Herodotus, Hegel, and knowledge

Abstract

This article locates Hegel’s understanding of the nature of knowledge in various contexts (Hegel’s logical system, Kantian idealism, the Enlightenment ideal of encyclopaedia) and applies it specifically to his systematic classification of histories. Here Hegel labels Herodotus an “original” historian, and hence incapable of the broader vision and self-reflexive method of a “philosophical” historian like Hegel himself. This theoretical classification is not quite in accord with Hegel’s actual appropriation of material from Herodotus’s narrative for his own purposes. These appropriations point in complex ways to dimensions of the “Father of History” which are proto-Hegelian, as well as to other dimensions which are not.