Among the intriguing issues over which philosophers and historians tend to disagree is the general character of historical explanations of events that are unique. Philosophers argue that every event is actually unique, but that any event may be explained, nevertheless, insofar as it happens to be one of a certain kind. Historians protest that this conception ignores the particularity of individual events and especially the fact that such an event may very well be the only one of its kind. As a result, historians tend to dismiss the philosopher's arguments as 'purely theoretical', while philosophers tend to dismiss the historian's retort as 'merely methodological', phrases that, within this context, at least, are dearly intended to have pejorative connotations. The purpose of this paper is to undertake an arbitration of this dispute by indicating what appear to be the strengths and weaknesses of both positions, while suggesting the view that more is involved here than either side at various times has been prepared to admit.
1. EVENTS AND DESCRIPTIONS
When philosophers argue that every event is actually unique, the sense in which this claim is intended, more likely than not, is rooted in the principle of identity, according to which any two names or descriptions -of objects or events -are simply different names or descriptions for one and the same thing just in case what they name or describe share all of their properties in common (including, it is worth noting, their spatial and temporal aspects). From this point of view, every object or event that occupies a particular location at a certain time (or sequence of locations over a sequence of times) is distinct from every other object or event that does not occupy precisely those places at precisely those times. When philosophers talk about kinds of things -be they objects or events -they are similarly speaking in very broad terms, for any two things may be properly classified as being of the same kind just in case and to the extent to which they happen to share various properties in common. And when philosophers maintain that every event is actually unique but that any event nevertheless may be explained as an event of a particular kind, what is intended by this claim is that when the occurrence of any event is subjected to explanatory clarification, it is not the case that that event is explainable with respect to every minute detail. 1