Document Type : Research

Author

• Amir Hossein Hatami

Faculty Member of the History Department of Imam Khomeini International University

Abstract

History, historiography, and historical knowledge are some of the favorite topics of postmodern scholars in the West and some of their exponents in Iran. Postmodernist ideas emerging from hermeneutical thought were a movement against positivist, deterministic, and objectivist views, especially in the humanities. The postmodern thinkers have defined history differently. In their view, any description of the events of the past is in the form of an interpretation of them, and the past is never fully and accurately recognizable. But the reality is that accepting and applying the hermeneutic postmodernist perspective in history means getting absolute skepticism and the destruction of the bases of the historical knowledge and its rejection. Hence, in this research, this devastating and relativistic view has been critically criticized on the basis of some of the main postmodern texts. The research findings indicate the postmodern hermeneutic view of history contains contradictions which do not allow the researchers to accept the history of this view.

Keywords

• Historical Knowledge
• Hermeneutics
• Postmodernism
• Re-thinking of History
• History Mission
• Time and Fable

Main Subjects

• History