Towards a Rational Historiography

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Towards a Rational Historiography; Transactions, American Philosophical Society (vol. 79, Part 3)

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By Lionel Gossman
Year: 1989
Pages: 68
Binding Paperback
ISBN 142238196X

Product Code: 0871690004

Description

This is a Print-On-Demand Book.
Gossman maintains that underlying the argument that historiography cannot be subsumed under a poetics or a rhetoric (in the sense of a system of purely inguistic or literary tropes) is a larger claim, namely that a wide range of activities, from literary criticism, through legal debate, theology, ethics, politics, psychology, and medicine to the natural sciences, all constitute rational practices, even if there is considerable variation in the degree of formalism and rigor and in the type of argument most commonly employed in each of these different of fields of inquiry. Hence Gossman emphasizes the practice or process of doing history rather than the product. What appeals to him in the idea of reason as a practice is its open, liberal, and democratic character. Historiography as a rational practice supposes a community of participants rather than the "anomie" of a world in which every man is his own historian or, at best, the relation of hero and follower that appears to be implied by privileging the historical "text."

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