History and Truth

History and Truth
Author: Paul Ricœur
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 362
Release: 1965
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780810105980

Incredible originality of thought in areas as vast as phenomenology, religion, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, intersubjectivity, language, Marxism, and structuralism has made Paul Ricoeur one of the philosophical giants of the twentieth century. The way in which Ricoeur approaches these themes makes his works relevant to the reader today: he writes with honesty and depth of insight into the core of a problem, and his ability to mark for future thought the very path of philosophical inquiry is nearly unmatched. In History and Truth, Ricoeur investigates the antinomy between history and truth, or between historicity and meaning. He argues that history has meaning insofar as it approaches universality and system but no meaning insofar as this universality violates the singularity of individuals' lives. Imposing unity upon truth, or unifying the diversity of knowledge and opinion, creates a singular and universal history but destroys historicity and subjectivity. Allowing for singularities in history promotes a multiplicity of truths over a single, unique truth and thereby annihilates system. This volume and the other new editions of Ricoeur's texts published by Northwestern University Press have joined the canon of contemporary continental philosophy and continue to contribute to emergent discussions in the twenty-first century. Book jacket.

Truth in History

Truth in History
Author:
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Total Pages: 464
Release: 1987
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781412840507

This is a work in both the social history of professional historians, and a sociology of knowledge study of how and why a discipline surrenders the search for truth in favor of assertions of ideological purity. In a frenzied effort to cope with exaggerated claims that the study of history is the high road to statesmanship, citizenship, and good neighbors, historians struggled to innovate. Some became radicalized and threatened to tear the world apart, but the more common response was the assertion that the subject would equip citizens to solve current and future policy problems.

The Truth of History

The Truth of History
Author: C. Behan McCullagh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2002-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134696256

Modern relativism and postmodern thought in culture and language challenge the 'truth' of history. This book considers how all historians, confined by the concepts and forms of argument of their own cultures, can still discover truths about the past. The Truth of History presents a study of various historical explanations and interpretations and evaluates their success as accounts of the past. C. Behan McCullagh contests that the variety of historical interpretations and subjectivity does not exclude the possibility of their truth. Through an examination of the constraints of history, the author argues that although historical descriptions do not mirror the past they can correlate with it in a regular and definable way. Far from debating in the abstract and philosophical only, the author beds his argument in numerous illuminating concrete historical examples. The Truth of History explores a new position between the two extremes of believing that history perfectly represents the past and that history can tell us nothing true of the past.

A Social History of Truth

A Social History of Truth
Author: Steven Shapin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2011-11-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 022614884X

How do we come to trust our knowledge of the world? What are the means by which we distinguish true from false accounts? Why do we credit one observational statement over another? In A Social History of Truth, Shapin engages these universal questions through an elegant recreation of a crucial period in the history of early modern science: the social world of gentlemen-philosophers in seventeenth-century England. Steven Shapin paints a vivid picture of the relations between gentlemanly culture and scientific practice. He argues that problems of credibility in science were practically solved through the codes and conventions of genteel conduct: trust, civility, honor, and integrity. These codes formed, and arguably still form, an important basis for securing reliable knowledge about the natural world. Shapin uses detailed historical narrative to argue about the establishment of factual knowledge both in science and in everyday practice. Accounts of the mores and manners of gentlemen-philosophers are used to illustrate Shapin's broad claim that trust is imperative for constituting every kind of knowledge. Knowledge-making is always a collective enterprise: people have to know whom to trust in order to know something about the natural world.

Telling the Truth about History

Telling the Truth about History
Author: Joyce Appleby
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2011-02-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393078914

"A fascinating historiographical essay. . . . An unusually lucid and inclusive explication of what it ultimately at stake in the culture wars over the nature, goals, and efficacy of history as a discipline."—Booklist

Reason, Truth and History

Reason, Truth and History
Author: Hilary Putnam
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1981-12-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1139935666

Hilary Putnam deals in this book with some of the most fundamental persistent problems in philosophy: the nature of truth, knowledge and rationality. His aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought which have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.

Truth and Revolution

Truth and Revolution
Author: Michael Staudenmaier
Publisher: AK Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2012-06-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1849350981

Founded in Chicago in 1969 from the rubble of the recently crumbled SDS, the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO) brought working-class consciousness to the forefront of New Left discourse, sending radicals back into the factories and thinking through the integration of radical politics into everyday realities. Through the influence of founding members like Noel Ignatiev and Don Hamerquist, STO took a Marxist approach to the question of race and revolution, exploring the notion of “white skin privilege,” and helping to lay the groundwork for the discipline of critical race studies. Michael Staudenmaier is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Illinois-Urbana.

These Truths: A History of the United States

These Truths: A History of the United States
Author: Jill Lepore
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 733
Release: 2018-09-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393635252

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.

The Truth about History

The Truth about History
Author: Russell Miller
Publisher:
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2004
Genre: Curiosities and wonders
ISBN: 9780276427510

This volume offers the reader information on scientific discoveries from early man to World War II, offering a view of world events.