OK this is a bombastic paper by design, but if falls short on a few things, least of which is conflating "study of history" with "historiography". Worst of all

OK this is a bombastic paper by design, but if falls short on a few things, least of which is conflating "study of history" with "historiography". Worst of all, he completely misses Gadamer's comment regarding the epistemic fruitlessness of philosophizing at all (and not just of studying past philosophers), so in a sense Sauer unwittingly rehashes and expands upon only a partial aspect of that. But he does express a "popular sentiment", which students of history (and the history of philosophy) will readily discover in any sub-era of modernity (including pomo'ity), but those who turn their backs to history will think it's all new and all of our own devising: namely that "We Know Better". It's the cultural switch: before modernity we considered "the ancients" as unerring sources of truth, after modernity we started seeing through the cracks. All too quick to note how pyramids and parthenons have cracks in them after standing for millennia, but wholly unable to produce something even equally sturdy, if not better. PS: Ah, and by "modernity" I'm referring to the history of this side of the Enlightenment. E.g. I consider Casaubon's 1614 overturning of the presumed antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum as part of modernity. (But doesn't everyone?)