Contents -- Preface to the new edition -- Preface to the first edition -- Chapter 1: Postmetaphysical History -- A Difficult Adjustment -- Dissolving and Inflating the Historical -- Expansion and Polarization in Empirical Historiography -- A Historical Approach to the Changing Culture of History -- Chapter 2: Tentative Steps into History From Vico to Dilthey -- The Question of Modern Historical Consciousness -- Individuality and Completeness in Vico and Hegel -- Historicism and Historiography after Hegel -- Dilthey and the Unfinished Revolution -- Chapter 3: The Reduction to History -- New Confrontations with Time and History -- This Particular World -- History, Language, and Individual Experience -- Chapter 4: Nietzsche - The Innocence of Becoming -- The Trouble with History -- Emptiness and Connectedness -- Reshaping the Past -- Affirming the Particular Totality -- Nietzsche's Triple Legacy -- Chapter 5: Croce - History as Thought and Action -- Croce's Uncertain Legacy -- A Postmetaphysical Historicism -- Knowing the World as History -- Experiencing Action as History -- Commitment and Collaboration, Humility and Faith -- Croce's Limits -- Chapter 6: Heidegger - Historicism, Disengagement, Holiness -- Heidegger and the Reduction to History -- Being and Time and After -- Being and History, Our History and Nihilism -- The Scope for an Active Response -- Out the Other Side of Historicism -- Attuning Ourselves to the Sending -- Chapter 7: Gadamerian Hermeneutics - Belonging to a Growing Tradition -- Interlude: Pathways in a New Terrain -- Heidegger, Gadamer, and Croce -- Belonging to History -- Confinement and Openness -- Concealment and the Fusion of Horizons -- The Authority of Tradition -- Chapter 8: Deconstruction - The Uses and Limits of Perversity -- Deconstruction and the Cultural Displacement -- Foucault and the End of Man.

Derrida and the Dissolution of Metaphysics -- The Premium on Disruption -- Plausible Extremity -- Overreaction and Preclusion -- Chapter 9: Pragmatism, Historicism, Aestheticism -- Rorty's Neopragmatism -- From Foundations to History -- From Philosophy to Textualism -- Irony, Redescription, Autonomy -- Suffocation, Weightlessness, and the Prophets of Extremity -- Reconnection and Truth -- Chapter 10: Past, Process, and Contest in Contemporary Historiography -- Historiographical Openness -- Processes to the Present -- The Uncanny Past -- Scott versus Himmelfarb -- Groups, Processes, and Axes of Contest -- Polarization and Revitalization -- Chapter 11: Responding to the World as Historical -- Postmetaphysical Moderation -- Care, Learning, and Truth -- The Process of Interaction -- Between Rational Critique and Disruptive Play -- Openness and Risk in Historiography -- The Extremes and the Middle Ground -- Notes -- Index.