LETTER OF THE MONTH
Truth and history
I enjoyed the focus on theoretical approaches to history in the Conversation pages of the June issue. I found the suggestion made by David Motadel in his piece - that historians now agree that their work is shaped, consciously or otherwise, by their environment - highly convincing. History and the past are not the same: the past encompasses the ‘before now’, and ‘history’ is the accepted methods of analysis needed to understand it.
As the philosopher Richard Rorty argued, humans are unable to detach themselves from their beliefs and existing viewpoints. This is why Motadel’s argument is so convincing. We need to abandon notions of empirical truth:
