You don't have to care, of course, but neither do I have to indulge straw men. The challenge is to how we are to understand history, with the suggestion being that all methodologies fail to achieve what is aimed at. I suppose my error was in not realising how little some practising historians are aware of this debate, notwithstanding those like Evans who address it head-on. I will try to introduce it in stages at my forum but will not waste your time further here.

Because it's largely irrelevant to the vast majority of what we do. (Ralph: the "abuse" to which he's referring is at Blogenspiel, a bit after the post you linked to below). The questions you ask and the answers (such as they are) to which philosophers come just don't affect the writing of history that much.

I can understand that history is a fascinating epistemological problem-set for philosophers, but philosophy does not fundamentally help us do our work as historians. The new and innovative ways of doing history over the last century have come from the social sciences; some of the literary theories have had an influence too, but for good or ill remains to be determined; philosophy as such does not yet present us useful tools or issues.

Once you're done defining "empirical" and "discipline" and all your other terms in such a way that your conclusions are "inescapable," we still have to go back and read real sources and draw reasonable inferences from partial and indirect data, and very little beyond Logic 101 (and some advanced work in common fallacies) is required or desirable. It might be a good thing to systematize our practice, or it might freeze us into a model in which we ask the same questions over and over and get the same answers (or worse, different ones) without ever resolving or progressing. Moreover, there are many different kinds of history writing, and evidence, each with their own epistemological issues, so that any "theory of history" has to take into account the multiplicity and variance of these materials.

Most of us know exactly where we sit on "truth, fact and the possibility (or otherwise) of neutral positions." We're not avoiding the questions; they're fundamental and we come to terms with them early and get on with the work of historians.

It seems I threw in a large measure of typos while complaining at getting my name wrong - no doubt for maximal ironic effect...

I think the concept of a philosophy of history is too tied up with the ideologies of historical causation (Marxism, marketism, divine providence, biological determinism, psychologism, racialism and ethnic nationalism, etc) which have distorted historical writing and political discourse for far too long. I can't speak for other 'work-a-day' historians (my best work is done at night, it seems) but none of these ideations are helpful to me except in very small doses.

I believe that there are individuals who make choices in the context of systems of behavior and belief based on available information, and that the aggregate of these choices -- conscious or not, surprising or predictable, effective or failure -- is history. Is that a philosophy? Probably not one that would satisfy a philosopher, but any time you systematize these things too much, it makes it impossible to account for the irrationality, partiality, selectivity, and contingent nature of both historical process and historiographical process.

But the real reason they wouldn't give you credit is that real departments don't give credit for courses they don't teach....

I would argue that "philosophy of history" is something which defines historiographic traditions, and that ways of writing sometimes incorporate implicit/inherent philosophies, and that historians should have a very different view of meta-questions: both their origins and potential answers have to come not from logical propositions, or even moral ones, but from evidentiary accumulations and analysis.

There's a graduate seminar in that somewhere.