Gurevich, P.S. Memorial Social Practice

Abstract: People of previous epochs are still alive in our memory due to a special form of social practice –memorials. When an ant hill is burnt down, nobody will ever remember it. However, in a human society we keep the memory about former generations. The past is still there in our minds. Humanitarian sciences have a principle of historicism allowing to understand the past as a part of historical process. The article states that as a methodological principle historicism was not created at once. A German historian and history philosopher Friedrich Meineke in his book ‘Formation of Historicism’ described a full and faithful process of how the phenomenon was formed. Historicism is viewed as a natural result of the entire ideological development of the West since Antique times. Meineke thoroughly traced back the sources of historicism in works of famous English, French and German educators. The book shows how the historical thought was developing in the Western Europe and opposes to the negative attitude to historicism as a thinking paradigm.

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