Keywords
Historical evidence
Historical comprehension
Contrafactual History. Historical Fiction
Empathy as an achievement
History teaching
How to Cite
Abstract
The article is centered on the connections problem between historical comprehension and historical imagination, from the double take on history as an academic exercise and its teaching. For historical knowledge to acquire a sense of communication and utility, as a condition, competence in historical comprehension is needed. It should presume a specific manner of relating with the past where the subjects of the present without getting compromised with the objectives and beliefs that are foreign to them, are perfectly capable of escaping their own prejudices and submerge themselves in a universe that in the beginning appears unfamiliar. For these objectives the author of the text pro¬poses empathy as an achievement and the use of imagination on three different levels as indispensable conditions. The article parts from the theoretical difficulties that represent imaginative thinking in history (the relationships given between imagination and evidence), and finally concludes, that without imagination, historical Knowledge will remain static.The journal Memoria y Sociedad is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
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