Lectures on the Philosophy of History by Mostafa Malekian, delivered to seminary students at the Dar-e Rah-e Haqq Institute

In these lectures, Mostafa Malekian addresses the philosophy of history in both of its senses. The first eleven sessions are devoted to the philosophy of the science of history (critical philosophy of history), in which he examines the validity of the particular propositions put forward in the discipline of history and raises issues such as the scientific nature of history, causality in history, objectivity in history, and so on. In the final seven sessions, he turns to (speculative philosophy of history), meaning the laws governing past events and the articulation of general propositions about past events, during which the philosophies of history of Hegel (session twelve), Karl Marx (session thirteen), Arnold Toynbee (sessions fourteen and fifteen), Vico, Condorcet, and Auguste Comte (session sixteen; which is incomplete), and Oswald Spengler and Kant (sessions seventeen and eighteen) are presented, critiqued, and evaluated.

Based on indications mentioned during the content of the sessions, these lectures were delivered weekly in the history class of the seminary students at the Dar-e Rah-e Haqq Institute, and their start date is Mehr 1372 (October 1993).

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A Brief Explanation of the Philosophy of History:

The philosophy of history is a branch of philosophy that, using philosophical methods, concepts, and analyses, examines past events and the nature of historical information obtained from the past. The reason for philosophers' attention to this subject is that the concept of history plays a key role in human thought. History draws human attention to changes, the role of material factors in human affairs, and the meanings that humans have assigned to historical events, and provides the capacity to learn from history. History is also of interest to philosophers because it enables a better understanding of the current situation (by illuminating the forces, choices, and circumstances that prevailed in the past and directed the course of history).

Although its exact origin (like other branches of philosophy) is unclear, according to Gordon Graham, this branch of philosophy was born out of religious studies of history (especially Christianity and Judaism) after a series of changes and transformations. According to Gordon Graham, the first prominent philosopher who explicitly attempted to provide a summary outline of the entire world's history was Immanuel Kant (in the book The Idea of a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View). After him, Hegel, in his book Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, attempted to give philosophical and logical meaning to the entirety of human history.

In the 19th century, the philosophy of Hegel, and after him Marx, gradually lost their popularity following the rapid growth of the empirical sciences: the rapid growth of the empirical sciences brought with it empiricism and logical positivism. Hegel's philosophy was criticized from two perspectives: one for failing to satisfy the principle of verifiability (that no experiment could be designed to examine and confirm the theory's correctness through external observations), and the other because this philosophy overlooks historical contingency and emphasizes historical necessity. During this era, Popper's philosophy of science drew the attention of philosophers of history to the tools and methods of historical inquiry.

In this period, there were two different views regarding the methods of historical inquiry: in the view of some, the task of the philosophy of history was to discover the general laws governing historical events, just as the task of the empirical sciences is to discover the general laws of nature. The second group sought to explain the meaning of human behavior. This group of philosophers expressed these meanings in a narrative form rather than deducing them from principles and laws. Neither group succeeded in prevailing over the other, and philosophers gradually lost their motivation and interest in this subject.

Philosophers then began to reflect on the nature of human behavior. This interest in examining the nature of human behavior, along with the revival of German hermeneutics (hermeneutics is a science that attempts to examine texts based on the culture and society of the time of their authorship), led to renewed attention to the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche. Advances in other sciences, such as social theories, had a great impact on the philosophy of history. In this era, the subject of the formation of important philosophical ideas throughout history came under philosophical scrutiny. The studies of philosophers led them to view the "Age of Enlightenment" in the West as an important historical period in the development of philosophy, and furthermore, after identifying this period, to conclude that the world has now entered a new "postmodern" era. In this way, social and philosophical theories of culture were once again revisited and received the attention of philosophy.

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Audio of Lectures on the Philosophy of History by Mostafa Malekian

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Session 1

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Session 2

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Session 3

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Session 4

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Session 12

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Session 18

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