Demolishes the conventional notion that there is one true history and one best way to teach it. Although most of us think of history and learn it as a conglomeration of facts, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing anunderstanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past.

It is as if [W. J. T.] Mitchell, who in his stance as a literary theorist is willing to admit of a plurality of equally legitimate critical modes, were unwilling to extend this pluralism to the consideration of history itself. By this I do not mean that he would be unwilling to view the history of criticism as a cacophony or polyphony of contending critical positions, as a never=ending circle of critical viewpoints, with no one of them being able finally (...) to declare itself the winner for all time, but rather that he must feel that this is the only legitimate perspective on that history. Such a perspective on history has a name, and it is historicism—the perspective associated with Ranke and Goethe in Friedrich Meinecke’s great book on this subject, the perspective which, in Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, is identified with the fate of literary realism in the West. Although the name given to this perspective by Meinecke suggests that it is the historical perspective, contemporary historical theory and practice deny it that claim. In point of fact, if we look at contemporary historical theory and practice, we must admit that there are as many perspectives on history as there are modes of critical practice in literary studies. And this for a very good reason: the referent of the term “history” is as indeterminable, is as much a matter of principled contestation, as the term “literature” itself. So that, if one wished to “correct” certain critical positions by reminding their proponents of the necessity of a proper “sense of history,” it would be just as legitimate to correct the corrector by reminding him that the history of historiography displays the same kind of confusion over the “sense of history” that the history of criticism displays over the “sense of literature.” When Mitchell characterizes the current schism in criticism as another enactment of the quarrel of ancients and moderns, he is surely right; but he fails to note that this reenactment takes place within an atmosphere made more murky by the fact that there is no generally agreed upon “sense of history” to which one can appeal in order to characterize the differences between the two camps. It is not as if the ancients and the moderns agree on some body of fact from which they draw different implications regarding the attitude that one ought to assume vis-à-vis modern as against ancient literature. For what is at issue is not the interpretation of the facts but the nature of historical factuality itself. Hayden White is Presidential Professor of Historical Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Historical Interpretation” , “The Narrativization of Real Events” , and “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”. (shrink)

The development of Louis Mink's philosophy of history is traced beginning with his classic essay "The Autonomy of Historical Understanding" and culminating in "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument". Mink's thoughts on history during this period were marked by an everdeepening interest in the textuality and intertextuality of historical accounts, in the modes of representation which historians adopt and use to produce their "reality effects," and in the effort to mediate between what he was to call the New Rhetorical Relativism (...) and the claim that histories are in some sense true. Mink's response to Hempel's "The Function of General Laws in History," the beginning of Mink's consideration of narrative in "The Autonomy of Historical Understanding" and later in "History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension," his association with Hayden White, his critique of a paper by Arno Mayer, and the beginning of Mink's final thoughts in "History and Narrative" and "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument" are considered in elaborating the development of Mink's philosophy of history. (shrink)

Sweeping denials of the story's capacity to accurately reflect the past are ever catalyzing equally misleading global affirmations. The impositionalists, such as theorist Hayden White, view historical narratives as imposing a falsifying narrative structure on the past, and conclude that narratives cannot be true. Plot-reifiers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, David Carr, and Frederick Olafson, posit that the past is already narratively structured; historical plots are reified in order for there to be something in the world to which narrative structures can (...) correspond in being true. The antireferentialists such as JeanFrançois Lyotard and Roland Barthes deny that narrative histories even claim truth. Escaping this trilemma of theoretical interpretation involves accepting the idea that construction of a history does not entail its falsification. Historical narrative need to be allowed to function both figurally, in the sense of generating new discursive figures, and at the same time literally, in the sense of asking to be understood literally. Narratives need to be understood on their own terms, and not treated as an approximation to some foreign ideal. (shrink)

The work of Bruner and Hirst suggested to history teachers that history might have its own structure but left open the answer as to what that structure might be. The three most popular approaches to new ways of teaching history state that teaching history: 1. is a matter of handing on substantive historical concepts; 2. must in the end come down to developing children's understanding of structural second-order concepts; and 3. is teaching historical skills, abilities, or procedures. Much of the (...) emphasis of the "new history" has been on giving children experience in handling evidence; not until recently has there been a corresponding interest in historical understanding, explanation, and connected notions of empathy and imagination. A discussion of empathy and imagination shows some of the ways in which assumptions about them affect arguments about history teaching. Philosophy of history is necessary in any attempt to arrive at a rational way of teaching history. (shrink)

The work of Bruner and Hirst suggested to history teachers that history might have its own structure but left open the answer as to what that structure might be. The three most popular approaches to new ways of teaching history state that teaching history: 1. is a matter of handing on substantive historical concepts; 2. must in the end come down to developing children's understanding of structural second-order concepts; and 3. is teaching historical skills, abilities, or procedures. Much of the (...) emphasis of the "new history" has been on giving children experience in handling evidence; not until recently has there been a corresponding interest in historical understanding, explanation, and connected notions of empathy and imagination. A discussion of empathy and imagination shows some of the ways in which assumptions about them affect arguments about history teaching. Philosophy of history is necessary in any attempt to arrive at a rational way of teaching history. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the development of Hayden White's work from Metahistory to the present. It compares his approach to Roland Barthes's study of narrative and historical discourse in order to illustrate the differences between White's structuralist methods and poststructuralist forms of textual analysis. The author puts particular emphasis on the interdependence between the development of White's work and the criticism it has received during the last twenty years. Whereas historians have dismissed White's relativism, literary theorists and intellectual historians have criticized (...) his formalist methods. White's attempts to counter these critiques have gone mostly unnoticed and have been unsuccessful in that they destabilized his original position without proposing a coherent alternative. The question about adequate representations of Nazism, which White has recently addressed, highlights the theoretical problems which have not received enough attention by White or his critics. (shrink)

Having adequate knowledge of the world is not just a matter of survival but also one of obligation. This obligation to "know well" is what philosophers have termed "epistemic responsibility." In this innovative and eclectic study, Lorraine Code explores the possibilities inherent in this concept as a basis for understanding human attempts to know and understand the world and for discerning the nature of intellectual virtue. By focusing on the idea that knowing is a creative process guided by imperatives of (...) epistemic responsibility, Code provides a fresh perspective on the theory of knowledge. From this new perspective, Code poses questions about knowledge that have a different focus from those traditionally raised in the two leading epistemological theories, foundationalism and coherentism. While not rejecting these approaches, this new position moves away from a primary concentration on determinate products and towards an examination of ever-changing processes. Arguing that knowledge never exists as an ungrounded abstraction but rather emerges through dialogue between variously authoritative "knowers" situated within particular social and historical contexts, she draws extensively on examples from lived social experience to illustrate the ways in which human beings have long tried to recognize and meet their epistemic responsibilities. This edition of Epistemic Responsibility includes a new preface from Lorraine Code"--Provided by the publisher. (shrink)

Narrative and the real world are not mutually exclusive. Life is not a structureless sequence of events; it consists of complex structures of temporal configurations that interlock and receive their meaning from within action itself. It is also not true that life lacks a point of view which transforms events into a story by telling them. Our focus of attention is not the past but the future, because we grasp configurations extending into the future. Action involves the adoption of an (...) anticipated future-retrospective point of view on the present. The actions of life can be viewed as the process of telling ourselves stories. The retrospective view of the narrator is an extension and refinement of a viewpoint inherent in action itself. Because storytelling is a social activity, the story of one's life is told as much to others as to oneself. Social human time, like individual human time, is constructed into configured sequences. The practical first-order narrative process that constitutes a person or a community can become a second-order narrative whose subject is unchanged but whose interest is primarily cognitive or aesthetic. (shrink)

The vocabulary of representation is better suited to an understanding of historiography than the vocabularies of description and interpretation. Since both art and historiography represent the world, they are closer to science than are criticism and the history of art because the interpretation of meaning is the specialty of the latter two fields. Historiography is less secure in its attempt to represent the world than art is; historiography is more artificial, more an expression of cultural codes than art itself. Historiography (...) is a suitable paradigm for studying certain philosophical problems, particularly epistemology, or codified representation. Representation always requires the presence of two sets of non-referential logical dummies; disturbing the symmetry between these logical dummies gives rise to the position of realism and idealism. Epistemology is strongly inclined to disturb this symmetry. The parallels between recent developments in art and those in historiography demonstrate how much historiography is part of the contemporary cultural world. The deficiencies of modern philosophy of history can largely be explained by its tendency to neglect the cultural significance of the writing of history. (shrink)

Philosophy of history is the Cinderella of contemporary philosophy. Philosophers rarely believe that the issues dealt with by philosophers of history are matters of any great theoretical interest or urgency. In their view philosophy of history rarely goes beyond the question of how results that have already been achieved elsewhere can or should be applied to the domain of historical writing. Moreover, contemporary philosophers of history have done desperately little to dispel the low opinion that their colleagues have of them. (...) In this essay I argue that Arthur Danto is the exception confirming the rule, for Danto’s philosophy of representation may help us understand how texts relate to what they are about. The main shortcoming of philosophy of language undoubtedly is that it never bothered to investigate the philosophical mysteries of the text. The writing of history is a philosophical goldmine and we must praise Danto for having reminded us of this. (shrink)

The Postmodern History Reader introduces students to the new points of controversy in the study of history and provides a framework by which to understand postmodernism and a guide to explore it further.

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus. Looking behind the self-consciousness of science, he discusses the tense relationship between truth and methodology. In examining the different experiences of truth, he aims to "present the hermeneutic phenomenon in its fullest extent.

"For description and defense of the narrative configurations of everyday life, and of the practical and social character of those narratives, there is no better treatment than Time, Narrative, and History.... a clear, judicious, and truthful account, provocative from beginning to end." —Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology "... a superior work of philosophy that tells a unique and insightful story about narrative." —Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Virtue Epistemology is a new movement receiving the bulk of recent attention from top epistemologists and ethicists; this volume reflects the best work in that vein. Included are unpublished articles by such eminent philosophers as Robert Audi, Simon Blackburn, Alvin Goldman, Christopher Hookway, Keith Lehrer, and Ernest Sosa.

This is a unique collection of new and recently-published articles which debate the merits of virtue-theoretic approaches to the core epistemological issues of knowledge and justified belief. The readings all contribute to our understanding of the relative importance, for a theory of justified belief, of the reliability of our cognitive faculties and of the individuals responsibility in gathering and weighing evidence. Highlights of the readings include direct exchanges between leading exponents of this approach and their critics.