Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 35 No. 2, 2015.
Original scientific paper
The Universal History as the Dialectic of Inclusion and Exclusion
Alen Tafra
orcid.org/0000-0001-5894-8783
; Pula, Croatia
Abstract
The all-pervasive disappointment and the discourse of crisis might be understood as a consequence of the disclosure of the segregational dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. The latter is otherwise hidden within a more complex discursive structure, designated by Wallerstein as the “centrist liberal geoculture”. The issue is the process of maturation that with good reason calls for an appropriate anamnesis and an explanation of the genesis of modern world-system. In the perspective of the philosophy of history, we should ask: what the future’s past can tell us about our present? Although Voltaire’s combination of the faith in moderate progress with the selective type of sinophilia indicates the birth of the modern philosophy of history and its universality, the latter is by the same token compromised as the symptom of eurocentrism. Still, the modern affirmation of historical science marks the fatal disintegration of universal time into the number of separate temporalities and historicities. It is for this reason that the advocacy of “total history” is conceivable only within the transgressive and holistic constellation of research which is unimaginable without the philosophy of history. The paper seeks to demonstrate this through the use of the deconstruction of still dominant periodization and cultural-historical epochs that are traditionally derived by means of exclusion of the contributions of different cultures and epochs.
Keywords
philosophy of history; dialectic of inclusion and exclusion; modern world system; colonialism; eurocentrism; universalism; anti-imperialism; historical periodization; cultural-historical epochs; geopolitics of knowledge
Hrčak ID:
158756
URI
Publication date:
22.9.2015.
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