Abstract
Leading thinkers from philosophy and intellectual history explore the moral dimension of the work of historians and the enterprise of history; What is implied by The Ethics of History ? The authors of this volume, internationally renowned philosophers and intellectual historians, come together to address this question, in all its novelty and ambiguity, and to develop multiple and varied perspectives on the place and nature of ethics in the philosophy, enterprise, and practice of history. Is the whole historical process - largely consisting as it does of the actions and suffering of persons and groups - subject to ethical constraint? And what of the ways in which historians present their subject matter? the contributors ask. Are these methods subject to moral scrutiny? Should - or do - historians bring moral judgment to bear on the past actions they study and report? Although they approach these issues from different directions, and in distinctive ways, the contributors agree in their critique of the correspondence theory of history; in their acceptance of an unbridgeable gap between the past and the historian's present account.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents
A. Historical Representation
1. In Praise of Subjectivity by F. R. Ankersmit
2. Representation, Narrative, and the Historian's Promise by Edith Wyschogrod
3. Some Aspects of the Ethics of History-Writing: Reflections on Edith; Wyschogrod's An Ethics of Remembering by Allan Megill
4. Prudence, History, Time, and Truth. by Arthur Danto
B. Postmodernist Challenges
5. No Tear Shall Be Lost: The History of Prayers and Tears by John D. Caputo
6. The Tomb of Perseverance: On Antigone by Joan Copjec
7. The Confession of Augustine by Jean-Francois Lyotard
8. The Limits of Ethics and History by Joseph Margolis
C. History and Responsibility
9. Responsibility and Irresponsibility in Historical Studies. A Critical Consideration of the Ethical; Dilemma in the Historian's Work by Jorn Rusen
10. An Ethically Responsive Hermeneutics of History by Rudolf A. Makkreel
11. Committed History by Thomas R. Flynn
12. History, Fiction, and Human Time: Historical Imagination and Historical Responsibility by David Carr
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents
A. Historical Representation
1. In Praise of Subjectivity by F. R. Ankersmit
2. Representation, Narrative, and the Historian's Promise by Edith Wyschogrod
3. Some Aspects of the Ethics of History-Writing: Reflections on Edith; Wyschogrod's An Ethics of Remembering by Allan Megill
4. Prudence, History, Time, and Truth. by Arthur Danto
B. Postmodernist Challenges
5. No Tear Shall Be Lost: The History of Prayers and Tears by John D. Caputo
6. The Tomb of Perseverance: On Antigone by Joan Copjec
7. The Confession of Augustine by Jean-Francois Lyotard
8. The Limits of Ethics and History by Joseph Margolis
C. History and Responsibility
9. Responsibility and Irresponsibility in Historical Studies. A Critical Consideration of the Ethical; Dilemma in the Historian's Work by Jorn Rusen
10. An Ethically Responsive Hermeneutics of History by Rudolf A. Makkreel
11. Committed History by Thomas R. Flynn
12. History, Fiction, and Human Time: Historical Imagination and Historical Responsibility by David Carr