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2012, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden
Abstract In this paper, I intend to show that different ways of describing, representing or thinking about human affairs presuppose different types of consciousness of temporality. This proposal is embedded in the fruitful concept ‘régimes d´historicités’, which was coined by F. Hartog. Within this context and in regard to historiography and the philosophy of history, I will try to show that these disciplines and concepts, coined by these fields of study, are only possible in a temporal order governed by the future. Within this context, I will examine historiography, understood as the discipline which makes sense of human past and other disciplines, including the analytical or narrativist philosophies of history, which have yielded concepts such as the ‘historical past’, ‘historical consciousnesses’ and ‘historical time’. Keywords: regime of historicity-historiographical regime-historical past-historical present
In this chapter, I will first analyze some of the recent evolutions in the study of historical time and focus on the much discussed relationship between history and modernity. In the first part, I will zoom in on Reinhart Koselleck’s influential idea that ‘exponential acceleration’ is the core of modernity and how this idea also informs the new varieties of ‘presentism’ as formulated by Francois Hartog and Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht. In the second part, I will highlight the connection between the rise of modernity and the rise of history as a discipline in general and how ‘modern history’ as a period has created all other periods in particular. In the third part, the origins of the modern conception of linear time will be traced, including its ‘relativization’ in physics since Einstein and the connection of time and space. Next, the question how the rise of postmodern and postcolonial ideas have influenced historical thinking concerning time will be addressed. In the fourth and last part, I will return to the issue of periodization in history, including the interconnections between periodizing time and the construction of space and identity.
Research Discourse
Periodizing Time: The Concept of Time in History2018 •
Time is the most important factor of history because it gives identity to it by differentiating it from present and future. So far nobody could have defined 'time' but each one from living to non-living has felt it directly from their beginning to end. It is surprising to note that, time which is the core of any historical work, historians have shown very little attention towards it. It is the literary scholars who have seized upon the subject of time before the historians. One reason for this may be because both modernism and postmodernism had more impact on literature than on history. But historians tend to assume the existence of "modernity", indeed posit it as a fundamental dividing line in historical studies and in most occasions, they describe it in their work rather than investigating it as a temporal category. What historians failed to attest is that, it is the western notion of the time imposed on the non-western world with an idea of the dichotomy of the backward and progressive world. Every culture was having (perhaps still having) a notion of time which can be evidenced by their historical accounts. So it is necessary to reinvestigate into the notion of time to understand 'the history' in its temporality rather than comparing it with the western time frame.
Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism. London: Bloomsbury Academic
Introduction: Rethinking Historical Time2019 •
In his "Archaeology of the Human Sciences" (1969), Michel Foucault compared the history of knowledge with a powerful geological process: it happens sometimes that deeply buried plates of commonly acknowledged ideas and concepts, covered since ages by a continuous accumulation of sediments – made of successive interpretations – suddenly break down under the huge pressure of events and come to the surface, making the world shaking. Is that what is happening now? Like seismographs, most of the various fields of human and social sciences – and specially those dealing with the past – are recording the lift of new objects of enquiry, that are appearing under the thrust of a new force, previously hidden and unnoticed, that of the present. The French historian François Hartog has first given a name to this conceptual earthquake: presentism (2003, and, for an English translation, 2014). But where are we now? It has become obvious that the Hartogian notion of presentism is actually insufficient to grasp this new reality dominated by the present – since it is not anymore a specific question addressed to history and the historians. It is urgent to draw the state of the fields that have been actually contaminated, or affected, by the spread of the present, but more importantly, it is urgent to assess what is at stake under this compelling transformation. The conventional frontiers which used to separate the disciplines from the others are gradually falling down. But this is not just some sort of new academic debate: presentism – whatever the name we stamp this phenomenon with – is a symptom revealing the ideology of our present time, in other words, its new ontological situation.
BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review
From Philosophy of History to Philosophy of Historicities: Some Ideas on a Potential Future of Historical Theory2012 •
European Review of History / Revue Européenne d'Histoire
Embracing presentisms: limits and possibilities of new philosophies of history2020 •
Codrul Cosminului
HISTORIANS IN SEARCH OF NEW WAYS AT THE BORDER OF THE CENTURIES2013 •
The paper analyses the radical transformations that took place in the theoretical foundations, methodology and conceptual models of historical science at the border of the XX – XXI centuries. The changes in research strategies of recent historiography are considered as an outcome of the fruitful interaction of different disciplines in the common space of social sciences and humanities. The author estimates the cognitive potential of new theoretical models aiming to restore the integrity of historical vision of the past.
Les âges de Britannia
History and the Temporal Turn: Returning to Causes, Effects and Diachronic Trends2015 •
World History Connected 9, 3
The little dog fondaco dei Tedeschi. On nations, globalization and periodization in the history curriculum2012 •
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