History as the Science of the Individual

Abstract

Abstract It has often been argued – especially by historicists – that history deals with the individual where science focuses on the universal. But few philosophers would nowadays express their agreement with the historicist’s demarcation between history and the sciences. A standard criticism is that knowledge of the individual can only be expressed by an appeal to universals. This essay is an effort to rehabilitate the historicist argument by means of a closer and more accurate analysis of the notion of the individual than is given in the traditional historicist account of the nature of historical writing. Leibniz’s conception of the substance or the monad proves to be quite helpful here.