Historical Explanation

This book is concerned with the appropriate form of explanations in historiography and the social sciences. It combines action theory and philosophy of historiography and develops a theory of teleological explanations of human actions based on late-Wittgensteinian and Ordinary Language Philosophy insights.

Gunnar Schumann is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. He studied Philosophy, History of Art and Political Science. PhD in Philosophy 2012. He is the editor of Explanation in Action Theory and Historiography: Causal and Teleological Approaches (Routledge, 2019).

1. Introduction 1.1 Overview of the book 1.2 Causalism and anti-causalism in the theory of action and the philosophy of historiography 1.3 Historical overview 1.4 On the conceptual method of this book 2. The Subject Matter of Historiography and the Concepts of Explanation and Causation 2.1 On the subject matter of historiography 2.2 On the concept of explanation 2.3 Excursus: On the concept of causation 3. Action Theory 3.1 What are actions? 3.2 On explaining actions 4. Historical Explanations 4.1 Historical explanations as reason explanations 4.2 Problems of the application of intentional explanations to historiographical subjects 4.3 On collective actions 4.4 Conclusions