In the fifteenth century, scholars writing in Arabic and Persian debated the nature of historical inquiry and its place among the sciences. While the motivations and perspectives of the various scholars differed, the terms and parameters of the debate remained remarkably fixed and focused, even as it unfolded across a vast geographic space between Herat, Cairo, and Constantinople. This article examines the contours of this debate and the relationships between five historians working on these issues. Although the scholars who considered these questions frequently arrived at different conclusions, they all firmly agreed, in contrast to previous doubt regarding the status of history, that historical inquiry did indeed constitute a distinct science requiring its own particular method. Accordingly, the debate and its conclusions helped cement the place of history within the broader pantheon of the sciences as conceived by scholars in the Ottoman Empire from the sixteenth century onwards.

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作为科学的历史：阿拉伯语和波斯语的 15 世纪辩论

在 15 世纪，用阿拉伯语和波斯语写作的学者们就历史探究的性质及其在科学中的地位展开了辩论。虽然不同学者的动机和观点各不相同，但辩论的术语和参数仍然非常固定和集中，即使它在赫拉特、开罗和君士坦丁堡之间的广阔地理空间中展开。本文考察了这场辩论的轮廓以及五位致力于这些问题的历史学家之间的关系。考虑这些问题的学者虽然经常得出不同的结论，但他们都坚定地认为，与以往对历史地位的怀疑不同，历史探究确实是一门独特的科学，需要有自己独特的方法。因此，