Philosophy of History - Isaiah Berlin (1961)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 มิ.ย. 2023
- A reupload of a short talk given by Isaiah Berlin in 1961. Note, the original audio has been improved.
Check out Isaiah Berlin's lectures on Romanticism: • Romanticism - Isaiah B...
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Love me some Isaiah Berlin.
Berlin is talking about Weber's ideal type explanations. There is a basic difference between the natural sciences and the social sciences. His arguments are weighted against the natural sciences rather than the social sciences in explaining history. It seems to me that both Berlin and Popper refused to see a fundamental difference in methodology between the natural and social sciences.
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Berlin makes a good case for why knowledge of an individual, with her particular personality and circumstances, cannot be abstracted; however, I’m still not convinced that societal developments and mass behavior can’t be abstracted. Sure, a mass is only a collection of individuals, but the potential for predicting the behavior of a collection of people is much higher than predicting that of a single person. This is precisely why we can develop the statistical sciences.
One of the things that some philosophers of history do is to downplay the significance of “great men” figures of history like Churchill and argue that, had they never existed, the existing material or economic conditions would have produced similar figures, and the same or similar events would have happened anyway. In this lecture, Berlin hasn’t convinced me otherwise.