Luiz Sérgio Duarte da Silva

Philosophy of History and Border Theory in the Latin American Essay: Pluralism and Development

There is a philosophy of history (speculative and critical) in the Latin American modernist essay of the twentieth century. The mixed gender is important as a record of efforts to produce identity and guiding discourses, as a landmark of historical thinking in the New World and as an innovative interpretive experiment. A Border Theory with a historicist characteristic was produced in it (a theory of modernization, a historical sociology of the modern on the periphery, a history of transculturation).  As a neo-baroque style of thinking (Far-West science and art), as a discursive construct on the originality of the subcontinent, as an attempt to construct a public space, it is above all a discussion of the plurality of rationalization processes. The project is supported by the Humboldt Foundation and took me to Las Palmas, Madrid, Mexico, Buenos Ayres, Essen, Berlin, Eichstaett, and Heidelberg. It is related to my research on "Narrative and Historical Experience in Contemporary Theory and Philosophy of History" (recorded as "The Postmodern Debate").

Narrative and philosophy of history: the postmodern debate

It is about enabling the debate on history at the beginning of the 21st century. The moment of encounter and debate of three conceptions (Historik, Analytical Philosophy of History and Neo-Historicism) of the relation between historical thought and modernity. Historik's tradition refers to the typical forms of thought of the Science of History and which descend from the design of history as one of the sciences of culture. The ingression in the science of the methods and forms of typical consideration of social sciences, the so-called Social History, was possibly made by the development of a theory of the science of history (Droysen) and the Weberian epistemological solution. The assumption of the hybrid character of the method of the sciences of culture (the combination of empirical interpretation and control in a project of knowledge that is wanted formal, comparative and understanding) and the systematic reflection on the various dimensions (epistemological, theoretical, Ethics) of historical thought in the era of its modernization produced a project of knowledge that presents itself as heir of the Enlightenment attempts of argumentative reasoning and controlled exposure of the knowledge of the symbolic phenomena. Such an inheritance is assumed without prejudice to the methodical emphasis and without giving up the attempts to defend historical consciousness (the relativizing principle that provides the specificity of the modernization of historical thought) that characterized historicism. Neo-Historicism is seen as a return to the tradition of the spirit sciences. Historicism, renewed by a critic who wants to get rid of its essentialist presuppositions, is presented as a model for the rehabilitation of narration. The narrative exposition of events (the valorization of rhetorical aspects against the pretensions of theoretical explanation), the attention to the phenomena of language (the application of the theory of metaphor to the study of historiography and the concern to situate as act of relational speech, inscribed in a specific language).