Truth, Time and History
A Philosophical Inquiry
Truth, Time and History investigates the reality of the past by connecting arguments across areas which are conventionally discussed in isolation from each other.
Breaking the impasse within the narrower analytic debate between Dummett’s semantic anti-realists and the truth value link realists as to whether the past exists independently of our methods of verification, the book argues, through an examination of the puzzles concerning identity over time, that only the present exists. Drawing on Lewis’s analogy between times and possible worlds, and work by Collingwood and Oakeshott, and the continental philosopher, Barthes, the author advances a wholly novel proposal, as to how aspects of ersatz presentism may be combined with historical coherentism to uphold the legitimacy of discourse about the past.
In highlighting the role of historians in the creation and construction of temporality, Truth, Time and History offers a convincing philosophical argument for the inherence of an unreal past in the real present.
The video introduction to Truth, Time and History was featured by The Day in their article on time – Time flies – except when it starts to crawl.
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Table of Contents
Part I: Truth
1. The realist/anti-realist wars
2. Projection, analogy and meaning
Part II: Time
3. Tense theory
4. Leibniz’s Law and the paradox of diachronic identity
5. Presentism and modality
Part III: History
6. Collingwood and Oakeshott: is history possible?
7. A realist present and a coherentist past
Bibliography
Index
Reviews of Truth, Time and History
“Botros' book has the virtue of being both incredibly insightful philosophically on all the topics it covers – truth, time and history – and very accessible. Her case for presentism and a rejection of the past as an independent entity is a daring yet persuasive one, and philosophers (of history) and historians would do well to acquaint themselves with it.”
Sina Talachian, Cambridge University, in Philosophy: The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Volume 94, Issue 3, July 2019, pp 489-491
A video introduction to Truth, Time and History
History
Prominent presentists, claiming to resolve this contradiction, hold that “past times” inhere abstractly in the present as stories. This ingenious theory is however cumbersome and strained. Its adherents, being realists about truth, yet denying that the past exists, are obliged to postulate a new kind of metaphysical entity to serve as truth maker for historical statements. My hybrid proposal, which accords a crucial role to historians, affirms realism as regards presently existing objects, including historical texts – the tomes on library shelves – but suspends it as regards the non-existent past which is their subject matter. I am influenced by the philosophers of history, Collingwood and Oakeshott, for whom, being idealists, not realists, historical truth is a function of the coherence of historical interpretation, not of anything existing in the past. Historical texts are governed internally by coherentist principles. “The victor of Agincourt was Henry V” is, on my view, not about Agincourt or Henry V, but about the historical text in which it figures. When realists protest: ‘What nonsense! It is about a real king, and a real battle. History is not fiction! Otherwise historians could make up anything they liked!’ I reply: they cannot: historians are held to rigorous standards in interpreting evidence. How could it help anyway to postulate that shadowy past which no historian has ever been able directly to access in order to check a single conclusion? . Historians, it is finally suggested, by their intellectual powers and narrative technique, fulfil a crucial role in the creation and construction of the historical past, and perhaps the past more generally.
