MEANING
1. Interpreting the past mainly through current attitudes and experiences, rather than its own historical circumstances.
2. The philosophical view that only things existing in the present are real.
3. The belief that biblical prophecies about the end times are being fulfilled in the present.
Use it for
criticizing the projection of current assumptions onto history; qualifying a judgment about past societies; distinguishing historical explanation from present-day expectations; identifying an anachronistic interpretive lensIdentifies present-centered distortion in historical interpretation while keeping unrelated specialist senses separate. Writing functions: Analysis / Interpretation.
Words that belong together
- avoid presentism
- accusations of presentism
- historical presentism
On the page
The chapter guards against presentism by reconstructing what information was available to officials at the time.
Avoiding presentism does not require suspending all moral judgment about past injustices.
The seminar contrasted presentism with accounts in which past and future events also exist.
Her objection to presentism concerned the status of truths about people who no longer exist.
The historian used presentism here for a reading of prophecy, not for a modern bias in historical judgment.
Word forms
- Base
- presentism
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Usage notes
Usually uncountable. Distinguish the historical, philosophical and theological senses by context. Register: academic. Commonness: uncommon (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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