A systematic introduction to the major accounts of the philosophy of history: linear (progressive and non-progressive), cyclic and spiral conceptions of historical time from antiquity to the modern era, exploring the significance of key interpretive terms such as the mechanism of unintended consequences, historical “deviation”, the categories of “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation”, the “secularization of metaphysics” and disenchantment and elucidations on focal methodological issues such as, inter alia, the distinction between conceptual structure and contents, the individualism-holism debate.