![]() ![]() “The Modal Definition of Being in Plato’s Sophist” – Melita Classica vol. Put simply: a historia is able to give “unscientific” causal explanations. A historia is able to give causal accounts, but it is unable to discern whether a given cause is essential to the substances involved or accidental. I push back against this view and argue that Aristotle has a richer notion of what a history is, or rather what an “investigation” ( historia) is, since he thinks human history is just giving a historia of human actions. ![]() The traditional interpretation is that Aristotle’s view of histories is so impoverished it becomes difficult to imagine how he even could have a philosophy about something so banal and uninteresting. Aristotle even appears to explicitly denigrate the epistemic value of human history compared to “more philosophic and serious” works such as philosophy or poetry. Such a view of history would, as de Ste Croix points out, suggest a profound ignorance of major historians, most of all Thucydides. The traditional view interprets Aristotle as thinking of histories as only a laundry list of facts. ![]() “Aristotle’s Philosophy of Histories” – Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, vol. ![]()
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