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Abstract
This essay engages the dismissal of presentism and identity politics by the former president of the American Historical Association. In doing so, the essay argues that his essay shares a rhetorical style with other intellectuals and politicians that can aptly be called the spectacle of transgression. The essay argues that this spectacle works to obscure the material conditions of higher education in general and of history in particular.

Presentism is generally regarded as a necessary evil in historiography. This paper explores the upside of that inevitability. Using a philosophical approach to discourse analysis in the tradition of new cultural history, the paper distinguishes between a strategic use of presentism on the one hand, and a rationalistic approach to history on the other hand. The paper concludes by considering some political implications of rationalistic accounts and strategically presentistic accounts in historiography. Rationalistic accounts inscribe expectations of the past into visions of the future; they cast the historian in the role of prophet; and they perpetuate notions of ahistoric agency. In contrast, strategically presentistic histories incorporate an orientation that deliberately uses the lenses and perspectives of the present in order to bring current assumptions and perspectives into focus. When assumptions are examined in relation to presentistic perspectives, those assumptions loosen their reins on thought. Since presentism is unavoidable, presentism should not be dismissed outright, but ought to be subject to probing and critical examination. With such a focus, strategically presentistic historiography allows for a reflection on the limits of what it is possible to think.

AbstractRecently, some have attempted to reformulate debates in first-order metaphysics, particularly in the metaphysics of time and modality, for reasons due to Williamson (Modal logic as metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2013). In this paper, we focus on the ways in which the likes of Cameron, Correia and Rosenkranz, Deasy, Ingram, Tallant, Viebahn,inter alia, have initiated and responded to attempts to capture the core of presentism using a formal, logical machinery. We argue that such attempts are doomed to fail because there is no theoretical core to presentism. There is no single view or family of views that is presentism.

The term 'presentism' has a variety of applications, but in this piece I shall adapt the analysis made by S. A. Smith in his article within this forum, making reference to Hartog's idea of a 'regime of historicity', of a 'sense that only the present exists', to propose a specific argument with regard to one topic: the historical analysis of China's experience during the Second World War. In the high Cold War era, the topic of China's wartime experience was taken by many American historians to be part of a continuum that informed a wider debate on the US presence in Asia. In the post-Cold War era, the same topic has been taken up by Chinese historians as a means of creating a new continuum between a wartime past and a politically turbulent present by elision of the revolutionary past. If, in Hartog's terms, the present is all that exists, the present 'regime of historicity' in China creates that present in part by a deliberate removal of some parts of the past which suggest difference rather than similarity with the present.