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.
Bennett Gilbert – We are inside of history; we are history in the becoming. We need to learn from the past, but we do not. Why do we hide history? Why does the power of the past to connect us to others often fail?
Editorial Board – How does this object demonstrate the interweaving of theory and empirical evidence in historical research?
Any idea? Please, leave a comment here.
Koselleck 100
Jan Ifversen – Darkness constitutes a paradigm opposed to enlightenment. While conceptual history is an approach suited to understand progressive semantic mastery, Reinhart Koselleck – although hesitatingly and implicitly – also developed an approach suited to situations where concepts are beyond reach and leave everyone groping in the dark. This entry traces Koselleck’s theory of the incomprehensible.
