Author’s note: This review was originally written and put on Amazon in 2019. It was not included on the blog because there were no additional philosophical issues I wished to address. However, it is one of my important reviews, and now that I am no longer posting reviews on Amazon, I decided to bring this one over here.

Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation by Frank Ankersmit, 2012

I am neither a historian nor a philosopher of history, but it’s always worthwhile to expand one’s scope, and especially so with such an engaging book. Dr. Ankersmit is engaged in a multidimensional exploration, not of “philosophy of history” (though variations are touched upon), but rather of the philosophy of writing history.

Ankersmit’s beginning is “historicism”, broadly the idea that what we are today (politically, culturally, economically, and so on) has emerged through history; the actual track that each of these things (and more) took between the past and the present. This idea seems pretty obvious to me, but apparently was not always so considered in the writing of history or philosophy of history. From this point, he explores the difference between science and art as they relate to history, and comes down on the side of art, with contributions from the practice of science playing their part. He argues that art and history are representational. It reflects, to the viewer or reader, an aspect of the work’s subject.

Aspects are related to perspectives. Individuals have perspectives. They are the subjective gestalt of our individual consciousness. Aspects are derived from the external world and constitute a kind of reflection from the world back to our subjective perspective. We project our viewpoint. We get back an aspect — one aspect of a potentially infinite number of them. Aesthetics in art has much to do with aspect (something Ankersmit explores in some detail), and it is the author’s claim that the same is true in the writing of history. Like a piece of art (he uses both painting and literature in his examples), each written history (assuming it respects records of the past and doesn’t merely make stuff up) reflects to the reader an aspect that can be said to genuinely reflect, and so represent, the past to the present.

From here, Ankersmit argues that, unlike [philosophy of] science in which the truth of propositions (and by extension theories) is the primary focus (the “meaning of it all” being secondary), the primary focus of historical writing is the representation of an aspect bearing meaning to the reader in the present. As in art, propositional truth is of secondary importance in historical writing and emerges from the representational meaning of the written work. This is the central insight of the book, carefully built up through its first two-thirds.

In the last third (roughly) of the book, Ankersmit explores the outworking of the insight in various historical writings and how, in particular, aspects build on one another from one history to another, covering the same topic (for example, the Renaissance). The meaning of these aspects emerges only through the reader’s encounter with multiple aspects of the same subject. In effect, the reader has not gotten the “aspectural meaning” of the Renaissance, having read only a single history of it. But meaning emerges (like depth in vision) the moment one reads a second and grows richer with the third, fourth, and so on. Truth in history emerges from meaning (not the other way around, as is the case in science), and meaning emerges from the collective aspects reflected to readers from multiple histories.

There is far more to this book than I can touch upon in a short review; for example, it’s examination of the role of language and the contrasting roles played by it in science, and history/art. The book is beautifully organized. Each chapter has a clearly delineated introduction, arguments divided into sections, and a conclusion that summarizes the chapter’s key points. There are extensive chapter notes that should be read, as many enhance the perspective of the text, though many (not the majority) are not translated from their original German or French. I also found it odd that, while all the works cited are extensively documented in the chapter notes, the Kindle edition (I am not familiar with the paper edition) lacks a bibliography.

This is a book that deserves to be read by every historian and philosopher of history, or, for that matter, art. The historian will more fully appreciate what her writing of history is really accomplishing, and the philosopher will better understand both the scope and limitations of historical writing, which is, after all, the philosopher’s access point to history about which she is writing philosophy.”