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yes, you make the good point. the author of the piece is a historian. he's not only bemoaning the eradication of freud, marx, and hegel from their respective di
by smalter 18y ago
yes, you make the good point. the author of the piece is a historian. he's not only bemoaning the eradication of freud, marx, and hegel from their respective disciplines, he's bemoaning the scientific-ization of those disciplines themselves, ya dig?
take economics, for example. it didn't always have such a "rigorous" mathematical foundation. and though economics has sought to be more and more scientific, it's unclear whether that's the "true" nature of the discipline of economics. in other words, the way, say, undergraduates are taught intro programming might have more to do with contemporary trends, e.g., object oriented programming, rather than other important things endemic to the discipline of computer science.
from my point of view, economics/psychology/philosophy (maybe less so) seek legitimacy in the present moment through the scientific-ization of their processes/thought. i'm with the author of this piece that history of thought, as in philosophy, is an important part of the discipline if not the discipline itself.
- menloparkbum 18y agoPurely rhetorical: why is it important that philosophy is taught as the history of thought, rather than attempting to make it more scientific? Perhaps philosophers who were important and popular 400 years ago had really bad ideas that are no longer worth thinking about. The history of mathematics is interesting, but learning how the ancient babylonians did mathematics doesn't help anyone learn category theory.
- akkartik 18y agoHistory shouldn't be a single subject in school; it should be an aspect of every subject.
- gregwebs 18y agoDoes that mean you are actually going to test on history? I was pretty mad when the physics professor actually put in a question about history on the exam. Its fine if they want to put sidebars in the textbook, but really if it is not tested it is going to have to be up to the student to take on an interest in the history and learn it.
- akkartik 18y agoAck, I'm talking about education, not literacy and certainly not about passing tests. Let's get a little bit idealistic here. If you had a child what would you want it to know by the time it left high school, and what's the best way to teach it those things? I want my child to know not just about the major theories and processes and so on, but the historical context that caused them to arise. What you think of some test is hugely about implementation details. Would you be less mad if you didn't have to deal with history as a separate subject? If the notion of tests didn't exist, and there were more positive motivations for students to study? If you already knew a more wide range of human history than most grad students today by the time you entered college, so you didn't have to study history anymore?