John Lange (2) (1931–)

I read most books all the way through, but not this one. After 104 pages, with another 500+ pages to go, I gave up. Perhaps the reason for my frustration is that historiography and philosophy are two of my main interests, so I was actually looking forward to reading this book. But I found the author's thoughts quite shallow and his restless style irritated me from the beginning, as he constantly jumped back and forth with random ideas and asides without really finishing up on them.

Basically, the author's idea is that A) nobody has written a philosophy of historiography before and B) logic and semantics, metaphysics, epistemology, axiology and aesthetics are the five cornerstones of philosophy, therefore C) he's going to write about the logic and semantics of historiography, metaphysics of historiography, epistemology of historiography, axiology of histriography and aesthetics of historiography. At first I thought I must have misunderstood this mission statement. Surely no philosopher could think that such a mechanical approach would be a fruitful way to perform an analysis?

But no, that's actually what the author sets out to do. So he starts the book by trying to write about the logic of historiography. The argument goes nowhere and he's forced to conclude that "there is no special or unique logic to historiography" (p.86). Indeed he's right, there isn't. Moving on to semantics, he ponders the meaning of the word "France". Again the argument unravels completely as he lines up an array of bizarre "thought-experiments". Let's pretend that the population of France is moved to a parallel universe, let's pretend that the French and Argentinean people exchange territories, and (on page 104) let's pretend that the United Nations decrees that France doesn't exist. What is France then?

I assume the eventual conclusion was that there is no special semantics to historiography, either. But at this point I was ready to throw this book out the window. I wasn't going to follow through another confused dead-end argument. The author didn't seem competent to write about the philosophy of historiography and there was no way I could imagine that he would have something interesting to say in the 500 pages I had left. So I bailed out and swore to avoid such bad books in the future.

Contrary to the author's assumptions, there actually are many books on the philosophy of historiography. I would especially recommend these:

Paul Veyne: Writing history
R.G. Collingwood: The idea of history
Moses Finley: Ancient history: Evidence and models
Reinhart Koselleck: The Practice of Conceptual History… (altro)