Preliminary Programme

In the culture of history, i.e. in the public use and popular reception and construction of history, history is often referred to as a judge. The pursuit of making history into a judge is today institutionalised in the truth and reconsiliation commissions, in the making of the sites of past atrocities into memorials, and the arheological establishment of 'topographies of terror' (e.g. Berlin).
The moral and judicial use of history is contradictory to the classical epistemology of history, according to which history can only make sense of what happened, not jo judge it. The science of history and the culture of history differ in this respect. It is up to the sociology of history to study why and how the differentiation happens.
This paper refers to the anthropological/sociological views of history, as represented e.g. by Jörn Rüsen and Frank Ankersmit, with their mutually deviating theories of the narrative form of history, and to concept of 'the politics of history' as represented by Jürgen Habermas. Moreover, examples of 'history as a judge' from Germany and the Baltic countries are analysed. (Show less)

My contribution subjects a concrete discipline of historical science as well as fundamental questions related to historiographical work. In fact,
historians often acknowledge the existence of group mentality and
subsequently often work with this category (for example they talk of the mentality of the bourgeoisie or analyse the mentality of students); but
they rarely investigate, whether something like the mentality of the Germans, Austrians or Italians exists at all. At least in theory, there is no reason to believe why there should be something likte the mentality of
workers but no national Italian mentality. Some historians even deny that something like national mentality exists at all, but implicitly and explicitly operate with this category in their studies. However, scientists of other disciplines (in particular ethnology, sociology and
social psychology) have already tried to answer the question, whether something like a national mentality exists or have tried to discuss related heuristical problems.
As a first step, I would like to point out why we are confronted with an important historiographic deficit in science. Secondly, I would like to discuss the various methodological problems scientists are confronted with
when approaching the subject of general and national mentalities. In the end, I will try to elaborate an approach by which means one could be able to investigate the question whether a national mentality exists or not. (Show less)

In this paper, I will argue that scholarly debates in philosophy of history – e.g., the debate on the merits of narrativism – tend to suffer from the fact that participants quite often speak about historiography in general, while basing their arguments on a specific type of historiography. This seems to imply that philosophers of history from different “schools” look upon different types of historiography as representative of historiography in general. The confusion of tongues resulting from this might be resolved by examining which types of historiography underlie the various schools in philosophy of history. This suggests, hoewever, that there is a one-to-one relation between historical subdisciplines and theoretical schools. Though this suggestion is attractive in several ways, I will argue that in this hypothesis too much is made of the diversity of the historical discipline. Looking for a theory that can do justice to both the unity and the diversity of the discipline, I will propose to distinguish between several aspects of historiography. I will argue that all writing of history is characterised by a number of identical aspects, but that in different types of historiography different aspects come to the fore. In my opinion, the uncompromising character of some debates in contemporary philosophy of history is caused by an over-emphasis on one or two of these aspects by each of the parties in the debate. I will suggest that if one wants to overcome this deadlock, one has to develop a philosophy of history in which historiography is regarded as an object with many, irreducible aspects. (Show less)