A history-of-ideas approach to the past presumes that beneath the multifarious events taking place in any age, influencing dominant personalities and shaping popular opinion, there are overarching ideas or ideologies that give meaning and
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“Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not.”
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“The idea that this end of philosophy— at least, of political philosophy and (I claim) moral philosophy— has close relations with history overlaps with a more ambitious view held by a consistently underestimated Oxford philosopher, R. G. Collingwood. The trouble with Collingwood’s kind of commitment is that it requires one to know some history. My two associates in the view I am sketching are Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor. They are both Roman Catholics, though of different sorts. I used to find this a disquieting fact but no longer do so. All three of us, I could say, accept the significant role of Christianity in understanding modern moral consciousness, and adopt respectively the three possible views about how to move in relation to that: backward in it, forward in it, and out of it. In any case, we all assume some historical commitments, they on a more ambitious scale than I, and perhaps there is a rather nervous competition for who writes the most irresponsible history.”
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“Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror”
― Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922
― Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913-1922
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