My mentor, Richard M. Owsley, did a lot of work on the philosophy of history. From R. G. Collingwood to Karl Jaspers, our work & dialogs together drew on a lot of figures in the history of 19th & 20th century philosophy. But the core insights came from Edmund Husserl. Landgrebe, one of Husserl’s last assistants, became a particularly important thinker to me shortly before Owsley passed away. I am very happy to see someone making use Landgrebe who I believe has not gotten his full due in American continental circles let alone in the wider philosophical profession at large.
“Recently I’ve encountered an approach to the philosophy of history that could be called “idealist” (at least in a certain sense), and this is much more persuasive to me that Staloff’s analytical representatives of the idealist tradition, like R. G. Collingwood. I have found this idealist perspective in the work of Ludwig Landgrebe, who was one of Husserl’s research assistants.
The casual reader of this blog might well have picked up on the amount of contemporary continental philosophy that I have read, but it unlikely to have realized the extent to which Edmund Husserl and phenomenology have been an influence on my thought. Nevertheless, that influence has been profound, to the point that many of Husserl’s expositors and commentators have also influenced my thinking. Recently I have been reading some essays by Ludwig Landgrebe, and this has started to give me another perspective on the philosophy of history.”
Related articles
- Philosophy of History in Our Time, Revisited (geopolicraticus.wordpress.com)
- Benedetto Croce: The Philosophy of History and the Duty of Freedom (ovibite.wordpress.com)
- New book on Wittgenstein and Heidegger (jeremyjschmidt.com)
- Struggle with Phenomenology (keithwaynebrown.com)
- On the Metaphysics of Presence (philosophyinatimeoferror.wordpress.com)
- Borromean Critical Theory (larvalsubjects.wordpress.com)
Friday
Much of what I write here, whether commenting on current affairs to delving into the depths of prehistory, could be classed under the general rubric of philosophy of history. One of my early posts to this forum was Of What Use is Philosophy of History in Our Time? (An echo of the title of Hans Meyerhoff’s widely available anthology Philosophy of History in Our Time.) It could be argued that my subsequent posts have been attempts to answer this question (that is to say, to answer the question what is the use of philosophy of history in our time), to demonstrate the usefulness of bringing a philosophical perspective to history, contemporary and otherwise. The reader is left to judge whether this attempt has been a success (partial or otherwise) or a failure (partial or otherwise).
In several recent posts — as, for example in
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