Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to presentism; viewing the past with a perspective limited to present-day attitudes and beliefs.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a theologian who believes that the Scripture prophecies of the Apocalypse (the Book of Revelation) are being fulfilled at the present time

Etymologies

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Examples

  • 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."

    Critical Presentism 2002

  • 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.

    Multiculturism: Friend or Foe 2007

  • 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.

    Multiculturism: Friend or Foe 2007

  • 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.

    Multiculturism: Friend or Foe 2007

  • 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.

    Critical Presentism 2002

  • 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.

    Reading Queerly: A Presentist's Confession 2002

  • This way of teaching may strike the resolute historical scholar as too "presentist," and the present-minded theorist as too "universalist."

    The Decline and Fall of Literature Delbanco, Andrew 1999

  • The idea that the same rules of access exist all over the world is very presentist.

    Advisor: Was it cruel to let poor kids in India play with my iPod? Boing Boing 2009

  • 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.

    The Volokh Conspiracy » Assassination, Self-Defense, and the Koh Speech 2010

  • 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.

    Utopianism and Joanna Baillie: A Preface to Converging Revolutions 2008

  • And there is also the problem that I already mentioned that the list is limited to the last decade. It's very much a "presentist" list, where presentism is "uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes".

    Books about Personal Knowledge Management and Zettelkasten binnyva 2024

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