Meaning in History
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Meaning in History
| Full title | Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History |
|---|---|
| Author | Karl Löwith |
| Published | 1949 |
| Pages | 257 |
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Karl Löwith, a German philosopher who fled the Nazi regime, works backward through the Western philosophy of history — from Burckhardt, Marx and Hegel to Joachim of Fiore and Augustine — to argue that the modern belief in progress is a secularized version of Jewish and Christian eschatology. The Greeks, on his account, had no philosophy of history at all, because a cyclical cosmos gives history nowhere to go. |
Meaning in History
Where I heard about it
- University of Austin — assigned in History, Historiography, and the Philosophy of History on its Fall 2025 reading list (November 2025), where it pairs with Becker’s Heavenly City and Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return as the secularization thesis in its strongest form, then hands off to Strauss and Fukuyama later on the same syllabus. Full curriculum: UATX Fall Reading List.
Connections
- UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this is assigned in.
- Philosophy of History — the discipline the book is an argument about.
- Progress — the idea Löwith traces to a theological origin.
- Christianity — the eschatology he says modern history-writing inherited.
- The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers — the adjacent argument, assigned in the same course.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.