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In this Letter to the Editor, I argue that Danto’s Ideal Chronicler thought experiment in philosophy of history conflates the properties of events with the relations between events. This oversight leads to misunderstandings regarding the nature of historical knowledge and historical events. The experiment fails to establish any non-trivial conclusions about the retrospective nature of historical truths or the constitution of historical events.
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Veli Virmajoki (2025) studied this question.
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