Insight and Hindsight: Historical Perspective Between Past and Present

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.