Philosophers of history posit a class of concepts known as colligatory concepts that contribute to historical consciousness and that refer specifically to historical events. Although analysis has identified colligatory concepts in historical discourse, these concepts have not yet been investigated empirically. We present a new methodology for studying these concepts and historical consciousness more broadly, as well as pilot data supporting the methodology. Our aim in the pilot study was to establish whether colligatory concepts (...) are processed differently from control concepts when subjects are asked to judge historical statements. We compared judgments of colligatory concepts in healthy participants and in a patient group with impaired working memory cognitive processing capacity. Forty healthy, college-educated participants and 25 patients with Parkinson's disease were asked to rate narrative sentences containing historical content and an equal number of identically constructed narrative sentences of equ.. (shrink)

It is now widely accepted that philosophers should be historically self-conscious. But what does this mean in practice? How does historical consciousness change the way we philosophize? To answer this question, I examine two philosophers who put historical consciousness at the heart of their projects: Richard Rorty and Paul Ricoeur. Rorty and Ricoeur both argue that historical consciousness leads us to see philosophy as fragmented. It leads us to view our thinking from multiple perspectives (...) at once, perspectives that are often in considerable tension. But Rorty and Ricoeur reach radically different conclusions about how we should respond to this fragmentation. Their disagreement, I argue, is closely connected to their views of identity. Rorty and Ricoeur have different understandings of what it means for something to be unified, and thus different ideas about what it would take for our perspectives on ourselves to be brought together. My argument for this claim has four parts. First, I try to identify the problems that historical consciousness raises for philosophy, and explain why the most common response to them is unsatisfactory. Second, I discuss Rorty's claim that historical consciousness ought to make us ironists about our philosophical views, and to abandon truth as a goal of inquiry. Third, I contrast Rorty's position with Ricoeur's. Ricoeur argues that we can be historically self-aware and still see philosophy as a rational enterprise that aims at truth. I argue that Ricoeur's optimism on this point is rooted in his view of identity, and specifically in his distinction between idem- and ipse-identity. Finally, I ask what all of this shows about the options available to historically minded philosophers today. (shrink)

What is a “historical” video game, let alone a successful one? It is difficult to answer this question because all our definitions of history have been constructed in a linear-narrative cultural context that is currently being challenged and in large part displaced by digital media, especially video games. I therefore consider this question from the point of view of historical semantics and in relation to the impact of digital technology on all aspects of the historiographical operation, from the (...) establishment of digital archives, to the production of e-texts, to the digital remediation of visual modes of historical representation. Seen from this dual perspective, video games appear to participate in a process of spatialization and virtualization of historical semantics. In the first place, video games have begun to detach the notion of history from its double reference to the past and to the real—“what essentially happened”—that it had acquired at the end of the eighteenth century. Second, they also challenge the semiotic production of “historic events” that has characterized the construction of modern historical consciousness. Historical video games, in other words, replace representation with simulation and presence with virtuality, thereby marginalizing the oscillation of the modern historical imagination between historical facts and historic events, transcendence and immanence, representation and presence. Although digital reworkings of historical semantics have not produced any grammatical transformation of the signifier, history—nor does this essay propose one—I do argue that the impact of video games on our contemporary historic culture is of paradigmatic proportions similar to those described by Reinhart Koselleck for the dawn of the modern age. Focusing on one of the most successful contemporary video games, Sid Meier’s Civilization, I show how the remediation of cinematic genres by video games is pushing the processes of de-temporalization and de-referentialization of history toward the formation of a new notion of the historical that may be conceptualized as the inversion of the classic Aristotelian paradigm: history has replaced poetry and philosophy as the realm of the possible. (shrink)

In this extraordinary analysis of the meaning of the remembered past, Lukacs discusses the evolution of historical consciousness since its first emergence about ...

The last several decades have witnessed an explosion of new empirical research into representations of the past and the conditions of their production, prompting claims that we have entered a new era in which the past has become more “present” than ever before. Contemplating Historical Consciousness brings together leading historians, ethnographers, and other scholars who give illuminating reflections on the aims, methods, and conceptualization of their own research as well as the successes and failures they have encountered. This (...) rich collective account provides valuable perspectives for current scholars while charting new avenues for future research. (shrink)

Constructs a philosophy of history and historical interpretation and applies it to various past and present events.

CHAPTER 1 Narrative Psychology and Historical Consciousness Relationships and Perspectives DONALD E. POLKINGHORNE Postmodern theory has severely undercut ...

In this essay, I ask what form of historical consciousness schools should nurture in students. The two criteria I set up in this regard are plausibility—is the account of history plausible—and practicality—does the form of historical consciousness help young people contribute to the betterment of society. The level of my analysis is that of modernity, a novel interpretation of which I gradually develop. I begin by drawing on Nietzsche to assess three forms of historical (...) class='Hi'>consciousness that are on offer: the belief in the old age of humankind, a forward-looking rebellion, and a backwards-looking rebellion. All three are found wanting according to my criteria. I retain from Nietzsche the idea that a certain degree of ‘presentism’ is inevitable in historical consciousness. I then use Paul Ricoeur’s reflections on modernity as a springboard for outlining a different account, which mobilizes the metaphor of modernity as a period of transition akin to adolescence. The form of historical consciousness that is associated with this metaphor is more plausible and practical than the three competitors I assessed. I conclude by defending this account from potential objections. (shrink)

This essay focuses on three topics that arose at the Photography and Historical Interpretation conference: photography’s incapacity to conceive duration; photography and the “rim of ontological uncertainty;” photography’s “anthropological revolution.” In the late nineteenth century, blindness to duration was conceptualized as the cost of photographic precision. Since the late twentieth century, blindness to our own desires, or inauthenticity, has been underlined as the price of photographic ubiquity. These forms of blindness, however, are not so much disabilities to be overcome (...) as they are aspects of modern consciousness to be acknowledged. The engagement with photography’s impact on historical consciousness gives rise to reconsiderations of temporal extension and to the difficulties of acknowledging one’s desires in an increasingly open and fractured social field. Photography’s indexicality combined with its reproducibility gives rise to photographic ambivalence. As with other forms of ambivalence, we should be less concerned with diluting its constitutive tensions than with learning to live with its conflicted possibilities. (shrink)

In this introductory article to the volume of the South African Journal of Philosophy in tribute of Hans- Georg Gadamer, the author, first, makes a few remarks about the nature of hermeneutics and Gadamer's views on the universality of the hermeneutical experience. This universality is, in particular, explained from the perspective of the “linguistic turn” in Gadamer's thought. Secondly, there is a brief discussion of certain particular aspects of Gadamer's contribution. Aspects of that contribution that are emphasized are: Gadamer's reevaluation (...) of prejudice, authority and tradition, his idea of “Wirkungs -geschichte”, his idea of meaning as a process rather than a given entity, his analogy between game- playing and the interpretation of art, and his dialogical conception of interpretation. The author concludes by developing his own estimate of the main thrust of Gadamer's contribution. This contribution consists of the way in which Gadamer's thought, on the one hand, represents a demonstration and embodiment of the kind of historical consciousness so typical of our times, but, on the other hand, also accomplishes this exemplification of historical consciousness while imaginatively avoiding the kind of relativistic historicism so typical of many other manifestations of the same trend. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.21(4) 2002: 228-241. (shrink)

I argue that eliminative materialism, with its aim of jettisoning folk psychology, cannot account for the possibility of historical knowledge. Eliminative materialism destroys the disciplinary distinctions between history and science in such a way as to eclipse the former. I argue that ‘historical consciousness’ cannot be reduced to the discoveries of neuroscience; Paul Churchland’s charge of folk psychology’s explanatory impotence is undercut by the possibility, indeed, the actuality of historical knowledge, and one of Churchland’s main arguments (...) for eliminative materialism is dependent upon historical knowledge-claims that themselves must contradictorily utilize the propositional attitudes of folk psychology. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to reveal the relationship between the discreteness of historical consciousness and the processes of spiritual and intellectual development of the individual; to offer his vision of what the discreteness of historical consciousness is and to determine the degree of its influence on the process of spiritual and intellectual formation of the individual. The article focuses on the fact that the discreteness of historical consciousness has a destructive effect on (...) public consciousness and its forms. The degree of discreteness of historical consciousness and the level of spiritual and intellectual development of the individual are interdependent and have a mutual influence on each other. As a result of the conducted research, it was revealed that the discrete historical consciousness is a fragmented "torn" historical consciousness, which poses a threat to the spiritual and intellectual formation of the individual. (shrink)

An autobiographic instinct may be as old as Man Writing; but only since 1800 has Western Man placed a premium on autobiography. A bibliography of all autobiographic writing prior to that time would be a small fascicule; a bibliography since 1800 a thick tome. The ground behind this simpleminded assertion of a quantitative measure cannot be explained away by easy reference to the mass literacy of the modern world or the greater ease of publishing. It is as much a fact (...) of cultural conditions as is the significant relation of rhetoric to the intense public mindedness of classical men, the relative insignificance of tragedy in a thoroughly Christianized world view, the disappearance of epic from a nonaristocratic world, or the powerful assertion of the novel in an age of burghers. The usage of the term "autobiography" itself is suggestive, although this mode of historical explanation is always defective in the sense that such older terms as "hypomnemata," "commentarii," "vita," "confessions," or "memoirs" may well have covered the functions subsequently encapsulated in a newly fashionable term. In German the term makes its appearance shortly before 1800; the Oxford English Dictionary attributes first English usage to Southey in an article on Portuguese literature from the year 1809. Karl J. Weintraub, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of History and dean of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, is the author of Visions of Culture and numerous articles. His introduction to a new edition of Goethe's Autobiography will prove of special interest to our readers. (shrink)

Over the past 20 years, there has been a shift in history education away from a view of history as the pursuit of an objective, universal story about the past toward ‘historical consciousness,’ which seeks to cultivate an understanding of the past as something that makes moral demands on us here and now. According to Roger Simon, historical consciousness calls us to ‘live historically’ – to live in a particular kind of ethical relationship with the past. (...) However, no matter how much educators might believe in the importance of learning to live historically, if students do not see it that way, even the most thoughtfully designed program in history education will never get off the ground. This paper is an attempt to see whether the notion of ‘caring for the past,’ based on Nel Noddings' ethic of care, might help us begin to address the problem of moral motivation in educating for historical consciousness. (shrink)

Philosophy, Socrates declared, is the art of dying. This book underscores that it is also the art of learning to live and share the earth with those who have come before us. Burial, with its surrounding rituals, is the most ancient documented cultural-symbolic practice: all humans have developed techniques of caring for and communicating with the dead. The premise of Being with the Dead is that we can explore our lives with the dead as a cross-cultural existential a priori out (...) of which the basic forms of historical consciousness emerge. Care for the dead is not just about the symbolic handling of mortal remains; it also points to a necropolitics, the social bond between the dead and living that holds societies together—a shared space or polis where the dead are maintained among the living. Moving from mortuary rituals to literary representations, from the problem of ancestrality to technologies of survival and intergenerational communication, Hans Ruin explores the epistemological, ethical, and ontological dimensions of what it means to be with the dead. His phenomenological approach to key sources in a range of fields gives us a new perspective on the human sciences as a whole. (shrink)

The article provides a new interpretation of the most widely cited essay on historical consciousness, Friedrich Nietzsche?s?On the use and abuse of history for life? from 1874, reconnecting it to current debates in educational science and the role of the historian and educator in a post-colonial situation. It reminds us how historical consciousness is an always contested and critical space, where our existential commitment to justice is also tested. The interpretation moves beyond the standard understanding of (...) Nietzsche as only favouring a life-affirming use of history. It displays how his argument opens the door toward understanding historical consciousness as a transcultural ethical space of an encounter between the dead and the living. It addresses the contemporary debate in education science concerning the relation and preference between a broader and more limited notion of historical consciousness, questioning the possibility of a conclusive theory of historical consciousness for practical-pedagogical purposes. It exemplifies its conclusions in regard to the legacies of the Holocaust and to Apartheid, as also pedagogical challenges. (shrink)

Using the history classroom as a context for ethics and moral education is a long, but also contested, tradition. Recently, more emphasis has been put on how to incorporate ethics education, with this paper exploring the spaces of ethics and moral education in the history classroom. It is argued here that insights from moral philosophy and theories of historical consciousness, but – importantly – also moral psychology and the study of moral emotions, are needed to realise the potential (...) of history teaching and learning to support ethics education. Following this line, three spaces of ethics education in the history classroom are identified in this paper, including: reasoning about the moral quality of historical actors’ conduct; the use of historical empathy ; and reflection of the past’s moral meaning to the present and the future. As an example of how to implement this, a set of stimulus activities is presented that is designed for the classroom and a qualitative analysis of students’ responses that explicate expressions of students’ moral reasoning, perspective-taking, and historical consciousness. (shrink)

These essays emerged from papers presented under the auspices of the American Academy of Religion. This volume contributes to scholarship that explores Christianity's role in modernity, the ongoing implications of historical controversies, and the importance of history in Christian theology.

The problematic Sui-dynasty catalog Lidai sanbao ji 歷代三寶紀 is well known for its many incorrect translator attributions for early canonical Chinese Buddhist texts, attributions that in large measure were accepted by the later tradition and which have remained in place even within modern editions of the Chinese Buddhist canon. The question of how its compiler Fei Changfang 費長房 arrived at his information—and whether he acted in good or bad faith in presenting it—has long been debated. Recent scholarship has argued that (...) patterns in how the Lidai sanbao ji draws from earlier sources demonstrate that Fei Changfang engaged in a deliberate manipulation of his data. This essay, in contrast, introduces manuscripts from Dunhuang of earlier and otherwise lost catalogs of Chinese Buddhist texts to demonstrate that these patterns can be explained in other ways. More broadly, it is suggested that the errors of the Lidai sanbao ji should be understood not as the products of a solitary forger, but as a sign of a wider loss of literary historical consciousness that impacted Chinese Buddhism between ca. 550–650 CE. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century historiography was not, as Meinecke argued, "the substitution of a process of individualizing observation for a generalizing view of human forces in history." This generally accepted view involves a metaphysics which, though characteristic of nineteenth-century historicism, rejects the primarily contextual evaluation of eighteenth-century historicism. This underlying form of evaluation developed not with individualism, but with aesthetics. Though usually considered a product of the eighteenth century, aesthetic historicism can be traced to the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, which (...) began in the late 1680s and culminated with the "war over Homer" of 1714-1716. This argument explored the problem of evaluating the art of other historical ages. The implications of this position are that historicism was not an essentially German movement and that historicism was not a rigid antithesis to the Enlightenment. (shrink)

In recent years, aggressive and conservative nationalistic forces have been growing stronger worldwide (Rydgren 2018). Increased random terrorist attacks are now occurring in sites previously thoug...

Using the form of cinematic montage, this essay explores the nature of historical consciousness in a mass-mediated culture where historical discourse takes the form of both showing and saying, moving images and written words. The title draws upon and argues with Roland Barthes's critique of the duplicity of the "insistent fringes" that supposedly reduce and naturalize "Roman-ness" to fringed hair in popular historical film. Barthes presumes a "certainty" in such a cinematic image, and hence deems it (...) mythological-that is, "it goes without saying." Countering Barthes with Walter Benjamin, one might argue that the "insistent fringe" is insistently historical and constitutes, in its insistence, a "dialectical image": a site and sight full of contradictions and open to excavation. That is, it concretizes historiographic saying by showing. Neither historiographic saying nor showing are privileged in medias res-in a culture saturated in images and textuality, in competing modes of expression each of which has its limits. Historical consciousness is sparked and constituted from both showing and saying. Indeed, the "insistent fringe" is precisely not clear-cut-and, if it insists on anything, it is its serrated nature, its articulation as a limit that differs from, but is constituted by, the elements of the two distinct domains which it both separates and connects. Similarly, there is a dynamic, functional, and hardly clear-cut relation that exists between the mythological histories wrought by Hollywood cinema and the academic histories written by scholars. They co-exist, compete, and cooperate in a contingent, heteroglossic, and always shifting ratio-thus constituting the "rationality" of contemporary historical consciousness. (shrink)

This paper addresses the self-overcoming of historical consciousness in Nietzsche’s “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” and contemporaneous texts. I argue that Nietzsche’s particular historical awareness, which conditions his treatment of historiography [Historie], is indebted to the lineage of German Idealism it also overtly contests. That contestation reaches its apex in Nietzsche’s valorization of appearance and the redirection of poietic power, which enables him to affirm an art of history rather than a science thereof, indeed, (...) an art aligned with justice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:John Henry Newman's Theology of History: Historical Consciousness, Theological "Imaginaries", and the Development of Tradition by Christopher CimorelliReinhard HütterJohn Henry Newman's Theology of History: Historical Consciousness, Theological "Imaginaries", and the Development of Tradition by Christopher Cimorelli (Leuven: Peeters, 2017), xii + 356.There is no end of books on John Henry Newman, and this is a good thing, because Newman's importance is not waning, but—arguably—increasing. (...) Christopher Cimorelli's study, the adapted version of a doctoral dissertation completed at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, under the directorship of the noted Newman scholar Terrence Merrigan, appeared in print in 2017. This book is of ongoing relevance, for at least three reasons. (1) No other work since then has replaced or improved upon Cimorelli's close reading and exacting interpretation of Newman's first [End Page 1339] monograph, The Arians of the Fourth Century. (2) There exists no other study on Newman's theology of history in correlation to his development of doctrine of similar depth. (3) Cimorelli has recently become director of the National Institute for Newman Studies (NINS) in Pittsburgh. It is to be expected that the programmatic thrust of this work will inform to some degree the research agenda and the overall theological approach taken at the NINS under his leadership.Cimorelli's book does two things in one: it fills an urgent need in Newman studies, and based on Newman's thought about history, it makes an important—albeit not unproblematic—contribution to the ongoing discussion regarding the development of doctrine by advancing a new theory of the development of tradition. This makes the book fall into two parts of unequal length, the second shorter constructive part being conjoined to the first longer interpretive part, an investigation of Newman's view of history as a whole, ecclesiastical history, the nature of historical research, and its significance for theology.In the first chapter, Cimorelli treats lucidly and briefly the religious and socio-political context within which the Oxford Movement arose and in which Newman's self-perception as a historian developed. The central topic of the chapter is a succinct analysis of the religious epistemology of the Oxford Movement, based on the connection between ethos and religious knowledge taken to be embodied in the life and teaching of the early Church, the normative instantiation of orthodoxy and moral temper, and thus a model for the intended reform of the Church of England. Cimorelli argues persuasively that "the Tractarian ethos was... a way of life, a way of seeing the fallen world, and it directly involved the exercise of the human will in the maintenance of the moral disposition from which one views and judges the world" (37). This religious epistemology informed Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons and became increasingly articulated in an explicit way in his Oxford University Sermons.In the second chapter, Cimorelli reconstructs Newman's self-perception as an ecclesial historian and the theological and theoretical method Newman develops, in which historical inquiry has a particular nature that is characterized by the dynamic confluence of three constitutive elements: evidence, antecedent probabilities, and antecedent considerations. The judgments the historian has inevitably to make regarding the method and the resources of a particular historical inquiry are irreducibly personal, because the antecedent considerations that guide these judgments will vary from historian to historian. Because historical evidence is imperfect, such considerations are valid and indeed indispensable. Cimorelli's analysis is [End Page 1340] perceptive and valuable; regrettably, too few contemporary Church historians reflect on these epistemological and hermeneutical matters pertaining to historiography in general and Church history in particular with sufficient depth and rigor. The central insights of Newman's view are still pertinent. His hermeneutical considerations are truly critical because they do justice to the specific nature of historical investigation. Compared to Newman's hermeneutics, the use by many ecclesial historians of the historical-critical method comes across as theologically quite uncritical and unreflective. To put it differently: Cimorelli's able analysis makes Newman a strikingly relevant interlocutor in a contemporary discussion about the nature of an ecclesiastical history and a history of doctrine and dogma that is fully... (shrink)

This article offers an exploration of how the teaching and learning of philosophy and history may go forward together in the future. This comes at a time when both disciplines are undergoing considerable challenges in making themselves meaningful in school curriculums, albeit for different purposes. Whilst school philosophy has implicitly been considered a necessary feature of school curriculums by way of teachers addressing topics such as logic and ethics, the explicit teaching of philosophy itself has gone begging because the benefits (...) of doing so have not been proven to be self-evident for curriculum writers. On the contrary, school history has consistently maintained itself as a subject that must be learnt by students, but the teaching and learning of the subject has undergone significant pedagogical reform since history educationalists have introduced and revised the ideas of historical thinking within history curriculum. Whilst philosophers have begun to form a more definitive pedagogical approach towards how they should teach philosophy, they are now concerning themselves with the policymaker’s question of 'why' they should be teaching it. In contrast, historians are still at a crossroads as to 'how' they should be teaching history but are still assured that they should be in the first place. Accordingly, this article will explore how both disciplines can answer their respective questions by unpacking the concept of ‘historical consciousness’. In doing so, it will make a more direct case as to why philosophy should be explicitly taught in schools as it provides a framework for students to engage with philosophical ideas and skills that are essential to the encountering and exploration of a student’s historical consciousness within the school history classroom. (shrink)

This essay focuses on Nishitani Keiji’s 西谷啟治 early and late thinking, in the discourse on world history and modernity during wartime and the postwar meditation on emptiness and historicity in Religion and Nothingness. Following the first part of the analysis, I will trace Nishitani’s critical indebtedness to Heidegger’s existential-phenomenological analysis of historicity in Being and Time, and thereby analyze how Nishitani attempts to solve the aporia of modernity by recourse to the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness. The essay will conclude with (...) some critical remarks that discern the limits and hidden dangers in Nishitani’s philosophical project. (shrink)