The History Of Experience

"Carr's purpose in his book is to outline a distinctively phenomenological approach to history. History is usually associated with social existence and its past, and thus his inquiry focuses on our experience of the social world and of its temporality. Experience in this context connotes not just observation but also involvement and interaction with it. Philosophers have asked both metaphysical and epistemological questions about history, and some of the best-known philosophies of history have resulted. The phenomenological approach proposed here is different but related to these traditional philosophical questions, and Carr focuses in some detail on how phenomenology may connect to them"--Provided by publisher.

In a landmark work, a leading scholar of the eighteenth century examines the ways in which an understanding of the nature of history influenced the thinking of the founding fathers. As Jack P. Greene has observed, " The Whig] conception saw the past as a continual struggle between liberty and virtue on one hand and arbitrary power and corruption on the other." Many founders found in this intellectual tradition what Josiah Quincy, Jr., called the "true old English liberty," and it was this Whig tradition--this conception of liberty--that the champions of American independence and crafters of the new republic sought to perpetuate. Colbourn supports his thesis--that "Independence was in large measure the product of the historical concepts of the men who made it"--by documenting what books were read most widely by the founding generation. He also cites diaries, personal correspondence, newspapers, and legislative records. Trevor Colbourn is President Emeritus of the University of Central Florida. Please note: This title is available as an ebook for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and iTunes.

This volume brings together a collection of recent essays on the philosophy and theory of history. This is a field of lively interdisciplinary discussion and research, to which historians, philosophers and theorists of culture and literature have contributed. The author is a philosopher by training, and his inspiration comes primarily from the continental-phenomenological tradition. Thus the influence of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur can be discerned here. This background opens up a unique perspective on the issues under discussion. Phenomenology differs from other philosophical approaches, like metaphysics and epistemology. Phenomenology asks, of anything that exists or may exist: how is it given, how does it enter our experience, what is our experience of it like? Very broadly we can say: phenomenology is about experience. At first glance, this approach may seem ill-suited to history. In our language, “history” usually means either 1) what happened, i.e. past events, or 2) our knowledge of what happened. We can’t experience past events, and whatever knowledge we have of them must come from other sources—memory, testimony, physical traces. But the author maintains that we actually do experience historical events, and these essays explain how this is so. Sitting at the intersection of philosophy and history, and divided into three parts—Historicity, Narrative, and Time, Teleology and History, and Embodiment and Experience—this is the ideal volume for those interested in experience from a philosophical and historical perspective.

In a wide arc from the Paleolithic to the present day, this book explores the changing structure of human experience and its impact on the dynamics of cultures, civilizations, and political ideas. The main thesis is a paradigm shift: the structure of human experience is not a universal constant but changes over time. Looking at the entire range of human history, there are a total of nine transformations, beginning with conscious perception and imagination in the Paleolithic and ending, for the time being, in modern times with the discovery of the unconscious. In between, this book explores six more transformations that took place in different regions and at different times, which include a sense of order, self-reflection, the eye of reason, spiritual experience, as well as the experience of creativity and of consciousness. As such, The History of Experience presents both a cross-cultural and comparative theory of experience and cultural dynamics, and an exploration of rich materials from East and West. This book is of great use to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars interested in the relationship between history, human experience, culture, and political order.

This elegantly written and illuminating book explores the attenuated relationship between history and cultural studies, reappraising some of the issues and positions which have led to the impasse between them and highlighting the contribution to be made by a new engagement between cultural and historical theory. Focusing on the contested concept of 'experience' as a central part of his argument, Pickering advances new ways of attending to the myriad voices of everyday cultures, past and present.

This open access book focuses on institutions that were produced and formed by the emerging welfare state. How were institutions experienced by the people who interacted with them? How did institutions as sites of experience shape and structure people’s everyday lives? Histories of institutions have mainly focused on the structures and power relations produced by institutional settings. Likewise, despite an extensive historiography of the welfare state, reflections on individuals’ experiences of welfare are few. By using ‘lived institutions’ as its conceptual frame, this edited collection merges the fields of institutional studies, the history of the welfare state – and the novel and vibrant field of the history of experience.

This open access book uses Finland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an empirical case in order to study the emergence, shaping and renewal of a nation through histories of experience and emotions. It revolves around the following questions: What kinds of experiences have engendered national mobilization and feelings of national belonging? How have political and societal conflicts turned into new communities of experience and emotion? What kinds of experiences have been integrated into, or excluded from, the national context in different instances? How have people internalized or contested the nation as a context for their personal, family and minority-group experiences? In what ways has the nation entered and affected people’s intimate spheres of life? How have “national” experiences been transmitted to children in the renewal of the nation? This edited collection points to the histories of experience and emotions as a novel way of studying nations and nationalism. Building on current debates in nationalism studies, it offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the historical construction of “lived nations,” and introduces a number of new methodological approaches to understand the experiences of the nation, extending from the investigation of personal reminiscences and music records to the study of dreams and children’s drawings.

This book promotes a historically and culturally sensitive understanding of trauma during and after World War II. Focusing especially on Eastern and Central Europe, its contributors take a fresh look at the experiences of violence and loss in 1939–45 and their long-term effects in different cultures and societies. The chapters analyze traumatic experiences among soldiers and civilians alike and expand the study of traumatic violence beyond psychiatric discourses and treatments. While acknowledging the problems of applying a present-day medical concept to the past, this book makes a case for a cultural, social and historical study of trauma. Moving the focus of historical trauma studies from World War I to World War II and from Western Europe to the east, it breaks new ground and helps to explain the troublesome politics of memory and trauma in post-1945 Europe all the way to the present day. This book is an outcome of a workshop project ‘Historical Trauma Studies,’ funded by the Joint Committee for the Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) in 2018–20. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.