Reading List

These primary texts form the epistemological backbone of the Areas of Knowledge section. They are not all easy, but they are all specific: they make arguments, not gestures.

E.H. Carr, What is History? (1961) — The most readable introduction to the philosophy of history in English. Carr’s opening chapters on the historian and the facts, and on causation, remain essential. His central claim — that history is “an unending dialogue between the present and the past” — is the starting point for this entire unit.
R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946) — Harder but deeper than Carr. Collingwood argues that all history is the history of thought, and that the historian’s task is to re-enact past thinking in their own mind. Part V (“Epilegomena”) is the core. One of the few works of philosophy that genuinely transforms how you read historical evidence.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995) — Trouillot’s argument that history is silenced at four moments — the making of sources, the making of archives, the making of narratives, and the making of significance — and that the Haitian Revolution provides the clearest case study of how an event can be made unthinkable by the historians of its own time. Essential reading for anyone who takes the politics of historical knowledge seriously.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) — Technically about natural science, but its argument that knowledge is produced within paradigms that shape what questions can be asked applies across all areas of knowledge. Read Chapter 1 and Chapter IX (“The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions”).
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (1963) — The introduction and Chapter 1 on the criterion of falsifiability. Essential for both the Natural Sciences and Mathematics units; in History, it raises the question of whether historical claims can ever be falsifiable.
G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (1940) — A short, elegant meditation on mathematical beauty and the difference between discovery and invention. Raises for mathematics the same question that Collingwood raises for history: what kind of knowledge is this?
Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (1976) — Lakatos’ Socratic-dialogue reconstruction of how the proof of Euler’s polyhedron theorem developed through repeated counterexamples. The clearest demonstration in print that mathematics is a dialectical practice, not a deductive deliverance — and one of the great pieces of philosophical writing of the 20th century.
Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), Chapter 1 — Hofstadter’s exploration of self-reference as the common structure underlying Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, Escher’s impossible figures, and Bach’s fugues. Difficult, brilliant, and unexpectedly funny.
Aristotle, Poetics (c. 335 BCE) — The first systematic theory of narrative and representation. Aristotle’s distinction between poetry (which says what could happen) and history (which says what did happen) is still the sharpest formulation of the relationship between art and historical knowledge. Chapters 1–9 are the relevant section.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972) — Four essays on the relationship between images, knowledge, and power. Berger shows how what we see depends on what we have been taught to see — a point that applies to historical sources as much as to paintings.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977), Chapter 1 (“In Plato’s Cave”) — Sontag’s argument that photographs do not show us the world but a particular relationship to it — one in which seeing is the substitute for knowing, and possessing the image is the substitute for possessing the thing. Indispensable for any thinking about visual evidence in art, history, or science.
Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (1904–1917) — Weber’s essays on “objectivity” in social and economic knowledge, and on the distinction between value judgements and value-free analysis. Directly relevant to the question of whether history (or any human science) can be objective.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Chapter 1 (“Performances”) — Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis of social interaction as performance. The opening chapter gives the conceptual apparatus — front stage and back stage, idealisation, dramaturgical loyalty — that frames everything Goffman writes after. A model of human-science theory that emerges from observation rather than from method.
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), Part IV — “Choices” examines how we reason under uncertainty and construct narratives about past events. The chapters on hindsight bias and the “narrative fallacy” are directly relevant to historiography.
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (2004), Chapters 4 and 7 — Accessible exposition of relativity (Ch. 4) and entanglement (Ch. 7). For students whose prior physics goes only as far as Newton, Greene is the cleanest route into the genuinely strange ontologies of contemporary physics — without the popularising glibness that often accompanies the genre.
Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” (1960) — A short essay in Communications in Pure and Applied Mathematics. Wigner’s puzzle — why should abstract mathematics, developed without reference to the physical world, turn out to describe it so precisely? — is fundamental to the Mathematics unit and raises questions about the relationship between human-made knowledge systems and reality.
Akira Kurosawa (dir.), Rashomon (1950) — Four irreconcilable accounts of the same event, all sincerely told, none demonstrably false. The film that gave its name to the “Rashomon effect” and a 90-minute argument about the insolubility of historical perspectivalism. The clearest cinematic statement of the historian’s epistemic problem.