The summer cohort application deadline is May 18, 2025
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Critical History

In this research track, we are going to investigate the concepts central to the writing and understanding of history. These include, on the one hand, theoretical concepts like objectivity, historical fact, causality, agency, determinism, and morality; on the other, more empirical concepts like nation, empire, revolution, global, race, culture, and identity. Reading selected writings by distinguished historians, we will analyze how these concepts shape the way historical events and processes are interpreted. This class is best suited to students with a broad interest in philosophy and history, who are eager to devote themselves to asking and challenging how we have come to think the way we think, how modernity came with a different temporality that determined us as historical beings in the world. Although this course requires no prior knowledge of philosophy and history, it demands and hopes to nourish in students an uncompromising inquisitiveness and the courage to push their thinking to the limit.

Pre-approved Topic List

  1. What is a historical fact? Is history basically an accumulation of hard facts? Do facts speak for themselves and by themselves constitute history? What distinguishes the facts that come to form the backbone of history from other countless facts about the past? What is the process of through which a mere fact is transformed into a fact of history? Is a historical fact for a historian necessarily a historical fact for another historian?
  2. Does history primarily concern with the past by itself or the historian’s judgment of the past, informed by the present? Is the work of historians to record or to evaluate? Are these two types of inquiry fundamentally different? If not, what is their relation? In other words, what is the relation between the past and the present in the production of historical knowledge?
  3. Is history ultimately something written by individuals about individuals? Is the historical knowledge the exclusive individual possession of the historian? To what extent are historians single, unique individuals and to what extent are they products of their society and their age? In what condition can historians transcend his own social and historical situation?
  4. Can history be written on the basis of “explanations in terms of human intentions”? Can historians see the thought behind the act the thought of the individual actor? What is the ultimate object of historical inquiry, “the biography of great men”—their conscious motives and actions in particular—or vast impersonal, unconscious forces? Can historians legitimately choose to dwell on one instead of the other? If not, how do these objects of inquiry inform and determine each other? How do historians account for unintended consequences of historical figures’ action, especially those that came to twist the course of history in a significant way?
  5. What is the relation between history and morality? Is the historian the arbiter of controversies? Is it the historian’s duty to pass moral judgment on individuals participating in historical events? Can evils be justified and condoned as the unavoidable “cost of progress” or “price of revolution”? How do historians come to terms with the fact that supposedly extra-historical absolutes like “good” and “evil” and accepted values like “equality,” “liberty,” “justice” are rooted in history, i.e., formulated in specific historical context, by certain historical actors?
  6. How do historians assign causes to events and how do they navigate amidst the multiplicity of causes? How do they order the causes in terms of significance to the event in question? How do they maintain, in the interpretation of the event, the dual and apparently contradictory process of advancing both the variety and complexity of causes and the determination of the ultimate cause?
  7. How do historians, in examining what happened, account also for what might have happened. In other words, how do they deal with the question of inevitability? How do they balance between determinism (the belief that everything that happens has a cause and could not have happened differently unless the cause had changed) and free will in interpreting historical events?
  8. Can history be defined as a movement, and if so, what is its ultimate purpose and meaning? Progress? Humanity? Liberty? Does progress, for example, mean progress for everyone, simultaneously? Does the movement of history have a resolute beginning and end? Can historians order and interpret facts without some sense of the direction of history?
  9. Is there absolute truth in history? How do historians negotiate between the two ends—dogmatism and relativism (the notion that one interpretation is as good as another and that every interpretation is true in its own time and place)?
  10. What distinguishes history from memory? What is the relation between them? What is the role of oblivion in the writing of history? Is there history if it is not written?