I'm a graduate student in history and currently struggling with mandatory coursework on the philosophy of history. I'm struggling to link what people have previously said about history, to how I study history now. While some groups are clearly obvious how their philosophy impacts their understanding of history, (Marx, Feminist, and Annales, for example), there are other debates that seem to be stuck in semantics (Butterfield vs Berlin with morality in history and historical determinism).
Do you have any favorite philosopher's of history? How have they impacted your view of history? Is your current study of history influenced by any particular philosophical discipline? I really want to love this like I have loved other parts of my history studies, but I'm spinning my wheels.
A lot of the old and many of the present popular historians were/are content to walk through a narrative and dispense tar or gilding over everyone in it, because they were/are usually concerned with Moral Instruction. But though that can be very satisfying and attractive ( if you count yourself and your readers among the gilt) it often blocks understanding of how those people functioned, thought. So, there's a point to philosophy of history.
As my own bias is towards practical method, my favorite philosopher of history is R.G. Collingwood. His Idea of History was inspiring, when I read it, and resonated with me as being useful, not just someone playing games with language or building some system of the world. To be even more practical, copies of it also abound. You can read some samples here, posted by a group of scholars who've created a project around the works of psychologist George Herbert Meade. Meade was a pragmatist, and not surprisingly in undertaking the project , like me they were inspired by Collingwood .