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This Companion provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the conceptual issues that history as a discipline and mode of thought gives rise to.
The book offers both historical and systematic treatments of these issues, as well as addressing their contemporary relevance. Structured in three parts - Modes and Schools of Historical Thought, Epistemology and Metaphysics of History, and Issues and Challenges in Historical Theory - it offers the reader a wide scope and expert treatment of each topic in this vibrant field that can be read in any order. An international team of experts both discuss the basis of their topic and present their own view, offering the reader a cutting-edge contribution while ensuring their chapters are of interest to both students and specialists in the field of historical theory and engaging with the very nature of historical thought, the metaphysics of historical existence, the politics of history-writing, and the intelligibility of the historical process.
The volume is an indispensable companion to the study of history and essential reading for anyone interested in the reflection on the nature of history and our historical existence.
List of contents
Part 1: Modes and Schools of Historical Thought 1. Historicism 2. Hermeneutics 3. Marxism 4. Idealism: With History in Mind 5. Positivism 6. Phenomenology 7. Critical Theory 8. Narrativism 9. Pragmatism 10. Analytical Philosophy of History 11. Postcolonial Theory: Then and Now 12. Psychoanalysis Part 2: Epistemology and Metaphysics of History 13. Contingency and Historical Inevitability 14. Imagination and Revision 15. Objectivity and Relativism 16. Constructivism and Realism 17. Explanation 18. Interpretation 19. Representation 20. Truth: What is it for? 21. Postmodernism: The “Crisis” of Narratives in the Historical Discipline 22. Ethics: Or Sharing History 23. Deconstruction: History, if there is History 24. Freedom and Agency Part 3: Issues and Challenges in Historical Theory 25. Political Ideologies 26. Didactics 27. Big data 28. New Television and Film 29. Counterfactuals: A Typological Approach 30. Globalisation/s 31. Teleology 32. The Sublime 33. Experience 34. Memory 35. Time 36. Presence 37. The End of History
About the author
Chiel van den Akker is Lecturer in Historical Theory at the Department of Art and Culture, History and Antiquities at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is the author of The Modern Idea of History and its Value. An Introduction (2020) and The Exemplifying Past. A Philosophy of History (2018).
Summary
This Companion provides a wide-ranging and up-to-date overview of the conceptual issues that history as a discipline and mode of thought gives rise to.
The book offers both historical and systematic treatments of these issues, as well as addressing their contemporary relevance. Structured in three parts – Modes and Schools of Historical Thought, Epistemology and Metaphysics of History, and Issues and Challenges in Historical Theory – it offers the reader a wide scope and expert treatment of each topic in this vibrant field that can be read in any order. An international team of experts both discuss the basis of their topic and present their own view, offering the reader a cutting-edge contribution while ensuring their chapters are of interest to both students and specialists in the field of historical theory and engaging with the very nature of historical thought, the metaphysics of historical existence, the politics of history-writing, and the intelligibility of the historical process.
The volume is an indispensable companion to the study of history and essential reading for anyone interested in the reflection on the nature of history and our historical existence.
