A Research On The Historical Philosophy Of Edward Carr

This thesis does some general research and analysis into the historical and philosophical thinking of British historian Edward ? Hallet ? Carr(1892--- 1982), which based on the book What Is History of Carr and related Chinese-foreign data.Although What Is History is only a booklet of two hundred pages, it is the unique work that intensively reflects his philosophy of history thinking in Carr’s lifetime. Carr discusses the nature of history, the subjectivity and objectivity of history, the causal relationship between society and individual history, necessity and contingency of history, the relationship between history and morality, the scientific nature of history, the relationship among history, present and future, the progressive standard of history and more in his book. With this book, Carr who has been seventy brought a new vitality to the western history world. In addition, the active debate on his historical and philosophical thought enlightened numerous historians’ thought. The impact of this book is deep and wide in historical world and even we can say that Carl eventually becomes the great master in the historical for this book.The first chapter analyzes the environment of Carr’s historical and philosophical thought from three aspects, for instance, the era environment of 20 th century, the work and life experience of Carr and the ideological source of Carr. Besides, the first chapter introduces the process of his historical and philosophical thought. The paper on the one hand analyzes four characteristics of Carr compared with other philosophy of, which based on the comprehensive and profound unscramble of Carr’s philosophy of history, on the other hand, the thesis expresses some thoughts that implied in Carr’s thought from the second chapter to the fifth chapter.The sixth chapter gives the positioning evaluation of Carr’s philosophy of history in the development of historical thought and morphology philosophy of Carr’s philosophy of history on the basis of summary of features of Carr’s historical philosophical thought.This paper argues that Carr’s philosophy of history is not common philosophy of history. Carr’s philosophy of history is the unity of history and historiography, also the unity of understanding and practice of history, a meta-philosophy of history or metaphilosophy, and the senior form of philosophy of history. All of these are the root reason that Carr’s philosophy of history sustains 50 years everlasting since it comes to the world.