Methodology
Difficulties

Let there be no mistake about it: The principal difficulty now facing the practice of history is not the well known and long acknowledged difficulty of doing history, but the postmodern attack on the very idea that history, meaning knowledge of the past, is possible in the first place. This section explores some aspects of this fundamental confrontation, as well as a few difficulties of a more technical nature.

• The Postmodern Confrontation
  • The Attack on History: Where is it Coming From?
  • Two Kinds of History: The Past and the Advocational Agenda
  • Knowledge of the Present: The Secret Principles of a Postmodernist
    • Postscript to Postmodernism: Stanley Fish
  • The Discipline of History: Postmodernism is Not the Only Problem
• Technical Matters
  • Dating a Text (Hu Shr versus The World)

 

15 June 2004 / Contact The Project / Exit to Methodology Page