The Vein Of Historical Relativism

From the latter half of the 19th century, with the breakdown of the belief of "objective historiography", historical relativism has become an important trend of thought. The decline of realism and rationalism in philosophy aggravated this course, and today historical relativism has come to be the mainstream discourse of historiography. Although it is impossible for most of the historians to accept relativism, the theoretical weapon which is used by the historians to resist historical relativism is only old historical realism, so after the downfall of realism it lacks a new fundamental for historical philology to establish its legality of knowledge.This paper proceeded from the philosophical foundation of historical relativism, tried to reduce the historical relativism to the level of philosophy. In the preface, author presented the significance of the selected title in academic study and the research methods; in the body of the work, author set off from the spring of historical relativism which named historicism, analyzed the theoretical foundation and the main points of historical relativism, and finally put forward the theory of existential-preposition to reconstruct the philosophical foundation of historiography. The main body of the work is divided into five chapters.In the first chapter, the author reviewed the origin and the development of historicism; hold that historicism had a ternary structure of "consistency-Individuality-historicity"; and in combination with the history of philosophy analyzed the process of how historicism developed to be historical relativism.In the second chapter, by the examining of "Geisteswissenschaften" which is the thought source of historical relativism, author analyzed the original context in this question, pointed out that it has actually risen above the kind of dualism construction of "classification principles on material" or "classification principles on form" and pointed to the philosophy of existential.The third chapter tried to find a unitive fundamental idea for historical relativism, pointed out that the central intention of historical relativism is the denial of certainty of historical knowledge rather than the denial of objectivity. In addition, author argued that historical realism can't become the foundation of historical knowledge, oppositely the concept of "the past itself" composed the logical starting point of empirical historical relativism. The fourth chapter began from the analysis of the concept of "historical account can't be verify", combined with the analysis of logical positivism and its verifiability principle, argued that the foundation of verifiability is the critical among texts rather than the immediate certainty of present experience. So author put forward the theory of existential-preposition, considered that the foundation of historical philology is based on the existential-preposition and the text critical of factual system.In the fifth chapter, author looked back on how the concept of "pure historical fact" fell down, analyzed the relationship between subjectivity and historical relativism, in which author thought that it's not subjectivity but the arbitrariness concluded in subjective judgment leaded to historical relativism. Combining with the existential-preposition to redefine the notions of subject and objectivity, author analyzed the subjective judgment, demonstrated the nature of dichotomy between "fact judgment" and "value judgment", and finally suggested that the subjective judgment could be "objective description" at the most basic discourse level of historical discourse by controlling its way of expression.