Historian’s Past

Abstract

Historian investigates the past, but this is not the prerogative of historiography, since all social sciences have to do with their own past, and histories are narrated by theologians, ideologists, authors of novels and all of us. To define the specific proper past of historical science, it is necessary to understand its distinctive features which, in turn, presupposes a certain philosophical view of the discipline, and some particular type of epistemology. In this paper, a radically constructivist position is opposed to the doctrine of “presentism”.