Miscellaneous
Ralph Cahn (LMU) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (5 June, 2013) titled "History: an Art between Science and Fiction". Abstract: What is History? This question was the title of Edward Carr’s famous Trevelyan Lecture in 1963. There is still no final answer to this question but a couple of different approaches. There is an anthropological approach beginning with the importance of memory for consciousness. There are narrative, idealistic, realistic or empiricist and constructivist methodological approaches. History then becomes the art of writing certain stories or of reenacting the past, a method of collecting or of constructing facts. There are functional approaches about the different uses of history in society and there is a certain skepticism concerning historical knowledge and its use. I will try do give an introductory overview of the very different problems of scientific method in the humanities.