Kalle Pihlainen- PhD
- Associate Professor at University of Turku
Kalle Pihlainen
- PhD
- Associate Professor at University of Turku
About
84
Publications
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Introduction
Kalle Pihlainen works on cultural theory, with an emphasis on the theory of history, embodiment and existential phenomenology. He is active in a number of organizations for the promotion of research in the theory and philosophy of history, including the International Network for Theory of History (INTH). His book, The Work of History: Constructivism and a Politics of the Past, was published by Routledge in 2017.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
January 2021 - August 2022
January 2016 - December 2019
August 2009 - July 2014
Publications
Publications (84)
This essay examines the unique positioning of Martin L. Davies within contemporary theory and philosophy of history, giving particular attention to the once again timely question of what is meant by historicity and historicization, as well as exploring the ways in which Davies suggests our relation to historical knowledge can, and perhaps should, b...
This article is a collaborative commentary on the first volume of a two-part anthology of works by Hayden White, The Ethics of Narrative, edited by Robert Doran. Informed by the collection and inspired by the co-authors, in this paper we discuss White’s writing. Herman Paul compares White’s constructivism with that of Berger and Luckmann, and discu...
The article proceeds from the assumption that poststructuralism contains an ethical dimension despite contrary claims by many of its critics. This ethics can be seen in the poststructuralist refusal of representation and, importantly, allows for representative interventions when their benefits are assumed to outweigh any conceivable harm. As an ela...
Fictionality has long been viewed in history writing as near-synonymous with abandoning truth and any supposedly consequent, ethical commitments. Understandably, this attitude has impeded the acceptance of theoretical approaches that aim, instead, to reveal the fundamental connectedness of history’s fictional aspects with ethical concerns. This lin...
En este artículo investigo el rol de una clase particular de ‘materialidad’ que opera en la escritura y la lectura de la historia. Esto implica examinar los desafíos planteados a los enfoques constructivistas de la historia tanto por los argumentos del giro post-lingüístico sobre la presencia y la experiencia como por el denomindado post-narrativis...
This theme section tackles the question “What makes history personal?” The four articles included in the issue present some possible strategies to begin to answer the question, often by reminding us of the need to overcome key dichotomies, such as the separation between mind and body, between scientific knowledge and emotions, between language and...
In this article, I examine the relation between history and autobiography in terms of the ‘rules’ and attitudes relating to their production and consumption. Setting these genres and their related genre expectations side by side serves to emphasize the distinctness of forms of referential ‘past writing’ within the overall field of literary expressi...
This conversation originated in a plenary session organized by Ewa Domańska and María Inés La Greca under the same title of ‘Globalizing Hayden White’ at the III International Network for Theory of History Conference ‘Place and Displacement: The Spacing of History’ held at Södertörn University, Stockholm, in August 2018. In order to pay homage to H...
Since the appearance of Hayden White’s seminal work Metahistory in 1973, constructivist thought has been a key force within theory of history and has at times even provided inspiration for historians more generally. Despite the radical theoretical shift marked by constructivism and elaborated in detail by its proponents, confusion regarding many of...
My aim in this article is to put an end to the continued either-or debate regarding the literary nature of history, whereby attention so easily returns to the fact–fiction issue. To prevent a relapse into this unfruitful argument, I offer a reading that is sensitive to the non-literary aspects of history writing and views them productively, rather...
Historiatieteen parissa työskentelee tuhansittain alan asiantuntijoita, mutta kokonaisvaltainen näkemys historian alan asiantuntijuudesta on kuitenkin puuttunut. Tässä artikkelissa pohdimme aihetta asiantuntijuuden tutkimuksen, historiateorian ja historian didaktiikan näkökulmista ja esitämme, että asiantuntijuuden määrittely ja samalla yliopisto-o...
The article approaches history as a genre with specific strengths and weaknesses that stem from its commitment to deal with the past truthfully. Although examination of this commitment has most often led to epistemological debates, that is not the intention here. Instead the goal is to fast-forward past any discussion of the possibilities for objec...
Historians often accuse linguistic-turn type theorizing à la Hayden White of doing away with the justifications for continuing to write histories. The rather naive interpretation is that if there is nothing in the record of the past to justify valuations in the present – no entailment, as Keith Jenkins nicely formulates it, between fact and value,...
(translated by Michihiro Okamoto)
This brief piece, based on a paper delivered at the 2012 UK Social Science History Conference, questions the merits of the common metaphor of communicating as a theorization of ‘doing history’. It claims that, following the rejection of the idea of objectivity in its most radical forms, the idea of conversing or communicating with the past has beco...
This article investigates the nature of historical consciousness - conceptualizations and constructions of the past outside academic history - and the way in which this has changed in parallel with developments in historical theory in recent decades. With the increased constructivist questioning of historical narratives as somehow objectively true,...
In the first part, two chapters discuss the philosophy behind the connection between fiction and history, whether history is fiction, and the distinction between the past and history. Part two goes on to discuss the relationship between history and literature using case studies such as Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens. Part three looks at televis...
Since the 1960s, and especially after the appearance of Metahistory in 1973, the relationship between narrative and reality has been one of the most important questions in historical theory. Despite this, historians have generally taken the kind of narrative constructivism associated with Hayden White to hold no significance for them. Their justifi...
En este artículo, exploro la aproximación constructivista de Hayden White para la representación histórica, a través de los lentes de la “verdad narrativa”. Mi objetivo es mostrar que –además de ayudar a que los historiadores hagan las paces con las premisas constructivistas– la apertura a una noción de verdad narrativa podría sustentar nuevas y út...
This article presents a selective evaluation of Keith Jenkins' contribution to theory of history, focusing particularly on issues that many historians seem to have had difficulties either understanding or accepting. A core part of the discussion involves the ideological and ethical reasons for as well as consequences of his recognition of epistemol...
In this essay, I present a thought experiment involving what I've called the Historian Mark II, roughly a time machine, but with a number of important restrictions. The most important of these restrictions is that the experiment must be defined in such a way as to uphold the ontological distinction between past and present. This permits a re-examin...
Narrative constructivism – the narrative theory of history following Hayden White – has focused intensely on the search for alternative forms for history writing. At the same time, since the late 1960s, many oppositional efforts within historical research proper have been coopted into mainstream history writing and their political edge has been blu...
Would a time machine be useful in our search for the meaning of the past?
History, historical consciousness and the use of the past
It is generally agreed upon that Grice’s causal theory of perception describes a necessary condition for perception. It does
not describe sufficient conditions, however, since there are entities in causal chains that we do not perceive and not all
causal chains yield perceptions. One strategy for overcoming these problems is that of strengthening t...
Although it is not an immediately obvious aspect of White's oeuvre, much of his theorizing is based on a particular conception of the reader of histories. For him, the reader is no longer a passive creature, simply the recipient of the historians' authoritative messages. Nor is the reader to be ignored by the historian. Rather, the reader is active...
Analyzes the conditions under which historical representation can be seen to contribute to the production and reformulation of cultural situatedness and historical understanding, with reference to the potential mediating role of live performance in conveying the reality of the past. Performance art, with its ambivalent status between immediate real...
Round and round we go... Literature and the limits of historical writing - Yearbook of the Literary Research Society of Finland
In this article I examine the gap that exists between an individual’s self-identity in a given situation and the later appropriation of that identity in any political programme aimed at changing similar situations. I will argue that an individual’s performance of the self constitutes the first stage in the transition from a ‘self’ to an ‘identity’...
New Literary History 33.1 (2002) 39-60
To support their other arguments, narrative theorists of history like Hayden White and F. R. Ankersmit tend to argue that historical narratives are identical to fictional ones in form. Now, while on the face of it this seems indeed to be so, one would common-sensically be tempted to think that because of the d...
In striving towards a limited freedom from the impossible demands of 'objectively'representing the past, historical narratives have lost some of the authority they held on epistemic grounds and thus part of their ability to persuade. Having attempted to reclaim the effectiveness of historical narratives through acknowledging their literariness whil...
Historical writing and narration after the fact–fiction debate
Literary knowledge in historical research: The case of Josef Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls
Literature and the overcoming of truth-questions in historical research
Diss. -- Turun yliopisto.
"We historical theorists are quite harmless" – a conversation with Frank Ankersmit
Akseli Gallen-Kallela's Flower of Death - The Yearbook of the Finnish Language Society
The article proposes that a going beyond of the fact--fiction debate is feasible only once the current emphasis on text and textuality is rethought. In doing so, it does not advocate a turning away from textuality (or even intend to suggest that such a thing would be possible) but only proposes that the over-simplified claims made in the name of th...
