Teaching Historical Narratives: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Virtues of Historical Interpretation (Bloomsbury Inquiries in Philosophy and Education)

With this book Jon Levisohn argues that current history education is set up in a way that sees students of history at one end of a continuum with the academic experts in the field of history at the other, and where the goal of history education is to help students to think like historians.Building on a critical engagement with Carl Hempel, Hayden White, and David Carr, as well as contemporary work in virtue epistemology, Levisohn proposes a new theory of historiography which serves as a set of guidelines for the teaching and learning of history.According to the theory, the work of historiography is best characterized as a negotiation among narratives, weaving together received narratives with new information and ideas in order to construct a new narrative.This negotiation happens with a particular orientation towards negative evidence or ‘flexible disconfirmationism’, and is assessed according to the openness, sensitivity, responsibility, creativity, boldness and humility, i.e. the vir