Representation

The Birth of Historical Reality from the Death of the Past

By: Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit

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Paperback | 14 June 2024 | Edition Number 1

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328 Pages

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2.29 x 1.52 x 0.2

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What makes historical writing distinctive? In Representation, Franklin Rudolf Ankersmit-the preeminent figure in the philosophy of history today-offers a deeply original way of understanding the practice of historical writing and a powerful vindication of history as an empirical discipline. Based on a new reading of the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz, Ankersmit constructs a rigorous framework for understanding the nature of historical argument.

Representation argues that while previous states of affairs have left evidence that can be used to formulate true statements, the past itself is irretrievably lost. A condition of historical writing is that the past as such does not exist. Historical texts are best understood as complex signs that mutually criticize one another to compose a historical reality fundamentally distinct from common-sense notions of the past.

Representation casts an entirely new light on fundamental concepts such as historical truth, historical debate, and historical rationality. Cogent, forceful, and provocative, this book is the most ambitious work in the philosophy of history in many years.

Industry Reviews

Representation offers a subtle account of the affinities between Leibnizian philosophy and the discipline of history. Frank Ankersmit is the most significant philosopher of history of the last forty years, and Representation his most thought-provoking work. From what might seem an unlikely quarter, and quite surprisingly, Ankersmit ends up laying down a defense of academic historiography from its enemies, those who deny that it can ever be an empirical science. -- Allan Megill, author of Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice
In his impressive and timely book Representation, Ankersmit offers a powerful challenge to many received assumptions about the nature of historical writing. Drawing on Leibniz to unravel the secrets of historical representation, this book lucidly argues that historical reality first comes into being when the past ceases to exist. This is philosophy of history at its best. -- Chiel van den Akker, author of The Exemplifying Past: A Philosophy of History
By way of a careful and highly original reading of Leibniz, Ankersmit demonstrates that the present nonexistence of the past is (contrary to much historical theorizing of the past half-century) no barrier to rendering true statements about pasts in the form of history. This masterful book also shows that philosophers of history and academic historians have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from each other's practices. -- Daniel Woolf, author of The Social Circulation of the Past

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