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Does the Munich Analogy Fit?

My essay below, “Does the Munich Analogy Fit?”, was published in the online journal History News Network on 3 March 2003 (http://hnn.us/articles/1286.html/). Analogies appear frequently in historical writing. Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl in their helpful book The Philosopher’s Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods (Blackwell: Oxford), 2003, point out that analogies are also used by philosophers, lawyers, and journalists to enhance reasoning, to make arguments, and as illustrations. Analogies are, according to Baggini and Fosl, “strong” if they “share a large or decisive number of relevant similarities” while at the same time they “do not exhibit a large or decisive number of relevant differences” (p. 47). To the extent that an analogy does not satisfactorily fit those two conditions, then the analogy is “weak”. The essay below discusses some of the difficulties of using analogies in historical arguments. “Does the Munich Analogy Fit?” By Robert Cook Recent wo