Tarih: Kadim Dönemden 20. Yüzyıla Bir Bilimin Kimlik Arayışı
History: Quest for Identity of A Science from Antiquity to the 20th Century

Summary/Abstract: Modernity undermining the traditional epistemology and history writing brings about a new scientific thought based on reason and progress. Stimulating a discourse that people boosted happiness and well-being through reason, this new scientific thought caused serious damages in two world wars, a process which led to the rising mistrust toward grand narratives of modernist paradigms and the questioning of modernist history writing based on the concept of nation-state and the nineteenth-century modernization. Structural, post-structural and post-modernist critics of this modernist thinking in the mid-twentieth century were replaced with the “games of discourses” accompanied by the collapse of a bipolar world and the rise of globalization. It is not clear how history writing, which had tried to occupy a niche in the modern scientific hierarchy, positioned itself in this new period when the end of history has been proclaimed. Thus, the definition of historiography and the factors shaping the content and tendencies of history writing still remain enigmatic. In societies like the Turkish one where ignorance toward national sciences and humanities is quite widespread, the patterns of history writings and the domain determining the position of a historian in the field remains unclear too. As a part of the two-phased study, this article offers a reading of history writing in the light of traditional and modern epistemologies.

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