Abstract
My first engagement with the past was prompted by philosophical and political commitments to Plato and Marx and their theories of historical development. But these commitments were soon dislodged by the study of the history of the ideas of historical development of Burke, Locke and Hooker. Prompted by Hookers intellectual background, these studies, in turn, led to further but different engagements with medieval history first with the history of medieval philosophy and, from there, with the socio-political formative centuries of the Middle Ages. And then, taking religion as seriously as medieval people had done, but myself not being a believer, I was obliged to ponder problems of the philosophy of religion. Each engagement raised further problems rather than provided solutions and therefore led to the next, which usually differed in kind. The one steady thread was the realization that since the past has led to the present, these events must have been actually related. According to Popper, causal links are relative to generalizations. But since the generalisations used vary according to times and circumstances, events are linked in endlessly different ways so that one gets a plethora of narratives. The conclusion that all these metahistorical preoccupations required a meta-narrative, or what used to be called a philosophy of history, was logicically inevitable.