The inexorability of change has always brought out the worst in philosophers, especially when they’ve deployed it in conjunction with the concept of time. Such a conjunction lies nestled at the heart of the philosophy of history, which has long provided philosophers with the perfect forum in which to display the various metaphysical, theological, ethical and political assumptions that underlie their thinking as a whole. Such assumptions are always necessary, but rarely are they so clearly and forcefully at play, and they include, for example: that radical or revolutionary change has been the driving force behind historical development; that such development must in fact be progress; that historical change can be understood properly only when viewed as universally exhibiting law-like regularity; and that such regularity must in fact be the product of a design that dictates the historical course of human affairs. In this book, Fairfield takes aim at several such fundamental assumptions, demonstrating how they have been employed in philosophical attempts to interpret the past. Focusing on early and late antiquity, Fairfield convincingly argues that the conventional approaches have failed, and he proposes a novel, hermeneutically sensitive approach that views broad historical change not as the product of radical conflict but as a process of dialogical transformation.

Jeff Mitscherling, University of Guelph