Insight and Hindsight: Historical Perspective Between Past and Present
Event information
Time
-
Venue location
Lo130
Location
Instructors: Jonas Ahlskog (Åbo Akademi), Paul Roth (UC Santa Cruz), Chris Lorenz (Free University of Amsterdam), Georg Gangl (University of Oulu/Ostrava University)
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.
For the full course syllabus, please see here. We welcome everybody to join us in this course, online or offline, and we especially invite scholars and PhD-students from elsewhere in Finland to come to Oulu and participate in the course.