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If you apply that kind of skepticism consistently you'll come to the conclusion that we don't know anything much about anything. It's actually extraordinary ho
by foldr 7y ago
If you apply that kind of skepticism consistently you'll come to the conclusion that we don't know anything much about anything.
It's actually extraordinary how much we know about the distant past. For example, Julius Caesar lived over 2000 years ago, but we know beyond any reasonable doubt a great many details of his life. Take, say, the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article on Caesar. We know all of that.
- freedomben 7y agoI mostly agree, but any time I get into serious historical scholarship it's amazing how much contradictory information there is that is usually left out for the books and stuff targeted at Lay people. I'm a huge fan of Bart Ehrman for example, and of course anything around religion is going to be polarizing, but he has a long list of contemporary sources that describe the same event with blatant contradictions in them. Flash forward to the modern times and despite having powerful tools like the internet, we still suffer from fake news and honest mistakes. I think the skepticism is healthy, tho I don't take it to "we can't really know anything" (but I concede it may have seemed like I was saying that).
- foldr 7y ago>but he has a long list of contemporary sources that describe the same event with blatant contradictions in them. And yet we don't conclude from this that we can't know anything about the present. Ehrman actually defends normal historical methods against the kind of unwarranted skepticism that you were expressing.