presentist
IPA: prˈɛzʌntɪst
noun
- A follower of presentism.
adjective
- Of or pertaining to presentism; viewing the past with a perspective limited to present-day attitudes and beliefs.
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Examples of "presentist" in Sentences
- The idea that the same rules of access exist all over the world is very presentist.
- This way of teaching may strike the resolute historical scholar as too "presentist," and the present-minded theorist as too "universalist."
- The Legal Adviser might have stopped merely with armed conflict, taking a narrow and presentist view that all that matters is Al Qaeda today, and not presidents tomorrow.
- Within literary studies, the term "presentism" or "presentist" is widely used to attack scholarship or criticism that appears not to respect what T.S. Eliot called the "pastness of the past."
- Employed as a term of opprobrium, "presentist" refers to criticism perceived as blithely and un-selfconsciously projecting a critic's own political or social concerns onto literature of another era.
- Far from allowing a “presentist” confusion of historical and current ideas to compromise research, the ongoing process of adjusting the canon requires a nuanced separation of historical, current, and projected values.
- As someone who has always considered it both intellectually and politically vital to articulate the fundamental connections between my scholarly efforts and my own sense of ethics and social values as an out, gay man, I confess that my own work strikes me as precisely the kind of presentist scholarship that Simpson sets out to critique.
- The errors that Clark has in his sights are, however, not only racial myths but, importantly, what he calls a 'presentist' mentality which assumes that constructive historical conflict and negotiation are essentially over and that there is now a self-evident state of political rationality prevailing, which lays down clear and universal principles for social stability and equity.
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