theory of history
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Author(s):  
Tiago Santos Almeida

Historicity is a key epistemological component of the definition of “science” proposed by authors such as Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, and partially accepted by the Brazilian Collective Health builders. What we call the “historicity awareness” of Collective Health is the field’s recognition that there is no knowledge of health without history and that its history interferes with its results, with the conceptualization of its objects, its cognitive and technological practices, and the feasibility of its promises of enhancing the quality of life towards an equal society. This helps explain why Humanities in general and History, in particular, are ubiquitous to Health Education, where they are known as Health and Medical Humanities or, as is more usual in Brazil, Human and Social Sciences in Health. They helped to imagine an equitable health care system of which the concrete manifestation, however imperfect, is the Brazilian Unified National Health System, the SUS. Health Humanities, Medical Humanities, and History of Science and Technology are all interdisciplinary fields that challenge historiography and theory of history to look beyond the borders of our normative understanding of the historian’s professional identity – which legitimacy is achieved through specific academic training – to properly evaluate the multiple expressions of society’s relationships and engagements with history and time.


2021 ◽  
pp. 42-86
Author(s):  
A.L. Rowse
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
M. John Lamola

The very claim of the historical instance of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is increasingly being subjected to critical interrogation from a variety of cultural and ideological perspectives. From an Afrocentric theory of history, this questioning of the ontology of the 4IR is sharpened by Africa’s experience of the claimed progressive mutation of global industrial progress from the “first” to this “fourth” revolution. Africa experienced the first industrial revolution as a European revolution in the exploitation of her natural and human resources, as well as the despoliation of her cultural-epistemic sovereignty. The challenge to fully engage in the theorisation of this 4IR, given the overwhelming and inexorable effects of its digital technologies on the personhood, sociality and geopolitical state of Africa has exposed the critical need for a set of rigorous Africanist analytical tools and epistemological approaches capable of guiding Africa’s appropriation of this techno-social revolution. This essay introduces the collection of research papers that have been selected for their endeavour to meet this challenge. It is highlighted that all of them move from a unique approach that asserts that technological progress is historical-cultural and socially embedded. Some of them address the question of the historico-ontological status of the 4IR innovatively with original African methodological tools, while others demonstrate how an African epistemology can be applied to issues such a digital virtual communities and robotics. This contribution to the bourgeoning field of African Philosophy of Technology is admired as work in progress.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-304
Author(s):  
Philippe Carrard

Abstract Forgotten during several years and rediscovered by historians of the Annales in the 1930s, Paul Lacombe’s De l’histoire considérée comme science (1894) is now quoted in such books as Antoine Prost’s Douze leçons sur l’histoire and the Sage Handbook of Historical Theory. Lacombe’s work is important from an historical standpoint. Against the focus on single events that prevailed in the late nineteenth century, Lacombe defined scientific history as the identifications of regularities for the purpose of articulating laws. Against the empirical approach practiced during that same period, he also stressed the importance of the hypothesis – of the assumptions that made the selection of the facts possible. Finally, connected to several militant women of the time, Lacombe, sought to do what we would now call “gender history,” that is, to study the distribution of gender roles during specific periods. While anticipating several developments in the theory of history, Lacombe was yet a man of his time. He thus did not foresee that his (and his contemporaries’) contrast between observation-based and document-based science would later be challenged, some philosophers now arguing that chemists and physicists are not more able than historians to “observe” the phenomena that they describe.


2021 ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Kuligowska

In this paper, I attempt to answer the question – how the ideas of German-speaking historians influenced Brygida Kurbis’s concepts of the theory of history and historical methodology. I focus on the categories elaborated by her, that are fundamental to the researcher in the field of historical method, such as source studies (fontology) as well as auxiliary sciences of history.


2021 ◽  
pp. 3-32
Author(s):  
Sofie Kluge
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
pp. 239-248
Author(s):  
David Lloyd Dusenbury

According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Roman trial of Jesus is the origin of Christian Europe’s fissile politics. Yet it seems to have gone unremarked in the literature on Rousseau’s thought that he rejects the Christian political legacy on the strength of his interpretation of Jesus’ Roman trial. Rousseau cites this trial at a critical moment of his Social Contract: “Jesus came to set up on earth a spiritual kingdom, which, by separating the theological system from the political system, led to the state’s ceasing to be one, and caused the internal divisions which have never ceased to convulse Christian peoples.” Salient in Rousseau’s theory of history is the moment when Jesus testifies to what he calls a “so-called kingdom of the other world” (prétendu royaume de l’autre monde). And when is that? None of Rousseau’s eighteenth-century readers could have failed to hear, in this, Jesus’ utterance before Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). This is Jesus’ world-historical idea which, in Rousseau’s words, “could never have entered the head of pagans”.


rth | ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-71
Author(s):  
Helio Rebello Cardoso Júnior

This article focuses on the one of the many outcomes of the so-called rebranded philosophy of history, namely, the continuity-discontinuity issue. Eelco Runia’s, Noël Bonneuil’s and Paul A. Roth’s conceptions of historical time will be analyzed as representative of this subject in the landscape of the theory of history from 2010 on. The authors sampled not only provide the evidence that historical discontinuity remains alive as a theoretical and historiographical challenge, but they also disclose different arrays to think the relationship among past, present, and future, and historical transformation. The concepts of historical time analyzed recall Foucault’s discontinuously-base model of thinking historical time and add to it different varieties of historical discontinuity. Moreover, the continuity-discontinuity issue in the new backdrop involves operation of translating time into space (spatialization of time). As a result, the discontinuously-based model of historical time’s main characteristics will be summarized and its strength as a heuristic tool for further analyses of the concepts of historical time is outlined.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-76
Author(s):  
I. R. Nasyrov

This article is devoted to the study of the preconditions for Ibn Khaldun’s philosophy of history. It is argued that his theory of history was both a result of his own intellectual development and previous theories. The author states that Ibn Khaldun was influenced by ancient thought, political culture of Western Asia and Islamic intellectual tradition. The first was Ancient Greek philosophy and medicine that he inherited from the great physicians and philosophers like Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen. The second was cultural and political legacy of Sassanid Persia. The third prerequisite for formation of Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history was the adoption of the achievements of his predecessors, Islamic scientists, theologians and philosophers who had contributed to the rational critique of history.


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