Facts, evidence, reality: debates in the philosophy and methodology of history

Download

12626064.pdf

Date

2021-2-08

Author

Demir, Mevlüt Can

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

296
views

384
downloads

Historians relations with the past, which is their object of production of knowledge, have always been a problematic issue. The underlying point of this problem is the empiricist claims of historians to establish a direct, unmediated connection with the past. Heavy criticism about this approach emerged with the French, structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser. Althusser argued that historians cannot have direct and unmediated contact with the past. After this criticism, another severe critique of historians’ relationship with the past came from the postmodernist side. Postmodernists again questioned the possibility of historians contacting historical reality. They said that historians cannot reveal the historical reality. Instead, they can do mere construction of the past. With direct response to Althusser, the British historian Edward Palmer Thompson argued that historians can contact the past as a result of correct questioning of facts and evidence found objectively in the past. After postmodernists engagement, historians repeated the same methodological argument to defend their territory. This situation reached its apogee with microhistorians emerging in Italy. Microhistorians approached historical evidence and facts in a new way, arguing that history writing was not a construction but a reconstruction. Although they could respond to some criticisms directed towards historians at the methodological level, they avoided discussing on the philosophical level and left many problems proposed by Louis Althusser and postmodernists unresolved.

Subject Keywords

Historians, the Past, Postmodernism, Microhistory, Structralism

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/89703

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

KNOWLEDGE IN THE HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF COMING-TO-BE AND PASSING-AWAY Yıldırım, Erdoğan (2018-06-01) Since the last decades of the 20th century the meaning and content of knowledge has dramatically changed. This necessitates adopting a historical perspective in approaching the questions of knowledge. But so far all the efforts of putting knowledge in a historical perspective since Hegel's historization of Spirit either suffer from the limitations of the presupposition of the One (Spirit or Being) or fail to ground the historicity of knowledge on the history of coming-to-be and passing-away. Moving from Hei...
Historical Sociology and International Relations: Geopolitics, Capitalism and State System Yalvaç, Faruk (2013-06-01) This article attempts to critically adress the development of the relation between historical sociology and international relations theory. It evaluates the main stages of the historical sociological approaches in IR and the main issues of contention. Historical sociological approaches to IR have evolved from a Weberian stage in 1970s and 80s to a point where it is heavily dominated by historical materialist approaches today. The focus of these debates is to develop a historical materialist undersanding of ...
Critical theory, deliberative democracy and international relations theory Akdenizli, Dilek; Yalvaç, Faruk; Department of International Relations (2005) In the 20th century, Critical Theory has been very influential on every discipline of social sciences including international relations. According to Critical IR Theory, traditional theories are problem solving and try to explain repetition and recurrence, rather than change; however, the main subject matter of an IR theory should be the change itself. The idea of change is also constitutive of Habermasian political thought. Jürgen Habermas, as a critical theorist, has developed the model of Deliberative De...
Identity representations in the narratives on the EU-Turkey relations Özbey, Ebru Ece; Hauge, Hanna-Lisa; Rumelili, Bahar; Eralp, Atila (2019-3-19) This study aims to situate contemporary debates on the EU-Turkey relations in a broader historical context. It argues that understanding from where current narratives come and identifying their constituents, and particularly the narrators’ mutual perceptions on each other, which have endured through decades or even centuries, contributes to a deeper understanding of the relationship in critical ways. The paper is based on the results of two historically oriented studies carried out within the framework of t...
Question concerning the universality of human rights: a comparative examination of the works of Donnelly, Nino, and Ferry and Renaut Demiray, Mehmet Ruhi; Deveci, Cem; Department of Political Science and Public Administration (2003) From the if century when the idea pfhurnan rights has been first articulated m the history of humankind to our age, the adherents of miş Idea have generally asserted that these rights have a universal, thus an ahistorical and trafiscultural, character in their scope of validity. However, even a superficial review of the recent human rights literature is sufficient to give one the insight mat the question of the ground of this universality is the most crucial issue in the current theoretical debates on human...

Citation Formats

M. C. Demir, “Facts, evidence, reality: debates in the philosophy and methodology of history,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2021.