Conceptual Engineering for Historians

Abstract Reviewing a sixteen-essay collection of essays on time, ethics and philosophy of history, involving a wide and eclectic range of cultural, anthropological and philosophical traditions and sources, I find the mix confusing. Needing to start from scratch, I adopt a pragmatic approach, enabling me to draw on neuroscience and link memory to imagination in order to structure the historical field. The field needs conceptualising, but I argue that, against compositionality, our understanding of a concept needs to be widened to include the linguistic practices characteristically adopted by historians, the creation of whole narratives. These are analysed as large-scale units of meaning, conceptualising time-extended objects of memory and imagination. I show that a similar widening is required for ethical concepts, and the centrality of evaluation for narrative construction is thereby clarified. The collection’s many essays are individually analysed and judged in the light of this approach.