TTC - Darren Staloff - The Search for a Meaningful Past Philosophies, Theories, and Interpretations

Course Number 427—16 lectures (45 minutes/lecture)

Taught by: Professor Darren Staloff—City College of New York

What is the point of history? What lessons can be drawn from it? How is history interpreted and understood? Is it an indicator of the future? Can it produce more than just stories—can it offer knowledge?

If these questions fascinate you as they have intellectuals of the last three centuries, then Professor Darren Staloff’s lectures are the spellbinding synthesis of relevant scholarly literature that you’ve been seeking.

This is not a course about dates and events, but one that presents key theories, interpretations, techniques, and visions of the past, leaving you free to select and apply a perspective you feel gives meaning to history.

Professor Staloff achieves this by examining the ideas of key thinkers from the last 275 years, taking each in turn and analyzing the contributions of each to our understanding of history. The result is a course that traces modern man’s struggle to comprehend his place in the world by unraveling the past.

About the professor: 

Darren Staloff received his B.A.. in 1983 and his Ph.D. in 1991, both from Columbia University. Currently an associate professor at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Staloff served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. He also spent three years as a preceptor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University.

Professor Staloff has also been the recipient of such fellowships and awards as the National Endowment of Humanities Fellow (1992), the President's Fellowship at Columbia University (1984-85), and the Harry J. Carman Scholar at Columbia University (1983-84). His books include The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (Oxford University Press, 1998) and he is currently completing a book entitled The Politics of Enlightenment: Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams and the Founding of the American Republic.
 
Part I 

Lecture 1: Issues and Problems

Lecture 2: Mircea Eliade's Cosmos and History and Cyclical Time

Lecture 3: The Early Enlightenment and the Search for the Laws of History—Vico's New Science of History

Lecture 4: The High Enlightenment's Cult of Progress: Kant's "Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View"

Lecture 5: Hegel's Philosophy of History

Lecture 6: Marx's Historical Materialism

Lecture 7: Nietzsche's Critique of Historical Consciousness—On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

Lecture 8: Weber's Historical Sociology

Part II 

Lecture 9: Taking the Long View—Arnold Toynbee and World Historical Speculation 

Lecture 10: Twentieth-Century Neo-Idealism—R.G. Collingwood's The Idea of History

Lecture 11: The Positivist Conception of Historical Knowledge—Carl Hempel's "The Function of General Laws in History"

Lecture 12: Analytic Musings—Arthur Danto's Narration and Knowledge 

Lecture 13: Social History, Structuralism, and the Long Duree—Fernand Braudel's On History

Lecture 14: Post-Structuralism and the Linguistic Turn—Hayden White's Introduction to Metahistory

Lecture 15: Naturalism Revisited—William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples

Lecture 16: The Heterogeneity of Historical Understanding