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Transcending the Realism/Anti-Realism Divide in the Philosophy of History
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 February 2017
Abstract
In this essay an attempt is made to transcend the divide between realists and anti-realists in the philosophy of history by proposing an alternative account of understanding the past, one based on the nature of testimonies, specifically their scope and depth. This is done through a critical engagement with the works of prominent realist and anti-realist philosophers of history (Bevir/Lorenz and Ankersmit/White, respectively); other philosophers working on relevant topics such as epistemology, and historians who have written on historical method. The alternative account thus developed is then tested by applying it to the case of the Historikerstreit, the bitterly waged historian's struggle concerning the history and legacy of Nazism. On the surface it appears to affirm the anti-realist position that posits historical narratives as being inherently normative/aesthetic given the inadequacies of the ‘thick’ realist position, but upon closer scrutiny it demonstrates the merit of my alternative, testimony-based ‘thin’ realist account.
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References
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77 Op. cit. note 76.
78 Op. cit. note 4, 18–19, 80. One can even say, speaking with Habermas, that it contains a performative contradiction, in that the past is being described when at the same time the epistemological possibility of the means of viably describing the past (via first-order truth-claims contained in testimonies) is being denied or undercut. In Habermas's own technical vocabulary: ‘A performative contradiction occurs when a constative speech act k(p) rests on noncontingent presuppositions whose propositional content contradicts the asserted proposition p’. See Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 80.
79 In relation to the possibility of reconstructing the nature of testimonies – which are affected by the social conditions of their production though not reducible to them – this means to take on the post-foundational approach of rejecting absolute objectivity (be it obtainable via a monistic method such as linguistic contextualism or otherwise), and instead taking it on as a regulative ideal (op. cit. note 4, 33–34).
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94 Ibid., 318.
95 Op. cit. note 47.
96 Op. cit. note 84, 337; op. cit. note 7, 12, 237.
97 The historiography of which is littered with contention that often maps onto ideological differences, like Marxists against liberals.