This article analyses the attitudes toward death and attempts to find reconciliation with life in four films by Ingmar Bergman (Eva; The Seventh Seal; Wild Strawberries; Cries and Whispers). The films are related to Nietzsche’s philosophy of life, the Swedish intellectual tradition of ”faith in life” (Ellen Key, Pär Lagerkvist) and the earlier tradition of ars moriendi. They are interpreted as responses to a new historical and existential situation characterized by secularization and the loss of legitimacy of earlier Christian frameworks and conceptions of death and life. As opposed to the general tendency in early post war culture to avoid addressing death as a personal problem, Bergman’s films persistently confront the viewer with finitude and emphasize the importance of death as an integrated dimension of life. At the same time, they also present attempts to find reconciliation with life under new existential conditions, without reference to gods or a transcendent afterlife. Central aspects of this art of dying (and art of living) include to confront the painful sides of one’s own life history in order to change and to reconcile with oneself and one’s closest before it is too late, to become conscious of one’s limited life time and to use it for something meaningful with regard to other people, as well as to try to adopt an attitude of gratitude rather than an attitude of self-absorbed discontent.

Whereas historical contextualization is often understood in terms of reconstructing conditions and circumstances in the past, this chapter analyses how to historicize the present. More specifically, it investigates how to construct large diachronic contexts of meaning for practical questions in the present. Philippe Ariès’ history of how attitudes toward death have changed from the Middle Ages to the present in Western culture is used as a guiding example. Compared to many other historians of mentalities who also use large diachronic perspectives, a particular feature of Ariès’ perspective is that the present is included in the diachronic context of meaning and that the diachronic context is used to historicize the present and to throw critical light on normative issues, such as how to handle death and dying. The structure of Ariès’ diachronic context of meaning is analyzed in three parts: a) a main theme that connects the past to the present (attitudes toward death), b) a differentiation of aspects of the main theme (e.g. whether death is preferably well prepared or unexpected, and whether dying is public or private), c) a periodization of the changes of attitudes that exposes contrasts and transformations that in Ariès’ view have resulted in the tendency to avoid talking about people’s own death in the twentieth century. This form of contextualization can be used also for other topics. The analysis provides guidance for historians who wish to historicize phenomena in the present by constructing a large diachronic context of meaning.

The article outlines the history of the concept of modernity in Sweden. The word is related to several different concepts. Three different kinds of concepts of modernity of particular relevance in this context are distinguished, a concept of an epoch (”den moderna tiden”), a concept of a form of society (”det moderna samhället”), and a normative concept of progess, pointing out the direction of progress. The etymological roots of ”modern” and ”modernitet” are traced and historical examples are given of uses of words corresponding to the three different concepts, from early examples to examples from the 19th century, the period before 1945 and the post war era. The rhetoric of ”the modern breakthrough” has been influential in Swedish historiography, but used with different periodization. After 1945 the word ”modernism” came to be used more often as a label for aesthetic currents that had often been labelled ”modern” or ”new” in their own time. In the social sciences, ”modernism” has been much used to label a positive attitude to modern society and modernization, leading to some confusion with regard to modernism in aesthetic discourse. When the word ”modernitet” became more frequent as a theoretical concept in academic discourse in the 1980s and onwards, it was often associated with ”the project of Enlightenment” and rationalization. In the critical analyses of modernity, ”modernitet” tended to be treated with distance and as an object in the past, separating the dimension of progress from concept. ”Moderniteten” seems to have become a society and an in the past, and the words ”modernitet” and ”modern have become less frequent. Belief in progress and development seem to have become related to other concepts and express with other words. Nontheless, much of the perspective on progress is based on ideals that used to be associated with modernity and modernism.

This article is an analysis of José Ortega y Gasset’s conception of historical reason (la razón histórica) as a response to the crisis of historicism in the early twentieth century. Ortega’s efforts to historicise and vitalise the concept of reason was not formulated only as a new direction for philosophy, but also as a new direction for history. The analysis traces the development and meaning of Ortega’s historical reason, and draws attention to peculiar parallels with Ernst Troeltsch’s perspective on historicism. It also articulates a number of problems related to the crisis of historicism that Ortega addressed in the formulation of la razón histórica. This analysis indirectly throws light on problems that are relevant also for contemporary theory of history. Compared to other directions, such as Hayden White’s practical past, historicist contextualism and neo-realist objectivism, Ortega indicates an alternative that goes beyond the distinction between the practical and the historical past, transcends the fact/value distinction of Neo-Kantianism and positivism and provides a dimension of practical reason based on historical experience. Ortega’s response to the crisis of historicism in terms of a reconstruction of a dialectical series of historical experiences can be understood as a historical form of practical argumentation.

Recension av Nils Gilje, Hermeneutik som metod. En historisk introduktion

This article aims to reveal an underlying pattern in the theory of history in the 20th century: the loss and revival of historical experience. While the dominant approach of the 19th century was characterized by historical perspectives, in the 20th century practical orientation was more often characterized by ahistorical approaches. This shift can be traced to the crisis of historicism and its crisis of the relevance of history for the present. The crisis gave rise to various ahistorical perspectives on society and values. But the experiences of the 20th century and the loss of experience also motivated some historians to develop new perspectives that could regain historical experience for practical orientation. This is illustrated with examples from three directions in historical research: Reinhart Koselleck, Hans-Ulrich Wehler's Gesellschaftsgeschichte and a concept of listening to the voices of the past in memory studies. A central trajectory for the theory of history in the 20th century can thus be formulated in terms of historical experience lost and regained.

This article analyses José Ortega y Gasset’s ideas of the tasks of philosophy and the university and how they were related to his diagnosis of the crisis of modern European culture. The texts ’Misión de la universidad’, ’Qué es filosofía?’ and ’La rebelión de las masas’, all written around 1930, are interpreted in light of each other to expose this relationship. Instead of simply declaring tasks for philosophy and the university, Ortega turned these issues into objects of historico-philosophical analysis. The tasks of philosophy and the university were historicized, corresponding to their changing roles in society, and related to the demands of the new situation in the present. The character of the present was not simply determined by applying a ready-made understanding of society, but was itself made an object of historico-philosophical diagnosis. The tasks that Ortega formulated for philosophy (to formulate a new form of reason related to life; to analyse the fundamental structure of ’life’ in the present) and the university (to transmit culture at the level of cultural development; to build a new cultural foundation as a vital system of ideas based on the current level of the disciplines; to act as a cultivating counter-balance to the power of the media) can be seen as part of the solution to the problems diagnosed in ’La rebelión de las masas’: the loss of the former cultural foundation; violence and nihilistic lack of respect for basic norms of civilization; self-righteous presentism and narrow-minded specialization. The final part points to worrying parallels between Ortega’s diagnosis and our contemporary populist condition and raises the question of a future alternative: a philosophical condition with a philosophical democracy based on philosophical citizens. Whether this is possible or not, Ortega’s analysis demonstrates the need to relate the question of the tasks of philosophy and the university to a diagnosis of the present.

The very idea of a theme issue about History as Diagnosis emerged from a need to show how Historical Theory could be understood as an independent approach towards ready-made theories and abstract models, especially in historical moments immediately perceived as critical. The idea of history as diagnosis offers possibilities of interpreting symptoms and identifying pathologies in both society and in research in an empirically sensitive and theoretically innovative way