| Hempel's famous article "The Function of the General Law in History" was published on Journal of Philosophy in 1942, in this article Hempel pointed out that the function of the general law in history was the same as in natural science, and so was the explanation procedure. One stone evoke a thousand wave, the article initiated a dispute about the historical explanation between forties to sixties twentieth century in the circle of the western philosophy. Although most participators were philosophers, no professional historians participated in, the importance of the dispute can't be ignored as it was put into the development of the whole historical philosophy.At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, Speculative Philosophy of History and Positivism had been declined, and it came the prosperity of the Analysis and Criticism of the philosophy of history, during this period a large number of Relativism scholars and writings emerged. Like Dilthey, Rickert, Cassirer, Croce and Collingwood etc. Although these scholars belonged to different schools of thought, a view was also held by each other differently, but on the whole they all held a critical attitude to the Speculative Philosophy of History and Positivism, they were apt to analyze and understood the nature of the knowledge of history, and strived to establish a knowledge base for the historical subject in order to lead the history out of the cover of the natural science, and made history become an independent scientific subject. Hempel, claimed an explanation model in his article not like the "empathy" and "experience" understanding patterns of the Relativism, on the contrary, thought that history research methods and natural sciences were the same, such conflicts in the development of the historical theory is very useful, through discussions, we found that, although Hempel's explanation model can stand the test in theory, but there were problems in the practice of history, such as the neglect of the 'human' and the conflict between histography forms and Hempel's explanation model, at the same time, the contemporary historical theorists had also made a number of explanation model parallelled with Hempel , such as "rational interpretation model "," colligation explanation mode" and " narrative mode of interpretation", and thus the choice is more when the historians explained. And the dispute lead to the Historical narrative discussion from the historical explanation in the circle of philosophy of history finally. |
