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Chapter 4 focuses on the German tradition of conceptual history and its philosophical foundations. As it shows, both theories, the Cambridge school’s and the German conceptual history’s, must be placed within the frameworks of the break of the evolutionist-teleological views of history at the end of the nineteenth century. It paved the way to the emergence of a new idea of temporality articulated around the idea of the radical contingency of historical processes. In turn, it provided the basis for an opposition between “natural sciences” and “cultural sciences,” emphasizing the centrality of subjective intentionality in the latter. The philosophical expression of this conceptual turn was Neo-Kantian historicism, whose best representative is Wilhelm Dilthey and his project of a “critique of historical reason.” The premise for it is the assumption of the meaningful character of social actions, which entailed another way of breaking the opposition between “ideas” and “reality,” different from that of the Cambridge school.
In this work, I explore four meanings of 'contemporary,' emphasizing its designation as a historical field. I argue that disagreements about when the presento or the contemporary era begins stem from historians assuming a linear, chronological, and absolute conception of time. Following scholars like L. Descombes, L. Hölscher, B. Latour, D. J. Wilcox and S. Tanaka, I propose conceiving relational historical time without chronology, emphasizing the original sense of “sharing the same time” that 'contemporary' acquired for the first time. This perspective mitigates issues concerning the 'beginnings' or 'meaning' of the present. Emphasizing relationships within a relational time framework aids in overcoming ontological challenges like 'so many presents' or 'distance in time,' along with the corresponding epistemological issue of 'objectivity.' This exploration aims to reevaluate and enrich our understanding of the multifaceted concept of the 'present' in the context of history.
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