This is philosophy bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.

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The philosophy of history concerns questions such as what counts as historical evidence or whether

history can be said to progress. The Polymath Theodore Zeldin is interested in

philosophy and history but not in the usual way.

He thinks we should be having a conversation with the past.

Theodore Selden, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you.

The topic we're going to focus on is philosophy and history.

That's an interesting combination.

What have you got to say about the relationship between philosophy and history?

History is the account of all human experience, and philosophy is the attempt

to make sense out of that and to discover at least for me what is a full life, what is worth doing, and using the experience of the past, not to obtain lessons from it,

but to obtain a provocation of the imagination, to see what has been tried out, why it has failed,

what new ideas might come out of it, what relationships one can create which were not

created in the past, what one can do now which

one hasn't done in the past.

That's really interesting because philosophy is often characterized as almost anachronistic

that it presents itself as contemporary logical debate about problems that matter?

Yes, the basis which I start is that we are all in our heads an antique shop.

We're full of bric-a-brac coming from every century.

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