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Category: Theory of History (Re)read

Memoria ardiente. Sobre el uso de la lava como metáfora en Koselleck

Koselleck 100

Lucila Svampa – Conocemos la obra de Koselleck principalmente por su fuerte legado en la historia conceptual y por su teoría de los tiempos históricos. Sin embargo, hace unos años comenzó a cobrar impulso la investigación sobre sus aportes al ámbito de la memoria. ¿Cuáles fueron sus principales contribuciones en este campo y por qué fueron tan controvertidas? Este breve artículo pretende situar su forma de entender la memoria, llamando la atención sobre su peculiar uso de la lava como metáfora.

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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.

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The Futures Past of the Postcolonial Present

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.

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Burning Memory. On Koselleck’s Use of Lava as Metaphor

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.

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The Incomprehensible, or Groping in the Dark: At the Limits of Concepts

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.

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Realism, Historical Traces, and Unintentional Evidence. A Look at Charles S. Peirce

Tullio Viola – Charles S. Peirce is primarily read and discussed today for his contribution to logic and semiotics, and as a key figure in pragmatist philosophy. Much less known is his interest in history, both as a scientific discipline to be cultivated alongside philosophy and as fertile ground for philosophical reflection.