We talk about curatorship as a process in which someone carefully and thoughtfully chooses and organizes a way to present particular artworks to the public. Some have theorized that curating an art exhibit and exercising the selection and organization of artworks is very similar to telling a story. This analogy invites us to expand it and reflect on how it can help illuminate what historians do as storytellers of the past. The central point of this paper is to think of (...) historical work as a curatorial practice. This, in turn, allows us to understand the constructive enterprise that historians engage in and challenge a rooted and prevalent commitment in the historical discipline that the past is discovered rather than constructed. Historians as curators of the past select and organize undetermined materials that become determined when subsumed under a narrative that bestows the past with a particular meaning. The analogy also serves to clarify that no epistemic or metaphysical tension need exist between a notion of the real and an acknowledgment of narrative construction. (shrink)

Alex Rosenberg’s latest book purports to establish that narrative history cannot have any epistemic value. Rosenberg argues not for the replacement of narrative history by something more science-like, but rather the end of histories understood as an account of human doings under a certain description. This review critiques three of his main arguments: 1) narrative history must root its explanations in folk psychology, 2) there are no beliefs nor desires guiding human action, and 3) historical narratives are morally and ethically (...) pernicious. Rosenberg’s book reprises themes about action explanation he first rehearsed 40 years ago, albeit with neuroscience rather than sociobiology now “preempting” explanations that trade on folk psychological notions. Although Rosenberg’s argument strategy has not altered, the review develops a number of reasons as to why his approach now lacks any plausibility as a strategy for explaining histories, much less a successful one. (shrink)

Explaining the persistence of multiple interpretations of the same historical event has been an ongoing question in the philosophy of history. In this paper I illustrate two possible answers and argue that neither offers a satisfactory resolution. First of all, the realist view, which holds a metaphysical commitment to the past that precludes it from fully recognizing the legitimacy of variability of historical interpretations. Second, Ankersmit’s representationalism which seeks to overcome the realist view by introducing the notion of aspects. Nevertheless, (...) I contend that this latter position ultimately proves indistinguishable from the sort of realist commitments it claims to avoid. In order to overcome these views, I argue that a new conception of historical aspects is needed. By developing a Wittgensteinian notion of aspect seeing, I provide a novel account of historical explanation. Wittgenstein’s insights allow us not only to explain the multiplicity of historical accounts but also to recognize the epistemic activity that goes into historiographical construction. (shrink)