Insight and Hindsight: Historical Perspective Between Past and Present

Insight and Hindsight: Historical Perspective Between Past and Present

Instructors: Jonas Ahlskog (Åbo Akademi), Paul Roth (UC Santa Cruz), Chris Lorenz (Free University of Amsterdam), Georg Gangl (University of Oulu/Ostrava University)

Course dates and lecture hall: 16.-17.12.2024, Lo130

Credits: 5 ECTS

Target group: Doctoral researchers in any field of the human sciences

Registration: Through the Peppi course code DP00AU74

Contact: Georg Gangl (georg.gangl@oulu.fi)

Course Description

In recent years, an intense debate has been going on in historiography and its philosophy about the goal and perspective of the discipline: Should the historian aim at describing the past in the way historical actors experienced it, i.e. should they try to gain insight into their actions and the reasons for their acting? Or should they make full use of their perspective in the future of the past and describe it with the help of hindsight in ways the historical actors never could have? Each of these positions comes with its own problems: Historiographic insight is faced with questions about the epistemic possibility and desirability of taking the perspective of past actors, and historiographic hindsight is confronted with questions about the legitimacy of anachronistic and presentist descriptions of the past.

The aim of the course “Hindsight and Insight: Historical Perspective between the Past and Present” is to introduce students to this central debate in historiography and its philosophy and to enable them to critically engage with the material and take their own reasoned stance on the questions at stake.

As such, this course is particularly aimed at students in the Humanities and Education degree programmes where questions of hindsight and insight, and with the latter also empathy, are of central concern. Yet, students from Business and Human Geography can also benefit from the course, given that insight into the perspective of people past and present and retrospective redescriptions of their behaviour play a central role in their respective fields as well.

Course Structure and Course Requirements

There is compulsory reading for each session to be read beforehand. Each session is let by one of the instructors and will begin with an introduction to the topic by the instructor. The rest of the session is dedicated to questions and free-form discussion of the topic of the session, based on the assigned texts.

Attendance in class and contribution to the discussion will account for 25% of the overall mark. The final essay will count for the remaining 75%. Modalities and topics of the essay will be discussed during the course, and essays will be graded by Georg Gangl.

For more information, please see Peppi under the course code DP00AU74.