Demolishes the conventional notion that there is one true history and one best way to teach it. Although most of us think of history and learn it as a conglomeration of facts, for professional historians it is a way of knowing, a method for developing anunderstanding about the relationships of peoples and events in the past.

The didactics of history traditionally are assigned no role in the academic discipline of history, influencing the students, rather than the practitioners, of history. The developments of the categories of history and pedagogy in West Germany serve to illustrate the actual field of the didactics of history -questions of how one thinks of history; the role of history in human nature; and the uses to which history can be put. In the 1960s and 1970s, as part of an emerging process (...) of historical self-awareness and a concern with curricular reform, the didactics of history developed into a distinct field. Historical didacticians became more involved with the discipline of history, although they were still associated with pedagogy. Currently, four issues form the focus of the didactics of history. They are the methodology of instruction, the function of history in public life, the establishment of goals for historical education in schools, and the analysis of the nature, function, and importance of historical consciousness. The didactics of history can be defined as an investigation of historical learning, the basic question of which asks how our experience and interpretation of the past influences our understanding of the present and our conception of the future. (shrink)

The vocabulary of representation is better suited to an understanding of historiography than the vocabularies of description and interpretation. Since both art and historiography represent the world, they are closer to science than are criticism and the history of art because the interpretation of meaning is the specialty of the latter two fields. Historiography is less secure in its attempt to represent the world than art is; historiography is more artificial, more an expression of cultural codes than art itself. Historiography (...) is a suitable paradigm for studying certain philosophical problems, particularly epistemology, or codified representation. Representation always requires the presence of two sets of non-referential logical dummies; disturbing the symmetry between these logical dummies gives rise to the position of realism and idealism. Epistemology is strongly inclined to disturb this symmetry. The parallels between recent developments in art and those in historiography demonstrate how much historiography is part of the contemporary cultural world. The deficiencies of modern philosophy of history can largely be explained by its tendency to neglect the cultural significance of the writing of history. (shrink)

Objectivity can be effectively described as striving for detachment -a capacity to achieve some distance from one's own spontaneous perceptions and convictions, to experimentally adopt perspectives that do not come naturally. Novick's treatment of objectivity satisfies the requirements of objectivity, while on a rhetorical level he rejects the notion as unrealistic. Detachment enables an intellectual, specifically an historian, to operate with self-reflexivity and simultaneously socializes him or her. The ultimate power in a community of detached intellectuals striving for objectivity is (...) a powerful argument. Under Novick's notion of objectivity, the conflict for historians between scholarly integrity and political alliance is unresolvable. Removing neutrality from the definition of objectivity resolves this conflict, enabling historians to strive for detachment and fairness, not disengagement from life. Postmodern disclaimers, such as Novick's on the futility of objectivity, fail, through being overly dismissive, to help us establish criteria for evaluating individual historical accounts. Having objectivity as a goal enables us to establish those criteria. (shrink)

A close link between empathy and understanding has often been attributed to Dilthey, but in fact one seldom finds the German word for empathy—Einfühlung— in his writings. For this and other reasons one should be reluctant to reduce Dilthey’s theory of Verstehen to a form of empathy.1 The relation between Einfühlung and Verstehen is much more explicit in Husserl. By working out what this relation is for Husserl in Book Two of Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie and (...) in some other late writings, we can see how phenomenology transformed the aesthetic meaning of Einfühlung, which had been originally established by the psychologist Theodor Lipps. In addition to distinguishing several senses of empathy, I will compare them to a range of related phenomena such as sympathy and pity, divination and transposition, appreciative understanding and critical understanding. (shrink)

Originally published: New York: Random House, 1972.

ABSTRACTWhat does “historical distance” mean? Starting with Johan Huizinga, the famous Dutch historian who refused to lecture on contemporary history, this introductory article argues that “historical distance” is a metaphor used in a variety of intellectual contexts. Accordingly, the metaphor has ontological, epistemological, moral, aesthetic, as well as methodological connotations. This implies that historical distance cannot be reduced to a single “problem” or “concept.” At the same time, this wide variety of meanings associated with distance helps explain why an easily (...) recognizable tradition of scholarly reflection on historical distance does not exist. In a broad survey of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century historical theory, this article nonetheless attempts to show that distance has been a major, if seldom explicitly articulated, theme in European and American philosophy of history. In doing so, it pays special attention to those few authors who in recent years have taken up the metaphor for critical study. Finally, the paper summarizes some of the main arguments put forward in the articles comprising this issue on historical distance. (shrink)

Abstract This paper defends a historicist approach to the history of ideas. A historicist ontology implies that texts have meaning only for specific people, whether these be individual authors, particular readers, or the intersubjective beliefs of social groups. Texts do not have intrinsic meanings in themselves.

I Two Traditions. Scientific inquiry, seen in a very broad perspective, may be said to present two main aspects. One is the ascertaining and discovery of ...

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we begin by suggesting an intuitive model of time embodying a notion of temporal distance that we claim is at work in Gadamer's hermeneutics, while it is rejected in Collingwood's theory of interpretation. To show this, after a brief review of the influence of Collingwood on Gadamer and of their disagreement over the possibility of recovering an author's intention, we examine in turn their answers to the problem of transposition, upon which the philosophy of Dilthey supposedly foundered. (...) We show that Gadamer embraced the idea of temporal distance in his solution, which consisted in claiming that the distance between an author from the past and us is filled in by tradition, which opens access to the text for us, while Collingwood considered explanations of the actions of historical agents, and by extension understanding of a text, in intentional or rational terms. Furthermore, he thought that such explanations are not causal, and that the thoughts involved in them do not stand within the flow of physical time, which is involved in any notion of temporal distance. This is why Collingwood felt entitled to anti‐relativistic conclusions about the recovery of authorial intentions, conclusions that prompted Gadamer to claim that “the dimension of hermeneutical mediation which is passed through in every act of understanding” escaped him. We then discuss the underlying notions of time at work in both Gadamer and Collingwood, showing that Ricœur had a better appreciation of the issue, since he saw that Collingwood's moves parallel, up to a point, Heidegger's critique of “vulgar time,” albeit with an entirely different result. We also point to the importance in Collingwood's thinking of his notion of “incapsulation.”. (shrink)

The New Leviathan, originally published in 1942, a few months before the author's death, is the book which R. G. Collingwood chose to write in preference to completing his life's work on the philosophy of history. It was a reaction to the Second World War and the threat which Nazism and Fascism constituted to civilization. The book draws upon many years of work in moral and political philosophy and attempts to establish the multiple and complex connections between the levels of (...) consciousness, society, civilization, and barbarism. Collingwood argues that traditional social contract theory has failed to account for the continuing existence of the non-social community and its relation to the social community in the body politic. He is also critical of the tendency within ethics to confound right and duty. The publication of additional manuscript material in this revised edition demonstrates in more detail how Collingwood was determined to show that right and duty occupy different levels of rational practical consciousness. The additional material also contains Collingwood's unequivocal rejection of relativism. (shrink)

This book deals with theoretical problems that arise at points of contact between the concerns of philosophers and historians about the practice of ...

ABSTRACTIn common usage, historical distance refers to a position of detached observation made possible by the passage of time. Understood in these terms, distance has long been regarded as essential to modern historical practice, but this conception narrows the idea of distance and burdens it with a regulatory purpose. I argue that distance needs to be re‐conceived in terms of the wider set of engagements that mediate our relations to the past, as well as the full spectrum of distance‐positions from (...) near to far. Re‐imagined in these terms, distance sheds its prescriptiveness and becomes a valuable heuristic for examining the history of historical representation. When distance is studied in relation to the range of mediations entailed in historical representation, it becomes evident that the plasticities of distance/proximity are by no means limited to gradients of time; rather, temporality is bound up with other distances that come from our need to engage with the historical past as a realm of making, of feeling, of doing, and of understanding. Thus for every historical work, we need to consider at least four basic dimensions of representation as they relate to the problem of mediating distance: 1. the genres, media, and vocabularies that shape the history's formal structures of representation; 2. the affective claims made by the historical account, including the emotional experiences it promises or withholds; 3. the work's implications for action, whether of a political or moral nature; and 4. the modes of understanding on which the history's intelligibility depends. These overlapping, but distinctive, distances—formal, affective, ideological, and conceptual—provide an analytic framework for examining changing modes of historical representation. (shrink)

Focusing on the notion of representation and on the necessity of distinguishing between representation and description, this book argues that the traditional semantic apparatus of meaning, truth, and reference that we use for description must be redefined if we are to understand properly the nature of historical writing.

R.G. Collingwood's name is familiar to historians and history educators around the world. Few, however, have charted the depths of his reflections on what it means to be educated in history. In this book Marnie Hughes-Warrington begins with the facet of Collingwood’s work best known to teachers — re-enactment — and locates it in historically-informed discussions on empathy, imagination and history education. Revealed are dynamic concepts of the a priori imagination and education that tend towards reflection on the presuppositions that (...) shape our own and others’ forms of life. (shrink)

In recent years, W. H. Walsh and William Dray have introduced to methodological studies of history the term “colligation.” An historian who colligates explains, roughly, what an event ‘really’ was, or what it ‘amounts to’, by relating particular events into a single entity, by synthesizing parts into a whole. He thus explains many of the events of fifteenth-century Italy as a renaissance or those of eighteenth-century France as a revolution. The explanatory power of colligation is said to lie in the (...) newness of the interpretation of a collection of events which historians have previously ascertained to have occurred. (shrink)

The concept of empathy in history education involves students in the attempt to think within the context of historical agents’ particular predicaments. Tracing the concept’s philosophical heritage to R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history and ‘re-enactment doctrine’, this article argues that our efforts in history classrooms to understand historical agents by their own standards are constrained by a tension that arises out of the need to disconnect ourselves from a present that provides the very means for understanding the past. Though (...) rather than serving to undermine the concept, it is proposed that the moderate hermeneutics of H.-G. Gadamer, through a positive conception of prejudice, tradition and temporal distance, transforms the factors typically seen as inhibitors to empathy’s operation into those that potentially enable it. The article aspires to shed new light on what is at play when history students engage in the intellectually demanding task of empathizing in history. (shrink)