Rebranded Philosophy of History

Abstract

This article focuses on the one of the many outcomes of the so-called rebranded philosophy of history, namely, the continuity-discontinuity issue. Eelco Runia’s, Noël Bonneuil’s and Paul A. Roth’s conceptions of historical time will be analyzed as representative of this subject in the landscape of the theory of history from 2010 on. The authors sampled not only provide the evidence that historical discontinuity remains alive as a theoretical and historiographical challenge, but they also disclose different arrays to think the relationship among past, present, and future, and historical transformation. The concepts of historical time analyzed recall Foucault’s discontinuously-base model of thinking historical time and add to it different varieties of historical discontinuity. Moreover, the continuity-discontinuity issue in the new backdrop involves operation of translating time into space (spatialization of time). As a result, the discontinuously-based model of historical time’s main characteristics will be summarized and its strength as a heuristic tool for further analyses of the concepts of historical time is outlined.