Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Author: Georg Gangl

0

Knowledge and Responsibility. Some Reflections on the Relationship Between Historiography and Morality on the Occasion of the 5th INTH Conference (Part II)

Georg Gangl – Having advocated a three-pronged historiographic, sociological and philosophical approach towards questions of historiographic morality in the first part of this text, I will now zoom in on some of the philosophical issues that for the most part have to do with morality’s supposed (negative) impact on historiography’s prime goal: the production of knowledge of the past.

0

Knowledge and Responsibility. Some Reflections on the Relationship Between Historiography and Morality on the Occasion of the 5th INTH Conference (Part I)

Georg Gangl – Never really out of mind, questions on the relationship between historiography and morality resurface with a certain regularity, usually following human-made calamities. After World War II for example, philosophical and historiographic discussions were occupied, reasonably enough, with the issue of choice between resistance and collaboration, and hence with questions of moral responsibility and praise and blame for past deeds.

0

History Now! On Presentism and a Strange Online Debate in American Historiography (Part 2)

Georg Gangl – Historians find themselves in a peculiar position: They employ the tools available to them in their own present to acquire knowledge about the past, a past that is over and done with and cannot be (experimentally) reinstated, and must therefore be reconstructed and inferred through the traces it left behind. Here the issue of our “existential presentism” and the accompanying issue of anachronism become salient. Whether we have our historian’s cap on or not, we cannot shed our temporal positioning in our own present and, with that, in the future of the past.
Read part 1 here

0

History Now! On Presentism and a Strange Online Debate in American Historiography (Part 1)

Georg Gangl – James H. Sweet is the current president of the American Historical Association (AHA), the largest scholarly organization of historians worldwide, and he recently found himself in quite a situation. As part of his function as president of AHA, Sweet writes the monthly column From the President in the organization’s news magazine Perspectives on History. While I imagine the column is usually read with some interest by AHA members and other readers, the text in the September issue of this year entitled “IS HISTORY HISTORY? Identity Politics and Teleologies of the Present” garnered rather special and outsized attention.