Thursday, January 15, 2015

The accuracy of history

Finals are on the mind, and the American studies one is certainly on mine. I've always loved writing essays, and I love philosophy, so the two are often intertwined throughout my educational career. As such, when I heard that the final was about the differentiation between fact and constructed conceptions of history, I was stoked. I'd recently been dipping into Derrida's works and his ideas. One that I've found to be particularly fascinating is his conceptions on how accurately we can learn historical events. There isn't any real "truth" behind the historical accounts that we learn about, given how we never lived through them. They're at best second hand recounts, and usually much more distant than that. Every link on the chain to you adds another filter of bias, predispositions, and slant to the image that is that snapshot of history. Then, when it finally gets to you, it's no longer a pure depiction of the event that took place. It's an image of an image of an image of an image...etc. On the other side of this, I can't really think of a better way to learn history. There is no real objective way, given the current technology we have, to experience the past first hand. Thanks a lot, doc Brown.

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