| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Aviezer Tucker. Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. 291. $70.00.
This is a most remarkable book. It also is a difficult book, although not because the text is unclear or badly argued. On the contrary, the scholarship of the book is impeccable, even though the readers of chapter two will sometimes raise their eyebrows when seeing what Aviezer Tucker writes about the history of historical writing since the sixteenth century. If the book is difficult, it is because Tucker wishes to apply to historical writing the most advanced models of how to assess the probability of claims to knowledge developed in contemporary logic and philosophy of science. This is where the great merits of this book are to be situated and this is also what a review trying to do justice to Tucker's brilliant book must focus on.	1
I will begin with an old and venerable distinction made by nineteenth-century historians such as Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen. The distinction I have in mind here is the one between Geschichts-forschung and Geschichtsschreibung. The former is the domain of historical research, where historians attempt to establish what exactly happened in the past, and what may have caused it to happen. When this has been done, the historian will try to integrate the results of historical research as well as he or she can within an interpretation or representation of the past (e.g. a book or article). Hence, historical research is, so to say, the "hard" part of the practice of history, whereas Geschichtsschreibung, or historical writing, is its more "soft" and interpretative dimension.	. . .

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