Critical History: Time, Cause, and Agency

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2020
This seminar aims at exploring the underlying metaphysics of historical writing. Using Foucault (especially his meta-historical works) as our guiding thread, we will examine critically the assumptions that lie behind the idea of causal plenitude (that events all have causal explanations); time, continuity, dislocation. Positivism, historical-structuralism, objectivity will be topics, along with the tension between structural and agential historical argument.