Revising historical accounts when new evidence comes to light or when
old evidence begs to be reconsidered is surely one of the major tasks of
the scholarly historian. The practitioner should ideally possess the
ability to unravel the past before our eyes in a clear and unbiased
fashion, both at phenomenological and causal levels. Some would argue that
a scholarly historian can not, any more than can a microbiologist
investigating the minuscule parts of an organism, detach the circumstances
of his or her act of observation from the object itself. In this view,
historians' accounts of the past are subjective narratives by default
if not by design. Narratives can, it might be argued, be
disproved—but factuality cannot be proved. Yet even this is not as
straightforward as it might seem: the best one can do is simply to
accumulate narratives, not with a view to displacing older with newer
ones, but to develop a larger or, pointedly in this context, more
useful, picture of reality.Sari
Nusseibeh is a visiting fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study, Harvard University (snusseib@ radcliffe.edu), and professor of
philosophy, al-Quds University, the Arab University of Jerusalem, of which
he was appointed president in 1995.