The Search for a Meaningful Past Philosophies, Theories, and Interpretations

About the professor:
Darren Staloff received his B.A.. in 1983 and his Ph.D. in 1991, both from Columbia University. Currently an associate professor at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Staloff served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute for Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. He also spent three years as a preceptor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University.
Professor Staloff has also been the recipient of such fellowships and awards as the National Endowment of Humanities Fellow (1992), the President's Fellowship at Columbia University (1984-85), and the Harry J. Carman Scholar at Columbia University (1983-84). His books include The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (Oxford University Press, 1998) and he is currently completing a book entitled The Politics of Enlightenment: Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams and the Founding of the American Republic.

Issues and Problems
Mircea Eliade's _Cosmos and History_ and Cyclical Time
The Early Enlightenment and the Search for the Laws of History
_ The High Enlightenment's Cult of Progress_ Kant's _Idea
Hegel's Philosophy of History
Marx's Historical Materialism
Nietzsche's Critique of Historical Consciousness
Weber's Historical Sociology
Taking the Long View-Arnold Toynbee and World Historical Speculation
Twentieth-Century Neo-Idealism-R.G. Collingwood's The Idea of History
The Positivist Conception of Historical Knowledge
Analytic Musings-Arthur Danto's Narration and Knowledge
Social History, Structuralism, and the Long Duree-Fernand Braudel's On History
Post-Structuralism and the Linguistic Turn-Hayden White's Introduction to Metahistory
Naturalism Revisited-William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples
The Heterogeneity of Historical Understanding