Narrativism

È veramente possibile comprendersi? Siamo in grado di coesistere con gli inviolabili spazi che ci separano? La psicologia cognitiva ha elaborato alcuni modelli che tentano di spiegare la comprensione dell’altro. Ma cosa accade se questo altro è un personaggio letterario? Come possiamo provare delle emozioni per dei personaggi che non esistono nella realtà? Per sceverare questi temi mi sono basata su alcune derivazioni della tradizione fenomenologica, analitica e su alcuni studi di psicologia cognitiva, partendo dall’assunto che elementi tratti dalle diverse tradizioni possano servire vicendevolmente da correttivi.

Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography argues that narrativism has made important contributions to the theory and philosophy of historiography but that it is now time to move beyond it to postnarrativism. Much of the theorizing of historiography has focused on defending either absolutist historical realism or relativist postmodernism. Kuukkanen shows how it is possible to reject the truth-functional evaluation of interpretations and yet accept that historiography can be assessed by rational standards. The postnarrativist view maintains that studies of history are informal arguments for theses about the past and that they are always located somewhere between subjectivity and objectivity.

Yao and Shun are two of the legendary Five Emperors, considered to be China's rulers from 2355–2185 BC. Apart from archeological discussions on their historicity, they play a key role in classical Chinese culture as a distinctive literary motif. Both Confucius and Mencius put their beliefs into mouths of Yao and Shun because of the Confucian idealization of the past: wanting to justify some convictions, they argued that long since Yao and Shun certain customs or rules were in force. All stories about their life, e.g. the legend about Yao's decision of choosing Shun as his successor, were morality tales or, like in the case of other Confucian writer, Xunzi, served as examples illustrating the results of conducting ancient rituals. The aim of the paper is to show different roles in which Yao and Shun were functioning in ancient Chinese literature, providing examples from The Analects, Mencius, Xunzi's On Learning, The Classic of the Virtue of the Tao and Zhuangzi's The True Classic of the Southern Flower. The author argues that actually there are no essential differences in the usage of these figures between literary prose and historiography. This insight provides some arguments for interpreting Chinese historiography from the narrativist point of view, which is to say, as a kind of literature. Legends constitute an integral part of the literature while historical legends are one of the most inspiring kinds of legends. In case of Chinese civilization, which is the longest in its continuous development from the antiquity up to our times, the legends of the historical origins of the Middle Kingdom play a crucial role. Taking into account the absence of cosmogonic myths of the creation of the world in China, they can even be said to be culture-genic. Among those legends, one can find tales and historical descriptions of the two model emperors, Yao and Shun. As a result of numerous comments and conceptual metamorphoses of this figure, Yao and Shun became more and more abstract, so that they had been.

Com vistas a contribuir para uma maior familiaridade com a linhagem anglófona da teoria da história, este artigo oferece uma exegese do exame narrativista realizado no pensamento historiográfico anglo-americano a partir de meados do século XX, por meio de obras que apresentaram alguns dos questionamentos seminais da filosofia analítica relacionados ao significado dos enunciados e aos esquemas conceituais e lógicos da história. Não se trata, contudo, de propor uma arqueologia da filosofia analítica da história nem de tentar percorrer o itinerário do debate sobre a filosofia da linguagem desde o Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus de Wittgenstein. Busca-se, mais precisamente, oferecer uma apresentação breve de alguns debates teóricos que antecederam o que se convencionou denominar linguistic turn, enumerando as linhas gerais de seus autores e argumentos determinantes, com o objetivo de ajudar a tornar a tradição anglófona do pensamento teórico acerca da história mais familiarizada no Brasil. Para isso, descreve-se o contexto e a distinção da teoria da história de linhagem anglófona e da teoria da história da linhagem francófona, para, em seguida, explicar como a crítica à tese de Carl Gustav Hempel ajudou a promover reflexões que redundaram nas teses narrativistas que precederam as obras de Louis Mink e de Hayden White. Demonstra-se, assim, a existência de um interesse progressivo de filósofos analíticos pela teoria da história e, como resultado da consolidação de tal interesse, o estabelecimento de um contexto propício ao florescimento das teses narrativistas.

Alun Munslow distinguishes three approaches to historical knowledge: reconstructionism, constructionism and deconstructionism. This threefold classification proved to be an effective means for him to discuss recent developments concerning such topics as narrative, correspondence, reference, etc. Moreover, his classificatory framework has also been utilized by other authors to interpret various issues of historical work. In this paper, however, I modify his classification and make a distinction between direct realism and impositionalism. I argue that the latter categorization seems to be more appropriate if one wants to follow the most general epistemological and ontological presuppositions of the views on historical knowledge.

The author in terms of idealizational theory of science explicates two approaches to history represented by positivism (Carl G. Hempel) and narrativism (Hayden White). According to positivism, history is branch of science, according to narrativism, history is closer to literature. In the second part of this paper, the author paraphrases some paradoxes of historical narrative elaborated by mentioned-above representatives of these standpoints what is argument for unity of scientific methods presupposed by idealizational theory of science.

Covers a broad range of biographical, autobiographical, and hybrid practices in a variety of national literatures;
Sheds light on the broad range of auto/biographical experimentation and innovation in modern Europe;
Features an interview with award-winning biographical novelist Janice Galloway;

The introduction to this book is available Open Access. See link in pdf.

What are persons and how do they exist? The predominant answer to this question in Western metaphysics is that persons, human and others, are, and exist as, substances, i.e., ontologically independent, well-demarcated things defined by an immutable (usually mental) essence. Change, on this view, is not essential for a person's identity; it is in fact more likely to be detrimental to it. In this chapter I want to suggest an alternative view of human persons which is motivated by an appreciation of their biological nature. Organisms, human and non-human, are dynamical systems that for their existence and persistence depend on an ongoing interaction with the environment in which they are embedded. Taking seriously this most fundamental human condition leads to recognising human persons as processes, i.e., as entities for the identity of which change is essential. It also implies a holistic view of the human mind.

This paper tries to show how the Fregean semantic framework, especially the notions of sense and tone, can be used to explain certain features of history. Following Michael Dummett’s interpretation of Gottlob Frege’s notion of meaning, it is possible to conceive of historical works as proposing particular modes of presentation of past events. In fact, alternative historical works about the same past events could be viewed as differing in what sense and tone they express. In this paper, I first outline some of the points and distinctions made by Frege. Second, I examine how the notions of sense, reference, and tone can be applied in semantic analysis of historical work. Finally, I point to a certain similarity between the Fregean framework and some of the views presented in the recent philosophy of history. My account suggests how to make use of some of the classical insights of Frege when dealing with the semantic issues of historical work.

Historian’s think that their task consists in offering a sure knowledge about the facts of the past. There has been different ways to understand the term “sure”. During the nineteenth century sure was understood like synonym of being objective. Through the twentieth century was established the notion of sure that prevails in the natural sciences. If history wanted to be respected as a cognitive discipline, it had to forget its literary aspect. It wasn’t enough that historian’s were rigorous in the administration of the method: they had to begin to talk like serious people. This article studies the efforts of Annales historian’s devoted to the end with the connection that exists between the historical discipline and the ordinary language. The thesis supports that this objective wasn’t achieved neither in the historiographical field nor in the epistemological field.

This paper poses the question of what possible desires expressed in Metahistory remain ungratified for Hayden White. In engaging the relationship between White’s later writings on figural realism, middle-voice writing and the practical past, I claim that these more recent topics are concerned with thinking ways for a community to retrospectively appropriate a past for its own project of self-making. Moreover, they also deal with the unavoidably figurative nature of any attempt at historical interpretation as narrativization. In other words, the three topics discuss the poetics of history, the constitution of a link between past, present and future, as a critical shifting between discourse and agency.
Within this context, I want to suggest that these later issues are elaborations of something that was already present in Metahistory forty years ago: a desire for a progressive historiography, a writing of history that ironically accepts both the free and conditioned nature of our cultural discursive means for giving ourselves a past that still romantically seeks to transcend its own irony and to imagine a future to call our own. In pursuing this aim, I will claim that a performative theory of (historical) identity inspired by Judith Butler’s work may well be where White’s desire can best be heard.

Narrativist philosophy of history popularized a constructivist view arguing that historical works are not simple depictions of the past but rather are complicated constructions. According to narrativists, historians engage in a creative activity of proposing points of view, interpretations, or theses on the past that do not straightforwardly reflect past events. Although this is a broad constructivist view behind the theorizing of a number of authors, it is possible to distinguish within this line of thinking at least two general proposals about how to understand historical works. The first, defended for instance by Frank Ankersmit, maintains that historical works are representations of the past. Nevertheless, these representations are not descriptions of past events—they represent in a special way that could be characterized via a certain complexity, indirectness, holism, and a retrospective approach. The second proposal, presented in the work of Paul Roth and Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, discards the epistemic framework of representation and understands historical works as the outcome of specific practices. In this article, I focus on these two constructivist versions, which could be called representationalism and non-representationalism. I analyze their crucial features, discuss their differences, and dispute the accusation that the latter view formulates an extreme theory of history. I argue that non-representationalism does not erase the notion of the past from its account of history; it merely attributes to the past a function different from the one it has within the representationalist paradigm.

Narratywizm to pogląd zyskujący coraz większą popularność nie tylko w filozofii, ale również w psychologii, historii, a nawet literaturoznawstwie. Mówiąc najkrócej, stanowisko to kładzie szczególny nacisk na znaczenie narratywności, czyli określonego sposobu spojrzenia, akcentującego diachroniczną ciągłość danego zjawiska – przede wszystkim ludzkiego życia – która pozwala na ujęcie go w ramy „historii” czy „fabuły”. Narratywizm filozoficzny ma swe początki w myśli Paula Ricoeura, ale został również zaadaptowany do filozofii anglosaskiej, w której jego zwolennikami są Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, a nawet Daniel Dennett. Cieszy się on również rosnącą popularnością w naszym kraju. Pomimo – a może za sprawą – wielości autorów, którzy przyjmują ten pogląd, trudno znaleźć jedną definicję narratywizmu. Wspólną jednak cechą narratywizmów filozoficznych jest to, iż stanowią one odpowiedź na pytanie, jak podmiot odczuwa sam siebie.
Mimo niezaprzeczalnego „zwrotu narratywistycznego”, który można zaobserwować w szeroko pojętej humanistyce, filozof Galen Strawson podaje ważne racje podważające narratywizm. W szczególności utrzymuje on, że postrzeganie swojego życia jako historii nie sprawia, że staje się ono lepsze. Strawson zdecydowanie opowiada się za epizodyzmem, czyli poglądem, zgodnie z którym wartościowe może być życie, którego odcinki nie układają się w spójną całość.
W ramach wystąpienia zamierzam przede wszystkim dokonać typologizacji odmian narratywizmu. Następnie przedstawię krytykę tego poglądu, którą proponuje Galen Strawson, zwracając szczególną uwagę na powody skłaniające go odrzucenia tej koncepcji. W ostatniej części referatu odpowiem na pytanie, czy istotnie można sformułować etykę, opartą na epizodyzmie. Racje, które przedstawię za Strawsonem, pozwalają uznać, iż jest to możliwe.

In his book Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (2015), Jouni-Matti
Kuukkanen has presented his critical thesis of postnarrativism, involving theories
of philosophers of science, e.g. Thomas Kuhn’s epistemic values and Karl Popper’s
falsificationism for historiographical rationale and objectivity (pp. 127, 169). In
this review, shortly explaining (post-)narrativism, I will scrutinise a pragmatist
extent of his thesis.

First of all, what is narrativism? It may be articulated, in my understanding,
that meaning is not in the sentences, but in between, or between the lines; it is
neither sentence nor statement but the story behind a claim makes the ‘truth’.
Something being narrated and interwoven into the text, or the narrative, ends
up with some verifiable account as historiography. Certainly, Kuukkanen’s thesis
goes beyond the current scholarship of narrativism in philosophy of history or
historiography. But it is neither anti-narrativism, nor a-narrativism, nor prenarrativism.

This is a textbook (in Slovak) from the critical philosophy of history discussing the authors from the second half of the 20th century. It includes 6 chapters, which, except the introduction, focus on specific authors: Arthur Danto, Louis Mink, Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit and Paul Roth. The emphasis is, however, on the questions they pose and issues they raise. These include, for instance, the notion of Ideal Chronicle and narrative sentences, the autonomy of history and three modes of comprehension, the issue of historical narrative, the difference between a statement and narratio / a description and historical representation, critique of intentionalism and realism.

This paper has two main purposes. Its primary purpose is to present the reception of the discussion between positivism and narrativism in Polish methodology of history. A secondary one is to paraphrase, using the notion apparatus of the idealisational theory of science, the issue of the accuracy of explanation. The paper consists of six parts. In the first, Hempel’s deductive-nomological (or covering law) model of explanation is presented. In the second part, the main tenets and assumptions of the Poznań school of methodology are described. The emergence of this school at the end of the 1960s was one of the most important intellectual phenomena in the cultural history of postwar Poland. However,the influence of the Poznań school postponed the popularisation of narrativism in the Polish methodology of history. The third part analyses the manifold reasons for this delayed reception. The popularisation of narrativism was only possible in Poland after 1989 but it had primarily an imitative character. This outline of the cultural and scientific context allows Chris Lorenz’s proposals (on the problem of the accuracy of explanation) to be put in a wider perspective (part four). Namely, this author describes “a theoretical historical debate” on the status of scientific laws and talks about a post-positivistic approach to science represented by Nancy Cartwright. This approach was to introduce new perspectives to the understanding of lawfulness. In the fifth part of the article, the main assumptions and tenets (for example, the modes of explanation) of another post-positivistic approach to science, namely the idealisational theory of science, are presented and compared with the Hempelian model of explanation. In the final part, Hempel’s explanatory sketch is paraphrased using the notion apparatus of the idealisational model of science which provides a solution to the problem of the accuracy of explanation

En el presente trabajo nos proponemos analizar la nueva aproximación al narrativismo que realiza Alasdair Macintyre en su último libro: Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity. An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning and Narrative (2016). En primer lugar, realizamos un recorrido histórico por las obras más significativas en las que MacIntyre desarrolla su visión del narrativismo en primera instancia: After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (1981), Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (1988) y Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Enciclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition (1990). En segundo lugar, intentamos explorar la reincidente problemática de la narratividad en la obra del 2016 para explicar cómo exhibe un agente neoaristotélico la racionalidad y cómo justifica sus juicios a través de una narrativa. Además exploramos por qué la narrativa cobra más protagonismo en esta obra que la noción de tradición y evidencia una mayor relación con el telos de la vida humana. También, señalamos una reaf...

Resumen Este trabajo discute la tesis "postnarrativista" de Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen que rechaza a la narrativa como el modo privilegiado de explicación histórica por los compromisos que esta última asume con la representación. Desde su punto de vista, la representación es inescindible de la narrativa, y dado que según su caracterización la representación histórica no transmite información, sino que presenta una imagen del pasado, obtura lo que es específico de la práctica de los historiadores: la argumentación. La crítica de Kuukkanen se basa en una reconstrucción del narrativismo que toma como referencia principal los trabajos de Frank Ankersmit. Sostengo que la reconstrucción que Kuukkanen hace del narrativismo pierde de vista sus presentaciones más sofisticadas, tales como el narrativismo de Arthur Danto o de Hayden White, en los que claramente la narrativa consiste en una manera particular de presentar argumentos que hacen posible la explicación histórica. En particular, realizo una reconstrucción diferente a la de Kuukkanen del narrativismo sofisticado de Hayden White para sostener que la presentación narrativa de argumentos históricos forma parte del narrativismo desde siempre. En cuanto a los compromisos que la narrativa asume con la representación, recupero las consideraciones de Howard Becker, sociólogo ajeno al narrativismo, para argumentar que la representación es una forma de comunicar información y que, en cuanto tal, es perfectamente apta para la argumentación histórica. Contra la crítica de Kuukkanen, sostengo que la representación en la práctica histórica no debería ser rechazada porque no logra sustituir al pasado, sino que debe ser considerada como un dispositivo comunicacional. 1. Introducción En los últimos tiempos la importancia de la retórica en el escrito histórico ha sido recuperada con miras a la consideración de la historia como una práctica argumentativa, racional y crítica (Peters, 2016; Kuukkanen, 2015; Kellner, 1989, 2013; Megill, 2007). Sin embargo, en algunos casos también ha sido impugnada la importancia de la narrativa como el modo privilegiado de presentación de los argumentos en la historiografía. Uno de los principales argumentos esgrimidos para sostener este rechazo pone el foco en los compromisos que toda narrativa asume con la concepción representacionalista del lenguaje. Dado que la relación entre narrativa histórica y representación parece inescindible, la primera es deudora de los problemas ocasionados por la segunda en la consecución de conocimiento histórico. La filosofía narrativista de la historia está estrechamente ligada a la cuestión moderna de la representación; se puede afirmar que la narrativa es en efecto un dispositivo representacional (Danto, 2014; Ankersmit, 2004, 2006). En la medida que la historiografía busca la elaboración de conocimiento científico mediante el uso de este dispositivo, la representación del pasado enfrenta el desafío del escéptico: ¿de qué manera, si es que lo hace, el dispositivo representacional permite conocer aquello que representa? El tipo de respuesta que demos a esta pregunta nos compromete con el realismo, el antirealismo, o directamente con el abandono del problema de la representación.

AbstractPierre Nora’s account of the ‘age of commemoration’ has been extremely influential in shaping the way that memory is understood in France as well as in other countries. But what those who adopt Nora’s historical account of the rise of memory often overlook, is that the story of the ‘age of commemoration’ is a narrative construct. This article argues that Nora’s historical explanation of the rise of memory constitutes memory as an historical object, and explains it through emplotment. Nora has constructed a story of crisis in which individual memories stand as ‘symptoms’ of, and reactions to, the ‘acceleration of history’. The significance of memory is supposed to lie in what it tells us about the times in which ‘we’ live. Memory is thus construed as a panicked reaction to historical changes, and the manifestation of an existential crisis in France. Nora’s account of memory is widely referred to in academic as well as public discussions on the memories of minority groups in France. These memory mov...

Despite having named ourselves Homo sapiens—a designation contingent on word/reason (logos) as our chosen identifier—recent evidence suggests language is only a small fraction of the story. Human beings would be more aptly named Homo videns—seeing man—if percentage of cortex area per modality determined the labeling of an organism. Instead, the sentential ontology of language philosophers and linguists persists in spite of the growing body of cognitive research challenging the language instinct as our most defining characteristic.
What is becoming clearer is that language is palimpsestic. It is like a marked transparency over visuospatial maps, which are wired to sensorimotor maps. The left lateralized interpreter uses language to communicably narrativize an apparent unity, but people are not the only fictionalizing animals.
This examination looks to cognitive and psychological studies to suggest that a prelinguistic instinct to make sense of unrelated information is a biological consequence of intersections between pattern matching, symbolic thinking, aesthetics, and emotive tagging, which is accessible by language, but not a product thereof. Language, rather, is just an outer surface.
Rather than thinking man, playing man, or tool-making man, we would be better described as storytelling animals (narrativism). Like other social mammals, we run simulation heuristics to predict causal chains, object/event frequency, value association, and problem solving. The post hoc product is episodic fiction. Language merely serves to magnify what Friederich Nietzsche rightfully identified as an art of dissimulation—lying. In short, the moral of the story is that we are making it all up as we go along.

En el presente trabajo nos proponemos analizar la nueva aproximación al narrativismo que realiza  Alasdair  MacIntyre en  su  último  libro:  Ethics  in  the  Conflicts  of  Modernity.  An  Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning and Narrative (2016). En primer lugar, realizamos un recorrido  histórico  por  las  obras  más  significativas  en  las  que  MacIntyre desarrolla  su  visión  del  narrativismo  en  primera  instancia:  After  Virtue.  A  Study  in  Moral  Theory  (1981),  Whose  Justice,  Which  Rationality?  (1988)  y  Three  Rival  Versions  of  Moral  Enquiry. Enciclopaedia,  Genealogy  and  Tradition (1990).  En  segundo  lugar,  intentamos  explorar  la  reincidente  problemática  de  la  narratividad  en  la  obra  del  2016  para  explicar  cómo exhibe un agente neoaristotélico la racionalidad y cómo justifica sus juicios a través de una narrativa. Además, exploramos por qué la narrativa cobra más protagonismo en esta obra  que  la  noción  de  tradición  y  evidencia  una  mayor  relación  con  el  telos  de  la  vida  humana.  También,  señalamos  una  reafirmación  de  la  posición  macinteryana  desde  el  aristotelismo frente a los ahora denominados expresivistas.

For over 20 years Frank Ankersmit has been one of the leading figures of narrativist philosophy of history. Despite the fact that his work has received considerable attention from other philosophers of history, few authors have attempted to provide a favorable interpretation of the interesting things he says about history. In this article I argue that such an interpretation of his account of historical representation may reveal a very important point he makes concerning the nature of historical work. Following a discussion of theory-ladenness and underdetermination from the general philosophy of science I show that these concepts should be taken into account better to understand Ankersmit's holistic view of historical representation. Although it is possible to find several types of holism in his writings, this article tries to emphasize the significance of one of them. It could be summarized in the so-called new holism thesis claiming that historical representation is a whole produced by the interplay of factual and conceptual elements. Thus, the important lesson to be learnt from Ankersmit's work and deserving further study is that there is not only an empirical but also a conceptual component playing a crucial role in writing history.

During his first decades as a historical theorist, Frank Ankersmit was mostly interested in narrativism and the logics involved in writing history. In his later work, the notion of experience became increasingly important.

The shift of interest has caused confusion. Peter P. Icke even wrote a dissertation (supervised by Keith Jenkins), essentially asserting that the notion of experience is both ludicrous and irreconcilable with narrativism. Icke defended the widely held position that there is no such thing as experience outside of language (and, by extension, outside of identity).

Ankersmit would completely agree with Icke that identity is a linguistic entity, and consequently unable to decontextualise (a prerequisite for having a historical experience, according to Ankersmit's own theory). But whereas that's the end of it for Icke, for Ankersmit it most certainly is not.

By introducing a realm of extra-linguistic experience, Ankersmit does not, however, violate his prior position as a narrativist. In this thesis, I argue that there merely seems to be more to who we are, in Ankersmit's view. Next to the narrative on "I", there is an experiential self that groans and grunts. But that part of our self has been overlooked by Icke.

El principal objetivo de este artículo es considerar el advenimiento de la filosofía de la historia de Hayden White como el resultado de un compromiso con cinco tesis que articulan la teoría como un todo. Ese compromiso permite inteligir buena parte del espacio ocupado por los críticos del narrativismo de White, pero más que suponer la necesidad de anular la teoría —en virtud de que uno u otro aspecto de alguna tesis es conceptualmente problemático—, me oriento en la direc-ción contraria. El objetivo ulterior reside en mostrar a la luz de las cinco tesis cómo las eventuales inconsistencias de la teoría se resuelven atendiendo a las críticas eficaces con miras a radicalizar la teoría. Si ése fuera el caso, entonces resultaría que Metahistoria fue el punto de partida —y no de llegada— en la emergencia de otra filosofía de la historia.

Abstract: The primary objective of this article is to consider the advent of Hayden White's philosophy of history as the result of a commitment with five theses that articulate the theory as a whole. That commitment allows to understand much of the space occupied by narrativism critics, but in terms that instead of assuming the need

Hayden White inaugurated narrativism in philosophy of history when he effected a productive displacement of earlier epistemological discussions around the relationship between narration and historical knowledge: White identified the problem of narrative in history with the problem of the use of figurative language in the representation of the past. Thus, he enabled a new way of thinking philosophy of history’s object of study by paying attention to an aspect of historical practice he considered wrongly overlooked: the writing of history. His formal theory of the historical work needs no introduction. Instead, this paper aims at reclaiming the fundamental philosophical legacy White has left us in his latest work on middle voice writing. First, I will frame White’s thought as a response to what I call the paradoxical nature of historical narrative, as Louis Mink and Roland Barthes understand it. By presenting our narrativist past as White’s ironical and liberating stance on historical...

El texto analiza el concepto de operación historiográfica en José Gaos, Michel de Certeau y Paul Ricoeur y busca relacionar las peculiaridades de estas propuestas con las líneas de investigación que han adquirido mayor relevancia en la teoría de la historia de finales del siglo XX.

This volume examines innovative intersections of life-writing and experimental fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries, bringing together scholars and practicing biographers from several disciplines (Modern Languages, English and Comparative Literature, Creative Writing). It covers a broad range of biographical, autobiographical, and hybrid practices in a variety of national literatures, among them many recent works: texts that test the ground between fact and fiction, that are marked by impressionist, self-reflexive and intermedial methods, by their recourse to myth, folklore, poetry, or drama as they tell a historical character’s story. Between them, the essays shed light on the broad range of auto/biographical experimentation in modern Europe and will appeal to readers with an interest in the history and politics of form in life-writing: in the ways in which departures from traditional generic paradigms are intricately linked with specific views of subjectivity, with questions of ...

The polymath Michel de Certeau is traditionally seen as one of a group of French poststructuralist thinkers who reject constructs in the social sciences in favour of the diversity of the everyday or the past. However, in this paper I will show that, as a historian, Certeau did not discard these constructs, but rather valued them as a means of doing justice to the “strangeness” of the past. The position which Certeaus adopts can be seen most clearly from his theoretical debate with Veyne, which is the starting point of this article. I then show how Certeau’s first major historical work, The Possession at Loudun, exemplifies his theoretical position. An analysis of this work demonstrates how the historian’s active reconstruction of interactions between exorcists, medical doctors, state officers and possessed nuns helps us to perceive the complexity of the past in a way which can be seen as a micro-history avant la lettre. I suggest that during his writing of the history of Loudun, Certeau implicitly raises more theoretical and epistemological problems, and in so doing he “practices” a theory of history. The most elusive aspect of the story at Loudun turns out to be the drama around the priest Grandier. This article demonstrates how Certeau pays tribute to Grandier by using “scientific” methods, thus showing the “limits of representation” through disciplinary means. Finally, the article explores the implications of Certeau’s theory and practice of the writing of history for the understanding of historiography at large. The historian not only appears as a tramp who looks for remains which are forever lost to us, but is also a “scientist” who uses both models and concepts in order to put them to the test, thus paying tribute to the “otherness” of the past.

This paper revisits the philosophy of R.G. Collingwood with a view to suggesting a solution to two problems that are often discussed in the philosophy of history. The first concerns the conflictual relation between science and the history of the philosophy of science. Science aims to be delivering timeless truths about the structure of reality while the history of the philosophy of science seems to show that the timeless truths that science aims to uncover are relative to historical paradigms. Since it cannot be the case both that there are and there are not timeless truths the claims of science conflict with those of the history of the philosophy of science. I argue that for Collingwood the conflict between science and the history of the philosophy of science is an instance of the more general case concerning the relation between history and science understood as forms of inquiry governed by different absolute presuppositions.
By locating Collingwood’s philosophy of history against the background of his conception of metaphysics as a science of absolute presuppositions the paper aims to show that while the presuppositions of historical inquiry and of natural science are incompatible there is no deep ontological conflict between the two and the choice between history and natural science can be made on the basis of pragmatic considerations concerning which explanatory framework is best suited to address the question one wants answered. To understand
Collingwood’s handling of the conflictual relation between history (including the history of the philosophy of science) and science it will be necessary to undermine the widespread view that the primary goal of Collingwood’s metaphysics was to historicise knowledge, including, scientific knowledge. If Collingwood’s metaphysics is understood as arguing that there is no presuppositionless knowledge (rather than as claiming that all knowledge is time-bound) the possible co-existence of history and natural science is defended not by reducing scientific knowledge to historical knowledge (which would make historicism into a topsy-turvy version of scientism), but by showing that the methodological practices at work in these different forms of inquiry provide answers to different kinds of why-questions.
The second problem concerns whether the past can be objectively known. It has often been claimed that since history is written retrospectively, from a later point in time, there can be no such thing as access to the past as it is in-itself because the historian will view the past through the lens of his own zeitgeist. Collingwood would agree that there is no such thing as knowledge of the past in its immediacy wie es eigentlich gewesen, but denied that one can infer from the impossibility of knowing the past in its immediacy the impossibility of knowing the past from the perspective of historical agents with a different mindset from that of the historian. For to view reality from the point of view of historical agents with very different epistemic, moral and aesthetic norms is not equivalent to knowing the past initself or in its immediacy; it is rather to understand it through a different form of cultural mediation. His re-enactment doctrine is meant precisely to show that there is no principled barrier to understanding reality as the Greeks or the Romans did. The claim that it is at least in principle possible to adopt the perspective of past agents does not therefore entail that the past can be known wie es eigentlich gewesen or in-itself.
It is one thing to deny that the past can be known in-itself; it is another to assert that we cannot understand the world as it was understood by the Greeks, Romans and so on. The task of understanding past agents is not different in kind from that of understanding agents from other cultures that mightbe contemporaneous to the historian. Thus, unless one is willing to commit to the view that it is impossible to understand other (contemporaneous) cultures in their own terms there is no reason to hold, as Gadamer did, for example, that each new generation of historians necessarily must understand the past in a different way or, as Quine claimed, that there is no identity of meaning and that translation from past cultures must remain necessarily indeterminate.

La filosofía de la historia de las últimas décadas ha prestado cre-ciente atención a la importancia de los dispositivos lingüísticos que contribu-yen a dar cuenta del pasado en común. Esta orientación " lingüística " encuen-tra uno de sus mayores exponentes en el narrativismo de Hayden White, el cual se ha visto desafiado más recientemente por consideraciones críticas acer-ca de lo que aquél supuestamente implica, en especial en lo referente a las vin-culaciones entre lenguaje y " realidad no lingüística ". Esas consideraciones postulan, en cambio, un " giro a la experiencia ". El presente artículo aspira a presentar bajo otra luz el planteo narrativista y a exhibir las contradicciones del giro " experiencialista " , en el intento de reconstruir las relaciones entre len-guaje y realidad históricos evitando las tensiones aparentemente ineliminables suscitadas por el concepto de representación.

ABSTRACT: The philosophy of history has paid increasing attention in recent times to the importance of the linguistic devices that contribute to give account of the past in common. This " linguistic " direction finds one of its better exponents in the narrativism of Hayden White, which has been more recently defied by critical considerations about what it supposedly implies, specifically in what is related with the linkages between language and the " nonlinguistic reality ". These considerations postulate conversely a " turn to the experience ". The present article aspires to expose under new light the narrativist proposal and also wants to reveal the contradictions of the " experiencialist " turn, in the attempt to reconstruct the relations between historical language and reality avoiding the apparently inevitable tensions motivated by the concept of representation.