Koselleck 100
Paul Kurek – Now that the widespread interdisciplinary call to finally face our geological foundations as an overarching material and intellectual framework is getting louder and louder, it seems unavoidable that we become aware of how close our collective weight has come to exceeding our planet’s load-bearing capacity.
Editorial Board – The editorial team wishes you happy holidays and says goodbye before the winter break. The next blog post will be published on January 14, 2025.
Jana Kristin Hoffmann & Philipp McLean – Theories of history have gained considerable prominence in recent scholarship. Much has been written on the significance of theory in the field of historical science. Since Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal essay, ‘Wozu noch Historie?’ (Why History?), published in 1970, it has become evident that historical science is fundamentally dependent on theoretical foundations. Furthermore, the cultural turn and the advent of the digital humanities have led to a proliferation of theoretical approaches. There is also increasing recognition of the need for theoretical discussions, with the question of what constitutes historical theory remaining a topic of ongoing debate. However, a gap persists in the (university) teaching of historical-theoretical thinking in connection with the instruction of historical research practice.
Koselleck 100
Bettina Brandt, Jonathon Catlin, Jana Kristin Hoffmann & Lisa Regazzoni – After a year of essayistic forays through Reinhart Koselleck’s intellectual cosmos, it is time for the KOMPOSITA blog edition to come to a point. Or rather two points: A “punctum” in the sense of a closing punctuation mark that marks the provisional conclusion of the anniversary project, but also, in reference to Roland Barthes’s theory of photography…
Hugo Bonin – A few quick thoughts regarding how different theoretical approaches in intellectual history can frame our empirical work, as exemplified by the trending topic of “representative democracy.”
Alexandre Avelar – The effort to offer truthful narratives about the past, based on documentary evidence and methodological guidance, involves identifying the assumptions present in historiographical practice. However, the persistence of negationist positions calls for reassessing this problem from a different angle than the one used in our usual practice.
Koselleck 100
John P. McCormick & Jonathon Catlin – Already at the opening of his 1959 dissertation book Critique and Crisis, Koselleck wrote that in the political realm, the rampant ideology of progress had “allowed the whole world to drift into a state of permanent crisis,” while accelerating technological progress threatened to “blow up mankind as well in a self-initiated process of self-destruction.” McCormick’s reflections on his encounter studying with Koselleck prompt us to speculate about what might have changed for Koselleck thirty years later, after the Soviet experiment had decisively failed.
Christian Wachter – What does Islam encompass? How can we portray the religion without essentializing it and without excluding the vast array of perspectives other than the canon of theological doctrines or Western viewpoints? How should this multifaceted portrayal be captured in a book? What narratives come into play, and how do they logically interconnect? Shahzad’s online book A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures ventures into these inquiries, expanding our perception of Islam and redefining our concept of a book’s potential.
Koselleck 100
David Scott – Neither the past nor the present appeared to me exactly as it appeared to my interlocutors. While we inhabited the same present, and thus were, so to speak, co-temporaries, we were effectively not contemporaries. My interlocutors were starting from different “problem-spaces,” and therefore the questions they posed about the past in the present, and the answers they derived for the future, were not identical to mine.
Koselleck 100
Lucila Svampa – We know Koselleck’s work primarily for its strong legacy in conceptual history and for his theory of historical times. However, a few years ago, research on his contributions to understanding memory began to gain impetus. What were his main contributions in this field, and why were they so controversial? This short article looks to better situate his understanding of memory, drawing attention to his peculiar use of lava as a metaphor.
