David Corfield philosophy of history

Events in Canterbury and Kent

• Pegwell/Bigbury camp
• Becket’s murder
• Bertha, Augustine and Ethelbert
• Huguenots, French church
• Mary and protestants.
• slave trade
• Hengist, Horsa.
• Canterbury in WWII. Movie. Raid on town.
• Mining in Snowsdown. Labour relations.
• Joan of Navarre, wife of Henry IV, Lady Joan Mohun (d. 1404) and Lady Elizabeth Trivet (d. 1433), Canterbury Women’s Citizens Association Committee

Extra topics

• Statues. Archbishop’s statement.
• Representation.

Themes

• Truth, reality, interpretation:
• Selection size in time and space.
• Value judgement: slavery Romans (Delos), Vikings, Barbary, slave trade.
• Direction: Hegel, Marx.
• Repetition: Henry VIII-Brexit.
• Its point today: in dramatic representation, etc. Ken Follett’s novel The Pillars of the Earth, of which one of the last scenes features the murder of Thomas Becket.

Roth

A narrative in this sense constructs both the explanans and explanandum. (p. 20)

Historical explanation qua narrative explanation concerns itself with a developmental or innovative process that emerges only in retrospect. A narrative traces a path of development, a path not defined or marked by any known laws or the like. An event emerges as an event only because our interests call it into being; events so constituted do not represent or embody some natural kind. Following that path might well and perhaps even should change our perception of how to proceed on the basis of an altered understanding of that past. (p. 25)