Op-Eds

Almost fifty years ago, in 1971, the historian David Hackett Fischer published Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. The book cataloged what Fischer described as “explicit historical errors” made by professional historians. And the list of errors was long. The book ended with an actual index of more than a hundred fallacies: anachronism, circular proof, false extrapolation, insidious generalization, quibbling, and much more. One of those fallacies was presentism. For Fischer, presentism was a fallacy of narration. It was “a complex anachronism, in which the antecedent in a narrative series is falsified by being defined or interpreted in terms of the consequent.” It endorsed “the mistaken idea that the proper way to do history is to prune away the dead branches of the past” and focus only on what has “grown into the dark forest of our contemporary world.”1 Fischer, though, did not object to historians addressing current events. He hoped for a usable past. History could “clarify contexts in which contemporary problems exist,” he wrote. It could show us how current issues “developed through time.” More dubiously, it could, in his eyes, even forecast the future through the “temporal sophistication” that historians have and other scholars, he claimed, “conspicuously lack.” “Professional historians,” he warned, “must hold something more than a private conversation with themselves.”2

Aesthetics · Anachronism · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Fallacy · Literature · Narrative · Narrative history · Political science · Politics · Presentism · Sophistication · History · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, History, and Historiography

• O fim de uma disciplina? “Presentismo”, colapso profissional e o problema do problema da história nos Estados Unidos contemporâneos (cenas de uma polêmica)

  Open Access•Arthur Lima De Avila•Tempo•2026

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• Introduction

  Open Access•Daniel Steinmetz‐Jenkins•Modern Intellectual History•2022

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