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Historical study has traditionally been built around the placement of the human at the center of inquiry. The de-stabilized concepts of the human in contemporary thought challenge this configuration. However, the ways in which these challenges provoke new historical perspectives both expand and enrich historical study but are also weak and vulnerable in their concept of the human, lacking or omitting something valuable in our self-understanding. A Personalist Philosophy of History argues for a robust concept of personhood in our experience of the past as a way to resolve this conflict. Focused on those who know history, rather than on the abstract properties of knowledge, it extends the moral agency of persons into non-human, trans-human, and deep history domains. It describes an approach to moral life through historical experience and study, rather than through abstractions. And it describes a kind of historiography that matches factual accuracy to both the constructed nature of understanding and to unavoidable moral purpose.
Introduces advanced students of literature to the latest critical thinkingFollowing a scene-setting Introduction which reflects on the state of atheory today, the 11 chapters in this volume introduce new areas of critical thinking which go beyond the standard aisms: Literary Reading in a Digital Age; Critical Making in the Digital Humanities; Thing Theory; Memory Work and Criticism; Body, Objects, Technology; Criticism and aThe Animal; Multimodality and Linguistic Approaches to Literary Study; Critical and Creative Practice: Conditions for Success in the Writing Workshop; Affect Theory; Spectrality; Critical Climate Change.A final rounding off chapter on Historicising presents debates around...
Liberating Histories makes an original, scholarly contribution to contemporary debates surrounding the cultural and political relevance of historical practices. Arguing against the idea that specifically historical readings of the past are necessary or are compelled by the force of past events themselves, this book instead focuses on other forms of past-talk and how they function in politically empowering ways against social injustices. Challenging the authority and constraints of academic history over the past, this book explores various forms of past-talk, including art, films, activism, memory, nostalgia and archives. Across seven clear chapters, Claire Norton and Mark Donnelly show how a...
Questions about the relationship between historical research and contemporary social and practical problems have posed a challenge to generations of historians, as well as to philosophers and theorists of history. In recent years, views regarding the isolation of academic history from real-world issues and affairs have come under increasing criticism. The contributions to this volume all focus on history’s role in the world today and on the possibilities for, and limits to, engagement resulting from disciplinary practices and conventions. The authors undertake their assessment of history’s relevance in different ways, combining case studies of political clashes, public debates, and pract...
Photography, Truth and Reconciliation charts the connections between photography and a crucial issue in contemporary social history. The book examines the prevalence of photography in cultural responses to processes of truth and reconciliation, and argues that photographs are a valuable means through which stories can be retold and historiography can be rethought. Five compelling case studies from Argentina, Canada, Australia, South Africa and Cambodia underscore the special role that this medium has played in facilitating processes of recovery, and in reconstructing suppressed histories, even when a documentary record of the events does not exist. The diverse practices addressed in this boo...
There is no more contentious and perennial issue in the history of modern Western thought than the vexed relationship between the genesis of an idea and its claim to validity beyond it. Can ideas or values transcend their temporal origins and overcome the sin of their original context, and in so doing earn abiding respect for their intrinsic merit? Or do they inevitably reflect them in ways that undermine their universal aspirations? Are discrete contexts so incommensurable and unique that the smooth passage of ideas from one to the other is impossible? Are we always trapped by the limits of our own cultural standpoints and partial perspectives, or can we somehow escape their constraints and...
Since the appearance of Hayden White’s seminal work Metahistory in 1973, constructivist thought has been a key force within theory of history and has at times even provided inspiration for historians more generally. Despite the radical theoretical shift marked by constructivism and elaborated in detail by its proponents, confusion regarding many of its practical and ethical consequences persists, however, and its position on truth and meaning is routinely misconstrued. To remedy this situation, The Work of History seeks to mediate between constructivist theory and history practitioners’ intuitions about the nature of their work, especially as these relate to the so-called fact–fiction debate and to the literary challenges involved in the production of historical accounts. In doing so, the book also offers much-needed insight into debates about our experiential relations with the past, the political use of history and the role of facts in the contestation of power.
There is a need for integrated thinking about causality, probability and mechanisms in scientific methodology. Causality and probability are long-established central concepts in the sciences, with a corresponding philosophical literature examining their problems. On the other hand, the philosophical literature examining mechanisms is not long-established, and there is no clear idea of how mechanisms relate to causality and probability. But we need some idea if we are to understand causal inference in the sciences: a panoply of disciplines, ranging from epidemiology to biology, from econometrics to physics, routinely make use of probability, statistics, theory and mechanisms to infer causal r...
Historical Mechanisms argues that scientific method can provide key new insights about events that took place long ago. Taking a fresh approach to historical method and theory, this book contends that there is enough data to show that under certain circumstances societies have behaved, and will continue to behave, in similar ways throughout history. In this book, Andreas D. Boldt discusses the possibility of utilizing natural scientific theories in order to explain historical processes, focusing on the question of how nations and empires rise, succeed, fail and then assume another form in which they begin the cycle again. Scientific methods are utilized metaphorically as a means of establish...
This open access book draws on conceptual resources ranging from medieval scholasticism to postmodern theory to propose a new understanding of secular time and its mediation in nineteenth-century technological networks. Untethering the concept of secularity from questions of religion and belief, it offers an innovative rethinking of the history of secularisation that will appeal to students, scholars, and everyone interested in secularity, Victorian culture, the history of technology, and the temporalities of modernity. Stefan Fisher-Hyrem (PhD) is a historian and Senior Academic Librarian at the University of Agder, Norway.