Testimony/Bearing Witness

Sybille Krämer is former Professor of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin and from 2019 she will hold a senior professorship at Leuphana University Lueneburg. Sigrid Weigel is former Director of the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin.

Introduction / Part I: Historical Perspectives / 1. The Presence of the Witness, Francois Hartog/ 2. The Debate on Testimonies Concerning Miracles and History in 17th-18th Century France, Michèle Bokobza Kahan/ 3. Enlightenment Perspectives on the Problem of Testimony, Axel Gelfert/ Part II: International Sites / 4. Testimony in Light of the Khmer Rouge Trials - Reflections of a Judge Involved, Marcel Lemonde / 5. The Armenian Case - Bearing Witness by mediation of the Second or Third Generation, Janine Altounian / 6. Testimonies in the Spaces of Promoting and Opposing Violent Extremism, Stevan Weine/ Part III: Holocaust- Paradigm and Intersection of Survivior Testimony and Philosophical Epistemology / 7. The Power and Perils of Being Believed, Benjamin McMyler / 8. The Testimony of the Traumatic Witness: The Tension between the Therapeutic Act and the Loss of Words and Their Meaning, Zohar Rubinstein / 9. Analysing Holocaust Survivor Testimony: Certainties, Scepticism, Relativism, Martin Kusch / 10. Probing the Limits of Visual Testimonies – A Cinematic Approach to Different Modes of Testimony from the Warsaw Ghetto in Hersonski’s A Film unfinished, Sigrid Weigel / Part IV: Visibility and Media-History of Testimony / 11. Like a Thief in the Night: Witnessing and Watching, John Durham Peters/ 12. Remembrance of Things Past: Testimony and Imagination, Peter Geimer / 13. The 1,001 Reflections of an Ongoing Catastrophe - From Visual to Cinematic Testimony, Aurélia Kalisky / Part V: Epistemology of Testimony / 14. Epistemic Dependence and Trust. On witnessing in the third-, second- and first-person perspective, Sybille Krämer / 15. The Philosophy of Testimony: Between Epistemology and Ethics, Sibylle Schmidt / 16. Is Testimony an Epistemically Distinguished Source of Knowledge?, Dirk Koppelberg / Contributors / Acknowledgements