Volume LIII Number 1-2
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Books
What If? By Jeremy Black
This short book, from the fertile pen of Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, is about historical counterfactuals, in other words about the philosophy of history. A counterfactual is a proposition running counter to, or substantively “replacing”, in our imagination or investigations, what is in fact the case. The philosophy underlying the views of those who find historical counterfactuals—what did not happen—crucial in the understanding of the actual record—what did happen—is “radical indeterminacy”, the view, roughly speaking, that history is an open question because human beings are free.
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