History and Theory最新文献

Reflecting on the ethical and unethical ways of empathizing is a necessary task for historians interested in the ethics of history. Research on empathy often classifies its various parts into affective, cognitive, and prosocial dimensions. However, in historical scholarship, the cognitive-intellectual dimension of empathy is overemphasized to the detriment of its affective and prosocial dimensions, whose roles in determining the ways historians should practice history are often disregarded. In this article, I will discuss the relations between empathy and ethics and how historians should empathize. Doing so, I argue that empathy's ethical potential for historical scholarship needs to be de-intellectualized by historical scholarship, a task that requires a complementary and supplementary approach to empathy that is in dialogue with moral philosophy, psychology, neurosciences, and animal studies. Only by recognizing empathy as a socially developed evolutionary capacity shared among humans and other species can historians fully develop its possibilities as a tool to guide human morality and ethical decision-making. Finally, I will claim that empathy as an ethical imperative for an ethics of care and vulnerability should guide historians' ethics toward more responsive and responsible ways of relating with others across time, space, cultures, generations, species, and so on.

This article explores the relation between testimony and history by considering the recent “ethical turn” toward experience and memory in historical research. By way of a brief history of the concept of testimony in historical research, the article pinpoints current discussions as being about historical understanding rather than factual knowledge about the past. With reference to the revaluation of history within the linguistic turn, influential historical theorists have argued that abandoning objectivism calls for a rapprochement between historical research and attempts to make sense of the past in accounts of memory. Both history and memory accounts, they argue, offer forms of understanding that are equally conditioned by language as well as politics, culture, and identity. Thus, the inclusion of testimony has been framed as not only legitimate but also important for an “ethical” understanding of the past within historiographical discourse. In relation to this development, the article shows that abandoning objectivism in the wake of the linguistic turn cannot justify a general rapprochement between history and memory accounts. On the contrary, abandoning objectivism only increases the importance of appreciating the conceptual distinction between testimony and history as different forms of understanding. For clarifying the conceptual distinction, the article reexamines R. G. Collingwood's (in)famous contention that “testimony … stops where history begins.” Collingwood's main point was not, as previous interpreters have argued, only about epistemology but was about the qualitative difference between historical and practical pasts. In conclusion, the article articulates the importance of the distinction between history and practice in relation to questions about the historian's ethical responsibility.

This is an article about the relationship between historical scholarship and pedagogy. The teaching of history can itself be seen as a meaningful form of historical scholarship and poses some of the same methodological, theoretical, and ethical questions as historical research, albeit usually generating quite different answers to the queries. I delve into three sets of questions that are of significance to historians in our roles as researchers and as teachers. In scholarship and in teaching, it pays to consider the relationship between authority and humility. In the library and the classroom, there is a balance to be struck between narrative and analysis. In both settings, one must at times choose between historicist particularity and human universalism. I discuss each set of tensions with reference to such thinkers as Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Friedrich Nietzsche. In each case, I also draw on my own experience in the classroom, particularly my time teaching tenth-grade world history. Throughout, I suggest that intellectually and ethically flourishing history classrooms are often “houses with exposed beams,” in which teachers initiate students as junior members in communities of historical inquiry, often, though not always, through collaborative analyses of revealing primary documents.

In recent decades, the role of the history discipline as part of the architecture of colonization has become more visible and better understood. Such acknowledgement reflects foundational shifts in historical practice and theory prompted by transdisciplinary and transnational scholarship in fields such as postcolonial and settler-colonial studies, First Nations knowledges, and historical perspectives and practices contextualized by transatlantic slavery. Their intervention in turn prompted a vital question: How do we map settler-colonial historiography if the discipline has been complicit in the settler-colonial project? Using Australian historiography as a case study, this article explores how History has been part of the architecture of colonization, policing whose stories can be told and by whom. Drawing on the work of Indigenous history-makers and knowledge-holders, it also points to ways that researchers might reach outside the traditional scope of historiography to map and contemplate the range of history-making that comprises history in the settler colony.

Today, there is a growing interest in the ethics of the human and social sciences, and in the discussions surrounding these topics, notions such as responsibility toward the past are often invoked. But those engaged in these discussions seldom acknowledge that there are at least two distinct logics of responsibility underlying many debates. These logics permeate a Western scholarly tradition but are seldom explicitly discussed. The two logics follow the Latin and Hebrew concepts of responsibility: spondeo and acharayut. The purpose of this article is to make an ethical argument: to explain, based on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and others, what kind of ethical-existential logic of responsibility acharayut is and how it differs from and challenges other concepts of responsibility in moral philosophy and the human sciences. I am especially concerned with what this logic implies with regard to reading and writing about the past. Responsibility is not necessarily congruent with performing a scientific (historical) task or defending the (political, juridical) interests of a group of people. Instead, a “guiltless responsibility” to people of other generations points to something that I refer to as a transgenerational responsibility. I contrast this transgenerational responsibility to inherited guilt and related ideas of generational interconnectedness, which follow the logic of spondeo. Inherited guilt suggests that a responsible relation the past is to either identify with or blame a group of people in the past. Contrary to inherited guilt, a commitment to acharayut means constantly probing one's responsibility to people of the past (for their posterity) and people of the future (as their predecessors) precisely because people of the present are not people of the past or people of the future.

How feasible would it be to develop a virtue ethics for historians that is analogous or similar to virtue-ethical approaches to research integrity that have been proposed for other areas of academic inquiry? The field of history is an interesting one, as few disciplines have an equally well-documented history of thinking, talking, and writing about virtues. This history merits ethicists’ attention, as it offers a unique opportunity for grounding ethical reflection in the lived realities of historical research and teaching. In the spirit of a “history and philosophy of history,” this article contributes to such a project by staging a conversation between virtue ethics and the history of historiography. Drawing on a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century examples, it argues that much of what applied virtue ethicists are recommending scholars to do has a long pedigree in the history of historiography. Critical virtue ethics, too, is a project to which historians can easily relate, especially insofar as they are committed to virtues of truthfulness in an age of post-truth. If this suggests that there is room, or perhaps even a need, for a virtue ethics for historians, the cases examined in this article also prompt critical questions, especially ones regarding the teachability of virtue, the potential of virtue talk to be misused for polemical and exclusionary purposes, and the sort of tasks that a virtue ethics is capable of addressing. In light of these considerations, the article calls for reflection on the “affordances” of virtue. It claims that the case for a virtue ethics will be strongest if it is grounded in a realistic understanding not only of the beneficial uses to which categories of virtue can be put but also of unintended uses to which virtue talk is susceptible and of tasks for which virtue thinking is less prepared.

The question of which “temporalities” underpinned historical processes in the past has increasingly become the focus of historical interest in recent years. In his brilliantly written study of Prussian history, Time and Power: Visions of History in German Politics, from the Thirty Years’ War to the Third Reich, Christopher Clark attempts to answer this question by turning to four Prussian statesmen and politicians who each followed different temporalities in their private and public lives. The benefit of his study lies not least in a better understanding of the concept of “temporality” and its significance for historical processes.