BETWEEN THE EVERHAUNTING PAST AND INEXORABLE FUTURE. PRESENTATION OF THE LATEST ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL “LOGOS”

Since Benedetto Croce declared about a hundred years ago that “all history is contemporary history”, the dependence of a historian on his time has increased so much that today his actual ability to see a past that could differ in any significant way from the present is being questioned. Presentism has been perhaps the most discussed topic in the theory of history over the last two decades. At the same time, the present in which we live does not seem to be altogether self-sufficient: it is tormented by the ghosts of the past that are “not going to let go”, and it is also greatly disturbed by the future which appears to be increasingly less favorable. The resulting dizziness, the feeling that “the time is out of joint” has already been the focus of attention of philosophers, who have been arguing about the possibility of co-existence of the past and the present (“non-modern modernity”), and finding more and more arguments in favor of the idea of multiple and multi-layered historical times.