The Collaborative International Dictionary
historic \his*tor"ic\ (h[i^]s*t[o^]r"[i^]k), historical \his*tor"ic*al\ (h[i^]s*t[o^]r"[i^]*kal), a. [L. historicus, Gr. "istoriko`s: cf. F. historique. See History.] Of or pertaining to history, or the record of past events; as, an historical poem; the historic page. -- His*tor"ic*al*ness, n. -- His*to*ric"i*ty, n.
There warriors frowning in historic brass.
--Pope.
2. having once lived, existed, or taken place in the real world; -- contrasted with legendary; as, the historical Jesus; doubt that a historical Camelot every existed; actual historical events.
3. Belonging to the past; as, historical (or historic) times; a historical character.
4. Within the period of time recorded in written documents; as, within historic times. Opposite of prehistoric.
Syn: diachronic.
5. (Linguistics) Same as diachronic. synchronic
Historical painting, that branch of painting which represents the events of history.
Historical sense, that meaning of a passage which is deduced from the circumstances of time, place, etc., under which it was written.
The historic sense, the capacity to conceive and represent the unity and significance of a past era or age.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1880, from Latin historicus (see historical) + -ity.
Wiktionary
n. 1 historical quality or authenticity based on fact. 2 The characteristic of having appeared or developed in history ''(ideas, practices, institutions...)'', as opposed to being natural or universal.
Wikipedia
Historicity is the historical actuality of persons and events, meaning the quality of being part of history as opposed to being a historical myth, legend, or fiction. Historicity focuses on the truth value of knowledge claims about the past (denoting historical actuality, authenticity, and factuality). The historicity of a claim about the past is its factual status.
Some theoreticians characterize historicity as a dimension of all natural phenomena that take place in space and time. Other scholars characterize it as an attribute reserved to certain human phenomena, in agreement with the practice of historiography. Herbert Marcuse explained historicity as that which “defines history and thus distinguishes it from ‘nature’ or from the ‘economy’” and “signifies the meaning we intend when we say of something that is ‘historical’.” The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy defines historicity as "denoting the feature of our human situation by which we are located in specific concrete temporal and historical circumstances." For Wilhelm Dilthey, historicity identifies human beings as unique and concrete historical beings.
Questions regarding historicity concern not just the issue of "what really happened," but also the issue of how modern observers can come to know "what really happened." This second issue is closely tied to historical research practices and methodologies for analyzing the reliability of primary sources and other evidence. Because various methodologies thematize historicity differently, it's not possible to reduce historicity to a single structure to be represented. Some methodologies (for example historicism), can make historicity subject to constructions of history based on submerged value commitments.
Questions of historicity are particularly relevant to partisan or poetic accounts of past events. For example, the historicity of the Iliad has become a topic of debate because later archaeological finds suggest that the work was based on some true event.
Questions of historicity also arise frequently in relation to historical studies of religion. In these cases, value commitments can influence the choice of research methodology.
Historicity in philosophy is the idea or fact that something has an historical origin and developed through history: concepts, practices, values. This is opposed to the belief that the same thing, in particular normative institutions or correlated ideologies, are natural or essential and thus exist universally.
Historicity relates to the underlying concept of history, or the intersection of teleology (the concept and study of progress and purpose), temporality (the concept of time), and historiography ( semiotics and history of history). Varying conceptualizations of historicity emphasize linear progress or the repetition or modulation of past events.
Historicity is an album by pianist Vijay Iyer released on the ACT label in 2009.
Usage examples of "historicity".
It is this network that defines the conditions that make a controversy or problem possible, and that bears the historicity of knowledge.
By its means, historicity will be able to introduce itself into the density of the spoken word itself.
And though their internal composition as structured individuals makes their historicity possible, that historicity becomes real history only by means of the external world in which they live.
By separating the characters of the living being or the rules of grammar from the laws of a self-analysing representation, the historicity of life and language was made possible.
In modem thought, what is revealed at the foundation of the history of things and of the historicity proper to man is the distance creating a vacuum within the Same, it is the hiatus that disperses and regroups it at the two ends of itself.
And we suppose that, on this basis, the historicity discovered within man was extended to the objects he had made, the language he spoke, and -even further still - to life.
Things first of all received a historicity proper to them, which freed them from the continuous space that imposed the same chronology upon them as upon men.
What first comes to light in the nineteenth century is a simple form of human historicity - the fact that man as such is exposed to the event.
The total absence of such things in the early Christian period is one of the strongest arguments against the reliability, indeed the very historicity, of the Gospel tale.
This bespeaks the historicity of this tradition rather than its legendary status.
And since the Assembly had repudiated historicity and precedent, those legitimating principles had, necessarily, to claim universal validity.
Who taught something horseshit-sounding like social historicity or historical sociality at some jr.
On the contrary, the struggles themselves are demonstrations of the creativity of desire, utopias of lived experience, the workings of historicity as potentiality-in short, the struggles are the naked reality of the res gestae.
All this demonstrates what is meant in practice by insisting upon the historicity of the text and the textuality of history.
Today only the res gestae are charged with historical capacities, or rather, today there is no history, only historicity.