Historicism
Definition
Historicism has developed three divergent, though loosely related, meanings:
Karl Popper used the term in his influential book the Poverty of historicism, to mean: "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their primary aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms' or the 'patterns', the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history" (p. 3, italics in original).
Most recently, Historicism has been used by post-modernist thinkers to describe the view that there is no absolute truth about deep philosophical questions that should stand for all time. Instead, historicism holds that there is only the history of philosophy or more generally, intellectual history, including the history of science and technology'. This sense is sometimes termed New Historicism.
The historicist position is that there is no objective way to determine which of the various competing theories on a subject is correct. In science, philosophy, or any other discipline, there are only the facts about who has believed what, and when they believed it. Therefore, historicists can accept Hegel's famous catchphrase, "Philosophy is the history of philosophy." --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism
New historicism
Since the 1990s, some post-modernist thinkers have used historicism to describe the view that there is no absolute truth about deep philosophical questions that should stand for all time. Instead, their historicism holds that there is only the history of philosophy or more generally, intellectual history, including the history of science and technology. This school of thought sometimes goes by the name of New Historicism.
The same label, new historicism is also employed for a school of literary scholarship which interprets a poem, drama, etc. as an expression of the power-structures of the surrounding society. Stephen Greenblatt is an outstanding practitioner of this school. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicism [May 2005]
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