Alfred North Whitehead once gave very shrewd counsel to people studying the past: “Do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend.” That is, what people in the past were openly debating and conversing about is unlikely to be the most important thing about them. “There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has
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