Calliope's ascent: Defragmenting philosophy of history by rhetoric

Abstract

In order to find a cure against the pandemic fragmentation in current theory of history this paper aims at uniting experience, narrative, and action from a rhetorical perspective. Developing a pragmatics of speech acts about actions and events from the most simple to the most complex, according to the rhetorical situation in which they occur, the paper presents the notions of retrospective and prospective historical narrative as expressions of historical experience. In the end, it appeals to historians and philosophers of history to take rhetoric more seriously in order to make historiography practically more relevant.