Pushing philosophy of history past the post-: The poverty of anti-realism
For the last fifty years—since the publication of Hayden White’s pathbreaking Metahistory (1973)—historians have been confronted with the postmodernist challenge that their accounts cannot represent past reality. Philosophers of history have claimed that the past is beyond reach, fluid, or impossible to depict by the means available to historians, foremost of which is narrative historiography. Such anti-realist views set philosophy of history (or historiography as some prefer to denote it to mark that their object of study cannot be the past itself but only historians’ accounts of it) apart from mainstream philosophers and practicing historians alike. Yet these notions dominate the field. In their recent book The Poverty of Anti-realism: Critical Perspectives on Postmodernist Philosophy of History (Lexington 2023) Tor Egil Førland and Branko Mitrović attempt to push philosophy of history past the post-. They and the other contributors to their book argue that postmodernist historical anti-realism is self-refuting, that its foundational tenets cannot be supported, and that its political implications are anathema to postmodernists themselves. In his talk, Førland will expound on these arguments and suggest a paradoxically postmodernist-appearing explanation of the anti-realist dominance in current philosophy of history.