I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Contemporaries certainly thought their peers were guilty of historical mistakes.
ReplyDeleteYes, but not yet understanding what critical history is, how would they know?
ReplyDeleteDid my comment get lost? That seems to happen every time I use my smartphone. It was something like this:
ReplyDeleteDiscriminating between sources requires the skills of the court room and not much more. But whatever the source of their judgments, the fact that they made them tells us that they saw accuracy as a goal of their genre.
I'm at a conference connecting via phone as well, but my answer will point to the different *types* of past, and note that one can be accurate about the practical past, but that doesn't mean one is doing history! More anon.
ReplyDeleteThe distinction here, PSH, is that if I say, "I had a roast beef sandwich for lunch," I am being accurate about the past, but the past I am dealing with is not the historical past, but the practical past. The historical past only differentiated out of other possible pasts in the 19th century.
ReplyDeleteNotice, PSH, what Ken did *not* say: "Two hundred years ago, no one made mistakes about the past."
ReplyDeleteThat, however, is what you have responded to.
In what sense does a work like Ammianus Marcellinus's Res Gestae (4th cent.) or Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (18th cent.) not touch on the historical past?
ReplyDeleteI haven't read those works, but I think you expressed it well yourself: earlier writers on the past sought to be edifying, and the past seen as a source of edification is the practical, not the historical past.
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