One might argue that in creating any historical publication, a historian is engaging with a philosopher, whether they know it or not. The process, methods, and interpretation of history is not innately objective. While there is a codified scientific process, there are multiple historiographies. An explicit historiography can hardly go without referencing some philosopher. One can approach the same data as a post-modernist, as a feminist, or as a materialist; how do you supposed we can define a post-modern history without invoking Mr. Derrida?

One of my favorite convergences of history and philosophy is the first chapter of Marx's 1845 The German Ideology. This section defines what we would know call "historical materialism." In short, the chapter is a reaction to both the idealists who preceded Marx (who emphasized the agency of ideologies and religions and social trends) and to his contemporary materialists, who weren't quite as materialist as the young Marx wanted them to be. Marx emphasizes that the social sciences must begin with the solid reality and actions of man:

That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.

This manner of approaching history is particularly important for archaeologists like me. An aspiring European historian can trace the growth and development of Christianity in Germany without ever looking down at the basic unit of Marxist materialism, the individual man. He may talk of kings and bishops and mantras and edicts and councils, but for Marx, these things "have no history, no development." The real history lies in what people are physically doing: Christianity's beliefs and evolution are the result of human production and not an agent in itself. You can't really study a cake until you've understood the baker, and to ignore the baker entirely is outrageous.

As if it were some kind of Marxist utopia, archaeology can't fall into this "trap." It is rather difficult for me to engross myself in some religion or politic of an ancient Andean people without grounding myself in the physical actions of the people themselves. I know the Recuay practiced ancestor veneration not because of what I have read in their books or learned from a chiefly decree, but because of where they buried their dead and how they physically interacted with mummies. (Of course, archaeology does have its own set of related theoretical issues....)

I also particularly appreciate this passage:

Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we must begin by stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to “make history.” But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life. Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with Saint Bruno [Bauer], it presupposes the action of producing the stick.

Of course this is hardly the "correct" philosophy. A feminist may protest that Marx's focus on production can overlook women historically less involved in some areas, and rightly so. A post-modernist will criticize Marx's reliance on solid, verifiable facts and suggest a more descriptive, narrative approach that foregoes removing bias since it's a hopeless endeavor to begin with. Most of us are all somewhere in the middle.

As they say though, even a photographer is taking a position, since he's the one deciding to take the picture in the first place. Whenever a historian writes a piece, he is engaging a philosophy in his choice of focus, mode of analysis, and manner of presentation.