In A Parallel World An Introduction To Frank Ankersmit's

journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 325–344
brill.com/jph
In a Parallel World: An Introduction to Frank

Ankersmit’s Philosophy of History
Marek Tamm
Tallinn University
[email protected]
Eugen Zeleňák
Catholic University in Ruzomberok
eugen.zeleňá[email protected]
Abstract
This article proposes to identify the conceptual structure guiding Frank Ankersmit’s
philosophy of history. We argue that philosophical analysis of history consists in
Ankersmit’s approach of three different levels: 1) the level of the past itself which is the
subject of ontology, 2) the level of description of the past that is studied by epistemol-
ogy, and 3) the level of representation of the past which should be analysed primarily
by means of aesthetics. In other words, the realm of history is constituted of three
aspects: 1) historical experience, 2) historical research, and 3) historical representation.
During his whole academic career, Ankersmit has been interested in the first and the
third aspects and has tried deliberately to avoid any serious engagement in epistemol-
ogy (historical research). Ankersmit’s philosophy of history is built on a few funda-
mental dichotomies that can be considered as a kind of axioms of his thinking: 1) the
distinction between historical research and historical writing, and 2) the distinction
between description and historical representation. The article offers a critical discus-
sion of Ankersmit’s two different approaches to the philosophy of history: cognitivist
philosophy of history (analysis of historical representation) and existentialist philoso
phy of history (analysis of historical experience), and concludes by a short overview of
the impact and significance of his historical-philosophical work and of his idea of the
uniqueness of history.
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/18722636-12341401

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326 Tamm and Zeleňák
Keywords
Frank Ankersmit – historical representation – historical experience – holism –

historicism – individuals – Leibniz
1 Introduction
Many would agree that Frank Ankersmit is the most original, important and
prolific philosopher of history working today. Yet, one might immediately add,
he is also the most controversial: his oeuvre has spawned intense discussions
and fierce exchanges over many decades.1 It might therefore come as a surprise
that Ankersmit’s philosophy of history2 has never been submitted to a collec-
tive scrutiny by his colleagues, or that there is no single special issue or edit
ed volume dedicated to his work either in English or in Dutch. Hans Kellner’s
memorable allegory of an imaginary committee discussing policy concerning
a certain matter might help us to understand this curious situation:
One senior member of the committee, however, highly respected and

active, seems to operate outside the consensus of the group. Although
his persuasive powers are formidable and his interventions frequent
and brilliantly argued, he seems to be working in a parallel world. His
comments describe quite a different matter from the familiar one the
committee considers. Admired for his knowledge and the extraordinary
1 Among the most important debates between Ankersmit and his critics, one can mention,
e.g., Perez Zagorin, “Historiography and Postmodernism: Reconsiderations,” History and
Theory, 29 (3), 1990, 263–274; F. R. Ankersmit, “Reply to Professor Zagorin,” History and Theory,
29 (3), 1990, 275–296; Georg G. Iggers, “Comments on F. R. Ankersmit’s Paper, ‘Historicism:
An Attempt at Synthesis’,” History and Theory, 34 (3), 1995, 162–167; F. R. Ankersmit, “Reply to
Professor Iggers,” History and Theory, 34 (3), 1995, 168–173; Mark Bevir and Frank Ankersmit,
“Exchange Ideas,” Rethinking History, 4 (3), 2000, 351–372; Heikki Saari, “On Frank Ankersmit’s
Post-Modernist Theory of Historical Narrativity,” Rethinking History, 9 (1), 2005, 5–21;
F. R. Ankersmit, “Reply to Professor Saari,” Rethinking History, 9 (1), 2005, 23–33; Paul A. Roth,
“Whistling History: Ankersmit’s Neo-Tractarian Theory of Historical Representation,”
Rethinking History, 17 (4), 2013, 548–569; Frank Ankersmit, “Reply to Professor Roth: On How
Antidogmatism Bred Dogmatism,” Rethinking History, 17 (4), 2013, 570–585.
2 It is important to keep in mind that next to his philosophy of history, Ankersmit has elaborat-
ed also his stance in political philosophy. See especially, F. R. Ankersmit, Political Represen
tation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) and Aesthetic Politics. Political Philosophy
Beyond Fact and Value (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). Although these two pro
jects are closely related, especially the notions of historical and political representations, this
special issue will focus only on Ankersmit’s work in the field of the philosophy of history.

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An Introduction to Frank Ankersmit ’ s Philosophy of History 327
erudition of his comments, he remains a bit apart, and a bit frustrated at

the discussions. Occasionally he will mutter, “but time has nothing to do
with history,” “truth has no place in this discussion,” or “where language
is, experience is not,” but the group moves on over the same ground. To
engage with his ideas, to follow his suggestions, would entail a nearly
total revision of their project, a redefinition of their mission, a trek into
unknown territory, a new identity.
“This describes to some extent,” Kellner concludes, “the place of Frank

Ankersmit in the world of historical theory.”3 Needless to say, this remark that
Ankersmit is “working in a parallel world” does not mean that his work has
not been discussed in scholarly journals, on the contrary, next to late Hayden
White, he is probably one of the most debated historical theorists of our
times.4 But this special issue of the Journal of the Philosophy of History,
3 Hans Kellner, “Ankersmit’s Proposal: Let’s Keep in Touch,” Clio, 36 (1), 2006, 85–86.
4 Among the rich harvest of critical discussions in English, see, e.g., Chris Lorenz, “Can Histo-
ries Be True? Narrativism, Positivism, and the ‘Metaphorical Turn’,” History and Theory, 37 (3),
1998, 309–329; John H. Zammito, “Ankersmit’s Postmodernist Historiography: The Hyperbole
of ‘Opacity’,” History and Theory, 37 (3), 1998, 330–346; Keith Jenkins, Why History?: Ethics
and Postmodernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 133–160; John H. Zammito,
“Ankersmit and Historical Representation,” History and Theory, 44 (1), 2005, 155–81, Keith
Jenkins, “Postmodernity, the End of History, and Frank Ankersmit,” in A. L. Macfie (ed.), The
Philosophy of History: Talks Given at the Institute of Historical Research, London, 2000–2006,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 138–154; Keith Jenkins, “Cohen contra Ankersmit,”
Rethinking History, 12 (4), 2008, 537–555; Ewa Domanska, “Frank Ankersmit: From Narrative
to Experience,” Rethinking History, 13 (2), 2009, 175–195; Eugen Zeleňák, “Exploring Holism
in Frank Ankersmit’s Historical Representation,” Rethinking History, 13 (3), 2009, 357–369;
Peng Gang, “From ‘Narrative Substance’ to ‘Historical Experience’: Frank Ankersmit and New
Trends in Contemporary Western Historical Theory,” Historical Research, 1, 2009, 155–173;
Peter Icke, “Frank Ankersmit’s ‘Narrative Substance’: A Legacy to Historians,” Rethinking
History, 14 (4), 2010, 551–67; Chiel van den Akker, “Ankersmit on Historical Representation.
Resemblance, Substitution and Exemplification,” Rethinking History, 15 (3), 2011, 355–371;
Peter P. Icke, Frank Ankersmit’s Lost Historical Cause: A Journey from Language to Experience
(New York: Routledge 2012); Anton Froeyman, “Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia: The Pres-
ence and the Otherness of the Past,” Rethinking History, 16 (3), 2012, 393–415; Jonathan Owen
Clark, “Aesthetic Experience, Subjective Historical Experience and the Problem of Construc-
tivism,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 7 (2), 2013, 57–81; Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “Expe-
rience as the Invisible Drive of Historical Writing,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 7 (2),
2013, 183–204; Kalle Pihlainen, “The View From the Fence,” Rethinking History, 19 (2), 2015,
310–321; Rodrigo Díaz-Maldonado “Historical Experience as a Mode of Comprehension,”
Journal of the Philosophy of History, on-line pre-publication, 2016, 1–21; Daniel Fairbrother,
“Leibniz and the Philosophical Criticism of Historiography,” Journal of the Philosophy of His
tory, 11 (1), 2017, 59–82; Herman Paul and Adriaan Van Veldhuizen, “A Retrieval of Historicism:
Frank Ankersmit’s Philosophy of History and Politics,” History and Theory, 57 (1), 2018, 33–55;

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celebrating, among others, Ankersmit’s work as the founding editor-in-chief of

the journal (2007–2017),5 seems to be the very first attempt to offer a collective
and comprehensive analysis of his contribution to the philosophy of history.6
Frank Ankersmit (born in 1945), the emeritus professor of intellectual history
and philosophy of history at Groningen University, has been in the business
of the philosophy of history for almost half a century. He has published more
than twenty books and a few hundred articles, written originally in Dutch
and in English, and translated into many other languages, including Chinese,
Russian and Spanish. Ankersmit has always believed in the special mission of
history and of the philosophy of history, that “there is in historical writing a
lesson of the greatest importance for all of philosophy”7 and that “the philoso-
phy of history is not merely the philosophy of an individual discipline, like
the philosophy of biology or economics. No, the philosophy of history may now
proudly parade itself as the real counterpart of the mathematically-grounded
sciences – with the implication that both, if taken together, offer us all the in-
gredients of the sum of reliable knowledge we can possibly have of the world
in which we live.”8
Ankersmit anchors his philosophy of history in two connected intellectual
traditions – historicism and Leibnizian philosophy. Historicism, “the alpha
and the omega of all wisdom in our discipline,”9 is in Ankersmit’s mind “a per-
fect theory of history”10 and on many occasions he presents his work simply as
“an attempt to translate the historicist theory of historical representation into
a more contemporary philosophical idiom.”11 Ankersmit likes to emphasize
Jonathan Menezes, “Aftermaths of the Dawn of Experience: On the Impact of Ankersmit’s

Sublime Historical Experience,” Rethinking history, 22 (1), 2018, 44–64.
5 See Frank Ankersmit, “Farewell to the Readers of the JPH,” Journal of the Philosophy of
History, 11 (2), 2017, 119–121.
6 However, one could still mention the important conference “The Transfiguration of the
Present: Reflections on Historical Distance” organized on 28–29 January 2010 in Gronin-
gen to mark the retirement of Ankersmit from his professorship; some of the papers of
the conference were later published in History and Theory, 50 (4), 2011.
7 Frank Ankersmit and Marek Tamm, “Leibnizian Philosophy of History: A Conversation,”
Rethinking History, 20 (4), 2016, 492.
8 Frank Ankersmit, “Representation in Retrospect”, in Marcel Arbeit and Ian Christie (eds.),
Where is History Today? New Ways of Representing the Past (Olomouc: Palacký University
Olomouc, 2015), 185.
9 Frank Ankersmit, “Invitation to Historians,” Rethinking History, 7 (3), 2003, 434.
10 Frank Ankersmit, “The Necessity of Historicism,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 4 (2),
2010, 399, n. 23.
11 Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 2012), IX. Cf. F. R. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic: A Semantic Analysis
of the Historian’s Language (The Hague and Boston, MA: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers,

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that historicism is the only genuine historical theory that has been developed
by historians about history: “Historians discovered it, developed it and applied
it, and they were extremely successful with it – so, at the end, one might sus-
pect that it contains more than a kernel of truth.”12 Historicists claim that the
nature of a thing lies in its history and therefore, Ankersmit maintains, no his-
torian nor philosopher of history can avoid subscribing to historicism.
Historicism, as pointed out by Friedrich Meinecke and Ernst Cassirer, owes
much to Leibniz and his “Monadology,” another major source of inspiration for
Ankersmit. Already in Narrative Logic (1983), one of his main ambitions was
to “demonstrate the resemblance between Leibniz’s logic and the histori[ci]st
philosophy of history.”13 Since then he has repeatedly argued that “Leibnizian
monadology is the kind of metaphysics ideally suited to the world of history
and of historical writing”14 and tried to elaborate his own Leibnizian philoso-
phy of history.15 According to Ankersmit, historical narratives are “window-
less” like monads, insofar as there is no direct interaction between them. Both
monads and historical narratives are defined by the perspective they have on
the world. “And both are holist in a double sense: (1) their whole is their iden-
tity, and (2) they are the components of either a narrativist or monadological
universe.”16
1983), 115; Ankersmit, Aesthetic Politics, XIII. Herman Paul and Adriaan Van Veldhuizen
have recently written to the point: “Nothing is more characteristic of Ankersmit’s reflec-
tions on history and politics alike than his attempt to translate a historicist Ideenlehre into
modern analytical categories, thereby stripping it of its metaphysical dimensions and em-
phasizing the aesthetic nature of both historical and political representation.” Paul and
Van Veldhuizen, “A Retrieval of Historicism,” 54.
12 Kalle Pihlainen, “ ‘Me historiateoreetikot olemme aivan vaarattomia’ – keskustelua Frank
Ankersmitin kanssa,” Historiallinen Aikakauskirja, 4, 1997, 368. We are grateful to Kalle
Pihlainen for sharing with us the original unpublished English version of this interview
(quoted here).
13 Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, 130.
14 Ankersmit, Political Representation, 229.
15 Ankersmit has promised to publish a book in the near future about Leibnizian philoso-
phy of history; until then one can read, for instance, Frank Ankersmit, “History as the
Science of the Individual,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 7 (3), 2013, 396–425; Frank
Ankersmit, “Representationalist Logic,” in Admir Skodo (ed.), Other Logics. Alternatives to
Formal Logic in the History of Thought and Contemporary Philosophy (Leiden and Boston:
Brill, 2014), 103–123.
16 Frank Ankersmit, “Rorty and History,” New Literary History, 39 (1), 2008, 92.

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2 Architectonics of Ankersmit’s Philosophy of History
Philosophical analysis of history, according to Ankersmit, can be divided be-

tween three levels: 1) the level of the past itself which is the subject of ontol-
ogy, 2) the level of description of the past that is studied by epistemology, and
3) the level of representation of the past which should be analysed primar-
ily by means of aesthetics.17 To put it differently, the realm of history is con-
stituted in Ankersmit’s approach by three conceptually distinctive, although
practically melded aspects: 1) historical experience, 2) historical research,
and 3) historical representation. During all his academic career, Ankersmit
has been interested in the first and the third aspects, in other words, in ontol-
ogy (historical experience) and in aesthetics (historical representation), try-
ing deliberately to avoid any serious engagement in epistemology (historical
research). Resistance to epistemology, incited by the early work of Richard
Rorty, is the basso continuo of Ankersmit’s writings; one of his main ambitions
has been to turn epistemological questions of history into aesthetic and onto-
logical (existential) questions.
Ankersmit’s philosophy of history is built on a few fundamental dichoto-
mies that can be considered as kind of axioms of his thinking. First, the clear
distinction between historical research and historical writing. This has been
the leitmotiv of Ankersmit’s work since the very beginning18 and it has been
constantly defended till nowadays. Thus, for instance, in a recent interview:
“my main move has always been to distinguish between 1) historical re-
search (in German Geschichtsforschung) and 2) historical writing (in German
Geschichtsschreibung). Historical research concentrates on the establishment
of historical facts, whereas historical writing addresses the problem of how
best to account for the past on the basis of generally accepted facts.”19
In Ankersmit’s account, the main problem of the philosophy of history is
that it doesn’t pay enough attention to the philosophy of Geschichtsschreibung.
Already in his Narrative Logic Ankersmit argues: “Nearly all current philoso-
phy of history is concerned with the philosophical problems of historical
research (‘what are historical facts?’, ‘how can facts be explained?’, ‘how do val-
ues influence the accounts given of historical facts?’) and we cannot fail to be
17 F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 57.
See also Domanska, “Frank Ankersmit: From Narrative to Experience,” 179.
18 See, e.g. F. Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, 12–14; F. R. Ankersmit, History and Tropology.
The Rise and Fall of Metaphor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 34;
Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference, 60–62; Ankersmit, “Representation in Retro-
spect,” 188.
19 Ankersmit and Tamm, “Leibnizian Philosophy of History,” 492.

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impressed by the work done in this field. (…) Nevertheless, it is regrettable

that the narrative writing of history has been neglected. This has been the first
major motivation for the writing of this book.”20 And in the same vein in 2012:
“This distinction between historical research and historical writing – though
always quite self-evident to historians when pondering the practice of their
discipline – has lost all its popularity with historical theorists.”21 Ankersmit
is convinced that historical writing presents us with a variant of rationality
unknown to the sciences and that if we are interested in contributing to con-
temporary philosophical thought, it is the history writing and not historical
research we should focus on: “This is not meant to downplay the significance of
historical research – again, far from it! Without historical research no histori-
cal writing. My only claim is that from a philosophical point of view historical
research is of less interest than historical writing. The real philosophical gun-
powder is in historical writing.”22
This first fundamental distinction is followed by another one, between
description and historical representation: “[my] point of departure is the claim
that we should strictly distinguish between description and representation.”23
While historical research results in descriptions of isolated states of affairs in
the past, historical writing is about integrating the results of historical research
in the historical text or representation as a whole. Ankersmit argues that there
is a logical difference between these two aspects of historians’ work. In a de-
scription one can always distinguish a part that refers and a part attributing
a certain property to the object referred to. Yet no such distinction can be
made in the case of a representation.24 In individual descriptive statements,
reference is made to past events, while a representation, as a synthesis of
descriptive sentences, “is about” a part of a specific past reality.25 Whilst in the
case of descriptions we can judge their truth value, this is not possible in
the case of representations which are self-referential and recursive. Thus, unlike
20 Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, 14. Cf. Ankersmit, History and Tropology, 4.

21 Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference, 60.
23 Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference, 65; cf. Frank Ankersmit, “Representation and
Reference,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 4 (3), 2010, 375; Ankersmit, “Reply to
Professor Roth,” 576; Frank Ankersmit, “Beware of the Gurus,” Rethinking History, 19 (1),
2015, 134.
24 Ankersmit, History and Tropology, 4; Frank Ankersmit, “Statements, Text and Pictures,” in
Frank Ankersmit and Hans Kellner (eds.), The New Philosophy of History (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1995), 212–240; Frank Ankersmit, “Representation as the Repre-
sentation of Experience,” Metaphilosophy, 41 (1–2), 2000, 148–169; Ankersmit, Historical
Representation, 39–48.
25 Ankersmit, Historical Representation, 48.

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descriptions, representations fall outside the scope of epistemology because

“epistemology relates words to things, whereas representation relates things
to things.”26 It doesn’t come as a surprise, therefore, that for Ankersmit, “[t]he
main shortcoming of (most) contemporary philosophy of history is that it
takes description – instead of representation – as its model in its attempts to
deal with the problem of historical writing.”27
Ankersmit’s historical-philosophical work can be divided between two main
topics: historical representation and historical experience. To use his own terms,
one can also say that Ankersmit has been practicing two different approaches
to the philosophy of history during his scholarly career: cognitivist philosophy
of history and existentialist philosophy of history. In the first case, the question
is about how we represent the past, in the second case, the question is about
how do we relate to the past.
3 Historical Representation Shaped by Individualistic Holism
Ankersmit’s views on historical representation are determined by the distinc-

tion made above between description and representation. For him, historical
representation is something very different from description but, at the same
time, its uniqueness might be grasped only by contrasting and distinguishing
it from description. It is important, therefore, to bear in mind that Ankersmit
does not reject description, however, it must be given its proper role and it
must be realized also that the most interesting and important issues of histori-
cal writing open up at the level that transcends this plain mode of dealing with
reality.28
Ankersmit makes his crucial points regarding the relation between descrip-
tion and representation consistently in all of his works starting with Narrative
Logic. According to Ankersmit, we need to bear in mind that historical works
consist of singular descriptive statements and these have two different func-
tions: “a) they describe the past, and b) by means of these statements an
‘image’ or ‘picture’ of the past (…) is constructed.”29 When it comes to describ-
ing, there is not much to add to what one gets from philosophically informed
but fairly intuitive and common understanding of statements such as “Arthur
26 Ankersmit, Historical Representation, 11–12.

28 As he puts it: “the historiographical value of a piece of history is determined less by the
facts disclosed in it than by the narrative interpretation of such facts.” Ankersmit, Narra
tive Logic, 1.
29 Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, 204, see also 101, 209.

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Danto participated in the discussion about historical explanation in 1960s.”

Such statements usually consist of singular terms (in this case “Arthur Danto”)
referring to concrete individuals and parts specifying further information
about individuals, i.e., expressing properties of individuals or locating them
within relations. If one follows in the footsteps of (one group of) philosophers
of language, one may obtain a good grasp of what is going on at this level. Yet
Ankersmit believes that philosophy of history has a special role to play when it
comes to the more complex and unique level of whole historical texts. At this
level, he speaks about statements constructing “images,” “pictures” and “points
of view,”30 or in his more recent works he prefers to speak about the level of
historical representation. Hence, whole historical texts, although consisting of
descriptive statements, do not describe past reality. Their function is to repre
sent the past in the sense that is very special and should not be understood in
terms of correspondence framework. In Historical Representation Ankersmit
states that historical representation is about the past, but again, one should
be careful not to understand aboutness or being about in a naïve way. “Though
both descriptions and representations stand in a relationship with reality,
a description will be said to refer to reality (…), whereas a representation (as a
whole) will be said to be about reality.”31 The latter relation “is essentially unsta-
ble and unfixed because it is differently defined by the descriptions contained
by the text of each representation” due to which it “gives us the ‘logical space’
within which historical thinking and historical discussion are possible.”32 We
must understand aboutness as a more complicated structure, so to say, reach-
ing out to the past and to the historical text at the same time. In his latest
book on the topic, Ankersmit makes an interesting move in his account by
emphasizing that historical representation is not a two-place but a three-place
operator: “representation (1) offers us the presented, or aspect (2) of a repre
sented reality (3), much in the way that we may draw someone’s attention to
certain features of a thing. Though these features are reducible neither to that
thing itself nor to its properties. (…) [A]spects or presenteds are less than
things and more than properties.”33 This further underlines his commitment
to uniqueness of historical representation stretching somehow in-between the
text and the world.
Although Ankersmit’s account of historical representation is sometimes
linked to radical detachment of historical works from reality and to certain
30 Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, 209 and 216.

33 Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation, 73.

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postmodern tendencies,34 one should be careful not to misconstrue his views.

Ankersmit is far from creating a concrete wall between the historical text and
the past reality. He does not see the texts historians construct as being isolated
from the past nor to be somehow floating around in an imaginary universe.
Historical works do contain statements describing past events, therefore, any
kind of complete erasure of the link between the past and the historical work
is unimaginable. On the other hand, Ankersmit’s crucial point is that descrip-
tion is not all there is to historical enterprise. Thus, according to Ankersmit,
there seem to be two perspicuous orientations significant for understand-
ing history: from descriptive statements towards transcending historical rep-
resentations and from historical representations towards their anchoring
statements. These orientations are unified in his peculiar type of holism that
takes historical works to be special wholes. These wholes are both very robust
because they allow historians to present complex points of view, narrative sub-
stances (terminology used in his Narrative Logic) or historical representations
(terminology used in his more recent works) and extremely fragile because a
tiny change within a whole may result in the construction of a different point
of view, narrative substance or historical representation.35 Ankersmit’s holism
combines these orientations and aspects into an original proposal balancing in
between constructivist and realist tendencies, sometimes inspiring and some-
times challenging authors from one or the other camp, and, in the end, avoid-
ing any simple classification.
Now, let us take a step back and look at the issue of historical representa-
tion from a fresh perspective. In July 2013, the newly established International
Network for Theory of History (INTH) organized its inaugural conference in
Ghent with the title “The Future of the Theory and Philosophy of History.” This
was the first and it seems the biggest and the most controversial INTH confer-
ence so far, with several heated discussions, intellectual skirmishes and emo-
tional outbursts. It was as if some kind of tension was in the air and needed
34 See, for instance, Zammito, “Ankersmit’s Postmodernist Historiography”, and Saari, “On
Frank Ankersmit’s Post-Modernist Theory of Historical Narrativity.” These works draw
mainly on Ankersmit’s brief “flirtation” with postmodern views in F. R. Ankersmit, “Histo-
riography and Postmodernism,” History and Theory, 28 (2), 1989, 137–153, and Ankersmit,
“Reply to Professor Zagorin.” See Jonathan Menezes, “The Limits of the ‘Autumn of His-
toriography’: On Frank Ankersmit’s Postmodernist Moment,” Journal of the Philosophy of
History, forthcoming.
35 See Frank Ankersmit “A Dialogue with Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen,” Journal of the Philosophy
of History, 11 (1), 2017, 38–58; Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen “Moving Deeper into Rational Prag-
matism: A Reply to My Reviewers,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 11 (1), 2017, 83–118;
Fairbrother, “Leibniz and the Philosophical Criticism of Historiography.”

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to manifest itself in some way or other.36 Another noticeable thing was that
Frank Ankersmit and his views were often used as a point of reference and dur-
ing some of the sessions it looked like almost everybody wanted to comment
on, refer to, advocate or distance themselves from some of his claims. This was
how his significance in the field was neatly revealed. Moreover, the organiz-
ers invited him to give the opening plenary talk of the conference. Thus, on
10 July 2013 Frank Ankersmit presented at Ghent University his paper “History
as the Science of the Individual,” later that year published in the Journal of
the Philosophy of History, which forcefully puts to the fore Ankersmit’s use of
Leibniz and historicism in making sense of history and, moreover, nicely sum-
marizes many of his key points about historical representation.
In the paper, Ankersmit distinguishes two types of individuals. Weak indi-
viduals are common objects characterized in terms of universals, externally;
these individuals are usually the objects of natural sciences. Strong individ-
uals, on the other hand, are very different. In fact, for Ankersmit, only these
objects are individuals through and through:
The idea here is that it is part of the meaning of being an individual to be

indivisible. That is to say, you cannot remove from an individual one or
more of its properties without it ceasing to be the individual that it is. It
follows that the individual defines itself, or, put differently, that its prin-
ciple of individuation is internal, and not external to it.37
Here, Ankersmit takes inspiration from Leibniz and argues that this Leibnizian
understanding of individuality is essentially useful for history: “Recall Leibniz’s
belief that the principle of indivisibility gives us the primary meaning of indi-
viduality. (…) It follows that all of an individual’s properties are essential to it in
the sense of determining its identity. (…) [A]ll of an individual’s properties are
contained in the individual’s complete concept and can therefore be analytically
derived from it.”38 One is reminded of Ankersmit’s points about self-referential
character of narrative substances and analyticity of statements about them as
these insights were formulated in Narrative Logic, occasionally in a technical
36 For similar observations about the conference and more details on one particular
exchange, see Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, “The Current State of Play in the Theory and Phi-
losophy of History: The Roth-Ankersmit Controversy and Beyond,” Rethinking History,
18 (4), 2014, 613–619.
37 Ankersmit, “History as the Science of the Individual,” 407.

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idiom.39 This was and still is, of course, a controversial point which is easily
misunderstood and misinterpreted.40 But, in fact, if approached with a pinch
of charity, it nicely fits within Ankersmit’s Leibnizian holistic account of his-
torical representation (narrative substance).
As mentioned earlier, Ankersmit subscribes to a historicist understanding of
history. He believes that history is the science of the individual, as historicists
claimed; however, he employs special Leibnizian strong indivisible individuals
(substances or monads) to illuminate the nature of historical representation.
Historical representations
are individuated by all of the statements they contain. Remove from, or

add one statement to a HR [historical representation], and you’ll have a
different HR. Each statement can and must be read in two ways: 1) as
expressing a truth about the past and 2) as being part of a recursive or
self-referential definition of the HR of which it is part. At that second
level we rediscover, therefore, Leibniz’s doctrine of the complete concept
and all that goes with it. Especially the claim that individuals – hence,
HR’s, too – are individuals through and through, that they define them-
selves wholly internally, are free from any external influence and, there-
fore, as Leibniz put it, “windowless.”41
This Ankersmit’s Leibnizian understanding of historical representation is

at the core of his view about the uniqueness of history. Historical representa-
tions are specific wholes and at the same time strong indivisible individuals.
Ankersmit’s individualistic holism, therefore, presents us with historical works
having specific status and philosophy of history having important center of
interest which can be illuminated neither by traditional nor by more sophis-
ticated observations springing from philosophy of science or philosophy of
language. For Ankersmit, these strong individual wholes are so peculiar that
only a diligent exploration untainted by observations drawn from other areas
(such as the idea of theory-ladenness, the correspondence framework, etc.)
may be of some help. Modus operandi at the level of historical representation,
at the level of historical writing, at the level of colligatory wholes, at the level of
narrative substances, at the level of strong individuals (such as Hellenism, the
39 “Just as a word cannot but consist of the letters of which it is formed, a Ns [narrative
substance] can only contain the statements that it does actually contain. The thesis that
all statements expressing the properties of Nss are analytical is, perhaps, the most funda-
mental theorem in narrative logic.” Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, 137, see also 134–139.
40 See, e.g., Saari, “On Frank Ankersmit’s Post-Modernist Theory of Historical Narrativity,” 9.

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Renaissance, the Rise of the Bourgeoisie, the Enlightenment, the Interbellum,

the Cold War) does not obey the routine of plain description nor anything we
are familiar with from other disciplines. Moreover, it seems this specificity is
so elusive that according to Ankersmit it cannot be disciplined by traditional
epistemological considerations:
the so familiar world/language juxtaposition will thus have to be dropped

for strong individuals. For that juxtaposition belongs to the regime of the
weak individual, necessarily depending on words, concepts, theories and
language for the individuation of weak individuals. Strong individuals,
however, can stand on their own feet and need only their properties,
whatever these may be, for being the individual that they are. Strong
individuals introduce us to a regime neither depending on, nor presup-
posing, nor being the result of the so familiar and reassuring polarization
between reality and language.42
Hence, his sui generis account of historical representation shaped by indi-

vidualistic holism also challenges a more general philosophical and epistemi-
cally popular dualistic framework. Historical representations are difficult to
be clearly associated with just one side of the world/language opposition.
Historical representation presents us with “the indeterminacy in the relation-
ship between language and reality” and helps us realize that “the use of lan-
guage [in historical writing] is not restricted to our speaking about reality but
that it sometimes also surreptitiously and unnoticedly resorts to a speaking
about this speaking about reality.”43
4 Varieties of Historical Experience
Ankersmit has acknowledged that he came to the notion of historical experi-

ence by means of historical representation.44 After an extended exploration of
historical narratives since 1970s, in the early 1990s he decided to turn his atten-
tion also to this aspect of the historical realm that makes historical representa-
tion possible: “What makes us aware of the past at all, what should happen, or
what must have happened to a nation or a collectivity to become fascinated

43 Ankersmit, Historical Representation, 48, 73–74.
44 F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005),
XVII.

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by the problem of its past?”45 However, the deeper reason behind this new in-
terest was in Ankersmit’s own words “a feeling that contemporary philosophy
is in a kind of impasse in the sense that it tends completely to rule out direct
contact with reality.”46 Ankersmit’s idea is to find out whether we can uphold
the possibility of contact with the world which is not mediated by language.
His aim is to work out “a non-, pre- or translinguistic approach to history,”47
to break through the walls of “the prisonhouse of language.”48 The notion of
historical experience will require us, Ankersmit asserts, to rethink the relation-
ship between language and experience.49
Already in his History and Tropology, in 1994, while comparing the postmod-
ernist and historicist philosophy of history, Ankersmit concluded that “we may
wonder whether the postmodernist theory of historical writing (…) still leaves
room for the authenticity of historical experience. That is, for an authentic ex-
perience of the past in which the past can still assert its independence from
historical writing.”50 In the introduction of his Sublime Historical Experience,
Ankersmit asks even more radically: “Can we rescue the past itself from how
we speak about it? More specifically, can the historian enter into a real, au-
thentic, and ‘experiential’ relationship to the past – that is, into a relationship
that is not contaminated by historiographical tradition, disciplinary presup-
positions, and linguistic structures (…)?”51
We are probably not mistaken to see some autobiographical apprehensions
behind these questions. Sublime Historical Experience is without any doubt
Ankersmit’s most personal book, it contains many autobiographical vignettes
from his childhood boredom to his love of eighteenth-century art and orna-
mentation, but also more generally, it is derived not only from readings and re-
flections, but also from the author’s own historical experiences or sensations.52
The book is furthermore an attempt to move beyond Enlightenment rational-
ism and turn to Romanticist sensationalism. “The intellectual bureaucracy
45 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, XV.

46 Pihlainen, “Me historiateoreetikot,” 368.
48 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 4.
49 Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference, 176. David Carr explains Ankermit’s project in
similar terms: “Ankersmit wants to revive the concept of experience as an antidote to
the emphasis on representation in the philosophy of history, especially when representa-
tion is interpreted as linguistic representation.” David Carr, Experience and History. Phe
nomenological Perspectives on the Historical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 31.
50 Ankersmit, History and Tropology, 194.
52 Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience, 286–287, 297.

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of ‘theory’ will in this book,” Ankersmit writes in the beginning of Sublime

Historical Experience,
be replaced by the “Romanticism” of an approach to the past involving all

of the historian’s personality and not just (or even merely primarily) the
formalism of his or her cognitive faculties. More specifically this book is a
rehabilitation of the romanticist’s world of moods and feelings as consti-
tutive of how we relate to the past. How we feel about the past is no less
important than what we know about it.53
Ankersmit places his study of historical experience under the sign of Johan
Huizinga (1872–1945), the famous Dutch cultural historian and “the only theo-
rist of historical writing to take seriously the notion of historical experience.”54
Herman Paul and Adriaan Van Veldhuizen have aptly pointed out the paral-
lel between Ankersmit’s attempt to revive Meinecke-style historicism in his
Narrative Logic and his efforts to renew Huizinga’s idea of “historical sensation”
in his Sublime Historical Experience. Both enterprises can be considered as
“attempts at reformulating an early twentieth-century idea in late twentieth-
century categories.”55 Ankersmit proceeds from the axiom that language and
experience are opposed to each other, that experience is a pre- or nonlinguis-
tic phenomenon: “either there is experience and then there is no language;
or there is language and then there is no experience.”56 This attempt to move
beyond language in order to grasp the authentic experience of the past has
ignited a fierce debate among philosophers of history and is probably still the
most controversial aspect of Ankersmit’s oeuvre. But it is important to empha-
size that his work on historical experience has never meant turning his back to
the study of language and historical representation. These two, historical expe-
rience and historical representation, as mentioned before, are complementary,
not exclusive undertakings, or in Ankersmit’s own explanation: “experience
unites aesthetics and the philosophy of history, while language will unite the
philosophy of language and the reflection on historical representation.”57

55 Paul and Van Veldhuizen, “A Retrieval of Historicism,” 44.
56 Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “The Expression of Historical Experience,” History and Theory, 54
(2), 2015, 179. Simon tries to show how historical experience could productively interact
with language in giving birth to novel historical representations. For another alternative
approach, see Anton Froeyman, “Never the Twain Shall Meet? How Narrativism and Ex-
perience can be Reconciled by Dialogical Ethics,” History and Theory, 54 (2), 2015, 162–177.

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Ankersmit distinguishes between three types of historical experience. First,

there is objective historical experience, which comprises all experiences people
have had in the past. Ankersmit does not address this type of historical experi-
ence in his writings, but refers to the work of cultural historians and other who
have explored this domain over the last few decades. Secondly, there is the sub
jective or individual historical experience, first identified by Huizinga (he calls
it “historical sensation”). It can be described as an individual “encounter” with
a particular piece of the past (material or immaterial), it is a sudden, wordless
and revelatory experience – “a moment of truth”58 – that can be translated
into a vision that supports historical representation. Ankersmit concedes that
this subjective historical experience “will remain by its very nature a rare and
exceptional phenomenon in historical practice,” adding that “many historians
will not even recognize it as a legitimate part of their relationship with the
past; admittedly, most historical writing is not informed by it and therefore
cannot be clarified in terms of historical experience.”59 Therefore, as Anton
Froeyman has rightly pointed out, the subjective historical experience “is an
elitist notion, limited to the elite of practicing (professional) historians.”60 And
thirdly, there is the sublime or collective historical experience, the most original
contribution of Ankersmit to the study of historical experience. He proceeds
from the position that in the beginning, there is the primeval unity of past
and present – an eternal or indiscriminate present. But then, at some very
unique moments, “the world falls apart into a past and a present, both mak-
ing their entrance at one and the same time and excluding each other for ever
in the future.”61 Ankersmit’s favorite example is the French Revolution, which
created the division between the modern world and the ancien régime. The
sublime historical experience consists therefore in the combination of los-
ing the old world and realizing the birth of the new one. What is important
here is that this revolves around matters of identity; sublime historical experi-
ence concerns not just a certain piece of the past (like in the case of subjective
historical identity) but the identity shifts of the entire civilization. Sublime his-
torical experience is therefore very close to the concept of collective historical
trauma. “The basic form of historical experience,” Ankersmit explains himself,
“is, therefore, basically, an experience of loss since you lose that part of this

59 F. R. Ankersmit, “Can We Experience the Past?”, in Rolf Torstendahl and Irmline Veit-
Brause (eds.), History-making. The Intellectual and Social Formation of a Discipline (Stock-
holm: Kungl. Vitterhets, historie och antikvitets akademien, 1996), 73.
60 Froeyman, “Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia,” 409.
61 Ankersmit, “Representation in Retrospect,” 192.

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indiscriminate present that has now become your past.”62 Or elsewhere even
more explicitly: “history as a reality of its own can only come into being as a
result of traumatic collective experience.”63
In its original form, sublime historical experience is “ineffable”: “As soon as
you succeed in speaking about it, it has ceased to exist and been transformed
into something fundamentally different.”64 However, sublime historical expe-
rience gives us the very idea of the past that can then be described and repre-
sented by historians. In other words, the writing of history is the consequence
of the sublime historical experience, a kind of “trauma therapy” to overcome
the past that we have lost. Or in Jonathan Menezes’ felicitous wording: “History
or representation comes in when the past or the (dramatic) historical experi-
ence goes out.”65 Hence, this is the critical juncture of Ankersmit’s two main
research topics: historical representation and historical experience. He admits
that the ties between these two “are both strong and weak”:
They are strong since a collectivist or holistic sublime experience of the

past lies at the root of all historical representation. (…) But these ties are
also weak in that the relationship between historical experience and his-
torical representation will play only a very marginal role once the disci-
pline of historical writing has come into being.66
Anton Froeyman has captured this paradoxical relation probably even better:
“So, although the two factors of the equation need each other (without his-
torical experience, there would be no historical writing, and without historical
writing, we would never become conscious of the existence of historical expe-
rience), there is very little mutual influence: (sublime) historical experience is
one thing, and historical representation is quite another.”67
62 Marcin Moskalewicz, “Sublime Experience and Politics. An Interview with Professor

Frank Ankersmit,” Rethinking History, 11 (2), 2007, 258.
63 F. R. Ankersmit, “Trauma and Suffering: A Forgotten Source of Western Historical Con-
sciousness,” in Jörn Rüsen (ed.), Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate (New
York: Berghahn), 76.
64 Frank Ankersmit and Jonathan Menezes, “Historical Experience Interrogated: A Conver-
sation,” Journal of the Philosophy of History, 11 (2), 2017, 266.
65 Menezes, “Aftermaths of the dawn of experience,” 47.
67 Froeyman, “Never the Twain Shall Meet?,” 166–167. See also Froeyman, “Frank Ankersmit
and Eelco Runia,” 397: “When Ankersmit talks about historical experience, he is talking
about the past as it constitutes us. When he talks about historical representation, he is
referring to historical reality as we constitute it (…). Historical representation is the end-
point of historical enquiry, and historical experience its beginning.”

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5 Significance of the Parallel World
While reading Ankersmit’s works, sooner or later, one necessarily arrives at a

point when one’s views are challenged by some of Ankersmit’s intriguing dis-
tinctions, surprising presuppositions, ingenious arguments or unique conclu-
sions. Even though he occasionally draws inspiration from relatively popular
sources, such as the works of Arthur Danto or Louis Mink,68 he often surprises
his colleagues by reviving views which are out of fashion or largely ignored
in the field. Of course, there will always be an expert on historicism, Leibniz,
Rorty, Goodman or Quine, who will present a different reading of the given
stimulus. Nevertheless, Ankersmit will still amaze the reader with how co-
gently and resourcefully he employs his interpretation of the given position or
author for his own purpose.
When it comes to his impact on philosophy of history, it is fair to repeat
that currently Ankersmit is the most influential living philosopher of history.
Although it would be an exaggeration to say that there is an Ankersmitian phil-
osophical school, still, there is a remarkable group of authors who have had the
chance and privilege to study and/or collaborate with him, to exchange their
views with him, or to visit him in Groningen, or who have been inspired by one
of his many works. Some of these authors have decided to engage in critical
debate with him, others chose to rethink and develop his interesting points or
simply humbly draw on his ideas. Two recent books by Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
and Chiel van den Akker are good cases in point: Ankersmit’s views play cru-
cial role in their approach to history and even if these works follow their own
independent routes, fruitful influence is undeniable.69
Frank Ankersmit has occasionally called himself a “philosopher of repre-
sentation.” This fitting label nicely captures the primary importance of this
topic for his writings. There is probably no other active philosopher of history
who has devoted so much energy to the exploration of the notion of historical
representation. In addition, in his later work, the topic of historical experience
and a detailed dissection of how we relate to the past has played a conspicu-
ous role. What is interesting is that these two so distinct topics often attract
68 See, for instance, Frank Ankersmit, “Danto on Representation, Identity, and Indis
cernibles,” History and Theory, 37 (4), 1998, 44–70; Ankersmit, “Danto’s Philosophy of His-
tory in Retrospective,” in Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007), 364–393, and Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representa
tion, 26.
69 Chiel van den Akker, The Exemplifying Past: A Philosophy of History (Amsterdam: Amster-
dam University Press, 2018); Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Histori
ography (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

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rather different audiences and that Ankersmit has been one of the very few
authors who were able to stir and even determine intellectual discussions
within such seemingly remote and mutually isolated discourses. For some of
his readers the link between the topics of historical representation and experi-
ence remains puzzling.70 And yet, one is bound to esteem Ankersmit’s courage
to ignore clear-cut labels and boundaries as well as his resolution to contribute
to the two allegedly “incommensurable” conversations and to enrich both cog-
nitivist and existentialist philosophy of history.
What is more, since Ankersmit defends a very peculiar account of histori-
cal representation, he brings an original insight to the discussion about the
nature of historical works. His distinction between description and historical
representation and subsequent examination of the peculiarity of representa-
tion moves to the forefront of theoretical agenda the semantics of historical
work.71 In all of his works, Ankersmit remains an archetypal philosopher of
history drawing on philosophical debates, notions, or traditions, employing ar-
gumentative and analytical approach, and, occasionally even utilizing seman-
tical and logical instruments to clarify his conclusions. This may appear as a
banal observation, but, in fact, in an era of ever-expanding historical theory,
there are not so many authors following the best tradition of critical philoso-
phy. Moreover, one should not forget his pivotal role in the founding of a new
journal in 2007, Journal of the Philosophy of History, focusing on and encourag-
ing research in philosophy of history.
In the end, Ankersmit’s specific notion of historical representation is a de-
cisive instrument in his argument for the uniqueness of history. As he repeat-
edly points out “the sciences and the writing of history are entirely different
disciplines, and (…) anyone trying to argue away these differences is inexora-
bly on the wrong track.”72 Rightly, then, Ankersmit has been one of the most
prominent, if not the most vocal defender of the uniqueness of history in the
last decades. Making use of historicism and Leibniz, he has been a firm advo-
cate of history understood as a sui generis enterprise, history as separate from
social and other sciences. Already in his Narrative Logic, he openly rejects “all
70 Although there exist interesting accounts about how to understand Ankersmit’s exis-
tential or experiential side and how interaction between experience and representation
might be possible. See, for instance, Froeyman, “Never the Twain Shall Meet?,” Froeyman,
“Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia,” Simon, “Experience as the Invisible Drive of Histori-
cal Writing,” Simon, “The Expression of Historical Experience”, and Menezes, “Aftermaths
of the Dawn of Experience.”
71 See especially, Ankersmit, Historical Representation, 17–68; Ankersmit, “Representation
and Reference,” and Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth, and Reference.

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attempts to transform history into a social science”73 and he has not changed
his view since. In one of his recent interviews he claims: “in all of my career as
a philosopher of history I never came across an analysis by a philosopher of
science making sense of historical writing as understood here. So here history
has an autonomy of its own if compared with the sciences.”74 His commitment
to the uniqueness of history seems to motivate his whole work. The resolu-
tion with which he defends the distinctiveness of history is almost unparal-
leled when it comes to contemporary discussions within critical philosophy of
history. Even from the perspective of the last hundred years or so, Ankersmit
has a special place among the philosophers advocating autonomy of history,
such as Collingwood, Mink or Goldstein. It is certainly not a common thing to
defend this kind of autonomy, especially in a climate dominated by the influ-
ences coming either from philosophy of science or from literary theory. During
his long career, Ankersmit resisted both the “unity of science” movement and
the fashionable literary turn and he has vigorously tried to convince his read-
ers about the special place of history in our culture. Hence, as Paul and Van
Veldhuizen aptly argue, his position should be contextualized within the his-
toricist tradition, a tradition so sensitive to the individuality of history.75 In a
nutshell, Ankersmit’s work celebrates the importance and uniqueness of his-
tory: “We should never try to penetrate the secrets of the past, of historical
writing, and of the relationship of the two by an appeal to the practice and
theory of other disciplines.”76
Having in mind the significance of his views for contemporary philosophy
of history, we invited six authors (Jacques Bos, Daniel Fairbrother, Martin
Jay, Hans Kellner, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, and Chiel van den Akker), a mix
of more experienced and younger scholars, to reflect on some of the most
prominent aspects and inspirations of Ankersmit’s philosophy of history. First
of all, we are very grateful for their ingenious contributions and we hope that
these papers will enrich the thinking of readers interested in Ankersmit’s work.
During the whole process, we benefited from the help and advice of a number
of referees and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Philosophy of History.
Finally, we would like to thank Frank Ankersmit for supporting the project and
responding to the six papers. Although this special issue cannot cover all the
dimensions of his rich work, we hope that it will be a helpful point of reference
for further scholarship on Ankersmit’s philosophy.77
73 Ankersmit, Narrative Logic, 248.

75 Paul and Van Veldhuizen, “A Retrieval of Historicism.”
77 We would like to thank Daniel Fairbrother, Jonathan Menezes and Herman Paul for their
helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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journal of the philosophy of history 12 (2018) 325–344