History and Hermeneutics Flashcards
Conception of time as though it were successive local movements
Cosmological Time
Time as a number or a measure
Cosmological Time
Date: November 05, 2004
Exact time: 4 o’clock
Cosmological Time
Age: 22 years old
Duration: 1 hour
Cosmological Time
Conception of time not as measurable local movement but as a span of duration experienced by a conscious subject, which endures in his consciousness or memory
Psychological Time
The emphasis is not on the duration but on the conscious subject who experiences time as a synthesis of past, present, and future
Psychological Time
Notes of Time
Cosmological Time
Melody of Time
Psychological Time
It is not just about dates, persons, or happenings.
History
It is about human experiences that are remembered, represented, and reconstructed by our memory.
History
When memory remembers or recalls, it functions as
data storage
When memory re-presents or makes presents, it functions as
imagination or fantasy
When memory revises (revisioning) or reconstructs, it functions as
creative faculty or ingenuity
Giambattista Vico Lifespan
1668 - 1744
Almost certainly the first to formulate a completely new idea of truth and knowledge and who, in a piece of bold anticipation, coined in an absolutely inimitable precision the typical formula of the modern attitude towards truth and reality (Pope Benedict XVI, 1990)
Giambattista Vico
It was in his book: Scienza Nuova - that he fully developed his notion of truth.
Giambattista Vico
Giambattista Vico reformulated his notion of truth to:
VERUM ET FACTUM CONVERTUNTUR.
Truth and Fact are convertible.
Truth is what we ourselves have made.
IMPLICATIONS OF VICO’S NOTION OF TRUTH
True or False: The task of the human mind is not to think about being in the abstract, but being as we have made it. History is a fundamental prerequisite for the study of any discipline.
True
IMPLICATIONS OF VICO’S NOTION OF TRUTH
True or False: History, previously despised as unscientific, became, alongside with mathematics, the only true science.
True
IMPLICATIONS OF VICO’S NOTION OF TRUTH
True or False: The factual world is not an abstract metaphysical construct but our world which we have constructed in history.
True
IMPLICATIONS OF VICO’S NOTION OF TRUTH
True or False: Vicos notion of truth eventually gave birth to the scientific method which is a combination of the primacy of mathematics and observable facts.
True
Karl Marx Lifespan
1818 - 1883
with his famous classical statement: So far philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; it is now time to change it saw in history the arena for mans self-transcendence. Man is not just a factum of history.
Karl Marx
VERUM EST FACTUM
Factum = What we made
Giambattista Vico
VERUM EST FACIENDUM
Faciendum = What we can make
Karl Marx
Karl Marx True or False:
For Karl Marx, we should not be concerned with knowing truth as being, or truth as a historical fact. We must be concerned with using this knowledge to change the world. Truth must impel us to act in order to create a better world.
False: For Karl Marx, we should be concerned not only with knowing truth as being, or truth as a historical fact. We must be concerned with using this knowledge to change the world. Truth must impel us to act in order to create a better world.
Is history objective?
No. The concept of objectivity originated from the supposition that the mind is imitative, that it copies objects out it.
True or False: There is objectivity when what is in the mind conforms with reality.
True
VERUM EST ADEQUATIO REI AD INTELLECTUM
Truth is the exact correspondence between the mind and reality
True or False: History is objective because the past can be repeated.
False. The past is gone, never to be repeated.
True or False: History is objective because it requires the conscientious regard for the critical method and standards of history as a discipline.
False. Although history requires the conscientious regard for the critical method and standards of history as a discipline, it always implies value judgment or creative reconstruction.
True or False. History is not objective because of the historian’s heightened sense of his tendency to be biased or mistaken
TRUE
True or False: History is not objective because there is a reasonable suspicion that bias, distortion, or error may be present in every historical document or narrative that he studies.
TRUE
Why can we not totally exclude value judgments and creativity?
Because history is permeated with meaningful human relationships the understanding of which requires an element of empathy and sympathy which often resist strict methodological procedures.
Philosopher.
(484-425 B.C.)
The events of history are caused by the confrontation between the man who recognizes his limits and the man who is carried away by hubris (PRIDE).
Man vs. Man vs. Gods
“Whom the gods wish to destroy…”
Herodotus
Philosopher.
(456-396 B.C.)
He wrote the history of the Peloponnesian wars. For him, history is the interplay of conflicts of interest, in which the stronger always imposes his law as the right. Might is right.
Thucydides
Philosopher.
(201-120 B.C.)
Wrote the first history of Rome. History is the interplay of personal and impersonal causes (climate, geography, etc.). He demonstrated for the first time how the destinies of various nations are interwoven.
Polybius
Philosopher.
Roman historians and politicians.
History, for them, follows the natural cycle of flowering and fading, birth and death, growth and corruption.
Fate, being the main cause of historical events, brings about the senseless recurrence of rise and fall.
Sallust and Tacitus
Philosopher.
(86 B.C. – 34 B.C.)
EVERY MAN IS THE ARCHITECT OF HIS OWN FORTUNE.
THE HIGHER YOUR STATION IN LIFE, THE LESS YOUR LIBERTY.
TO SOMEONE SEEKING POWER, THE POOREST MAN IS THE MOST USEFUL.
Sallust
Philosopher.
(55 A.D. – 117 A.D.)
I AM MY NEAREST NEIGHBOR.
Tacitus
Philospher.
Added a personalistic and subjective element in his understanding of history, in such a way that the conversion of the individual, cuts right across the historical events in the world.
All history is biography.
St. Agustine
- History is the story of Gods initiative to enter into a covenant. The successes and reversals of history are phases of this covenant.
Salvation History
- Grace, sin, punishment, forgiveness, fidelity and Divine Providence are the categories in which history is understood.
Salvation History
Events that changed our view of history.
RENAISSANCE, HUMANISM, ENLIGHTENMENT
Reason and Progress have taken the place of Providence
RENAISSANCE, HUMANISM, ENLIGHTENMENT
The hermeneutical framework which considers the world as self-explanatory.
Secularism
We can understand history without any recourse to transcendent values or being.
Secularism
The ideology of buy and sell with emphasis on instantaneity and disposability.
Consumerism
