediacy of which is taken as guaranteeing its indubitability.
I am wary of concerning myself with a metaphysics of history, when metaphysics has so often
been an impulse to get out of history, and I am wary of taking up metaphysics in its modern dress as
phenomenology, even though I do wonder in a phenomenological sort of way, what it is to be in
history, and what the experience of the historical quality of being amounts to. Philosophy now and for
some time has had to answer any desire to transcend history by asserting concrete existence against
timeless abstraction. What matters is embodiment, actuality in all its contingency and how things got
to be the way they are. That might only be philosophy now and for the time being, and for all that
limited by its times. Indeed phenomenology of history now is for the time being too, and as such treats
embodiment and the quality of historical experience as objects of its investigations. Sure, it is crucial
to acknowledge that whatever is experienced is experienced (by a subject as we say). The insights of
so conservative a philosopher of history as Michael Oakeshott proceed from such an
acknowledgement. But my concern is with the whatever (the object as we say) in this case history,
which, despite the apparent immediacy and perhaps even indubitability of experience as experience, I
take not only to be the object of my interest, but what matters most, preponderant in the scheme of
things even if not immediate. And I can’t help but think that it takes quite a bit of philosophical
abstraction, or mediation, to cotton on to this notion of the immediacy of experience as experience —
the notion only occurs in fleeting senses before Descartes articulated it with his cogito — for what is

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more immediately apparent to experience, and what matters most for experience, is its object.
Appearance and nature and its history have instructed us in a kind of natural philosophy here, probably
for good reason.

So I have written a series of essays and footnotes around the traps of history and philosophy of
history. Where they aspire or stoop to analysis I want them to be analytical of and descriptive of
historical consciousness only so far as analysis is a critical project that avoids reconciling antithetical
notions and acknowledges that its object and its own predicament is historically limited. I don’t expect
or want them to amount to a credo, or a set of positive findings, nor claim be analytical in the sense of
assuming that the task of analytical philosophy is to discover and micro-manage the workings of a
universe of assertions and inferences. To be critical they need to avoid the pre-fabricated forms of
critique that we now find among the aging furniture of positive and orthodox theory, the complacent
critique that lives in comfort off an inheritance it has assumed from the great critical impulses of the
likes of Nietzsche, or Benjamin or the Frankfurt School. Those critical insights have been divided up
and dispersed for display or demonstration purposes among the rest of the trappings of a university
education.
The essays address the questions of philosophy of history, popular or otherwise, that I have
posed above, but not head on. Their thinking is directed to some neglected or misunderstood notions
that frame historical consciousness. I think that important concepts like act, event, fact, truth,
narrative, writing, actual footage, media and selection are often used in thinking about history but
reflection seldom gives them the attention they need. Except maybe for cinephiles or media theorists, I
doubt whether actual footage is even much thought of as an important concept for the philosophy of
history. If only because of the pre-eminent role of media in driving the history of history, I doubt
whether there is a more important concept. Because they are all such everyday concepts, they might
scarcely seem worthy of philosophy. They look banal not profound. As is the case with many of
philosophy’s objects most people think they just understand these things already anyway; they are a
birthright and they become the unquestioned building blocks of theories about history rather than
being treated as the objects of inquiry. If they have been scrutinised, critique has done its work on
them, and now they come with a pretext for disregarding or discarding them. Sometimes I think they
are just misunderstood, sometimes misused or abused. When people start to get philosophical about
history the terms often seem to be used, unconsciously or in some cases even deliberately, as innocent
looking props diverting our attention from theoretical trickery or received doctrine. Even though most
of the terms are well known to philosophical reflection, far too much of the serious thought that
philosophy has given to them is ignored when philosophising about history.
I have written these essays because I could not find philosophy of history or theories of history
that reflected on these concepts to my satisfaction. I’ve written about what I would have liked to read
about. I now hope I find a reader who also wants to read about what I wanted to read about.

2. What is History About?

To raise the zeal of a true antiquary little more is necessary than to mention a name mankind have conspired to
forget.
—Samuel Johnson, Rambler, 132

In the essay at the end of War & Peace, Tolstoy said that historians have told the history of
peoples and humanity in the lives of those individuals who stood in authority. In this practice we see
how history, having emerged from myth, still drags along the interests and failings of the very forebear
that it has laboured to supersede. Even when these histories were explicitly dedicated to the progress
of whole peoples — or the regression — they still could scarcely free themselves from the
predisposition of myth to indulge fame and circumstance and exalt the lives of certain individuals. The
deeds of those who lived ‘a hidden life’ remained, to the observation of Tolstoy’s contemporary,
George Eliot, ‘unhistoric acts’. Though the benefit of these acts accrue to others, they took place
beyond the gaze of kings, ministers and general fame. That is, they were glimpsed through the cloud
of myth and not in light of history.

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 There is not one subject of history but many. I am not sure if it is triumph or failure speaking
when history’s proper subject matter is prescribed, its uses stipulated, or its practitioners authorised as
rightful or not. Gertrude Himmelfarb wants political history, national history, and the history of ideas,
but would rather do without social and other new-fangled histories. John Hirst is convinced women’s
history is not mainstream history. When I read a couple of food writers claim that Lebanese
restaurants were not part of Sydney culture in the 1970s I was amazed at the conspiracy to forget. It
made we want a history of Cleveland St if only to get this little thing right. If this is trivial, history is
trivial. In fact maybe history is trivial, more trivial than its arch defenders would like to think. Maybe
we should ease it off the school syllabus. Still everything makes someone wonder how it became what
it became. What happened? And nothing is too trivial for historical inquiry, because it is fascinated by
what only happened once, that is, by events that are made trivial by time.
Maybe everything is made trivial by time. It is characteristic of modern inquiry that so many
things have come to be seen as the children of time. Certainly we can have no thorough understanding
of anything if we ignore its historical character. Historical curiosity goes everywhere. Everything’s
history.
The history that politicians complain is not being taught in schools is mostly just a bit of
parochial political history, although mostly just fine for being only that. Inga Clendinnen is thankful
though that Gondwana and tectonic plates ‘lie beyond the historian’s jurisdiction’. She’s not a
geologist. But historical inquiry that stops at the old border between humans and nature, or the frontier
where ‘historical consciousness’ emerges from the wilds of prehistory, is needlessly diminished. I bet
even Inga wouldn’t discount geological time in the unspoken historical background of her human
stories. You just don’t have to be a professional geologist to do history well. To discount any truth is
to risk all truth, because a truth only survives by being tested along with other truths. These boundaries
between history and prehistory and culture and nature, so significant in that they seem to mark off
essentially different fields of inquiry, are dissolved by the relentless action of the acid of historical
inquiry. They are boundaries in history and they are defined historically. They are marked in time by
very peculiar biological and cultural events: the latter by the evolution of humans, the former by the
invention of writing, the technology that made historical records possible.
The notion that nature and even prehistory lie beyond the historian’s jurisdiction is itself an
historically specific one. Collingwood was quite sure: history is to be concerned with actions —
human actions — rather than just events. And throughout the history of history this has been largely
the rule, right up to and culminating in the professional academic consensus. The persistence, not to
mention the world historical significance, of the distinction, is enough to incline me to accept it as an
historical fact, not to argue, and to content myself with pointing out that in human history geological,
climatic, and biological events are of the utmost interest anyway. If it were only an administrative
distinction I would leave it at that, but like so much ‘mere’ administration, the distinction has become
hypostatised.
Historical inquiry — that is, inquiry into relations of temporal order, processes of change,
cause and effect, and into events so far as they are unique — is pursued in sciences other than just
those concerned primarily with human action. And these disciplines have repaid history with
descriptions of such general processes as, for example, natural selection, that no historian can ignore.
Under the eye of history, if such different things as actions and purely physical events are essentially
different, that difference has emerged historically. Only in time does mind emerge from matter.
Historical consciousness dissolves essences. This is the great insight that a thoroughly historical
consciousness has bequeathed to all the sciences. Would the science that wants to define itself by
ignoring this most historical of insights, deserve still to bear the name of ‘history’ itself?
Antiquarianism still sounds like an antiquated form of history, but perhaps history that
consigns antiquarian curiosity to its prehistory is impoverishing itself. In the past antiquarian curiosity
about artefacts and languages not only revealed unsuspected events of human history, it revealed new
methods of inquiry. The methods of philology grew out of what we would now call antiquarian
impulse. Philological inquiry preceded the natural sciences in developing methods of historical
inference that revealed the workings of natural selection. And inferences based on understanding
selection processes re-inform the human historical sciences. The discipline of ‘history’ has, in the past,
made sacrifices by defining its boundaries itself. It is probably because he still did not live in times of
sufficient historical self-consciousness that Collingwood did not ask the thoroughly historical question

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about his distinction between mere events and history’s action: How did this distinction come about
and when?
History is a science of what has happened. It is concerned specifically with events so fas as
they are characterised by two features: that they only happen once, and that they have happened once.
A science is historical to the extent that it must pay heed to the uniqueness of events. Otherwise a
science is concerned with events of a kind, that is with events which, as representatives of a kind, are
repeatable.
For most people history is too dismal to be a science, and history, trying to console itself or
fool itself or to make a virtue of what it takes to be necessity, assumes higher roles. ‘Literary’ for
example. However it is history’s honour to be the most dismal of sciences. God knows true historical
curiosity will seldom be satisfied by what historians say; historians themselves would never be
satisfied just to have read no more than what the historians have said. Perhaps historians who wanted
to be read as more than mere glosses on or introductions to their subject matter would be better off
writing about their own times, like Thucydides rather than say Gibbon, so that they are read for their
own experience of their own times. What we call ‘history’ is the science — or perhaps rather the
scientific attitude — that, in chasing down the particular, can mistakenly sense that it has abandoned
the universal. In its obsession with the particular it consigns what is universal to its unconscious and it
can cease to remember that its concern with truth will always link it to scientific universals. Strange
that history, often construed as the discipline of social memory, deliberately makes itself so forgetful.
Only in such forgetfulness would historians ever think their main task was to find general laws of
history, or cringe at their inability to find them. The historical world is the scientific world. It does not
and cannot and would not switch off gravity or the speed of light or natural selection. Nor for that
matter ignore human universals, strict and trivial, loose and contentious, or otherwise.

3. Who Are The Historians?

Everyone’s a historian. History so Montaigne tells us ‘is anybody’s business’ 5 . Inga

Clendinnen 6 says ‘the fine thing about history is that you don’t have to be a professional to do it well’.
In his History of Histories, John Burrows doesn’t want to write a grand narrative that culminates in no
more than what the ‘twentieth-century professional consensus’ has decided history should be. What
historians do in their departments is just one department of history. Even Thucydides’ History of the
Peloponnesian War is not history in the most usual modern sense. A contemporary account of
contemporary events, written by an unsuccessful commander, scrupulously avoiding memoir, we
would probably call it a piece of reportage. What professional historians do, history in the most usual
modern sense, is just everyone’s history done more self-consciously.
Although still not quite happy to become scientific history — as if that would mean sacrificing
not just its status among the humanities, but its literary aspirations — academic history is just one of
several weakly interacting sub-systems of historiography, some professional, some amateur, some pop
culture, some do-it-yourself, each more or less conscious of itself as history, each more or less
systemically organised around a constellation of canonical works, topics, methods, institutional
imperatives and media of choice. Besides academic history there are the histories political news
media, the speculative history of ideas, literary biography, literary non-fiction, biological history, local
history, personal memoir, genealogy, urban myth, and on it goes — all disciplines or pleasures
mediated by the latest and the gamut of information and communications technology, from talk to text
to video.

4. Why Bother With History?

We need history, according to Nietzsche, but not the way a jaded idler in the garden of
knowledge needs it; we need it for life and action. But maybe he was wrong. Maybe we need it the
way John Howard thought we needed it: as the testament of national achievement. A bit like the way
Herodotus and Thucydides said they used it: to preserve remembrance of the great deeds of the
Greeks. But does patriotism, as Goethe said, ruin it? Does that leave us with Tacitus, who sought, ‘to

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rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that
men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved
expressions and base actions’? Or do we need it, as George Santayana thought, because otherwise we
will be condemned to repeat it? Does it repeat itself? Or as Mark Twain said does it only rhyme? Or
do events happen as Marx said Hegel said ‘the first time as tragedy, the second as farce’? Is there
something lawful or lawlike here that we need to understand? Is that why we need it? Or is it just part
of the project of enlightenment anyway. ‘Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to
continue always a child’ according, at least, to Cicero. ‘If no use is made of the labours of past ages,
the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.’ Do we need it for more democratic or
generous purposes, as E. P. Thompson used it, to rescue those who lived through past times ‘from the
enormous condescension of posterity’? George Eliot said, ‘the growing good of the world is partly
dependent on unhistoric acts’, acts which I take to be those that, unless rescued not merely from the
condescension but from the active ignorance of posterity, will disappear forever. The desire to rescue
— from oblivion, condescension or whatever — is a common sentiment here. Tacitus expressed at
least this, long ago. Do we use history to declare what is properly historic, to make historic what
would otherwise not be? To make history?
When E.H. Carr said he suspected that good historians ‘have the future in their bones’ 7 he
implied that we make history to preserve records of past events for the future. ‘History begins with the
handing down of tradition’ and when ‘records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future
generations.’ Translating this into the grander register of a finale he alters the claim into a non
sequitur: ‘Besides the question “Why?” the historian also asks the question “Whither?”’ We make
history because we wonder where past events might lead. True enough of some but this is one of those
writerly moments. The future sounds exalted enough to justify anything to an age that is, as the
environmental historian William Lines said ‘futurist to the point of bigotry.’ 8
Of all people, Nietzsche, the Darwinian despite himself, should have realised that the same
thing can have many uses. ‘While forms are fluid’ he said ‘their meanings are even more so’. History
is a discipline with many uses. To say it has only one use is to limit it by prescription. The value of
history, whether moral, political, aesthetic, or whatever, lies in what it is used for. Or at least this is as
our unreflected model of evaluation would have it: we value something in terms of something else.
What’s the use of this?
The uses of finding uses for history are explanation of, justification for, praise of and
advocacy of historical inquiry. Mostly we hear or read about the uses of history in the advocacy of
historical education, usually that means what someone thinks is the right historical education. Most
would explain in order to justify, justify in order to praise, and praise in order to advocate historical
inquiry and education; but they scarcely explain, mostly advocate, and mostly advocate by praising the
virtues of historical awareness for present undertakings — usually passing political and ethical
endeavours — and praise in order to recommend the familiar pleasures of their own gardens of
knowledge. The desire to praise and celebrate gives their reflections a chance to indulge some biggish
phrases for deepish meanings, a chance to end on a rousing note, and so digressing, pass by the point
of history.
We need make no apology for history. Whether we need history or not, we have it. We tell
stories come what may. We are narrative animals. The point however is to tell them well. As in the
case of the other sciences, we judge the narrative science we call history by the truth of its claims and
by the claims it’s narrative generates.

1
Wittgenstein’s term. Husserl’s term ‘lifeworld’ would do. So would something like ‘cultural context’.
2
Alasdair MacIntyre in his sketch of a history of virtue in After Virtue, 76
3
A line by John Hirst from his essay ‘Women and History’ in Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, 2006,
Black Inc. Melbourne, 40.
4
The sentence comes from Galen Strawson’s essay on ‘Self, Body and Experience’ in Real Materialism, 131-
150, 140
5
In his essay ‘The Doings Of Certain Ambassadors’.
6
In her Quarterly Essay 23, The History Question: Who Owns The Past? Black Inc, Melbourne, 2006, 4.

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7
In What is History (1961), Penguin, 1972, in the chapter ‘Causation in History’, 108. From lectures first
delivered at Cambridge in 1961, the book has endured as a standard English primer for history students on
historical method and the philosophy of history.
8
William Lines in correspondence to Quarterly Essay 9, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2003, 91-96.