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Category: #English

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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.

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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.

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Geology

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.

Theory as Practice – Transfer of the Theory(ies) of History in Research and Teaching

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.

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A Year with KOMPOSITA: Punctum…

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…

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A Theory of History Issue? Reassessing Denialism Through a Brief Reading of Jacques Rancière

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.

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Progress

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.

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Redefining Boundaries by Multivocality: The Synergy of Content and Form in Shahzad Bashir’s Online Book A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures

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.