The Research On Michael Oakeshott's Historical Thoughts

Michael Oakshott was a famous British conservative politician and a historical philosopher.The reflections about the nature and connotation of historical philosophy and historical activities are reflected in his representative works such as "Experiences and Its Mode" and "On History and Other Essays".In Oakeshott's thought,his experience theory holds that experience is a ideal world that exists in the reality,a ideal world with coherence and unity,a world of experience is a real world,and things outside of experience are nothing and human beings can't understand.The goal of philosophy is to pursue an experience world with absolute coherence and unity.However,people in reality tend to have easier access to artificial,decentralized and partial ideal worlds.These ideal worlds based on different assumptions are experience modes.History is one of the experience mode,Oakeshott takes history as an abstract ideal world,an experience mode,which is original and influential.Under the historical experience mode.Oakeshott gave the explanation of the concept of premise hypotheses,including the concept of "historical past",facts,historical individuality,and historical explanations.Looking at Oakeshott's historical thoughts,we can see that his historical thoughts contain many postmodernist historical factors,including the denial of the existence of objective facts of the past,the historical ideas are based on the characteristics of the basis of interpretation and the uncertainty of history itself and the facts found in the contingency,as well as the historical outlook based on experience.On the comparison of Oakeshott's historical thoughts with collingwood and Croce,it can be seen that Oakeshoot's views on the philosophy of history have always been in the front of the historical trend,he think that the historical philosophy is different from the history,and the historical philosophers and historians do the completely different work,and the research objects of the two are completely different.Oakeshott also carried out a process of tracing the result of the re-enact in the mind about collingwood,and inferred that the result was a world of ideas formed by historians based on the experience of the present.In addition,Croce emphasizes the practical value of history,but Oakeshott believes that the practical past and historical past two are totally different modes of experience,they are the different experience modes based on thedifferent assumptions,they are completely autonomous.Oakeshott's mode theory provides us with a new way and new idea to understand the world.It is worth pondering about the elaboration of historical models.