Presentism - Historical Time, Concerns Of History, Bibliography
age past interpretation
Presentism is a neologism coined to identify today's preoccupation with the present age as the essential temporal referent in historical interpretation. (One notes that the term does not appear in the earlier edition of this Dictionary.) As a perspective on the meaning of historical time, it accords the present a privileged status. Presentism therefore stands as a counterpoint to the historicist idea of "progress," which dominated thinking about historical time during the modern age in its greater valuation of the future. As a stance on historical interpretation, moreover, presentism takes issue with the proposition that historical knowledge of the past should be pursued for its own sake, and offers instead the call for interpretations of the past that contribute to morally responsible critical perspectives on the present age.
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In his classic essays on the time of history, the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) proposed a unified narrative framework for recounting the way humankind over time had come to understand its own predicament, a saga with a conjectural beginning, middle, and end. Modern historical writing has for the most part played out this portrayal of history's script as a susta…
As the dominant historical perspective on time in the contemporary age, presentism speaks to the urgency of the concerns of today's historians, notable among them: The Holocaust and other egregious atrocities of the mid-to late twentieth century have rendered the idea of history as a continuous narrative problematic. The motives behind such acts have been so incomprehensible as to defy read…
Ariès, Philippe. Le temps de l'histoire. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1986. Eliade, Mircea. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon, 1972. Harlan, David. The Degradation of American History. Chicago: Univers…
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