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History & philosophy should make us feel baffled & strange

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/history-and-philo...nd-strange

EXCERPT: . . . Philosophy, Aristotle tells us in his Metaphysics, begins with wonder. History does too. It starts with obvious perplexities but also with our realisation of the strangeness of the everyday, making our head swim like Plato’s Theaetetus. History works to make sense of things via our crossings from the present to the past, and from the physical world to the spiritual world. It takes us from the specific to the universal and vice versa; from the habitual to the new; from understanding things to understanding ourselves; from one discipline to another; from exclusion to inclusion and thereby the unethical to the ethical. If you want to know where the cross-beams and limits of history’s blueprint are, look at wonder.

Yet wonder is sadly absent from much of our discussions on history and philosophy today. We use the word in conversations all the time but, somehow, the idea that we might feel like Theaetetus at times doesn’t seem very explicable or, worse, grown-up. History and philosophy don’t do wonder: that is for rockstar boy-scientists, children and sideshow alleys. In thinking these ways, I think we have lost something immeasurably more powerful than the racks of books that I still grieve.

In a way, I think we want wonder lost because it is discomforting. It gets under your skin, mocking your efforts at sense-making. When we look at the way that people have thought about wonder through time, our tidy, rational disciplinary histories unravel. New voices emerge, and we aren’t sure what to do with them. We also come face-to-face with those who appropriate the ‘look’ of history and philosophy to challenge and confuse us about what is certain and what is good, right and fair. They do so for good and for ill. And we face the dark thought that our efforts at ordering both knowledge and the world can prevent us from facing our most troubling ethical problems.

Acknowledging wonder is fraught with difficulties and can leave you riddled with doubt. Even the earliest historians and philosophers knew that. The Hellenistic historian Polybius thought he had it all sorted out when he argued that historians should make sense of things through seeing and the other senses, and that they should do so in as straight a manner as possible. No drama, no elaborations, no making things up. Wonder, he instructed, should be used by the historian to talk only about things that even the gods could not understand. He kept his wondering to natural catastrophes and – like Herodotus and Thucydides – used phrases such as ‘others say’ to describe claims to wonder that he wasn’t at all sure about. It didn’t work... (MORE - details)
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#2
Syne Offline
So, how does "begins with wonder" preclude "sense-making"? Does this presuppose that something that "begins with wonder" must always continue to be wondrous? That just doesn't track. Nor are the two mutually exclusive.
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#3
Yazata Offline
I've definitely felt a profound sense of mystery regarding philosophy. That's what originally attracted me to the subject and what continues to attract me today. The feeling that profound and even ultimate mysteries surround us at every moment, as obvious as the noses on our faces, if we only have the eyes to see.

We talk about things. But what are word meanings? How does reference link nouns and the things we use them to talk about? What is truth? How can we determine which of our beliefs are in fact knowledge? What's up with ethics and ethical judgements? Is there any objective truth to them or are they just expressions of preference? What is causation? What does causation add to mere statistical correlation? What are we asking for when we ask 'Why?' about something? What is the 'if-then' relation in logic? How do we determine the logical necessity of logical and mathematical relationships? What is the ontological status of logic and mathematics? Why do they seem so objective? How does confirmation work in science?

And on and on... Questions like these underlie and are presupposed by everything we do in life. And we don't really have satisfactory answers to any of them.

I've never really felt the same sense of profound mystery with history. History is a little different. What history offers me, particularly the history of ideas and intellectual history, is a glimpse into profoundly different ways of looking at things. In ancient Greece and Rome, they thought about the world very differently than we do. Yet there's enough continuity and similarity that we can place ourselves in their sandals, so to speak, and look at things from their perspective.

I like the history of science, since it kind of combines the historical and philosophical aspect, looking at how people in different cultural periods (ancient Mesopotamia, Hellenistic Greece, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the 19 and 20th centuries looked at the philosophical issues raised by their own scientific practice.
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#4
C C Offline
Depending upon the era, history has varying degrees of uncertainty to it. That's the only "wonder" about it that I grok. Major events can be more certain in modern times due to the massively increased and systematic recorded documentation. But the further back one goes the blurrier it gets. Where it ratchets down from grand narratives to smaller details and specific lives it crosses borders with biography and an author's hypotheses. So lots of speculative interpretations enter the picture there.
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#5
Ben the Donkey Offline
I'm not entirely sure I agree with you there , CC, where you said "major events can be more certain in modern times".
I wonder which is worse... knowing, where the past is concerned, that there are things we don't know, and probably never will - or the relative uncertainty resulting from modern manipulation.

... you said "grok". I haven't heard that in a long time Smile
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