Is there any real proof that history exists?
- Thread starter jonH
- Start date
thanx, i've never seen that word used before....or maybe i have but never noticedSwarfega said:
jonH said:
you're an utter cock
bluestreak
HomosexualityIsStalin’sAtomBombtoDestroyAmerica
it depends on what you call proof jonH.
Start by proving anything exists and once you've done that I'll work onto history.
Start by proving anything exists and once you've done that I'll work onto history.
purves grundy
ambient clown remix
It's a fucking serious question, but probably the wrong one.
Do history books exist? As much as anything else.
Does history exist? In the collective consciousness - maybe, but how? How can but probably not any more than any other socially-conditioned attitude... but add to that a memory if you were there to be part of it and...hmmm...
ANyway, that's all by the by, there are lots of other juicy philosophical questions that the study of history brings up.
Do history books exist? As much as anything else.
Does history exist? In the collective consciousness - maybe, but how? How can but probably not any more than any other socially-conditioned attitude... but add to that a memory if you were there to be part of it and...hmmm...
ANyway, that's all by the by, there are lots of other juicy philosophical questions that the study of history brings up.
absinthe pirate
Well-Known Member
jonH said:
GOOD ANSWER!
I really don't understand the context of the question...do you mean ancient history or 5 minutes ago? a unified agreement or a general idea? ideal or actual? cause then you have to discuss reality etc and we have a discussion
none of these things are arguing that history doesn't exist. they're arguing about the nature of that history.
history - by definition - exists.
history - by definition - exists.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Well history itself can't exist, by virtue of it having appeared in the past - it doesn't exist in a physical sense, but then neither does 'future'...however, up until *this* moment, and indeed, *this moment* there have been lives and events that happened prior to it, and that is 'past', and the study and creation of a narrative of 'past' is called 'history'...
kyser_soze said:
precisely. So it exists inasmuch as the meaning of the word suggests it does - the word doesn't imply it has any material existence, so it exists precisely as much as the definition says it does.
Paulie Tandoori
shut it you egg!
in your head, maybe.Dubversion said:
perhaps not in that of a buddhist.
who knows?
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
A bit of proof is this:
Do you think that the last second in time before this one exists? The one you just lived through?
Well if that one existed, so did the second that happened a thousand years ago.
Do you think that the last second in time before this one exists? The one you just lived through?
Well if that one existed, so did the second that happened a thousand years ago.
Paulie Tandoori
shut it you egg!
qu'est que c'est?
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
Paulie Tandoori said:
The past, ie history, starts one second behind the present, and stretches back from there.
The past seems to have existed but our interpretations of the events that occurred are so widely differing that there is no unified account or agreed history. Shared histories are made to unify people but we should question the motives, the newspapers bring us news of recent histories, consequently we know as much about contemporary happenings as we do about how the Pyramids and Stonehenge were built.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
Eyewitness history is interesting.
What did you do yesterday - recent history
What did your parents do as children - older history
What did people your grandparents age do - ancient history
I have the journal of a woman who was a young girl in nazi germany, I have no doubt that what she wrote actually occurred.
History does not exist, but history did exist.
What did you do yesterday - recent history
What did your parents do as children - older history
What did people your grandparents age do - ancient history
I have the journal of a woman who was a young girl in nazi germany, I have no doubt that what she wrote actually occurred.
History does not exist, but history did exist.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
How about 'history doesn't exist, but it happened'...
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
Hell, once you're past 25/26 time starts speeding up! Altho I put that down to familiarity with life - when you're young you are still absorbing everything, learning...basically your brain is having to perceive and process lots of 'new' data all the time, whereas the older you get the less 'new' (as in unfamiliar) data you have to process...at least that's my theory for why the 7 yrs since I turned 27 seem to have gone by in an eyeblink!
Geological and cosmological time are both really, really hard to get your head round, and I put that down as one of the reasons some people find accepting evolution hard - the time scales involved are unimaginable, much like the timescales involved in cosmology...
Geological and cosmological time are both really, really hard to get your head round, and I put that down as one of the reasons some people find accepting evolution hard - the time scales involved are unimaginable, much like the timescales involved in cosmology...
you're all still arguing about the nature of history, not the existence of it.
kyser_soze
Hawking's Angry Eyebrow
gorski said:At the beginning there was - FUTURE!!!Or we're not Human!!!
So do you think, at the beginging (theological or otherwise), the universe was an arena of infinite possibility, or it's course had already been set?
Diamond Dog
Delusions of Grandeur
Dubversion said:
Depends on your definition of history; you have to define something before you can say it exists (I don't mean you personally; you as in 'one'; an unfortunate inflexibility of the English language)
History nowadays is being contested in a reductionist Manichean sense; either the past is definable and concrete with intelligible (and teleological) chains of causation and explanation; an (even if eventual and distant) possibility of uncovering the 'Truth' of the past, OR we submit to hyper-relativity, where everything is interpretation; your guess is as good as mine, all that is solid melts into air etc.
Contesting history is contesting the very nature of reality in a sense, as history tries to give an explanation of a past reality. Is this possible? If so one could say that our present reality can therefore be causally explained in its entirety. But this would be a reductionist over-simplification of our own existence. In a somewhat solipsistic sense, there are six billion realities all somehow co-existing that could also be pooling their collective consciousnesses to make the world intelligible, but this too runs a reductionist risk, albeit of turning reality into hyper-relativism or Jungian para-psychology.
If there are four people in a room, they each have a different view of the room, and each view is equally valid; there is no one True view of the room. Yet, is there not still a room?
Perhaps there are no easy answers. Perhaps, as Dostoyevsky said, the human condition thrives on its own contradictions and insolvable questions.
E2A: I get pompous and confused when pissed. Sorry. Read Popper, Weber or Foucault for more info. Or don't.
gorski
customised free radical
kyser_soze said:
You're thinking in temporal terms, not in Human terms, not methodically/philosophically. One can sense Science in not so good a sense of the word, taking over the discourse in all directions, "forgetting itself" every so often... and all too often...
What I said had to do with us. We have/are History [as in "self-developing" etc.], we are essentially characterised by our Future. Animals only by their past and present...
Jonti
what the dormouse said
Yeah, we're happy to think the very very small is different in quality to the very very large when it comes to size. Why should time be different?jonH said:history works differently on different timescale as well...........
geological time expressed in seconds just doesn't make sense and might as well not exist, but it happened
absinthe pirate
Well-Known Member
kyser_soze said:
Hmm 2 things you might like - the first being an experiment i heard of where differing age ranges we told to estimate when they thought a minute had past.
On average, the under 20s were too fast, the 20 somethings were about spot on, and the post 20s were too slow...Our mental perception of time slows down as we get older, so the world really does go past quicker as far as we are concerned!
Also a friend once summed it beautifully... We look to the future and there seems so much time, as its all stretched out ahead of us and when we think what we can do for an hour, and times it by the future, it seems forever...But the fact is we fill our lives with empty hours - the past seems so condensed as when we think back we remove the empty spaces...it seems so short because there is only the time we filled.
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