La reescritura pragmática del pasado en la filosofía de G. H. Mead

Abstract

In the current work, we propound to introduce G. H. Mead’s philosophy of history as a pragmatist philosopher. For that purpose, we explored his notions of the past and present, what his conception of the historian’s labour is, the way he poses the problem of the reference to the historical past and, finally, we focused on the place given by the philosopher to the chance of rewriting the past. 

According to Mead, there exists a tension between the acceptance of the emergence historians’, as a new event that did not exist there previously, and the assertion of the same historians who support that there is a relation of necessity between the past and the present. In the latter case, the emerging would stop being; therefore, “emerging” and it would necessarily be a continuation of the past. We intend to rebuild the Meadean answer to the existent contradiction between emergence and necessity, in the specific case of history. 

We claim that Mead elaborated a theory that allows the consideration of the historicity of the history itself which makes each age rewrite the past in an incommensurable way, with an effective strategy of rejection to the scepticism of the historical knowledge. The alternative to the metaphysic realism is not any form of scepticism.