History in Crisis? Recent Directions in Historiography written byNorman Wilson

 

読んだ。160ページぐらいあった。マルクス主義歴史論とか哲学者カールポパーの反証主義が出たりと、学術的に「歴史」とは何なのかを解説した本。要は、歴史学以外の分野にいて様々な手法や見解が進歩したからそれを取り入れることこそが、歴史だよーっていう本です。間違った要約だったらぜひ指摘してください。

History cures us of provincialism by showing that change is the only constant.

History is to time what anthropology is to space in that differences occur over time.

The otherness of the past is a product of these changes over time.

The historical perspective of this otherness cures us of our provincialism by revealing the uncanniness of our own world.

This memory of the past is necessary because our collective memory defines us.

Therefore we need ambitious and passionate historical who are willing to create new questions and answers. The pursuit of new questions and new histories should prevent history as a field of study from becoming stagnant.

Postmodernism, postcolonialism and the rise in literary criticism of self-defined New historicists all contribute to a new type of history and a new role for history. Postmodernism reveals the fallacies of the literary from that historic as have embraced without questioning for thoousands of years. Moreover, the rejection of the very possibility of universal standards means that standards are historically contingent. Kuhn’s theory of paradigms in science is superseded by the notion that all knowledge is merely linguistic convention. History offers the opportunity for exploring the factors that created the expressions, the range of recipients’ receptions, and the general contingency of knowledge. Knowledge exists within a historical context, so history subsumed all other disciplines: the Archimedean point for evaluating the respective merits of any form of discourse becomes a historical problem. Recent developments in theory do not singnal an end to the pursuit of truths; they instead require analysis of the historical contingency of those truths.