Abstract

This essay introduces and critically explores a theme for philosophical discussion which has almost entirely disappeared from contemporary researches in philosophy, but which used to be a central part of mainstream philosophical debate: the philosophy of the history of the world. At the height of its most intensive period of study in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, philosophical accounts in this area were predominantly theological histories of man. In our time these accounts have been largely displaced by natural histories of man. The change involved in this displacement is not, I contend, a minor shift in philosophical fashion but marks a fundamental mutation in the default construal of the world and the significance of our lives. The naturalization of our understanding of human life is closely tied up with the movement of secularization in European society. However, it is argued that the mutation in the movement of the history of the world that is making itself visible in our time is not best understood as an atheist event but a mutation within a fundamentally Christian one