Revamping syllabus for the semester so re-upping suggestion that, if you teach 'History of Modern', you should assign this old paper by David Norton - or you should at least get the kids to read just the first two paragraphs, which are genius.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
It really is a solid paper, very helpful. With only the problems I mentioned - to my eye. No one knows HOW it's all fake, exactly, but everyone is pretty intuitively aware that it's SO artificial it must be somehow. And he construes Russell as championing empiricism more than he does. Otherwise 👍
I think I've posted that before but don't think I included my thoughts on HOW to teach it - since I think Norton somewhat oversteps, polemically. He oversteps insofar as he tries to make out that continued acceptance of the 'myth' is indicative of delusion. But surely everyone sees it's fake olds.
Teaching the stock Descartes-Spinoza-Leibniz, Locke-Berkeley-Hume empiricists-vs-rationalists, then Kant solves it with his 'maybe you are sure the next object will be green because you are wearing green spectacles' breakthrough is patently fake history. Fake-fake-FAKE!
But still useful to teach it like that, like conventional chess 'book' openings. Descartes' "Meditations" is like Ruy Lopez. You push your weak-looking pawn to the center (cogito!), wheel your knight to defend (real distinction!), then shoot your bishop across (proofs of God). 1-2-3 meditations!
It's fake history - fake geography, too - but good practice. (And no one thinks the Sicilian defense teaches you about Sicily either, so where's the harm?) The artificiality doesn't impair the pedagogy. Students pick up use of 'Cartesian', 'Lockean', 'Humean' etc. That's going to pay dividends.
the idea that it's good practice and unimpaired pedagogy seems to depend on something strongly implied but not actually stated (edit: it is sort of stated) in the remainder of the thread, which is that "history of modern" surveys don't and aren't intended to teach the history of modern philosophy
what they do and what they're intended to do is hip students to a lingo that will be useful to them in graduate school and beyond. ("what would someone say in a Q&A?") Of course most students aren't going to go to grad school. Aren't they ill served by what probably isn't obviously a myth to them?
You can now talk to other philosophers & your pattern recognition get a big boost & we all know that you can divide through by the beetle in the box of 'Cartesian' - namely, Descartes. Descartes wasn't a Cartesian, you child, but we borrow his name to schematise simple, standard gambits. It's fine.
So live with it: the myth is a myth, but a stable solution to a disciplinary coordination problem. And that's why it has persisted, not because philosophers are dumb about it. But! It's still true we have this myth here we are calling 'history', so no non-fake history is getting slotted in there.
Comments
Those first two paragraphs…wow!