Comment on Monroe Beardsley’s ‘Inevitability in History’

Abstract

There seem to be inevitabilities both within and without history. Thus, Monroe Beardsley’s analysis of historical inevitability raises this question: what is the relationship between the extra-historical and the historical inevitability? There seems to be an assumption that the concept of inevitability is the same within and without history. I wish to question that assumption. There are distinctively historical forms of inevitability that cannot be assimilated to other kinds of inevitability.