“Is the essential invisible to the eyes”? Essence and Appearance of (Medieval) Societies
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4025/actascieduc.v48.i1.77202Abstract
Rationality and critical knowledge have lost much of their prestige, and their internal divergences have become more pronounced. For some decades now, History has been an intellectual field marked by various disagreements. Diverse are its epistemology, theoretical and methodological frameworks that support its operations, and even the absence of these parameters supposedly in favor of overcoming the constraints of objectivity and any desire to achieve historical truth. In this article, I raise some of these issues, especially the perspective that continues to preside over our medieval studies and beyond. By granting to their historical agents, conceptions and worldviews, ‘gnosiological’ superiority in the understanding of their societies, History is constituted as an emic-based discipline that reduces it to the uncritical reproduction of the ideologies of the dominant classes of yesterday and today. I advocate an epistemology that reaffirms the ultimate function of historical knowledge, the objective understanding of the laws and tendencies that govern the functioning and transformation of human societies.
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