Results of the Qualifying Test of the 2009 FSO Examination
Posted using ShareThis
Monday, June 22, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
The Nature of Philosophy
(www.philosophy.lander.edu)
The derivation of the word "philosophy" from the Greek is suggested by the following words and word-fragments.
philo—love of, affinity for, liking of
philander—to engage in love affairs frivolously
philanthropy—love of mankind in general
philately—postage stamps hobby
phile—(as in "anglophile") one having a love for
philology—having a liking for words
sophos—wisdom
sophist—lit. one who loves knowledge
sophomore—wise and moros—foolish; i.e. one who thinks he knows many things
sophisticated—one who is knowledgeable
A suggested definition for our beginning study is as follows. Philosophy is the systematic inquiry into the principles and presuppositions of any field of study. From a pyschological point of view, philosophy is an attitude, an approach, or a calling to answer or to ask, or even to comment upon certain peculiar problems (i.e., specifically the kinds of problems usually relegated to the main branches discussed below in Section II). There is, perhaps, no one single sense of the word "philosophy." Eventually most writers abandon the attempt to define adequately philosophy and, instead, turn to the kinds of things philosophers do.
What is involved in the study of philosophy involves is described by the London Times in an article dealing with the 20th World Congress of Philosophy: "The great virtue of philosophy is that it teaches not what to think, but how to think. It is the study of meaning, of the principles underlying conduct, thought and knowledge. The skills it hones are the ability to analyse, to question orthodoxies and to express things clearly. However arcane some philosophical texts may be … the ability to formulate questions and follow arguments is the essence of education."
The Main Branches of Philosophy are divided as to the nature of the questions asked in each area. The integrity of these divisions cannot be rigidly maintained, for one area overlaps into the others.
I. Axiology - the study of value; the investigation of its nature, criteria, and metaphysical status. More often than not, the term " value theory" is used instead of "axiology" in contemporary discussions even though the former term is used with respect to economic value. We can briefly elaborate as follows.
· Nature of value: is value a fulfillment of desire, a pleasure, a preference, a behavioral disposition, or simply a human interest of some kind?
· Criteria of value: de gustibus non (est) disputandum or do objective standards apply?
· Status of value: how are values related to (scientific) facts? What ultimate worth, if any, do human values have?
Axiology is usually divided into two main parts.
1. Ethics: the study of values in human behavior or the study of moral problems: e.g., (1) the rightness and wrongness of actions, (2) the kinds of things which are good or desirable, and (3) whether actions are blameworthy or praiseworthy. Consider this example analyzed by J. O. Urmson in his well-known essay, "Saints and Heroes":
"We may imagine a squad of soldiers to be practicing the throwing of live hand grenades; a grenade slips from the hand of one of them and rolls on the ground near the squad; one of them sacrifices his life by throwing himself on the grenade and protecting his comrades with his own body. It is quite unreasonable to suppose that such a man must be impelled by the sort of emotion that he might be impelled by if his best friend were in the squad."
Did the soldier who threw himself on the grenade do the right thing? If he did not cover the grenade, probably several soldiers would be killed. His action undoubtedly saved lives; certainly, an action which saves lives is a morally correct action. One might even be inclined to conclude that saving lives is a duty. But if this were so, wouldn't each of the soldiers have the moral obligation or duty to save his comrades?
2. Æsthetics: the study of value in the arts or the inquiry into feelings, judgments, or standards of beauty and related concepts. Philosophy of art is concerned with judgments of sense, taste, and emotion.
· E.g., Is art an intellectual or representational activity? What would the realistic representations in pop art represent? Does art represent sensible objects or ideal objects?
· Is artistic value objective? Is it merely coincidental that many forms in architecture and painting seem to illustrate mathematical principles? Are there standards of taste?
· Is there a clear distinction between art and reality?
II. Epistemology: the study of knowledge. In particular, epistemology is the study of the nature, scope, and limits of human knowledge. Epistemology investigates the origin, structure, methods, and integrity of knowledge. Consider the degree of truth of the statement, "The earth is round." Does its truth depend upon the context in which the statement is uttered? For example, this statement can be successively more accurately translated as …
· "The earth is spherical"
· "The earth is an oblate spheroid" (i.e., flattened at the poles).
But what about the Himalayas and the Marianias Trench? Even if we surveyed exactly the shape of the earth, our process of surveying would alter the surface by the footprints left, albeit marginally. (Note here as well the implications for skepticism and relativism: simply because we cannot describe the exact shape of the earth, the conclusion does not logically follow that the earth does not have a shape.)
Furthermore, consider two well-known problems in epistemology: Russell's Five-Minute-World Hypothesis: Suppose the earth were created five minutes ago, complete with memory images, history books, records, etc., how could we ever know of it? As Russell wrote in The Analysis of Mind, "There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago."
Suppose everything in the universe (including spatial relations) were to expand uniformly a thousand times larger. How could we ever know it? A moment's thought reveals that the mass of objects increases by the cube whereas the distance among them increases linearly. Hence, if such an expansion were possible, changes in the measurement of gravity and the speed of light would be evident, if, indeed, life would be possible. Russell's Five-Minute-World Hypothesis is a philosophical problem; the universe's expanding is a scientific problem since the latter problem can, in fact, be answered by principles of elementary physics.
III. Ontology or Metaphysics: the study of what is really real. Metaphysics deals with the so-called first principles of the natural order and "the ultimate generalizations available to the human intellect." Specifically, ontology seeks to establish the relationships between the categories of the types of existent things. What kinds of things exist? Do only particular things exist or do general things also exist? How is existence possible? Questions as to identity and change of objects—are you the same person you were yesterday? How do ideas exist if they have no size, shape, or color. (My idea of the Empire State Building is quite as "small" or as "large" as my idea of a book. I.e., An idea is not extended in space.) What is space? What is time? E.g., the truths of mathematics: in what manner do geometric figures exist? Are points, lines, or planes real or not? Of what are they made? What is spirit? or soul? or matter? spac? Are they made up of the same sort of "stuff"? When, if ever, are events necessary? Under what conditions are they possible?
Further Reading:
The Nature of Philosophical Inquiry. A chapter from Reading for Philosophical Inquiry, an online etext on this site, summarizing the main divisions of philosophy as well as illustating some introductory philosophical problems.
Omphalos (theology). Wikipedia entry for several variations of the omphalos hypothesis—the philosophical problem of accounting for present state of the universe by puported evidence drawn from the past.
Philosophy. Useful encyclopedia entry from the authoritative 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica outlining the branches of philosophy (despite a few scanning errors).
What is Philosophy Anyway? Summary article from M. Russo and G. Fair's Molloy College site discussing the definition and main branches of philosophy.
“Philosophy … has no other subject matter than the nature of the real world, as that world lies around us in everyday life, and lies open to observers on every side. But if this is so, it may be asked what function can remain for philosophy when every portion of the field is already lotted out and enclosed by specialists? Philosophy claims to be the science of the whole; but, if we get the knowledge of the parts from the different sciences, what is there left for philosophy to tell us? To this it is sufficient to answer generally that the synthesis of the parts is something more than that detailed knowledge of the parts in separation which is gained by the man of science. It is with the ultimate synthesis that philosophy concerns itself; it has to show that the subject-matter which we are all dealing with in detail really is a whole, consisting of articulated members.” - Philosophy, Encylopedia Britannica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911) Vol. 21.
Characteristics of a Philosophical Problem
In general, philosophy questions often are a series of "why-questions," whereas science is often said to ask "how-questions." E.g., asking "Why did you come to class today?" is the beginning of a series of why-questions which ultimately lead to the answer of the principles or presuppositions by which you lead your life.I.e., Answer: "To pass the course."Question: "Why do you want to pass the course?"Answer: "To graduate from college."Question: "Why do you want to graduate?"Answer: "To get a good job."Question: "Why do you want a good job?"Answer: "To make lots of money."Question: "Why do you want to make money?"Answer: "To be happy."Hence, one comes to class in order to increase the chances for happiness.
Avrum Stroll and Richard H. Popkin, in their highly readable book, Introduction to Philosophy, isolate seven characteristics of a philosophical problem. These characteristics serve as a good introduction to mark some of the perplexing kinds of problems which can arise in philosophy.
Philosophical Thought-Experiments from Metaphysics and Epistemology
Characteristics
Typical Examples
1. A reflection about the world and the things in it.
If I take a book off my hand, what's left on my hand? If I take away the air, then what's left? If I take away the space? Does everything exist in nothing?
2. A conceptual rather than a practical activity.
According to Newton's gravitation theory, as the ballerina on a New York stage moves, my balance is affected.
3. The use of reason and argumentation to establish a point.
Does a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it, make a sound? To solve, we distinguish two senses of "sound": (1) hearing—a phenomenological perception and (2) vibration—a longitudinal wave in matter.
4. An explanation of the puzzling features of things.
Does a mirror reverse left and right? If I move my right hand, the image's left hand moves. But why then doesn't the mirror reverse up and down? Why aren't the feet in the mirror image at the top of the mirror?
5. Digging beyond the obvious.
What is a fact? In science, facts are collected. Is a book a fact? Is it a big or little fact? Is it a brown fact? If facts don't have size, shape, and color, then in what manner do they exist in the world?
6. The search for principles which underlie phenomena.
Is a geranium one flower or is it a combination of many small flowers bunched together? If I turn on a computer, am I doing one action or am I doing many different actions?
7. Theory building from these principles.
Is nature discrete or continuous? E.g., Zeno's paradoxes of motion. If you are to leave the classroom today, isn't it true that you will have to walk at least half-way to the door? And then when you get half-way, you will have to at least walk another half? How many "halves" are there? How will you ever get out?
In practice, philosophy is an attitude, an approach, or even a calling to answer, to ask, or to comment upon certain peculiar kinds of questions. As we saw previously, the problems are often relegated to the subdivisions of philosophy: Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Axiology (Ethics and Æsthetics).
Attitude—a curiosity arising from questions such as the following: Under the assumption that time is a dimension just like any other, the case of the problem of the surprise examination can arise: Suppose students obtain the promise from their teacher that a surprise quiz scheduled be given next week will not be given, if the students demonstrate how they can know, in advance, the day the teacher will give the exam. Thus, the students can argue as follows: Assuming the class meets only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, the students know the surprise exam cannot be given on Friday because everyone would know Thursday night that the following day is the only period left in which to give the exam. One would think that the teacher could give the exam Wednesday, but since Friday has been eliminated as a possibility, on Tuesday night, the students would know that the only period left in the week would be Wednesday (since Friday has already been eliminated; hence, the exam could not be given Wednesday either. Monday, then, is the only possible period left to offer the exam. But, of course, the teacher could not give the exam Monday because the students would expect the exam that day. Consequently, the teacher cannot give a surprise examination next week.
In his Nobel Prize Lecture, Richard Feynman explained that from the perspective of quantum electrodynamics, if an electron is seen as going forward in time, a positron is the same particle moving backwards in time. Is time- reversal really possible? Is a positron, or even the earlier tachyon, discussed above, associated with backward causation a possible event? Consider this paradoxical result. Suppose a "positron gun" or a "tachyon gun" would fire a particle going backward in time—it could "trigger" an off-switch to turn off the gun before it could be fired. This example is, of course, a thought-experiment. As Feynman noted in his Lectures on Physics, "Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.
Approach—to devise a methodology to answer such puzzles. Very often, all that is needed is to invoke old maxim, "When there is a difficulty, make a distinction." E.g., for the problem of the sound of a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear, all we need do is distinguish two different senses of "sound." If by "sound" is meant a "phenomenological perception by a subject," then no sound ("hearing") would occur. If by "sound" is meant "a longitudinal wave in matter," then a sound is discoverable.
Calling— if a person has had experiences of curiosity, discovery, and invention at an early age, these experiences could leave an imprint on mind and character to last a lifetime.
Further Reading:
Backward Causation. Jan Fey's entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy examines several paradoxes based on the notion where an effect temporally, but not causally, precedes its cause.
Paradox. An extensive reference list of paradoxes is summarized by topic in mathematics, logic, practice, philosophy, psychology, physics and economics with links to more extensive discussion. Unexpected Hanging Paradox. Eric W. Weisstein provides another version of the Surprise Examination Paradox with a list of further references.
The derivation of the word "philosophy" from the Greek is suggested by the following words and word-fragments.
philo—love of, affinity for, liking of
philander—to engage in love affairs frivolously
philanthropy—love of mankind in general
philately—postage stamps hobby
phile—(as in "anglophile") one having a love for
philology—having a liking for words
sophos—wisdom
sophist—lit. one who loves knowledge
sophomore—wise and moros—foolish; i.e. one who thinks he knows many things
sophisticated—one who is knowledgeable
A suggested definition for our beginning study is as follows. Philosophy is the systematic inquiry into the principles and presuppositions of any field of study. From a pyschological point of view, philosophy is an attitude, an approach, or a calling to answer or to ask, or even to comment upon certain peculiar problems (i.e., specifically the kinds of problems usually relegated to the main branches discussed below in Section II). There is, perhaps, no one single sense of the word "philosophy." Eventually most writers abandon the attempt to define adequately philosophy and, instead, turn to the kinds of things philosophers do.
What is involved in the study of philosophy involves is described by the London Times in an article dealing with the 20th World Congress of Philosophy: "The great virtue of philosophy is that it teaches not what to think, but how to think. It is the study of meaning, of the principles underlying conduct, thought and knowledge. The skills it hones are the ability to analyse, to question orthodoxies and to express things clearly. However arcane some philosophical texts may be … the ability to formulate questions and follow arguments is the essence of education."
The Main Branches of Philosophy are divided as to the nature of the questions asked in each area. The integrity of these divisions cannot be rigidly maintained, for one area overlaps into the others.
I. Axiology - the study of value; the investigation of its nature, criteria, and metaphysical status. More often than not, the term " value theory" is used instead of "axiology" in contemporary discussions even though the former term is used with respect to economic value. We can briefly elaborate as follows.
· Nature of value: is value a fulfillment of desire, a pleasure, a preference, a behavioral disposition, or simply a human interest of some kind?
· Criteria of value: de gustibus non (est) disputandum or do objective standards apply?
· Status of value: how are values related to (scientific) facts? What ultimate worth, if any, do human values have?
Axiology is usually divided into two main parts.
1. Ethics: the study of values in human behavior or the study of moral problems: e.g., (1) the rightness and wrongness of actions, (2) the kinds of things which are good or desirable, and (3) whether actions are blameworthy or praiseworthy. Consider this example analyzed by J. O. Urmson in his well-known essay, "Saints and Heroes":
"We may imagine a squad of soldiers to be practicing the throwing of live hand grenades; a grenade slips from the hand of one of them and rolls on the ground near the squad; one of them sacrifices his life by throwing himself on the grenade and protecting his comrades with his own body. It is quite unreasonable to suppose that such a man must be impelled by the sort of emotion that he might be impelled by if his best friend were in the squad."
Did the soldier who threw himself on the grenade do the right thing? If he did not cover the grenade, probably several soldiers would be killed. His action undoubtedly saved lives; certainly, an action which saves lives is a morally correct action. One might even be inclined to conclude that saving lives is a duty. But if this were so, wouldn't each of the soldiers have the moral obligation or duty to save his comrades?
2. Æsthetics: the study of value in the arts or the inquiry into feelings, judgments, or standards of beauty and related concepts. Philosophy of art is concerned with judgments of sense, taste, and emotion.
· E.g., Is art an intellectual or representational activity? What would the realistic representations in pop art represent? Does art represent sensible objects or ideal objects?
· Is artistic value objective? Is it merely coincidental that many forms in architecture and painting seem to illustrate mathematical principles? Are there standards of taste?
· Is there a clear distinction between art and reality?
II. Epistemology: the study of knowledge. In particular, epistemology is the study of the nature, scope, and limits of human knowledge. Epistemology investigates the origin, structure, methods, and integrity of knowledge. Consider the degree of truth of the statement, "The earth is round." Does its truth depend upon the context in which the statement is uttered? For example, this statement can be successively more accurately translated as …
· "The earth is spherical"
· "The earth is an oblate spheroid" (i.e., flattened at the poles).
But what about the Himalayas and the Marianias Trench? Even if we surveyed exactly the shape of the earth, our process of surveying would alter the surface by the footprints left, albeit marginally. (Note here as well the implications for skepticism and relativism: simply because we cannot describe the exact shape of the earth, the conclusion does not logically follow that the earth does not have a shape.)
Furthermore, consider two well-known problems in epistemology: Russell's Five-Minute-World Hypothesis: Suppose the earth were created five minutes ago, complete with memory images, history books, records, etc., how could we ever know of it? As Russell wrote in The Analysis of Mind, "There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past. There is no logically necessary connection between events at different times; therefore nothing that is happening now or will happen in the future can disprove the hypothesis that the world began five minutes ago."
Suppose everything in the universe (including spatial relations) were to expand uniformly a thousand times larger. How could we ever know it? A moment's thought reveals that the mass of objects increases by the cube whereas the distance among them increases linearly. Hence, if such an expansion were possible, changes in the measurement of gravity and the speed of light would be evident, if, indeed, life would be possible. Russell's Five-Minute-World Hypothesis is a philosophical problem; the universe's expanding is a scientific problem since the latter problem can, in fact, be answered by principles of elementary physics.
III. Ontology or Metaphysics: the study of what is really real. Metaphysics deals with the so-called first principles of the natural order and "the ultimate generalizations available to the human intellect." Specifically, ontology seeks to establish the relationships between the categories of the types of existent things. What kinds of things exist? Do only particular things exist or do general things also exist? How is existence possible? Questions as to identity and change of objects—are you the same person you were yesterday? How do ideas exist if they have no size, shape, or color. (My idea of the Empire State Building is quite as "small" or as "large" as my idea of a book. I.e., An idea is not extended in space.) What is space? What is time? E.g., the truths of mathematics: in what manner do geometric figures exist? Are points, lines, or planes real or not? Of what are they made? What is spirit? or soul? or matter? spac? Are they made up of the same sort of "stuff"? When, if ever, are events necessary? Under what conditions are they possible?
Further Reading:
The Nature of Philosophical Inquiry. A chapter from Reading for Philosophical Inquiry, an online etext on this site, summarizing the main divisions of philosophy as well as illustating some introductory philosophical problems.
Omphalos (theology). Wikipedia entry for several variations of the omphalos hypothesis—the philosophical problem of accounting for present state of the universe by puported evidence drawn from the past.
Philosophy. Useful encyclopedia entry from the authoritative 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica outlining the branches of philosophy (despite a few scanning errors).
What is Philosophy Anyway? Summary article from M. Russo and G. Fair's Molloy College site discussing the definition and main branches of philosophy.
“Philosophy … has no other subject matter than the nature of the real world, as that world lies around us in everyday life, and lies open to observers on every side. But if this is so, it may be asked what function can remain for philosophy when every portion of the field is already lotted out and enclosed by specialists? Philosophy claims to be the science of the whole; but, if we get the knowledge of the parts from the different sciences, what is there left for philosophy to tell us? To this it is sufficient to answer generally that the synthesis of the parts is something more than that detailed knowledge of the parts in separation which is gained by the man of science. It is with the ultimate synthesis that philosophy concerns itself; it has to show that the subject-matter which we are all dealing with in detail really is a whole, consisting of articulated members.” - Philosophy, Encylopedia Britannica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911) Vol. 21.
Characteristics of a Philosophical Problem
In general, philosophy questions often are a series of "why-questions," whereas science is often said to ask "how-questions." E.g., asking "Why did you come to class today?" is the beginning of a series of why-questions which ultimately lead to the answer of the principles or presuppositions by which you lead your life.I.e., Answer: "To pass the course."Question: "Why do you want to pass the course?"Answer: "To graduate from college."Question: "Why do you want to graduate?"Answer: "To get a good job."Question: "Why do you want a good job?"Answer: "To make lots of money."Question: "Why do you want to make money?"Answer: "To be happy."Hence, one comes to class in order to increase the chances for happiness.
Avrum Stroll and Richard H. Popkin, in their highly readable book, Introduction to Philosophy, isolate seven characteristics of a philosophical problem. These characteristics serve as a good introduction to mark some of the perplexing kinds of problems which can arise in philosophy.
Philosophical Thought-Experiments from Metaphysics and Epistemology
Characteristics
Typical Examples
1. A reflection about the world and the things in it.
If I take a book off my hand, what's left on my hand? If I take away the air, then what's left? If I take away the space? Does everything exist in nothing?
2. A conceptual rather than a practical activity.
According to Newton's gravitation theory, as the ballerina on a New York stage moves, my balance is affected.
3. The use of reason and argumentation to establish a point.
Does a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it, make a sound? To solve, we distinguish two senses of "sound": (1) hearing—a phenomenological perception and (2) vibration—a longitudinal wave in matter.
4. An explanation of the puzzling features of things.
Does a mirror reverse left and right? If I move my right hand, the image's left hand moves. But why then doesn't the mirror reverse up and down? Why aren't the feet in the mirror image at the top of the mirror?
5. Digging beyond the obvious.
What is a fact? In science, facts are collected. Is a book a fact? Is it a big or little fact? Is it a brown fact? If facts don't have size, shape, and color, then in what manner do they exist in the world?
6. The search for principles which underlie phenomena.
Is a geranium one flower or is it a combination of many small flowers bunched together? If I turn on a computer, am I doing one action or am I doing many different actions?
7. Theory building from these principles.
Is nature discrete or continuous? E.g., Zeno's paradoxes of motion. If you are to leave the classroom today, isn't it true that you will have to walk at least half-way to the door? And then when you get half-way, you will have to at least walk another half? How many "halves" are there? How will you ever get out?
In practice, philosophy is an attitude, an approach, or even a calling to answer, to ask, or to comment upon certain peculiar kinds of questions. As we saw previously, the problems are often relegated to the subdivisions of philosophy: Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Axiology (Ethics and Æsthetics).
Attitude—a curiosity arising from questions such as the following: Under the assumption that time is a dimension just like any other, the case of the problem of the surprise examination can arise: Suppose students obtain the promise from their teacher that a surprise quiz scheduled be given next week will not be given, if the students demonstrate how they can know, in advance, the day the teacher will give the exam. Thus, the students can argue as follows: Assuming the class meets only on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, the students know the surprise exam cannot be given on Friday because everyone would know Thursday night that the following day is the only period left in which to give the exam. One would think that the teacher could give the exam Wednesday, but since Friday has been eliminated as a possibility, on Tuesday night, the students would know that the only period left in the week would be Wednesday (since Friday has already been eliminated; hence, the exam could not be given Wednesday either. Monday, then, is the only possible period left to offer the exam. But, of course, the teacher could not give the exam Monday because the students would expect the exam that day. Consequently, the teacher cannot give a surprise examination next week.
In his Nobel Prize Lecture, Richard Feynman explained that from the perspective of quantum electrodynamics, if an electron is seen as going forward in time, a positron is the same particle moving backwards in time. Is time- reversal really possible? Is a positron, or even the earlier tachyon, discussed above, associated with backward causation a possible event? Consider this paradoxical result. Suppose a "positron gun" or a "tachyon gun" would fire a particle going backward in time—it could "trigger" an off-switch to turn off the gun before it could be fired. This example is, of course, a thought-experiment. As Feynman noted in his Lectures on Physics, "Philosophers say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive, and probably wrong.
Approach—to devise a methodology to answer such puzzles. Very often, all that is needed is to invoke old maxim, "When there is a difficulty, make a distinction." E.g., for the problem of the sound of a tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear, all we need do is distinguish two different senses of "sound." If by "sound" is meant a "phenomenological perception by a subject," then no sound ("hearing") would occur. If by "sound" is meant "a longitudinal wave in matter," then a sound is discoverable.
Calling— if a person has had experiences of curiosity, discovery, and invention at an early age, these experiences could leave an imprint on mind and character to last a lifetime.
Further Reading:
Backward Causation. Jan Fey's entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy examines several paradoxes based on the notion where an effect temporally, but not causally, precedes its cause.
Paradox. An extensive reference list of paradoxes is summarized by topic in mathematics, logic, practice, philosophy, psychology, physics and economics with links to more extensive discussion. Unexpected Hanging Paradox. Eric W. Weisstein provides another version of the Surprise Examination Paradox with a list of further references.
A Definition of Philosophy Based on Socrates' Behavior in the Plato Dialogues
Sarah Maccarelli
January 31, 2006
(www.associatedcontent.com)
My younger sister, Jennifer, just asked me what I was doing. I answered that I was writing an essay on Philosophy. She replied “Philosophy of what?” That is the perfect example of how many people think of philosophy, only as the core of something else. For instance, “The Philosophy of Dance”. In that phrase, Philosophy would mean “Essence”. But what is philosophy itself? Since I have only just begun to study philosophy, I don’t claim to know what it is, but I do think that because the more one studies philosophy, the more questions it raises, philosophy is a very elusive thing which might even be improbable, if not entirely impossible, to define.
To define something is to pin it down, and it must be definite, a certainty. Can one ever really be certain of what philosophy is? I think philosophy is a lot like a lizard that loses its tail as soon as you catch it, and it leaves you chasing after it again. With that being said, I feel one can only come very close to the essence of philosophy, and only by asking many questions.
In the dialogue titled “Euthyphro”, Socrates asks Euthyphro about the nature of piety and impiety. Euthyphro responds by giving examples of pious actions. Socrates is not satisfied with this answer, and continues to ask questions because he wants to know the nature of piety itself “what is characteristic of piety which makes all pious actions pious and all impious actions impious? (Arthur 5).” Like piety, Philosophy is not easy to define because one can describe what philosophers do, but not exactly what Philosophy itself is.
The word Philosophy is Greek for “love/pursuit of knowledge”, but for Socrates philosophy is so much more than that. Socrates does not merely love knowledge. For Socrates knowledge is a way of life, in fact, the only way. When faced with the opportunity to escape death on the condition that Socrates quit “philosophizing”, Socrates would rather die. Socrates also mentions that people should not fear death since they don’t know what it will be like. This shows that Socrates mind is always open to new possibilities. In Socrates time, many people simply believed what they were told, but Socrates did not just accept any answer.
Socrates spent most of his life as a drifter who was passionate about asking people questions. Socrates believes that was his purpose in life, and he says “I must set the god’s command above everything. So I had to go to every man who seemed to possess any knowledge, and investigate the meaning of the oracle (Arthur 14).” And so, I believe that based on what Socrates does, philosophy is asking questions, and never taking anything for granted. Socrates never just assumes anything, he asks as many people as he can in order to be absolutely certain. In order to really begin to know and understand something, one must ask many questions about it. It is only through this process of questioning that we begin to learn.
By asking questions, one can gain possible answers and learn more about the topic s/he is trying to learn about. I say “possible answers” because, like Socrates, the person who is asking the questions should never assume that the answer they receive is the correct one either. There are many (maybe even an infinite amount) of answers to one question, especially when that question is about such an abstract concept.
In applying this concept of philosophy to everyday life, I might ask “Is the ocean blue?” One can look into an ocean and see that it LOOKS blue, but as Socrates implies, Appearance and Reality do not always coincide. In order to test my hypothesis, I can gather samples of ocean water, read about the ocean, and ask as many people as possible if the ocean is blue. However, there are many oceans, and therefore just as many answers to my question. The answers I receive will be as varied as the people I ask. People in Hawaii would probably agree that the ocean is blue, but people in New Jersey might say the ocean is brown! Some scientists might say that the ocean is colorless, and what one might perceive as blue is actually just the reflection of the sky. (But is the sky really blue?). Until I examine all of these possible answers, I can never really be absolutely certain if the ocean is blue or not.
My example above concerned the color of the ocean, but it also raises questions about the color of the sky. I believe that a good question should elicit further questioning, according to Socrates’ actions. If Socrates were alive today (one can’t be too sure if his immortal soul is still around or not) he might even ask “but is the ocean really there at all?” This just goes to show that Socrates never just assumes anything. Yes, one can see, feel, and experience the ocean with all the other senses, but is it real or just an illusion? This might even become an endless cycle of questions, but the more I answer, the closer I come to knowing my subject. To conclude, based on Socrates’ actions, I think that philosophy is the science of asking many questions, which in turn raises more questions which must be answered in order to know or understand something.
January 31, 2006
(www.associatedcontent.com)
My younger sister, Jennifer, just asked me what I was doing. I answered that I was writing an essay on Philosophy. She replied “Philosophy of what?” That is the perfect example of how many people think of philosophy, only as the core of something else. For instance, “The Philosophy of Dance”. In that phrase, Philosophy would mean “Essence”. But what is philosophy itself? Since I have only just begun to study philosophy, I don’t claim to know what it is, but I do think that because the more one studies philosophy, the more questions it raises, philosophy is a very elusive thing which might even be improbable, if not entirely impossible, to define.
To define something is to pin it down, and it must be definite, a certainty. Can one ever really be certain of what philosophy is? I think philosophy is a lot like a lizard that loses its tail as soon as you catch it, and it leaves you chasing after it again. With that being said, I feel one can only come very close to the essence of philosophy, and only by asking many questions.
In the dialogue titled “Euthyphro”, Socrates asks Euthyphro about the nature of piety and impiety. Euthyphro responds by giving examples of pious actions. Socrates is not satisfied with this answer, and continues to ask questions because he wants to know the nature of piety itself “what is characteristic of piety which makes all pious actions pious and all impious actions impious? (Arthur 5).” Like piety, Philosophy is not easy to define because one can describe what philosophers do, but not exactly what Philosophy itself is.
The word Philosophy is Greek for “love/pursuit of knowledge”, but for Socrates philosophy is so much more than that. Socrates does not merely love knowledge. For Socrates knowledge is a way of life, in fact, the only way. When faced with the opportunity to escape death on the condition that Socrates quit “philosophizing”, Socrates would rather die. Socrates also mentions that people should not fear death since they don’t know what it will be like. This shows that Socrates mind is always open to new possibilities. In Socrates time, many people simply believed what they were told, but Socrates did not just accept any answer.
Socrates spent most of his life as a drifter who was passionate about asking people questions. Socrates believes that was his purpose in life, and he says “I must set the god’s command above everything. So I had to go to every man who seemed to possess any knowledge, and investigate the meaning of the oracle (Arthur 14).” And so, I believe that based on what Socrates does, philosophy is asking questions, and never taking anything for granted. Socrates never just assumes anything, he asks as many people as he can in order to be absolutely certain. In order to really begin to know and understand something, one must ask many questions about it. It is only through this process of questioning that we begin to learn.
By asking questions, one can gain possible answers and learn more about the topic s/he is trying to learn about. I say “possible answers” because, like Socrates, the person who is asking the questions should never assume that the answer they receive is the correct one either. There are many (maybe even an infinite amount) of answers to one question, especially when that question is about such an abstract concept.
In applying this concept of philosophy to everyday life, I might ask “Is the ocean blue?” One can look into an ocean and see that it LOOKS blue, but as Socrates implies, Appearance and Reality do not always coincide. In order to test my hypothesis, I can gather samples of ocean water, read about the ocean, and ask as many people as possible if the ocean is blue. However, there are many oceans, and therefore just as many answers to my question. The answers I receive will be as varied as the people I ask. People in Hawaii would probably agree that the ocean is blue, but people in New Jersey might say the ocean is brown! Some scientists might say that the ocean is colorless, and what one might perceive as blue is actually just the reflection of the sky. (But is the sky really blue?). Until I examine all of these possible answers, I can never really be absolutely certain if the ocean is blue or not.
My example above concerned the color of the ocean, but it also raises questions about the color of the sky. I believe that a good question should elicit further questioning, according to Socrates’ actions. If Socrates were alive today (one can’t be too sure if his immortal soul is still around or not) he might even ask “but is the ocean really there at all?” This just goes to show that Socrates never just assumes anything. Yes, one can see, feel, and experience the ocean with all the other senses, but is it real or just an illusion? This might even become an endless cycle of questions, but the more I answer, the closer I come to knowing my subject. To conclude, based on Socrates’ actions, I think that philosophy is the science of asking many questions, which in turn raises more questions which must be answered in order to know or understand something.
A Definition of Philosophy Based on Socrates' Behavior in the Plato Dialogues
Sarah Maccarelli
January 31, 2006
(www.associatedcontent.com)
My younger sister, Jennifer, just asked me what I was doing. I answered that I was writing an essay on Philosophy. She replied “Philosophy of what?” That is the perfect example of how many people think of philosophy, only as the core of something else. For instance, “The Philosophy of Dance”. In that phrase, Philosophy would mean “Essence”. But what is philosophy itself? Since I have only just begun to study philosophy, I don’t claim to know what it is, but I do think that because the more one studies philosophy, the more questions it raises, philosophy is a very elusive thing which might even be improbable, if not entirely impossible, to define.
To define something is to pin it down, and it must be definite, a certainty. Can one ever really be certain of what philosophy is? I think philosophy is a lot like a lizard that loses its tail as soon as you catch it, and it leaves you chasing after it again. With that being said, I feel one can only come very close to the essence of philosophy, and only by asking many questions.
In the dialogue titled “Euthyphro”, Socrates asks Euthyphro about the nature of piety and impiety. Euthyphro responds by giving examples of pious actions. Socrates is not satisfied with this answer, and continues to ask questions because he wants to know the nature of piety itself “what is characteristic of piety which makes all pious actions pious and all impious actions impious? (Arthur 5).” Like piety, Philosophy is not easy to define because one can describe what philosophers do, but not exactly what Philosophy itself is.
The word Philosophy is Greek for “love/pursuit of knowledge”, but for Socrates philosophy is so much more than that. Socrates does not merely love knowledge. For Socrates knowledge is a way of life, in fact, the only way. When faced with the opportunity to escape death on the condition that Socrates quit “philosophizing”, Socrates would rather die. Socrates also mentions that people should not fear death since they don’t know what it will be like. This shows that Socrates mind is always open to new possibilities. In Socrates time, many people simply believed what they were told, but Socrates did not just accept any answer.
Socrates spent most of his life as a drifter who was passionate about asking people questions. Socrates believes that was his purpose in life, and he says “I must set the god’s command above everything. So I had to go to every man who seemed to possess any knowledge, and investigate the meaning of the oracle (Arthur 14).” And so, I believe that based on what Socrates does, philosophy is asking questions, and never taking anything for granted. Socrates never just assumes anything, he asks as many people as he can in order to be absolutely certain. In order to really begin to know and understand something, one must ask many questions about it. It is only through this process of questioning that we begin to learn.
By asking questions, one can gain possible answers and learn more about the topic s/he is trying to learn about. I say “possible answers” because, like Socrates, the person who is asking the questions should never assume that the answer they receive is the correct one either. There are many (maybe even an infinite amount) of answers to one question, especially when that question is about such an abstract concept.
In applying this concept of philosophy to everyday life, I might ask “Is the ocean blue?” One can look into an ocean and see that it LOOKS blue, but as Socrates implies, Appearance and Reality do not always coincide. In order to test my hypothesis, I can gather samples of ocean water, read about the ocean, and ask as many people as possible if the ocean is blue. However, there are many oceans, and therefore just as many answers to my question. The answers I receive will be as varied as the people I ask. People in Hawaii would probably agree that the ocean is blue, but people in New Jersey might say the ocean is brown! Some scientists might say that the ocean is colorless, and what one might perceive as blue is actually just the reflection of the sky. (But is the sky really blue?). Until I examine all of these possible answers, I can never really be absolutely certain if the ocean is blue or not.
My example above concerned the color of the ocean, but it also raises questions about the color of the sky. I believe that a good question should elicit further questioning, according to Socrates’ actions. If Socrates were alive today (one can’t be too sure if his immortal soul is still around or not) he might even ask “but is the ocean really there at all?” This just goes to show that Socrates never just assumes anything. Yes, one can see, feel, and experience the ocean with all the other senses, but is it real or just an illusion? This might even become an endless cycle of questions, but the more I answer, the closer I come to knowing my subject. To conclude, based on Socrates’ actions, I think that philosophy is the science of asking many questions, which in turn raises more questions which must be answered in order to know or understand something.
January 31, 2006
(www.associatedcontent.com)
My younger sister, Jennifer, just asked me what I was doing. I answered that I was writing an essay on Philosophy. She replied “Philosophy of what?” That is the perfect example of how many people think of philosophy, only as the core of something else. For instance, “The Philosophy of Dance”. In that phrase, Philosophy would mean “Essence”. But what is philosophy itself? Since I have only just begun to study philosophy, I don’t claim to know what it is, but I do think that because the more one studies philosophy, the more questions it raises, philosophy is a very elusive thing which might even be improbable, if not entirely impossible, to define.
To define something is to pin it down, and it must be definite, a certainty. Can one ever really be certain of what philosophy is? I think philosophy is a lot like a lizard that loses its tail as soon as you catch it, and it leaves you chasing after it again. With that being said, I feel one can only come very close to the essence of philosophy, and only by asking many questions.
In the dialogue titled “Euthyphro”, Socrates asks Euthyphro about the nature of piety and impiety. Euthyphro responds by giving examples of pious actions. Socrates is not satisfied with this answer, and continues to ask questions because he wants to know the nature of piety itself “what is characteristic of piety which makes all pious actions pious and all impious actions impious? (Arthur 5).” Like piety, Philosophy is not easy to define because one can describe what philosophers do, but not exactly what Philosophy itself is.
The word Philosophy is Greek for “love/pursuit of knowledge”, but for Socrates philosophy is so much more than that. Socrates does not merely love knowledge. For Socrates knowledge is a way of life, in fact, the only way. When faced with the opportunity to escape death on the condition that Socrates quit “philosophizing”, Socrates would rather die. Socrates also mentions that people should not fear death since they don’t know what it will be like. This shows that Socrates mind is always open to new possibilities. In Socrates time, many people simply believed what they were told, but Socrates did not just accept any answer.
Socrates spent most of his life as a drifter who was passionate about asking people questions. Socrates believes that was his purpose in life, and he says “I must set the god’s command above everything. So I had to go to every man who seemed to possess any knowledge, and investigate the meaning of the oracle (Arthur 14).” And so, I believe that based on what Socrates does, philosophy is asking questions, and never taking anything for granted. Socrates never just assumes anything, he asks as many people as he can in order to be absolutely certain. In order to really begin to know and understand something, one must ask many questions about it. It is only through this process of questioning that we begin to learn.
By asking questions, one can gain possible answers and learn more about the topic s/he is trying to learn about. I say “possible answers” because, like Socrates, the person who is asking the questions should never assume that the answer they receive is the correct one either. There are many (maybe even an infinite amount) of answers to one question, especially when that question is about such an abstract concept.
In applying this concept of philosophy to everyday life, I might ask “Is the ocean blue?” One can look into an ocean and see that it LOOKS blue, but as Socrates implies, Appearance and Reality do not always coincide. In order to test my hypothesis, I can gather samples of ocean water, read about the ocean, and ask as many people as possible if the ocean is blue. However, there are many oceans, and therefore just as many answers to my question. The answers I receive will be as varied as the people I ask. People in Hawaii would probably agree that the ocean is blue, but people in New Jersey might say the ocean is brown! Some scientists might say that the ocean is colorless, and what one might perceive as blue is actually just the reflection of the sky. (But is the sky really blue?). Until I examine all of these possible answers, I can never really be absolutely certain if the ocean is blue or not.
My example above concerned the color of the ocean, but it also raises questions about the color of the sky. I believe that a good question should elicit further questioning, according to Socrates’ actions. If Socrates were alive today (one can’t be too sure if his immortal soul is still around or not) he might even ask “but is the ocean really there at all?” This just goes to show that Socrates never just assumes anything. Yes, one can see, feel, and experience the ocean with all the other senses, but is it real or just an illusion? This might even become an endless cycle of questions, but the more I answer, the closer I come to knowing my subject. To conclude, based on Socrates’ actions, I think that philosophy is the science of asking many questions, which in turn raises more questions which must be answered in order to know or understand something.
Definitions and Branches of Philosophy
(www.the-thinking-man.com)
Definition of Philosophy
The definition of philosophy - judging, at least, from very nearly every philosophy dictionary on the planet - has confounded philosophers for many centuries, the concept being too large, it is sometimes said, to properly convey in a concise fashion. Yet, at the same time, in all branches of philosophy, minutia is cataloged to complete weariness.
This annoying problem is really nothing more than skepticism and its little bitch postmodernism running amok again. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, for instance, a thoroughly postmodern compilation, says this: "Some readers might be surprised to find that there is no entry simply on philosophy itself. This is partly because no short definition will do." That statement - and all others like it - is flatly false.
The definition of philosophy is as follows: Philosophy: the science of rudiments and foundations; the study of fundamentals. A philosophy is an organized system of ideas and arguments.
Etymologically, the word, as you know, comes from the Greek term philia (meaning love) or philos (meaning friend or lover); and sophia (meaning wisdom).
A fellow by the name of Diogenes Laertius claims that the term philosopher was coined by Pythagoras, in place of the word sophist, which meant "wise man." But Diogenes Laertius was squirrelly, and his Pythagorean claim is therefore dubious.
Oxford - evidently not as equivocal as Cambridge - defines philosophy thus: "The investigation of the most general and abstract features of the world and the categories with which we think, in order to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions."
Not bad; better still, however, is Penguin's philosophy dictionary, which says that philosophy studies "the most fundamental and general concepts and principles involved in thought, action, and reality."
And yet the best of them all comes not from a philosophy dictionary, exactly, but a man named Désiré-Félicien-François-Joseph Mercier - a.k.a. Cardinal Mercier - the late nineteenth-century thinker, who spoke well when he spoke thus: "[Philosophy] does not profess to be a particularized science [but] ranks above them, dealing in an ultimate fashion with their respective objects, inquiring into their connexions and relations of these connexions."
Philosophy, he continues, "deserves above all to be called the most general science" (A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy).
Lexically, here's all you really need to know: Philosophy comes first, and last. Philosophy is the alpha and the omega; it is the most fundamental science because it studies the foundations of all subsequent knowledge, and that is why all the other sciences depend upon it: because knowledge forms a hierarchy.
For humans, to live is to think; our life is in large part our consciousness: we are defined by the entirety of our actions, but our actions are shaped by our thoughts. Thinking, as stated once before, is the human quiddity. Philosophy provides the gauge for, and also defines the limits (or lack) of, all human knowledge, as well as systematizing the proper methods by which we are able to know. That is the definition of philosophy.
Branches of Philosophy
Three major branches grow upon the ancient tree of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. From these three branches spring two secondary and one tertiary. The two secondary limbs are politics, a sub-branch of ethics, and aesthetics (also known as art), a sub-branch of epistemology. One limb alone grows from the sub-branch of politics, and that is called economics. In the tradition of Greek philosophy, then, we may properly classify philosophy's branches, in order of hierarchical importance, like so:
• Metaphysics: the study of reality.
• Epistemology: the study of knowledge.
• Ethics: the study of human action.
• Politics: the study of government.
• Economics: the study of production and exchange.
• Aesthetics: the study of art.
These are the six main branches of philosophy, none of which, incidentally, are luxuries but human necessities. (Note: up until the time of Rene Descartes, epistemology was called Logic.) There are, however, in addition to these, a great many smaller limbs that grow on the tree of philosophy, a very partial listing of which might, in no particular order, look something like this:
• Ontology: the branch of metaphysics that studies entities.
• Philosophy of mind: the branch of epistemology that studies the putative dichotomy between brain and body and includes the soft science of psychology.
• Philosophy of language: the branch of epistemology that studies linguistic meaning and linguistic evolution.
• Philosophy of law: the branch of politics, and also ethics, that studies specific implementations of justice, rights, property, governmental procedure, and so on.
• Philosophy of education: the branch of epistemology that studies the devilish intricacies of pedagogy.
• Philosophy of mathematics: the branch of epistemology that studies critical problems raised by math.
• Hermeneutics: the branch of aesthetics that studies textual interpretation.
• Critical theory: the branch of ethics - and to some extent politics and aesthetics as well - that studies so-called underlying social practices.
Obviously this list is far from exhaustive, but a full compendiation here isn't the point. The point is this: Each sub-branch of philosophy and each sub-sub-branch is a species of either metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics. In the same way that philosophy forms the foundations of all knowledge, so metaphysics (the study of reality) forms the foundation of all philosophy.
All knowledge is built hierarchically, from the ground up. Thus, knowledge forms a unity wherein one thing leads logically to another, which leads to another, and so on. In this way, knowledge is interwoven and therefore entirely contextual.
In the house of knowledge, there are many mansions, but it's all built upon one foundation: and that foundation is philosophy.
Definition of Philosophy
The definition of philosophy - judging, at least, from very nearly every philosophy dictionary on the planet - has confounded philosophers for many centuries, the concept being too large, it is sometimes said, to properly convey in a concise fashion. Yet, at the same time, in all branches of philosophy, minutia is cataloged to complete weariness.
This annoying problem is really nothing more than skepticism and its little bitch postmodernism running amok again. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, for instance, a thoroughly postmodern compilation, says this: "Some readers might be surprised to find that there is no entry simply on philosophy itself. This is partly because no short definition will do." That statement - and all others like it - is flatly false.
The definition of philosophy is as follows: Philosophy: the science of rudiments and foundations; the study of fundamentals. A philosophy is an organized system of ideas and arguments.
Etymologically, the word, as you know, comes from the Greek term philia (meaning love) or philos (meaning friend or lover); and sophia (meaning wisdom).
A fellow by the name of Diogenes Laertius claims that the term philosopher was coined by Pythagoras, in place of the word sophist, which meant "wise man." But Diogenes Laertius was squirrelly, and his Pythagorean claim is therefore dubious.
Oxford - evidently not as equivocal as Cambridge - defines philosophy thus: "The investigation of the most general and abstract features of the world and the categories with which we think, in order to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions."
Not bad; better still, however, is Penguin's philosophy dictionary, which says that philosophy studies "the most fundamental and general concepts and principles involved in thought, action, and reality."
And yet the best of them all comes not from a philosophy dictionary, exactly, but a man named Désiré-Félicien-François-Joseph Mercier - a.k.a. Cardinal Mercier - the late nineteenth-century thinker, who spoke well when he spoke thus: "[Philosophy] does not profess to be a particularized science [but] ranks above them, dealing in an ultimate fashion with their respective objects, inquiring into their connexions and relations of these connexions."
Philosophy, he continues, "deserves above all to be called the most general science" (A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy).
Lexically, here's all you really need to know: Philosophy comes first, and last. Philosophy is the alpha and the omega; it is the most fundamental science because it studies the foundations of all subsequent knowledge, and that is why all the other sciences depend upon it: because knowledge forms a hierarchy.
For humans, to live is to think; our life is in large part our consciousness: we are defined by the entirety of our actions, but our actions are shaped by our thoughts. Thinking, as stated once before, is the human quiddity. Philosophy provides the gauge for, and also defines the limits (or lack) of, all human knowledge, as well as systematizing the proper methods by which we are able to know. That is the definition of philosophy.
Branches of Philosophy
Three major branches grow upon the ancient tree of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. From these three branches spring two secondary and one tertiary. The two secondary limbs are politics, a sub-branch of ethics, and aesthetics (also known as art), a sub-branch of epistemology. One limb alone grows from the sub-branch of politics, and that is called economics. In the tradition of Greek philosophy, then, we may properly classify philosophy's branches, in order of hierarchical importance, like so:
• Metaphysics: the study of reality.
• Epistemology: the study of knowledge.
• Ethics: the study of human action.
• Politics: the study of government.
• Economics: the study of production and exchange.
• Aesthetics: the study of art.
These are the six main branches of philosophy, none of which, incidentally, are luxuries but human necessities. (Note: up until the time of Rene Descartes, epistemology was called Logic.) There are, however, in addition to these, a great many smaller limbs that grow on the tree of philosophy, a very partial listing of which might, in no particular order, look something like this:
• Ontology: the branch of metaphysics that studies entities.
• Philosophy of mind: the branch of epistemology that studies the putative dichotomy between brain and body and includes the soft science of psychology.
• Philosophy of language: the branch of epistemology that studies linguistic meaning and linguistic evolution.
• Philosophy of law: the branch of politics, and also ethics, that studies specific implementations of justice, rights, property, governmental procedure, and so on.
• Philosophy of education: the branch of epistemology that studies the devilish intricacies of pedagogy.
• Philosophy of mathematics: the branch of epistemology that studies critical problems raised by math.
• Hermeneutics: the branch of aesthetics that studies textual interpretation.
• Critical theory: the branch of ethics - and to some extent politics and aesthetics as well - that studies so-called underlying social practices.
Obviously this list is far from exhaustive, but a full compendiation here isn't the point. The point is this: Each sub-branch of philosophy and each sub-sub-branch is a species of either metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics. In the same way that philosophy forms the foundations of all knowledge, so metaphysics (the study of reality) forms the foundation of all philosophy.
All knowledge is built hierarchically, from the ground up. Thus, knowledge forms a unity wherein one thing leads logically to another, which leads to another, and so on. In this way, knowledge is interwoven and therefore entirely contextual.
In the house of knowledge, there are many mansions, but it's all built upon one foundation: and that foundation is philosophy.
Definitions and Branches of Philosophy
(www.the-thinking-man.com)
Definition of Philosophy
The definition of philosophy - judging, at least, from very nearly every philosophy dictionary on the planet - has confounded philosophers for many centuries, the concept being too large, it is sometimes said, to properly convey in a concise fashion. Yet, at the same time, in all branches of philosophy, minutia is cataloged to complete weariness.
This annoying problem is really nothing more than skepticism and its little bitch postmodernism running amok again. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, for instance, a thoroughly postmodern compilation, says this: "Some readers might be surprised to find that there is no entry simply on philosophy itself. This is partly because no short definition will do." That statement - and all others like it - is flatly false.
The definition of philosophy is as follows: Philosophy: the science of rudiments and foundations; the study of fundamentals. A philosophy is an organized system of ideas and arguments.
Etymologically, the word, as you know, comes from the Greek term philia (meaning love) or philos (meaning friend or lover); and sophia (meaning wisdom).
A fellow by the name of Diogenes Laertius claims that the term philosopher was coined by Pythagoras, in place of the word sophist, which meant "wise man." But Diogenes Laertius was squirrelly, and his Pythagorean claim is therefore dubious.
Oxford - evidently not as equivocal as Cambridge - defines philosophy thus: "The investigation of the most general and abstract features of the world and the categories with which we think, in order to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions."
Not bad; better still, however, is Penguin's philosophy dictionary, which says that philosophy studies "the most fundamental and general concepts and principles involved in thought, action, and reality."
And yet the best of them all comes not from a philosophy dictionary, exactly, but a man named Désiré-Félicien-François-Joseph Mercier - a.k.a. Cardinal Mercier - the late nineteenth-century thinker, who spoke well when he spoke thus: "[Philosophy] does not profess to be a particularized science [but] ranks above them, dealing in an ultimate fashion with their respective objects, inquiring into their connexions and relations of these connexions."
Philosophy, he continues, "deserves above all to be called the most general science" (A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy).
Lexically, here's all you really need to know: Philosophy comes first, and last. Philosophy is the alpha and the omega; it is the most fundamental science because it studies the foundations of all subsequent knowledge, and that is why all the other sciences depend upon it: because knowledge forms a hierarchy.
For humans, to live is to think; our life is in large part our consciousness: we are defined by the entirety of our actions, but our actions are shaped by our thoughts. Thinking, as stated once before, is the human quiddity. Philosophy provides the gauge for, and also defines the limits (or lack) of, all human knowledge, as well as systematizing the proper methods by which we are able to know. That is the definition of philosophy.
Branches of Philosophy
Three major branches grow upon the ancient tree of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. From these three branches spring two secondary and one tertiary. The two secondary limbs are politics, a sub-branch of ethics, and aesthetics (also known as art), a sub-branch of epistemology. One limb alone grows from the sub-branch of politics, and that is called economics. In the tradition of Greek philosophy, then, we may properly classify philosophy's branches, in order of hierarchical importance, like so:
• Metaphysics: the study of reality.
• Epistemology: the study of knowledge.
• Ethics: the study of human action.
• Politics: the study of government.
• Economics: the study of production and exchange.
• Aesthetics: the study of art.
These are the six main branches of philosophy, none of which, incidentally, are luxuries but human necessities. (Note: up until the time of Rene Descartes, epistemology was called Logic.) There are, however, in addition to these, a great many smaller limbs that grow on the tree of philosophy, a very partial listing of which might, in no particular order, look something like this:
• Ontology: the branch of metaphysics that studies entities.
• Philosophy of mind: the branch of epistemology that studies the putative dichotomy between brain and body and includes the soft science of psychology.
• Philosophy of language: the branch of epistemology that studies linguistic meaning and linguistic evolution.
• Philosophy of law: the branch of politics, and also ethics, that studies specific implementations of justice, rights, property, governmental procedure, and so on.
• Philosophy of education: the branch of epistemology that studies the devilish intricacies of pedagogy.
• Philosophy of mathematics: the branch of epistemology that studies critical problems raised by math.
• Hermeneutics: the branch of aesthetics that studies textual interpretation.
• Critical theory: the branch of ethics - and to some extent politics and aesthetics as well - that studies so-called underlying social practices.
Obviously this list is far from exhaustive, but a full compendiation here isn't the point. The point is this: Each sub-branch of philosophy and each sub-sub-branch is a species of either metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics. In the same way that philosophy forms the foundations of all knowledge, so metaphysics (the study of reality) forms the foundation of all philosophy.
All knowledge is built hierarchically, from the ground up. Thus, knowledge forms a unity wherein one thing leads logically to another, which leads to another, and so on. In this way, knowledge is interwoven and therefore entirely contextual.
In the house of knowledge, there are many mansions, but it's all built upon one foundation: and that foundation is philosophy.
Definition of Philosophy
The definition of philosophy - judging, at least, from very nearly every philosophy dictionary on the planet - has confounded philosophers for many centuries, the concept being too large, it is sometimes said, to properly convey in a concise fashion. Yet, at the same time, in all branches of philosophy, minutia is cataloged to complete weariness.
This annoying problem is really nothing more than skepticism and its little bitch postmodernism running amok again. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, for instance, a thoroughly postmodern compilation, says this: "Some readers might be surprised to find that there is no entry simply on philosophy itself. This is partly because no short definition will do." That statement - and all others like it - is flatly false.
The definition of philosophy is as follows: Philosophy: the science of rudiments and foundations; the study of fundamentals. A philosophy is an organized system of ideas and arguments.
Etymologically, the word, as you know, comes from the Greek term philia (meaning love) or philos (meaning friend or lover); and sophia (meaning wisdom).
A fellow by the name of Diogenes Laertius claims that the term philosopher was coined by Pythagoras, in place of the word sophist, which meant "wise man." But Diogenes Laertius was squirrelly, and his Pythagorean claim is therefore dubious.
Oxford - evidently not as equivocal as Cambridge - defines philosophy thus: "The investigation of the most general and abstract features of the world and the categories with which we think, in order to lay bare their foundations and presuppositions."
Not bad; better still, however, is Penguin's philosophy dictionary, which says that philosophy studies "the most fundamental and general concepts and principles involved in thought, action, and reality."
And yet the best of them all comes not from a philosophy dictionary, exactly, but a man named Désiré-Félicien-François-Joseph Mercier - a.k.a. Cardinal Mercier - the late nineteenth-century thinker, who spoke well when he spoke thus: "[Philosophy] does not profess to be a particularized science [but] ranks above them, dealing in an ultimate fashion with their respective objects, inquiring into their connexions and relations of these connexions."
Philosophy, he continues, "deserves above all to be called the most general science" (A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy).
Lexically, here's all you really need to know: Philosophy comes first, and last. Philosophy is the alpha and the omega; it is the most fundamental science because it studies the foundations of all subsequent knowledge, and that is why all the other sciences depend upon it: because knowledge forms a hierarchy.
For humans, to live is to think; our life is in large part our consciousness: we are defined by the entirety of our actions, but our actions are shaped by our thoughts. Thinking, as stated once before, is the human quiddity. Philosophy provides the gauge for, and also defines the limits (or lack) of, all human knowledge, as well as systematizing the proper methods by which we are able to know. That is the definition of philosophy.
Branches of Philosophy
Three major branches grow upon the ancient tree of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. From these three branches spring two secondary and one tertiary. The two secondary limbs are politics, a sub-branch of ethics, and aesthetics (also known as art), a sub-branch of epistemology. One limb alone grows from the sub-branch of politics, and that is called economics. In the tradition of Greek philosophy, then, we may properly classify philosophy's branches, in order of hierarchical importance, like so:
• Metaphysics: the study of reality.
• Epistemology: the study of knowledge.
• Ethics: the study of human action.
• Politics: the study of government.
• Economics: the study of production and exchange.
• Aesthetics: the study of art.
These are the six main branches of philosophy, none of which, incidentally, are luxuries but human necessities. (Note: up until the time of Rene Descartes, epistemology was called Logic.) There are, however, in addition to these, a great many smaller limbs that grow on the tree of philosophy, a very partial listing of which might, in no particular order, look something like this:
• Ontology: the branch of metaphysics that studies entities.
• Philosophy of mind: the branch of epistemology that studies the putative dichotomy between brain and body and includes the soft science of psychology.
• Philosophy of language: the branch of epistemology that studies linguistic meaning and linguistic evolution.
• Philosophy of law: the branch of politics, and also ethics, that studies specific implementations of justice, rights, property, governmental procedure, and so on.
• Philosophy of education: the branch of epistemology that studies the devilish intricacies of pedagogy.
• Philosophy of mathematics: the branch of epistemology that studies critical problems raised by math.
• Hermeneutics: the branch of aesthetics that studies textual interpretation.
• Critical theory: the branch of ethics - and to some extent politics and aesthetics as well - that studies so-called underlying social practices.
Obviously this list is far from exhaustive, but a full compendiation here isn't the point. The point is this: Each sub-branch of philosophy and each sub-sub-branch is a species of either metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics. In the same way that philosophy forms the foundations of all knowledge, so metaphysics (the study of reality) forms the foundation of all philosophy.
All knowledge is built hierarchically, from the ground up. Thus, knowledge forms a unity wherein one thing leads logically to another, which leads to another, and so on. In this way, knowledge is interwoven and therefore entirely contextual.
In the house of knowledge, there are many mansions, but it's all built upon one foundation: and that foundation is philosophy.
The Importance of History
Anthony Odom
August 15, 2006
(www.associatedcontent.com)
Convincing students of history's importance is difficult, but it can be done. Few people would argue that history is important. Few people, that is, who are not students. I have taught American history and Mississippi history and most of the students I've had state that history is one of their least favorite subjects. The two main complaints about history is that it is irrelevant to their discipline, and that it is boring. When asked to elaborate on how it is boring, the complaint seems to come back to a question of relevance. "I don't see how knowing a bunch of stuff about things that happened years ago helps me at all, its not like I'm going to use it" a student once told me on the first day of class. As prepared as I was to teach history, I have to say that I had no idea I'd have to be an apologist for the discipline as well. One of the hardest questions most history teachers have to answer is, "Why is this stuff important?" In an age of streamlining education and when colleges are becoming more like vocational institutions than classical universities, the issue of relevance becomes all the more important. Most rely on cliche' responses like "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Today's savvy, cynical students don't take to cryptic warnings or deep philosophical truths too well. Personally, I steer clear of this old maxim. When faced with the question of relevance, I prefer to speak in a language my students can understand. History teaches you how to think critically and analytically. These abilities are prized in any discipline, especially business-related fields and even scientific fields. Reading a research study is something anyone can do, but analyzing it takes a skill that history class can hone. Who wrote this study? What were their motives? Who's paying for it? What is this research trying to prove or gain? Who benefits?
One of my former students, a business major, asked me how could history possibly help him. I presented him with a hypothetical scenario. "Let's pretend," I said, "that you are asked by your company to research an area for possible expansion into that area." "Well, the first thing you'd need to know is has anyone opened a similar business in that area before." "Was it a success or a failure, and why did it succeed or fail? To answer these questions, you need some skills that historical education can provide." "Without those skills, you'll have a ton of data but it won't mean anything because you won't have the ability to critically analyze that data and make it make sense to your superiors." The student came away with a new appreciation, and made a decent grade in the class.
The ability to conduct research is another skill that history education can provide. Knowing the answers is not nearly as important as knowing where to find answers. Again, I revert to the example from my business student. If he were to go about researching an area for expansion, he would need information. History classes that emphasize student research can help him learn where to find such information. Knowing where to look in the library or on the internet can give the student as great advantage over someone who does not. Median incomes, historical economic trends, and other relevant information that he would need is out there, but if he is ignorant about how to find it, it may as well be on Mars.
One of the main functions of history education is that it brings awareness of the world. Knowing what is going on and why is advantageous to students in any field. All fields are affected by current events. All schools are effected by current events. All people, regardless of how uninformed they may be, are affected by current events. If you can understand your situation, you can either make it better or keep it as is (whichever is called for) based on what you know about how you got from point "A" to point "B." Simply put, there is no better way to gain an understanding of the present than the study of the past. Although it is a well-worn cliche', the past does indeed repeat itself. If past mistakes are not understood, they may well be repeated. This is true in every discipline from chemistry to civil engineering. Making history relevant to every student is difficult, and the endeavor is not always successful. But in doing so, a teacher can not only make their students better at their discipline, but the students just may come away with a new perspective. One of the best compliments a student ever paid me was, "I hated history until I took your class." If all I ever do is convince a student to at least open their mind to what history can offer them outside of just being a convenient hole to plug in their program of study, then my mission as an educator has been successful.
August 15, 2006
(www.associatedcontent.com)
Convincing students of history's importance is difficult, but it can be done. Few people would argue that history is important. Few people, that is, who are not students. I have taught American history and Mississippi history and most of the students I've had state that history is one of their least favorite subjects. The two main complaints about history is that it is irrelevant to their discipline, and that it is boring. When asked to elaborate on how it is boring, the complaint seems to come back to a question of relevance. "I don't see how knowing a bunch of stuff about things that happened years ago helps me at all, its not like I'm going to use it" a student once told me on the first day of class. As prepared as I was to teach history, I have to say that I had no idea I'd have to be an apologist for the discipline as well. One of the hardest questions most history teachers have to answer is, "Why is this stuff important?" In an age of streamlining education and when colleges are becoming more like vocational institutions than classical universities, the issue of relevance becomes all the more important. Most rely on cliche' responses like "Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Today's savvy, cynical students don't take to cryptic warnings or deep philosophical truths too well. Personally, I steer clear of this old maxim. When faced with the question of relevance, I prefer to speak in a language my students can understand. History teaches you how to think critically and analytically. These abilities are prized in any discipline, especially business-related fields and even scientific fields. Reading a research study is something anyone can do, but analyzing it takes a skill that history class can hone. Who wrote this study? What were their motives? Who's paying for it? What is this research trying to prove or gain? Who benefits?
One of my former students, a business major, asked me how could history possibly help him. I presented him with a hypothetical scenario. "Let's pretend," I said, "that you are asked by your company to research an area for possible expansion into that area." "Well, the first thing you'd need to know is has anyone opened a similar business in that area before." "Was it a success or a failure, and why did it succeed or fail? To answer these questions, you need some skills that historical education can provide." "Without those skills, you'll have a ton of data but it won't mean anything because you won't have the ability to critically analyze that data and make it make sense to your superiors." The student came away with a new appreciation, and made a decent grade in the class.
The ability to conduct research is another skill that history education can provide. Knowing the answers is not nearly as important as knowing where to find answers. Again, I revert to the example from my business student. If he were to go about researching an area for expansion, he would need information. History classes that emphasize student research can help him learn where to find such information. Knowing where to look in the library or on the internet can give the student as great advantage over someone who does not. Median incomes, historical economic trends, and other relevant information that he would need is out there, but if he is ignorant about how to find it, it may as well be on Mars.
One of the main functions of history education is that it brings awareness of the world. Knowing what is going on and why is advantageous to students in any field. All fields are affected by current events. All schools are effected by current events. All people, regardless of how uninformed they may be, are affected by current events. If you can understand your situation, you can either make it better or keep it as is (whichever is called for) based on what you know about how you got from point "A" to point "B." Simply put, there is no better way to gain an understanding of the present than the study of the past. Although it is a well-worn cliche', the past does indeed repeat itself. If past mistakes are not understood, they may well be repeated. This is true in every discipline from chemistry to civil engineering. Making history relevant to every student is difficult, and the endeavor is not always successful. But in doing so, a teacher can not only make their students better at their discipline, but the students just may come away with a new perspective. One of the best compliments a student ever paid me was, "I hated history until I took your class." If all I ever do is convince a student to at least open their mind to what history can offer them outside of just being a convenient hole to plug in their program of study, then my mission as an educator has been successful.
The Importance of History by David Crabtree (www.mckenziestudycenter.org)
The Importance of History
David Crabtree
(www.mckenziestudycenter.org)
History is important. In centuries past this statement would have seemed self-evident. Ancient cultures devoted much time and effort to teaching their children family history. It was thought that the past helps a child understand who he is. Modern society, however, has turned its back on the past. We live in a time of rapid change, a time of progress. We prefer to define ourselves in terms of where we are going, not where we come from. Our ancestors hold no importance for us. They lived in times so different from our own that they are incapable of shedding light on our experience. Man is so much smarter now than he was even ten years ago that anything from the past is outdated and irrelevant to us. Therefore the past, even the relatively recent past, is, in the minds of most of us, enshrouded by mists and only very vaguely perceived. Our ignorance of the past is not the result of a lack of information, but of indifference. We do not believe that history matters.
But history does matter. It has been said that he who controls the past controls the future. Our view of history shapes the way we view the present, and therefore it dictates what answers we offer for existing problems. Let me offer a few examples to indicate how this might be true.
One of my children comes running up to me, "Papa, Stefan hit me!" Another child comes close on the heels of the first, "I did not. You hit me!" As a parent I have to determine what happened. Usually I have to sort through conflicting testimony to get to the truth of the matter. Part of my information is my knowledge of human beings in general; part of my information is the knowledge I have assembled over the lifetimes of these particular children. All of this is essentially history. It is knowledge about the past. I must have a good understanding of the past in order to know how to deal wisely with these children in the present. Any punishment or chastisement will depend on my reconstruction of what actually happened. The children realize this, and thus they present very selective histories of the event in an attempt to dictate my response. In these kinds of situations, children very clearly understand that history matters.
When you go into a doctor's office for the first time, you invariably have to fill out an information sheet that asks about your medical history. Some of these forms are very detailed, asking questions that require information from rarely accessed memory banks. Why does a doctor ask these questions? The doctor is trying to construct an accurate picture of your state of health. Your health is heavily influenced by the past. Your heredity, past behaviors, past experiences are all important determinants and clues to your present condition. Whenever you return to the doctor, he or she pulls out a file which contains all the notes from past visits. This file is a history of your health. Doctors understand very clearly that the past matters.
Some of you might be thinking that these examples are not very compelling because they both deal with the very recent past-they are not what we think of when we think of history. Let me give one final example that is more to the point. In 1917 the Communists took control of Russia. They began to exercise control over how the history of their country ought to be told. They depicted the tsar as oppressive and cruel. The leaders of the revolution, on the other hand, were portrayed in a very positive light. The Communist government insisted that these leaders, and in particular Lenin, understood more clearly than any one else what Russia needed and what course of action the government ought to follow.
According to the official history, Lenin made no mistakes and he passed his virtually infallible understanding on to the other leaders of the party. The official history presented Lenin and Stalin as kind, compassionate, wise, nearly divine leaders. Consequently, difficulties that people in the Soviet Union experienced were all attributable to capitalism. The nation's economic backwardness, the need for a massive military and tight security, and domestic crime were all ultimately tied to the influence of capitalistic countries. This is the perspective of history that was taught to Soviet children for half a century.
In the seventies and eighties, several things happened to shake people's confidence in this view of history. One was the publication of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. This work was the product of years of historical research by the author. He interviewed scores of prisoners and did extensive research to chronicle the genesis and development of the chain of labor camps that dotted the Soviet Union. His book described the cruelty and injustice of the system in great detail; but most important of all, he was able to show that Lenin and Stalin were active and knowing participants in the formation of this brutal institution.
Solzhenitsyn's depiction of these leaders was incompatible with the official history. And if the official history was wrong, the legitimacy and justification for Soviet rule was all brought into question. In 1979, a Soviet emigre, after having read Gulag Archipelago, told me, "The impact of this book will be far more devastating to Soviet power than an atomic bomb." I am convinced that one of the reasons the Soviet Union disintegrated is because people began to doubt the official history. Ask Gorbachev if history matters.
I. A DEFINITION OF HISTORY
So history matters, but what is history? My advisor in graduate school had a simple definition that I have grown to appreciate: "History is a story about the past that is significant and true." This simple definition contains two words packed with meaning which must be understood in order to understand history.
A. Significance
The first word is "significant." No one could record everything that is true about an event in the past: temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, soil type, molecules bouncing around, hearts beating, lungs inflating and deflating, and so forth-there is no end to what could be listed. History is the process of simplifying. Of all that could be said about an event, what is most important or most significant? The goal of history is to tell a story about the past which captures the essence of an event while omitting superfluous details.
Significance is determined by the historian. The historian sorts through the evidence and presents only that which, given his particular world view, is significant. What a historian finds significant is not entirely a personal choice; it is largely shaped by his training and his colleagues. In order for a historian to have his works published, he has to receive the approval of his fellow historians. Therefore, the community of historians has a large say in deciding what about the past is significant. But historians are just as much a part of society as anyone else, and we are all greatly influenced by those around us. As a result, the community of historians tends to share the same notion of significance as is held by society as a whole. Therefore, historians tend to tell stories which reflect the dominant values of the society in which they live.
This leads to a curious feature of historical narrative: the past is fixed-no one can change what happened-but as the values of society change, the historians' depiction of the past changes also. It has been argued that history tells us more about the time in which it is written than the time about which it is written. I recently did some reading about the history of homosexuality. For a couple of decades in the middle of the nineteenth century, historians viewed homosexuality as an immoral act and consequently looked at the prevalence of homosexuality in ancient Greece as a sign of its moral decadence and a precursor to the collapse of Greek civilization. Historians then applied this same analysis to Roman society. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, society began to question the existence of moral absolutes. As a result, historians ceased to give credence to any connection between moral behavior and the health of a civilization. Therefore, the search for a connection between moral decline and the fall of empire ceased to hold any interest and was abandoned. Instead, historians, interested in telling the story of the growth and development of liberty, saw the open practice of homosexuality as a good thing, in that it demonstrated greater social tolerance and, therefore, increased personal liberty. Notice that the first view (based on moral absolutes) was not disproved; it was simply abandoned due to a change in the values of society. This, in turn, produced a change in the way historians depicted the past. The past does not change, but history changes with every generation.
B. Truth
I said that history is a story about the past that is significant and true. I have talked about the word "significant"; now I want to talk about the word "true." What does it mean to say that a historical account is true? Most modern historians would claim there is no absolute truth. This would imply there is no basis for saying that one historical account is true and another one false. I know of no historian, however, who actually operates this way in practice. Most historians use the word "true" to mean any perspective well supported by facts.
The tricky thing is that every historian uses facts to build his case. Rarely does a historian consciously distort the facts; and although minor factual errors are common, they seldom undermine the overall presentation. But even though most histories are built on facts, the histories can be very different, even contradictory, because falsehoods can be constructed solely with facts.
My parents once put in a new front lawn. Soon after it was planted, my mother discovered bicycle tracks running across the yard. She had a pretty good idea who had done it, so she asked this boy if he knew anything about the tracks. He said, "Yes, I do. My sister's bike did it." This is a wonderfully crafted statement. It is built on facts, but it is designed to create a false impression. We often refer to such statements as "half-truths." For history to be true, it must not only be based on facts, it must present those facts in a balanced, well- proportioned manner. Too often histories are half-truths.
I need to point out quickly that most historians do not intentionally distort history to serve their purposes, as this boy did. The process is much less malicious, yet far more insidious. Historians interpret evidence through the eyes of their own world view. This is natural; we could not expect anything else. This has far-reaching consequences, however. Take, for example, a historian studying the story of Jonathan and David. If all of the historian's close same-sex relationships have been sexual, he will be unable to conceive of Jonathan and David's relationship as being anything else. Thus he will conclude that David and Jonathan were homosexuals. Given his experience, he can not imagine any other interpretation of the evidence. Therefore, the accuracy of an historian's version of past events depends greatly on the soundness of his world view.
I suspect this is contrary to most people's image of history. People generally think of history as a very objective discipline. This perspective dominated the field about a century ago, and most of us were led to believe this in the course of our education. We were taught that objective historians began to piece together a picture of the past, and every new generation of historians discovers new facts which alter our understanding of the past. With each generation, therefore, we get closer to the truth of history, but these refinements do not significantly alter the assured findings of science.
This perspective would find few adherents today. It has become painfully obvious that no researcher is a blank slate. We all start with some preconceived notions about what is true and what is not. It should not and can not be otherwise. All history is, in this sense, biased.
For the reasons I have listed, history is a value-laden discipline. Howard Zinn, the author of a book to which we will return in a minute, makes the following statement: It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the mapmaker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual." (Note 1)
II. "HISTORY" EXAMPLES
History, by its very nature, does more than tell us about the past; it argues for an ideology a world view. 1992 gave us an excellent opportunity to see a struggle between different groups each trying to claim history in support of their cause. It was the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing on American soil. Columbus, who had long enjoyed the status of hero, came under heavy criticism. This historical event and the versions of history it generated are a very good example of what I have been talking about. I would like to look at two descriptions of this event and show how ideology infuses both accounts. One account is found in The Light and the Glory by Peter Marshall and David Manuel. (Note 2) The other is from A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
Both of these books were written at the end of the 1970s. For a quarter of a century prior to this time, the most noted historian of the life of Columbus was Samuel Eliot Morison. He wrote several books about Columbus, but the most widely read was Christopher Columbus, Mariner.(Note 3) Until the late seventies, Morison's depiction of Columbus was considered the most authoritative. Since both Marshall's and Zinn's books were written to correct Morison's presentation, let me first describe Morison's perspective.
A. Morison: Columbus, the mariner
Morison was a naval officer (so I have heard) turned historian. His love of the sea and appreciation for good seamanship is obvious in his history. Morison has enormous respect and admiration for Columbus as a sailor and navigator. This and this alone was Columbus's greatness. At a time when all of Europe was trying to find economical routes to Asia, Columbus was convinced that Asia could easily be reached by sailing west across the Atlantic. Most scholars of the time believed that the world was round and that Asia could be reached by sailing west, but they thought it was too far. Columbus argued that the scholarly opinion greatly overestimated the distance and that Asia was only about a three week voyage. As it turned out, the scholars were right; Asia was too far away, but fortunately for Columbus, America was just about where he thought Asia would be.
Columbus undertook the trip to prove that he was right. His superior sailing skills enabled the expedition to reach America. Columbus thought he had landed in Asia, and he spent the rest of his life trying to prove he was correct. This drove him to be in constant search for gold and more geographical knowledge: since Asia was known to be rich in gold, a vast amount of gold would suggest that the land was, in fact, Asia; and since Marco Polo had written about the geography of Asia, Columbus felt further exploration would demonstrate that he had found the land Marco Polo described. Columbus's constant exploration and search for gold led him to make some poor decisions regarding the administration of the lands he discovered; his negligence resulted in brutal treatment of the native population. Although Morison does not excuse Columbus's negligence, he does not want this flaw to detract from our appreciation for Columbus's skills as a seaman.
B. Peter Marshall: Columbus, the tool of God
Peter Marshall has a very different perspective. He sees Columbus as a key figure in God's grand plan to establish a very special country, unique in the history of the world. Just as God selected Israel to be a special nation which He promised to bless as long as the people were obedient to His commandments, God singled out the United States for a similar purpose: Could it be that we Americans, as a people, were meant to be a "light to lighten the Gentiles" (Luke 2:23)-a demonstration to the world of how God intended His children to live together under the Lordship of Christ? Was our vast divergence from this blueprint, after such a promising beginning, the reason why we now seem to be heading into a new dark age? (p. 19)
Marshall's book, therefore, chronicles the indications of God's special guidance of key individuals in the history of the United States. Columbus is one of those individuals. Marshall sees the hand of God behind Columbus's voyage from its very inception. He quotes from one of Columbus's writings:
It was the Lord who put into my mind ( I could feel his hand upon me) the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit, because He comforted me with rays of marvelous inspiration from the Holy Scripture.... (p. 17)
Marshall is very sensitive to indications of God's divine guidance and protection for Columbus's venture and Columbus's personal relationship with God. Marshall begins by pointing out that Columbus's first name is Christopher, which means "Christ-bearer." He sees this as significant because one of the main reasons Columbus gave for wanting to find Asia was to evangelize its inhabitants. Columbus's name was, therefore, prophetic.
Marshall describes the difficulty Columbus had in finding a sponsor for his expedition. He tried but failed to get the king of Portugal to finance his trip. He got nowhere with the king of England. He approached the king and queen of Spain, but they kept putting him off. Having given up on the Spanish monarchs and at a point of desperation, he was about to leave for France to ask the French king to finance his expedition when the queen of Spain had a change of heart. Marshall points out that the queen's confessor, who was the head of the monastery where Columbus was staying, was instrumental in convincing the queen of the value of the enterprise. Marshall imagines what might have transpired between the monk and Columbus while Columbus was in despair over his inability to find a sponsor.:
But in the cool stone cloister of the monastery, we can almost hear Father Perez as he might have reminded Christopher that all of the things which had tormented him-the elusive recognition, wealth and position which he wanted so desperately and which always seemed just out of reach-these were the world's inducements, not the things that concerned the Lord Jesus. (p. 34)
[Let me take this opportunity to make a short digression. I do not think Marshall's book is accepted as a serious work of history. One of the reasons is because the author occasionally inserts these imaginary scenes for which he has absolutely no evidence. I would like to point out, however, that this criticism is a little unfair. The mind of any historian is constantly at work trying to imagine the event under investigation. The evidence is always less than complete, and the historian tries to fill in the missing pieces, by drawing on his knowledge of reality and general human experience to extrapolate what must have happened. So whereas Marshall has actually recorded his imaginings, and serious historians do not, we must nevertheless acknowledge that all historians use their imaginations to fill out the picture, and this affects the way they tell the story.]
Marshall describes Columbus's first crossing as a major test of Columbus's faith in God. Early on, the voyage went extremely well, but as the time went on with no land in sight, the crew became very fearful. On October 9th, there was almost a mutiny, but Columbus reached an agreement to sail west three more days before turning back. For the next three days, the sailing conditions improved dramatically, and on the third day, at the end of the day, they finally sighted land. Marshall's description of this voyage puts less emphasis on Columbus's skills as a seaman and great emphasis on the indications of providential guidance. From Marshall's perspective, Columbus's skill was just one more instance of God's blessing on the venture. Of infinitely more importance to Marshall is how Columbus responded to this test of his faith, for the success or failure of the mission hinged on this.
Marshall concluded that Columbus responded well to the test of his faith while at sea, but after Columbus reached America he made two serious errors. The first mistake was establishing a precedent for mistreatment of the Indians. While Columbus generally treated the Indians fairly well, he did them one very serious injustice-he forcibly took several Indians back to Spain with him to become interpreters. This set a very bad precedent for the treatment of Indians, which became much more brutal with later explorers. Marshall holds Columbus partially responsible for this. The other error Columbus committed was to embark on a search for gold. From Marshall's perspective, Columbus became preoccupied with a thirst for gold and this corrupted him:
Gold-one can see the hand of the Devil here. Unable to overcome the faith of the Christ-bearer by sowing fear and dissension in the hearts of his men or by paralyzing him with despair, Satan had failed to keep the Light of Christ from establishing a beachhead in practically the only part of the world in which he still reigned unchallenged. So he now moved to destroy the army of holy invaders from within their ranks. And he chose the one instrument which almost never failed: the love of money. (p. 42)
Behind the scenes, Marshall sees a grand conflict between God and the godly and Satan and his forces. Gold is the tool Satan used to distract Columbus from his divinely appointed mission.
Columbus's thirst for gold and his rejection of God's mission for him caused God to afflict Columbus with a series of tragedies. While Columbus went to Spain to report his find, he left a small number of Spaniards in the New World. He returned to America only to discover that these men had been massacred by the Indians who were exasperated by the Spaniards' cruel, greed-motivated treatment. The men he brought with him on the second trip were even more consumed with a desire for gold; they not only fought with Indians for gold, they fought with each other. When word of the chaos and maladministration reached the king and queen, they sent a new governor and had Columbus returned from his second trip in chains. The king and queen freed him from his chains, but he was nevertheless humiliated. Later, he was afflicted with grandiose illusions of being called by God to lead a crusade against the infidels in the Holy Land. After several years, Columbus returned to America, but now he, too, was obsessed with desire for gold. He finally found a major deposit of gold, but by this time Columbus was almost out of touch with reality. Marshall writes: "It is doubtful that he who does what he will in the world is going to be used to bring many souls to Paradise." This particular narrative goes on to reveal just how far off-center Columbus's thinking had wandered: "For by the same sort of weird, convoluted reasoning that earmarks Gnosticism and so much of occult metaphysics, Columbus arrived at a monumental conclusion: he was convinced that he had found King Solomon's mines!" (p. 65) This dementia was divine punishment for Columbus's refusal to look constantly to God for deliverance from his difficulties.
Finding a major source of gold opened a Pandora's box of problems. It brought the conquistadors to America. These men inflicted countless atrocities on the native population, further proof of divine judgment on Columbus and his enterprise.
According to Marshall, God had a glorious role for Columbus to play in the history of mankind, but Columbus was distracted by gold and nearly driven mad because he refused to trust God. Marshall speculates, however, that Columbus, on his death bed, was reconciled to God:
The old man brushed away the tears at the corners of his eyes, and perhaps he spoke to God again then, for the first time in a long while. "Father, it is over now, isn't it?" Yes, son, he might have heard in his heart. "Father, I'm afraid I have not done well in carrying the Light of Your Son to the West. I'm sorry. I pray that others will carry the light further." They will. You are forgiven. "It's time now, isn't it?" Yes. (p. 65-66)
C. Howard Zinn: Columbus, the oppressor
Howard Zinn's portrayal of Columbus could scarcely be more different from Marshall's. His presentation is rooted in a very different understanding of the essence and value of history. Zinn is outraged by the traditional practice of telling the history of a nation as though all members of that nation shared the same interests. This illusion of cohesion within a nation hides the reality that every society includes oppressors and the oppressed. Zinn thinks history should tell the story of this all-important struggle, regardless of national divisions. He hopes we might learn from such a history how to help the oppressed successfully rise up against their oppressors.
From this perspective, Columbus is the quintessential oppressor. From the outset of the expedition Columbus was intent on extracting wealth from the native. Zinn demonstrates Columbus's malevolent motives by quoting Columbus's words from the log on the day he first saw the Indians:
They. . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword; they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane . . . . They would make fine servants . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. (p. 1)
Zinn sees this as evidence that from the very beginning Columbus was eager to assess the exploitability of the native inhabitants. Columbus began to gather information from the natives. He took some of the natives by force for this purpose. The object of his investigation was very focused: "The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold?" (p. 1). Having this as his primary goal, Columbus had no compunction about treating the Indians cruelly. All the Indians of San Salvador were required to collect a certain amount of gold every three months. Those who failed to do so had their hands cut off. When even these extreme methods failed to squeeze enough gold out of the land, Columbus tried another approach: "When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas." (p. 4). Zinn portrays Columbus as one who would go to any length to extract wealth from the new-found land.
Zinn magnifies our sense of outrage by describing the innocence and nobility of the natives who were so senselessly brutalized. He proves that the Indian culture treated its women well, using the following quotation from a Spanish priest who accompanied Columbus:
Marriage laws are non-existent: men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a man's head or at his hands. (p. 5).
Zinn also notes the communal and non-capitalistic nature of Indian society: They live in large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time. . . . They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality. (p. 5)
From Zinn's perspective, these qualities of Indian society made it superior to European society; and yet the Europeans brutalized and, in some cases, exterminated whole tribes in the name of Christianity, civilization, and progress. Columbus was but the first of many such oppressors.
III. CAN WE LEARN FROM HISTORY?
Very briefly I have outlined two different stories of Columbus. You are probably asking yourself, "How can the accounts be so different? Didn't they read the same evidence?" I am certain they both read many of the same sources. Two people can read the same document, however, and interpret it very differently. One very obvious example of this is the way the two historians handled Columbus's religious motivations. When Columbus talked about his desire to evangelize the natives, Marshall took him very seriously; Marshall can identify with such desires and is willing to take Columbus at face value at this point. Zinn, on the other hand, does not take these same statements at face value; he dismisses them by saying, "He was full of religious talk. . . " (p. 3), implying that Columbus was not sincere. Although Zinn seems to be skeptical that anyone could be sincerely religiously motivated, he does not trust Columbus because, more importantly, Columbus was a scoundrel. So, although both authors look at the same words penned by Columbus, one believes him and the other does not. And neither can prove that his judgment on this matter is correct. When the two historians look at document after document through their different perspectives, the end result is two entirely different pictures of Columbus.
I hope you can see from these two versions of Columbus's discovery of America that history is much more subjective than we generally realize. Every historian tells a different story, each one largely reflecting the historian's own world view. This raises the awkward question, "Can we learn from history?" If every historian reads his own world view into the past, can the past ever break through and speak to us?
The answer is "yes." The past speaks in a voice audible to those who want to hear and to listen attentively. Establishing what really happened at a given point in history is much like establishing the guilt or innocence of an accused criminal in a courtroom trial. Evidence is presented and witnesses testify. Taken as a whole, the evidence is full of inconsistencies and inexplicable gaps, and so a sorting process begins. Some witnesses are suspected of being liars; their testimony is handled with suspicion. Some apparent contradictions are found to be resolvable. The gaps are filled with plausible conjecture. As this sorting process continues, a coherent picture begins to emerge. That emerging picture, however, will be one of two very different kinds. If in the course of this sorting procedure we have held tightly to our preconceived notions, the final picture will be a reaffirmation of those prejudices. If, however, we have been willing to jettison beliefs that did not seem to have adequate factual support, we may have our initial suspicions rejected.
Can we learn from history? The short answer is yes-if we are willing to. But if we do not sincerely seek to learn from the past, we will learn nothing. This is true of professional historians as well as students.
CONCLUSION
History is important because it helps us to understand the present. If we will listen to what history has to say, we can come to a sound understanding of the past that will tell us much about the problems we now face. If we refuse to listen to history, we will find ourselves fabricating a past that reinforces our understanding of current problems.
People tend to underestimate the power of history. If I want to convince you that capitalism is evil, I could simply tell you that capitalism is evil, but this is likely to have little effect on the skeptical. This frontal attack is too crude. If, however, I disinterestedly tell you the history of capitalism, nonchalantly listing all the atrocities attributable to it, I am much more likely to achieve my goal. I can leave a lasting impression that will evoke revulsion at the mere mention of the word.
History teaches values. If it is true history, it teaches true values; if it is pseudo-history, it teaches false values. The history taught to our children is playing a role in shaping their values and beliefs-a much greater role than we may suspect.
NOTES: 1 Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (Harper, New York: 1980), 8. 2 Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and Glory: Did God have a plan for America? (Power Books, Old Tappan: 1977). 3 Samuel Eliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Little and Brown: Boston, 1942).
Copyright November 1993 by McKenzie Study Center.
David Crabtree
(www.mckenziestudycenter.org)
History is important. In centuries past this statement would have seemed self-evident. Ancient cultures devoted much time and effort to teaching their children family history. It was thought that the past helps a child understand who he is. Modern society, however, has turned its back on the past. We live in a time of rapid change, a time of progress. We prefer to define ourselves in terms of where we are going, not where we come from. Our ancestors hold no importance for us. They lived in times so different from our own that they are incapable of shedding light on our experience. Man is so much smarter now than he was even ten years ago that anything from the past is outdated and irrelevant to us. Therefore the past, even the relatively recent past, is, in the minds of most of us, enshrouded by mists and only very vaguely perceived. Our ignorance of the past is not the result of a lack of information, but of indifference. We do not believe that history matters.
But history does matter. It has been said that he who controls the past controls the future. Our view of history shapes the way we view the present, and therefore it dictates what answers we offer for existing problems. Let me offer a few examples to indicate how this might be true.
One of my children comes running up to me, "Papa, Stefan hit me!" Another child comes close on the heels of the first, "I did not. You hit me!" As a parent I have to determine what happened. Usually I have to sort through conflicting testimony to get to the truth of the matter. Part of my information is my knowledge of human beings in general; part of my information is the knowledge I have assembled over the lifetimes of these particular children. All of this is essentially history. It is knowledge about the past. I must have a good understanding of the past in order to know how to deal wisely with these children in the present. Any punishment or chastisement will depend on my reconstruction of what actually happened. The children realize this, and thus they present very selective histories of the event in an attempt to dictate my response. In these kinds of situations, children very clearly understand that history matters.
When you go into a doctor's office for the first time, you invariably have to fill out an information sheet that asks about your medical history. Some of these forms are very detailed, asking questions that require information from rarely accessed memory banks. Why does a doctor ask these questions? The doctor is trying to construct an accurate picture of your state of health. Your health is heavily influenced by the past. Your heredity, past behaviors, past experiences are all important determinants and clues to your present condition. Whenever you return to the doctor, he or she pulls out a file which contains all the notes from past visits. This file is a history of your health. Doctors understand very clearly that the past matters.
Some of you might be thinking that these examples are not very compelling because they both deal with the very recent past-they are not what we think of when we think of history. Let me give one final example that is more to the point. In 1917 the Communists took control of Russia. They began to exercise control over how the history of their country ought to be told. They depicted the tsar as oppressive and cruel. The leaders of the revolution, on the other hand, were portrayed in a very positive light. The Communist government insisted that these leaders, and in particular Lenin, understood more clearly than any one else what Russia needed and what course of action the government ought to follow.
According to the official history, Lenin made no mistakes and he passed his virtually infallible understanding on to the other leaders of the party. The official history presented Lenin and Stalin as kind, compassionate, wise, nearly divine leaders. Consequently, difficulties that people in the Soviet Union experienced were all attributable to capitalism. The nation's economic backwardness, the need for a massive military and tight security, and domestic crime were all ultimately tied to the influence of capitalistic countries. This is the perspective of history that was taught to Soviet children for half a century.
In the seventies and eighties, several things happened to shake people's confidence in this view of history. One was the publication of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. This work was the product of years of historical research by the author. He interviewed scores of prisoners and did extensive research to chronicle the genesis and development of the chain of labor camps that dotted the Soviet Union. His book described the cruelty and injustice of the system in great detail; but most important of all, he was able to show that Lenin and Stalin were active and knowing participants in the formation of this brutal institution.
Solzhenitsyn's depiction of these leaders was incompatible with the official history. And if the official history was wrong, the legitimacy and justification for Soviet rule was all brought into question. In 1979, a Soviet emigre, after having read Gulag Archipelago, told me, "The impact of this book will be far more devastating to Soviet power than an atomic bomb." I am convinced that one of the reasons the Soviet Union disintegrated is because people began to doubt the official history. Ask Gorbachev if history matters.
I. A DEFINITION OF HISTORY
So history matters, but what is history? My advisor in graduate school had a simple definition that I have grown to appreciate: "History is a story about the past that is significant and true." This simple definition contains two words packed with meaning which must be understood in order to understand history.
A. Significance
The first word is "significant." No one could record everything that is true about an event in the past: temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, soil type, molecules bouncing around, hearts beating, lungs inflating and deflating, and so forth-there is no end to what could be listed. History is the process of simplifying. Of all that could be said about an event, what is most important or most significant? The goal of history is to tell a story about the past which captures the essence of an event while omitting superfluous details.
Significance is determined by the historian. The historian sorts through the evidence and presents only that which, given his particular world view, is significant. What a historian finds significant is not entirely a personal choice; it is largely shaped by his training and his colleagues. In order for a historian to have his works published, he has to receive the approval of his fellow historians. Therefore, the community of historians has a large say in deciding what about the past is significant. But historians are just as much a part of society as anyone else, and we are all greatly influenced by those around us. As a result, the community of historians tends to share the same notion of significance as is held by society as a whole. Therefore, historians tend to tell stories which reflect the dominant values of the society in which they live.
This leads to a curious feature of historical narrative: the past is fixed-no one can change what happened-but as the values of society change, the historians' depiction of the past changes also. It has been argued that history tells us more about the time in which it is written than the time about which it is written. I recently did some reading about the history of homosexuality. For a couple of decades in the middle of the nineteenth century, historians viewed homosexuality as an immoral act and consequently looked at the prevalence of homosexuality in ancient Greece as a sign of its moral decadence and a precursor to the collapse of Greek civilization. Historians then applied this same analysis to Roman society. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, society began to question the existence of moral absolutes. As a result, historians ceased to give credence to any connection between moral behavior and the health of a civilization. Therefore, the search for a connection between moral decline and the fall of empire ceased to hold any interest and was abandoned. Instead, historians, interested in telling the story of the growth and development of liberty, saw the open practice of homosexuality as a good thing, in that it demonstrated greater social tolerance and, therefore, increased personal liberty. Notice that the first view (based on moral absolutes) was not disproved; it was simply abandoned due to a change in the values of society. This, in turn, produced a change in the way historians depicted the past. The past does not change, but history changes with every generation.
B. Truth
I said that history is a story about the past that is significant and true. I have talked about the word "significant"; now I want to talk about the word "true." What does it mean to say that a historical account is true? Most modern historians would claim there is no absolute truth. This would imply there is no basis for saying that one historical account is true and another one false. I know of no historian, however, who actually operates this way in practice. Most historians use the word "true" to mean any perspective well supported by facts.
The tricky thing is that every historian uses facts to build his case. Rarely does a historian consciously distort the facts; and although minor factual errors are common, they seldom undermine the overall presentation. But even though most histories are built on facts, the histories can be very different, even contradictory, because falsehoods can be constructed solely with facts.
My parents once put in a new front lawn. Soon after it was planted, my mother discovered bicycle tracks running across the yard. She had a pretty good idea who had done it, so she asked this boy if he knew anything about the tracks. He said, "Yes, I do. My sister's bike did it." This is a wonderfully crafted statement. It is built on facts, but it is designed to create a false impression. We often refer to such statements as "half-truths." For history to be true, it must not only be based on facts, it must present those facts in a balanced, well- proportioned manner. Too often histories are half-truths.
I need to point out quickly that most historians do not intentionally distort history to serve their purposes, as this boy did. The process is much less malicious, yet far more insidious. Historians interpret evidence through the eyes of their own world view. This is natural; we could not expect anything else. This has far-reaching consequences, however. Take, for example, a historian studying the story of Jonathan and David. If all of the historian's close same-sex relationships have been sexual, he will be unable to conceive of Jonathan and David's relationship as being anything else. Thus he will conclude that David and Jonathan were homosexuals. Given his experience, he can not imagine any other interpretation of the evidence. Therefore, the accuracy of an historian's version of past events depends greatly on the soundness of his world view.
I suspect this is contrary to most people's image of history. People generally think of history as a very objective discipline. This perspective dominated the field about a century ago, and most of us were led to believe this in the course of our education. We were taught that objective historians began to piece together a picture of the past, and every new generation of historians discovers new facts which alter our understanding of the past. With each generation, therefore, we get closer to the truth of history, but these refinements do not significantly alter the assured findings of science.
This perspective would find few adherents today. It has become painfully obvious that no researcher is a blank slate. We all start with some preconceived notions about what is true and what is not. It should not and can not be otherwise. All history is, in this sense, biased.
For the reasons I have listed, history is a value-laden discipline. Howard Zinn, the author of a book to which we will return in a minute, makes the following statement: It is not that the historian can avoid emphasis of some facts and not of others. This is as natural to him as to the mapmaker, who, in order to produce a usable drawing for practical purposes, must first flatten and distort the shape of the earth, then choose out of the bewildering mass of geographic information those things needed for the purpose of this or that particular map.
My argument cannot be against selection, simplification, emphasis, which are inevitable for both cartographers and historians. But the mapmaker's distortion is a technical necessity for a common purpose shared by all people who need maps. The historian's distortion is more than technical, it is ideological; it is released into a world of contending interests, where any chosen emphasis supports (whether the historian means to or not) some kind of interest, whether economic or political or racial or national or sexual." (Note 1)
II. "HISTORY" EXAMPLES
History, by its very nature, does more than tell us about the past; it argues for an ideology a world view. 1992 gave us an excellent opportunity to see a struggle between different groups each trying to claim history in support of their cause. It was the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing on American soil. Columbus, who had long enjoyed the status of hero, came under heavy criticism. This historical event and the versions of history it generated are a very good example of what I have been talking about. I would like to look at two descriptions of this event and show how ideology infuses both accounts. One account is found in The Light and the Glory by Peter Marshall and David Manuel. (Note 2) The other is from A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
Both of these books were written at the end of the 1970s. For a quarter of a century prior to this time, the most noted historian of the life of Columbus was Samuel Eliot Morison. He wrote several books about Columbus, but the most widely read was Christopher Columbus, Mariner.(Note 3) Until the late seventies, Morison's depiction of Columbus was considered the most authoritative. Since both Marshall's and Zinn's books were written to correct Morison's presentation, let me first describe Morison's perspective.
A. Morison: Columbus, the mariner
Morison was a naval officer (so I have heard) turned historian. His love of the sea and appreciation for good seamanship is obvious in his history. Morison has enormous respect and admiration for Columbus as a sailor and navigator. This and this alone was Columbus's greatness. At a time when all of Europe was trying to find economical routes to Asia, Columbus was convinced that Asia could easily be reached by sailing west across the Atlantic. Most scholars of the time believed that the world was round and that Asia could be reached by sailing west, but they thought it was too far. Columbus argued that the scholarly opinion greatly overestimated the distance and that Asia was only about a three week voyage. As it turned out, the scholars were right; Asia was too far away, but fortunately for Columbus, America was just about where he thought Asia would be.
Columbus undertook the trip to prove that he was right. His superior sailing skills enabled the expedition to reach America. Columbus thought he had landed in Asia, and he spent the rest of his life trying to prove he was correct. This drove him to be in constant search for gold and more geographical knowledge: since Asia was known to be rich in gold, a vast amount of gold would suggest that the land was, in fact, Asia; and since Marco Polo had written about the geography of Asia, Columbus felt further exploration would demonstrate that he had found the land Marco Polo described. Columbus's constant exploration and search for gold led him to make some poor decisions regarding the administration of the lands he discovered; his negligence resulted in brutal treatment of the native population. Although Morison does not excuse Columbus's negligence, he does not want this flaw to detract from our appreciation for Columbus's skills as a seaman.
B. Peter Marshall: Columbus, the tool of God
Peter Marshall has a very different perspective. He sees Columbus as a key figure in God's grand plan to establish a very special country, unique in the history of the world. Just as God selected Israel to be a special nation which He promised to bless as long as the people were obedient to His commandments, God singled out the United States for a similar purpose: Could it be that we Americans, as a people, were meant to be a "light to lighten the Gentiles" (Luke 2:23)-a demonstration to the world of how God intended His children to live together under the Lordship of Christ? Was our vast divergence from this blueprint, after such a promising beginning, the reason why we now seem to be heading into a new dark age? (p. 19)
Marshall's book, therefore, chronicles the indications of God's special guidance of key individuals in the history of the United States. Columbus is one of those individuals. Marshall sees the hand of God behind Columbus's voyage from its very inception. He quotes from one of Columbus's writings:
It was the Lord who put into my mind ( I could feel his hand upon me) the fact that it would be possible to sail from here to the Indies. All who heard of my project rejected it with laughter, ridiculing me. There is no question that the inspiration was from the Holy Spirit, because He comforted me with rays of marvelous inspiration from the Holy Scripture.... (p. 17)
Marshall is very sensitive to indications of God's divine guidance and protection for Columbus's venture and Columbus's personal relationship with God. Marshall begins by pointing out that Columbus's first name is Christopher, which means "Christ-bearer." He sees this as significant because one of the main reasons Columbus gave for wanting to find Asia was to evangelize its inhabitants. Columbus's name was, therefore, prophetic.
Marshall describes the difficulty Columbus had in finding a sponsor for his expedition. He tried but failed to get the king of Portugal to finance his trip. He got nowhere with the king of England. He approached the king and queen of Spain, but they kept putting him off. Having given up on the Spanish monarchs and at a point of desperation, he was about to leave for France to ask the French king to finance his expedition when the queen of Spain had a change of heart. Marshall points out that the queen's confessor, who was the head of the monastery where Columbus was staying, was instrumental in convincing the queen of the value of the enterprise. Marshall imagines what might have transpired between the monk and Columbus while Columbus was in despair over his inability to find a sponsor.:
But in the cool stone cloister of the monastery, we can almost hear Father Perez as he might have reminded Christopher that all of the things which had tormented him-the elusive recognition, wealth and position which he wanted so desperately and which always seemed just out of reach-these were the world's inducements, not the things that concerned the Lord Jesus. (p. 34)
[Let me take this opportunity to make a short digression. I do not think Marshall's book is accepted as a serious work of history. One of the reasons is because the author occasionally inserts these imaginary scenes for which he has absolutely no evidence. I would like to point out, however, that this criticism is a little unfair. The mind of any historian is constantly at work trying to imagine the event under investigation. The evidence is always less than complete, and the historian tries to fill in the missing pieces, by drawing on his knowledge of reality and general human experience to extrapolate what must have happened. So whereas Marshall has actually recorded his imaginings, and serious historians do not, we must nevertheless acknowledge that all historians use their imaginations to fill out the picture, and this affects the way they tell the story.]
Marshall describes Columbus's first crossing as a major test of Columbus's faith in God. Early on, the voyage went extremely well, but as the time went on with no land in sight, the crew became very fearful. On October 9th, there was almost a mutiny, but Columbus reached an agreement to sail west three more days before turning back. For the next three days, the sailing conditions improved dramatically, and on the third day, at the end of the day, they finally sighted land. Marshall's description of this voyage puts less emphasis on Columbus's skills as a seaman and great emphasis on the indications of providential guidance. From Marshall's perspective, Columbus's skill was just one more instance of God's blessing on the venture. Of infinitely more importance to Marshall is how Columbus responded to this test of his faith, for the success or failure of the mission hinged on this.
Marshall concluded that Columbus responded well to the test of his faith while at sea, but after Columbus reached America he made two serious errors. The first mistake was establishing a precedent for mistreatment of the Indians. While Columbus generally treated the Indians fairly well, he did them one very serious injustice-he forcibly took several Indians back to Spain with him to become interpreters. This set a very bad precedent for the treatment of Indians, which became much more brutal with later explorers. Marshall holds Columbus partially responsible for this. The other error Columbus committed was to embark on a search for gold. From Marshall's perspective, Columbus became preoccupied with a thirst for gold and this corrupted him:
Gold-one can see the hand of the Devil here. Unable to overcome the faith of the Christ-bearer by sowing fear and dissension in the hearts of his men or by paralyzing him with despair, Satan had failed to keep the Light of Christ from establishing a beachhead in practically the only part of the world in which he still reigned unchallenged. So he now moved to destroy the army of holy invaders from within their ranks. And he chose the one instrument which almost never failed: the love of money. (p. 42)
Behind the scenes, Marshall sees a grand conflict between God and the godly and Satan and his forces. Gold is the tool Satan used to distract Columbus from his divinely appointed mission.
Columbus's thirst for gold and his rejection of God's mission for him caused God to afflict Columbus with a series of tragedies. While Columbus went to Spain to report his find, he left a small number of Spaniards in the New World. He returned to America only to discover that these men had been massacred by the Indians who were exasperated by the Spaniards' cruel, greed-motivated treatment. The men he brought with him on the second trip were even more consumed with a desire for gold; they not only fought with Indians for gold, they fought with each other. When word of the chaos and maladministration reached the king and queen, they sent a new governor and had Columbus returned from his second trip in chains. The king and queen freed him from his chains, but he was nevertheless humiliated. Later, he was afflicted with grandiose illusions of being called by God to lead a crusade against the infidels in the Holy Land. After several years, Columbus returned to America, but now he, too, was obsessed with desire for gold. He finally found a major deposit of gold, but by this time Columbus was almost out of touch with reality. Marshall writes: "It is doubtful that he who does what he will in the world is going to be used to bring many souls to Paradise." This particular narrative goes on to reveal just how far off-center Columbus's thinking had wandered: "For by the same sort of weird, convoluted reasoning that earmarks Gnosticism and so much of occult metaphysics, Columbus arrived at a monumental conclusion: he was convinced that he had found King Solomon's mines!" (p. 65) This dementia was divine punishment for Columbus's refusal to look constantly to God for deliverance from his difficulties.
Finding a major source of gold opened a Pandora's box of problems. It brought the conquistadors to America. These men inflicted countless atrocities on the native population, further proof of divine judgment on Columbus and his enterprise.
According to Marshall, God had a glorious role for Columbus to play in the history of mankind, but Columbus was distracted by gold and nearly driven mad because he refused to trust God. Marshall speculates, however, that Columbus, on his death bed, was reconciled to God:
The old man brushed away the tears at the corners of his eyes, and perhaps he spoke to God again then, for the first time in a long while. "Father, it is over now, isn't it?" Yes, son, he might have heard in his heart. "Father, I'm afraid I have not done well in carrying the Light of Your Son to the West. I'm sorry. I pray that others will carry the light further." They will. You are forgiven. "It's time now, isn't it?" Yes. (p. 65-66)
C. Howard Zinn: Columbus, the oppressor
Howard Zinn's portrayal of Columbus could scarcely be more different from Marshall's. His presentation is rooted in a very different understanding of the essence and value of history. Zinn is outraged by the traditional practice of telling the history of a nation as though all members of that nation shared the same interests. This illusion of cohesion within a nation hides the reality that every society includes oppressors and the oppressed. Zinn thinks history should tell the story of this all-important struggle, regardless of national divisions. He hopes we might learn from such a history how to help the oppressed successfully rise up against their oppressors.
From this perspective, Columbus is the quintessential oppressor. From the outset of the expedition Columbus was intent on extracting wealth from the native. Zinn demonstrates Columbus's malevolent motives by quoting Columbus's words from the log on the day he first saw the Indians:
They. . . brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned . . . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features . . . They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword; they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane . . . . They would make fine servants . . . With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. (p. 1)
Zinn sees this as evidence that from the very beginning Columbus was eager to assess the exploitability of the native inhabitants. Columbus began to gather information from the natives. He took some of the natives by force for this purpose. The object of his investigation was very focused: "The information that Columbus wanted most was: Where is the gold?" (p. 1). Having this as his primary goal, Columbus had no compunction about treating the Indians cruelly. All the Indians of San Salvador were required to collect a certain amount of gold every three months. Those who failed to do so had their hands cut off. When even these extreme methods failed to squeeze enough gold out of the land, Columbus tried another approach: "When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas." (p. 4). Zinn portrays Columbus as one who would go to any length to extract wealth from the new-found land.
Zinn magnifies our sense of outrage by describing the innocence and nobility of the natives who were so senselessly brutalized. He proves that the Indian culture treated its women well, using the following quotation from a Spanish priest who accompanied Columbus:
Marriage laws are non-existent: men and women alike choose their mates and leave them as they please, without offense, jealousy or anger. They multiply in great abundance; pregnant women work to the last minute and give birth almost painlessly; up the next day, they bathe in the river and are as clean and healthy as before giving birth. If they tire of their men, they give themselves abortions with herbs that force stillbirths, covering their shameful parts with leaves or cotton cloth; although on the whole, Indian men and women look upon total nakedness with as much casualness as we look upon a man's head or at his hands. (p. 5).
Zinn also notes the communal and non-capitalistic nature of Indian society: They live in large communal bell-shaped buildings, housing up to 600 people at one time. . . . They lack all manner of commerce, neither buying nor selling, and rely exclusively on their natural environment for maintenance. They are extremely generous with their possessions and by the same token covet the possessions of their friends and expect the same degree of liberality. (p. 5)
From Zinn's perspective, these qualities of Indian society made it superior to European society; and yet the Europeans brutalized and, in some cases, exterminated whole tribes in the name of Christianity, civilization, and progress. Columbus was but the first of many such oppressors.
III. CAN WE LEARN FROM HISTORY?
Very briefly I have outlined two different stories of Columbus. You are probably asking yourself, "How can the accounts be so different? Didn't they read the same evidence?" I am certain they both read many of the same sources. Two people can read the same document, however, and interpret it very differently. One very obvious example of this is the way the two historians handled Columbus's religious motivations. When Columbus talked about his desire to evangelize the natives, Marshall took him very seriously; Marshall can identify with such desires and is willing to take Columbus at face value at this point. Zinn, on the other hand, does not take these same statements at face value; he dismisses them by saying, "He was full of religious talk. . . " (p. 3), implying that Columbus was not sincere. Although Zinn seems to be skeptical that anyone could be sincerely religiously motivated, he does not trust Columbus because, more importantly, Columbus was a scoundrel. So, although both authors look at the same words penned by Columbus, one believes him and the other does not. And neither can prove that his judgment on this matter is correct. When the two historians look at document after document through their different perspectives, the end result is two entirely different pictures of Columbus.
I hope you can see from these two versions of Columbus's discovery of America that history is much more subjective than we generally realize. Every historian tells a different story, each one largely reflecting the historian's own world view. This raises the awkward question, "Can we learn from history?" If every historian reads his own world view into the past, can the past ever break through and speak to us?
The answer is "yes." The past speaks in a voice audible to those who want to hear and to listen attentively. Establishing what really happened at a given point in history is much like establishing the guilt or innocence of an accused criminal in a courtroom trial. Evidence is presented and witnesses testify. Taken as a whole, the evidence is full of inconsistencies and inexplicable gaps, and so a sorting process begins. Some witnesses are suspected of being liars; their testimony is handled with suspicion. Some apparent contradictions are found to be resolvable. The gaps are filled with plausible conjecture. As this sorting process continues, a coherent picture begins to emerge. That emerging picture, however, will be one of two very different kinds. If in the course of this sorting procedure we have held tightly to our preconceived notions, the final picture will be a reaffirmation of those prejudices. If, however, we have been willing to jettison beliefs that did not seem to have adequate factual support, we may have our initial suspicions rejected.
Can we learn from history? The short answer is yes-if we are willing to. But if we do not sincerely seek to learn from the past, we will learn nothing. This is true of professional historians as well as students.
CONCLUSION
History is important because it helps us to understand the present. If we will listen to what history has to say, we can come to a sound understanding of the past that will tell us much about the problems we now face. If we refuse to listen to history, we will find ourselves fabricating a past that reinforces our understanding of current problems.
People tend to underestimate the power of history. If I want to convince you that capitalism is evil, I could simply tell you that capitalism is evil, but this is likely to have little effect on the skeptical. This frontal attack is too crude. If, however, I disinterestedly tell you the history of capitalism, nonchalantly listing all the atrocities attributable to it, I am much more likely to achieve my goal. I can leave a lasting impression that will evoke revulsion at the mere mention of the word.
History teaches values. If it is true history, it teaches true values; if it is pseudo-history, it teaches false values. The history taught to our children is playing a role in shaping their values and beliefs-a much greater role than we may suspect.
NOTES: 1 Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (Harper, New York: 1980), 8. 2 Peter Marshall and David Manuel, The Light and Glory: Did God have a plan for America? (Power Books, Old Tappan: 1977). 3 Samuel Eliot Morison, Christopher Columbus, Mariner (Little and Brown: Boston, 1942).
Copyright November 1993 by McKenzie Study Center.
What History Is by Prof. Ann Muslow (www.ac.uk)
How do historians, at least in the anglophone West, make history? By that I mean what consequences flow from the fact that all the events and processes in 'the past', are 'turned' by the historian into that narrative we call history? The debate on this 'narrative' or 'linguistic turn' - the recognition that history is a narrative about the past written in the here and now, rather than some distanced mirror of it - has been a significant issue within the profession for several years. What are some of the consequences that flow from this view of history as a narrative about the past constructed by the historian in the present?
Much of the debate on viewing history, as the narrative construction of the historian, is whether this judgment distorts what history is, what historians do, and it reflects upon the objectivity and truth-seeking nature of the exercise. As a writer of history it is my conclusion that the linguistic turn - the essential element in the postmodern challenge to a view of history founded solely on the empirical-analytical model - is no threat to the study of the past. This is not because it does not fundamentally change how we think about history - I think it can - but it offers the opportunity to redefine what we do and broaden the scope of our activities.
How do historians gain historical knowledge? It is assumed in every historical narrative that form always follows content. What this means is that the historical narrative must always be transparent in referring to what actually happened according to the evidence. As Voltaire said, and most conventionally trained historians might still agree, 'too many metaphors are hurtful...to truth, by saying more or less than the thing itself' (quoted in White 1973: 53). To get at the thing itself, objectivity is the aim and this demands the referential language of historians. With this aim and this tool we can infer the realities beneath the misleading world of appearances. To the Western modernist Enlightenment-inspired mind objectivity and the historical narrative must remain compatible.
The nineteenth century European critique of that vision, particularly in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche, moved beyond how knowledge is derived, to concentrate more how it is represented, and the effects the process of representation has upon the status and nature of our knowledge. This debate about knowing and telling within the European-American discipline of history continued into the last century in the work of many historian-philosophers: initially Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood then, among many others, Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel, Patrick Gardiner, and later Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Hayden White.
The study of the past has never been static. The practice of history has witnessed many shifts and turns in the way it is thought and undertaken. Since the 1960s, for example, the discipline of history has experienced a 'social science turn', a 'cliometric' or 'statistics turn', a 'women's history turn', a 'cultural history turn' and so on. These are not novelties that have not come and gone. Each has remained a significant way for historians to reflect upon and write about change over time. But, in all this one thing has apparently not altered. This is the epistemology of history. In spite of this rich variety of methodological developments or shifts and turns of interest, the foundational way historians 'know' things about the past' has been unchallenged. Despite the use of statistics, the new themes (society, women, gender, culture) and the application of fresh concepts and theories, there remain two steady points in the historian's cosmos: empiricism and rational analysis. As the product of the European eighteenth-century Enlightenment the empirical-analytical model has become the epistemology for undertaking the study of the past.
However, since the 1960s and 1970s something has changed at this epistemological level. Doubts about the empirical-analytical as the privileged path to historical knowing have emerged. This has not happened in history alone, of course. In all the arts, humanities, social sciences, and even the physical and life sciences the question is increasingly being put, how can we be sure that empiricism and inference really does get us close to the true meaning of the past? In history how can we trust our sources - not because they are forgeries or missing, but because of the claims empiricism is forced to make about our ability not only to find the data, but also just as importantly represent their meaning accurately? It is not an abstract or scholastic philosophical question to ask, where does meaning come from in history? Is it the past itself? Is its meaning simply ushered in by the historian. Is the historian merely the midwife to the truth of the past? Or is the historian unavoidably implicated in the creation of a meaning for the past. Does the past contain one true meaning or several? Is there one story to be discovered or several that can be legitimately generated? I think most historians today would agree on the latter analysis. The difference comes over the consequences of that implication, and what it does for truth. In other words is it the historian who provides the truth of the past as she represents it rather than as she finds it? This is the essence of the postmodern challenge, the turn to the narrative-linguistic and its implications.
What makes this turn more significant than the others is that it demonstrates a deeper change in our views concerning the conditions under which we create historical knowledge. In other words it has challenged history not with new topics or methods as such, but by confronting the discipline's empirical-analytical foundations. The linguistic turn in history, of course, continues to rely on the empirical-analytical model, but it extends our epistemology to include its narrative-linguistic representation, the form we give to the past within our texts, and it accepts history as an essentially literary activity, one that is self-evidently authored. The emphasis now is less on history as a process of objective discovery and report but, rather, accepts its unavoidably fictive nature, that is, its literary constructedness. By this I mean recognising the figurative assumptions that underpin authorial activity in creating the text and which are already (in a pre-empirical sense) and necessarily brought to the historical field, often determining the selection of evidence and its most likely meaning. This is a process that is revealed by the complex analysis of authorial activity.
Postmodern history, because it is a literary as much as an empirical project, recognises it cannot escape its authorship. In other words, the past is not just re-interpreted according to new evidence but also through self-conscious acts of re-writing as well. Thus it is that history and the past cannot coincide to the extent that the former, whether we like it or not, is principally a narrative about the latter. Arguably there are no original centres of meaning to be found outside the narrative-linguistic. Data in and of itself does not have given meaning. Though empirical and analytical, postmodern history deliberately draws our attention to the conditions under which we create knowledge, in the case of history its nature as a series of forms, or turns perhaps, of a realist literature? In a very real sense the postmodern challenge forces us to face up to the highly complex question of how we know things about the past and what we, as moral beings, do as a result.
In other words, it extends the remit of history to include the historian's pre-narrative assumptions and how we translate those assumptions figuratively as we construct our strategies of narrative explanation. Postmodern historians thus ask many fresh questions. Are facts best thought of as events under a description? Is all data ultimately textual and, if so, what are its implications? Should history be written primarily according to literary rules and, if so, what are they? What is the significant difference between literary and figurative speech in history and how does it create historical meaning? How do we distinguish the historical referent of a discourse and its constructed, i.e., its ideological, meaning? Can history ever exist beyond discourse? And the very big question, is history what happened, or what historians tell us happened? All these have to be addressed when we do history, to ignore them is to do only half the job.
Much of the debate on viewing history, as the narrative construction of the historian, is whether this judgment distorts what history is, what historians do, and it reflects upon the objectivity and truth-seeking nature of the exercise. As a writer of history it is my conclusion that the linguistic turn - the essential element in the postmodern challenge to a view of history founded solely on the empirical-analytical model - is no threat to the study of the past. This is not because it does not fundamentally change how we think about history - I think it can - but it offers the opportunity to redefine what we do and broaden the scope of our activities.
How do historians gain historical knowledge? It is assumed in every historical narrative that form always follows content. What this means is that the historical narrative must always be transparent in referring to what actually happened according to the evidence. As Voltaire said, and most conventionally trained historians might still agree, 'too many metaphors are hurtful...to truth, by saying more or less than the thing itself' (quoted in White 1973: 53). To get at the thing itself, objectivity is the aim and this demands the referential language of historians. With this aim and this tool we can infer the realities beneath the misleading world of appearances. To the Western modernist Enlightenment-inspired mind objectivity and the historical narrative must remain compatible.
The nineteenth century European critique of that vision, particularly in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche, moved beyond how knowledge is derived, to concentrate more how it is represented, and the effects the process of representation has upon the status and nature of our knowledge. This debate about knowing and telling within the European-American discipline of history continued into the last century in the work of many historian-philosophers: initially Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood then, among many others, Carl Hempel, Ernest Nagel, Patrick Gardiner, and later Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Hayden White.
The study of the past has never been static. The practice of history has witnessed many shifts and turns in the way it is thought and undertaken. Since the 1960s, for example, the discipline of history has experienced a 'social science turn', a 'cliometric' or 'statistics turn', a 'women's history turn', a 'cultural history turn' and so on. These are not novelties that have not come and gone. Each has remained a significant way for historians to reflect upon and write about change over time. But, in all this one thing has apparently not altered. This is the epistemology of history. In spite of this rich variety of methodological developments or shifts and turns of interest, the foundational way historians 'know' things about the past' has been unchallenged. Despite the use of statistics, the new themes (society, women, gender, culture) and the application of fresh concepts and theories, there remain two steady points in the historian's cosmos: empiricism and rational analysis. As the product of the European eighteenth-century Enlightenment the empirical-analytical model has become the epistemology for undertaking the study of the past.
However, since the 1960s and 1970s something has changed at this epistemological level. Doubts about the empirical-analytical as the privileged path to historical knowing have emerged. This has not happened in history alone, of course. In all the arts, humanities, social sciences, and even the physical and life sciences the question is increasingly being put, how can we be sure that empiricism and inference really does get us close to the true meaning of the past? In history how can we trust our sources - not because they are forgeries or missing, but because of the claims empiricism is forced to make about our ability not only to find the data, but also just as importantly represent their meaning accurately? It is not an abstract or scholastic philosophical question to ask, where does meaning come from in history? Is it the past itself? Is its meaning simply ushered in by the historian. Is the historian merely the midwife to the truth of the past? Or is the historian unavoidably implicated in the creation of a meaning for the past. Does the past contain one true meaning or several? Is there one story to be discovered or several that can be legitimately generated? I think most historians today would agree on the latter analysis. The difference comes over the consequences of that implication, and what it does for truth. In other words is it the historian who provides the truth of the past as she represents it rather than as she finds it? This is the essence of the postmodern challenge, the turn to the narrative-linguistic and its implications.
What makes this turn more significant than the others is that it demonstrates a deeper change in our views concerning the conditions under which we create historical knowledge. In other words it has challenged history not with new topics or methods as such, but by confronting the discipline's empirical-analytical foundations. The linguistic turn in history, of course, continues to rely on the empirical-analytical model, but it extends our epistemology to include its narrative-linguistic representation, the form we give to the past within our texts, and it accepts history as an essentially literary activity, one that is self-evidently authored. The emphasis now is less on history as a process of objective discovery and report but, rather, accepts its unavoidably fictive nature, that is, its literary constructedness. By this I mean recognising the figurative assumptions that underpin authorial activity in creating the text and which are already (in a pre-empirical sense) and necessarily brought to the historical field, often determining the selection of evidence and its most likely meaning. This is a process that is revealed by the complex analysis of authorial activity.
Postmodern history, because it is a literary as much as an empirical project, recognises it cannot escape its authorship. In other words, the past is not just re-interpreted according to new evidence but also through self-conscious acts of re-writing as well. Thus it is that history and the past cannot coincide to the extent that the former, whether we like it or not, is principally a narrative about the latter. Arguably there are no original centres of meaning to be found outside the narrative-linguistic. Data in and of itself does not have given meaning. Though empirical and analytical, postmodern history deliberately draws our attention to the conditions under which we create knowledge, in the case of history its nature as a series of forms, or turns perhaps, of a realist literature? In a very real sense the postmodern challenge forces us to face up to the highly complex question of how we know things about the past and what we, as moral beings, do as a result.
In other words, it extends the remit of history to include the historian's pre-narrative assumptions and how we translate those assumptions figuratively as we construct our strategies of narrative explanation. Postmodern historians thus ask many fresh questions. Are facts best thought of as events under a description? Is all data ultimately textual and, if so, what are its implications? Should history be written primarily according to literary rules and, if so, what are they? What is the significant difference between literary and figurative speech in history and how does it create historical meaning? How do we distinguish the historical referent of a discourse and its constructed, i.e., its ideological, meaning? Can history ever exist beyond discourse? And the very big question, is history what happened, or what historians tell us happened? All these have to be addressed when we do history, to ignore them is to do only half the job.
History Guides by Steven Kreis (www.historyguide.com)
Welcome to A Student's Guide to the Study of History. I have written this guide as an aid to high school and college students who are either taking history classes or who intend to major in history as undergraduates. The aim of the Guide is quite simple. First, all too often History instructors tend to jump right into the subject matter without first setting the groundwork. Large questions such as: what is history? why study history? or how to write a research essay are often left up to the student to figure out.
Second, the purpose of this site is the empowerment of the student. I must share my knowledge with students rather than hide it as if it were my property only. It's not! Knowledge is power, but only if you have access to it!
In general, the study of history requires certain skills--skills which are somewhat different from those used in other disciplines. Hopefully this Guide will force you to consider those skills as you go about your studies.
Remember, this is only a guide and it is not the only guide available to you. There are several guides which have been published in the past decade but very few have been published on the Internet. (See Patrick Rael's Reading, Writing and Researching for History for a point of comparison.) Given the broad resources -- some excellent, some downright horrible -- that are available on the Internet, it seems to me that the time is right to publish my own thoughts on the study of history --- And these are my thoughts. That much said, let's get down to business.
The Proper Attitude
In History as in life in general, your attitude is everything. In other words, to make your experience with History as enjoyable and worthwhile as possible requires the proper attitude. You have to be able to place yourself in the right frame of mind and that frame of mind is one in which exploration, discovery and self-awareness are integral.
History has always gotten a bad rap in part because what students remember of their experience in history classes is that sort of mindless memorization of facts: dates, events, wars--what I routinely refer to as "the history of kings and queens." This sort of history has its place, I suppose. It does qualify as History, but of a most basic sort. A case in point: go to your local bookstore, go to several in fact, and take a look at what they have on the shelves under history. Unless you are at one of the larger stores like Borders, Barnes & Noble, or at a university bookstore, I'm willing to bet that most of what falls under History is really little more than war. We have a fascination for war--I don't know why. But, the fact remains, that for most people, the study of history means little else than the study of war.
This confuses me! All these facts. All this stuff of history crowding my mind. A number of surveys over the years have pointed to the disturbing fact that Americans don't know history. They don't know their own history. Here is a typical question from one of those surveys: Did the Civil War take place before, or after 1850? Hopefully, you did not need to find your textbook for the answer to that one. But there is a deeper issue here. To know, to have the knowledge, to have committed to memory the simple fact that the Civil War took place after 1850 is, to me relatively unimportant. After all, anyone can learn to memorize, well, anything. Is this history? What have you learned? What I would like to suggest is that you learned a fact--you have obtained knowledge. But, far more important to me is wisdom. Does the knowledge that the Civil War took place after 1850 give you wisdom? Does it make you wiser? Or, are facts and wisdom gained through knowledge two distinct entities?
Some people like to read about war. For these people, it is war that "makes history come alive" (as if it needed any prodding in the first place). Military history is fascinating but, in my opinion, only meaningful (historically) when put into the context of the "other" history that is occurring at the same time. What is that "other" history? Simple. It's the history which explains why that war took place in terms of the economy, culture, diplomacy and perhaps a hundred other variables. In general, most Americans would rather be "entertained" by passively watching a film about war rather than listen to someone talk about the origins and consequences of that war.
So, this much said, what sort of attitude do we need to have when studying history? Well, the first thing is that you should not enter a history class--any history class--looking for answers. The study of history reveals that there is no clear cut answer for anything. Since understanding history is based on individual--and therefore subjective--interpretation, you must decide for yourself what kind of meaning you will attach to the topic. Go into history with an open mind. Don't expect the answer to be presented to you as if written in stone. It's not. History is not a science--it's a form of literature and the historian is little more than a writer of non-fiction.
A number of years ago I was teaching the second part of a western civilization course at a community college. We had just spent four or five lectures running through the French Revolution. The students had heard lectures on the origins of the Revolution, the moderate stage, the radical stage, Robespierre and finally Napoleon. Now it came time to review. Twenty of us sat in a circle and set out to "discuss" the meaning and significance of the French Revolution. Was it successful? Was it a failure? Did the Revolution come as a result of the Age of Enlightenment? Was it a bourgeois revolution? I began the discussion by reviewing the "great days" of the Revolution, events like the Oath of the Tennis Court or the Flight to Varennes and people like Robespierre and so on. So, we eventually got to the point where we were discussing interpretation. Some students spoke up and said the Revolution was a success, others said it was a failure. This went on for ten or fifteen minutes until one student raised her hand and said, plain as day, "Well, which is it? Was it a success or a failure?" She sat in her chair, her pen poised to write...the answer! All I could say was, "Well, what do you think?" I immediately saw a brick wall. She didn't get it. Some of us don't. We build brick walls as a short cut to thinking. "There must be an answer. What is it? I don't want to think. I want to know." So much for wisdom.
You can avoid this trap. It's not that hard. You have to open your eyes, open your mind. Tear down the walls. Study history with a sense of wonder and enjoyment. After all, this "stuff"' is all happening in the past. Study history with a sense of engagement. There ought to be a sense of "what was it like" when you study history. Really good professors will instill this sense of wonder, that is, if they are worth anything at all. More about this later.
I've seen a great many students come and go in my own classes in Western Civilization and European History. And one thing that will help them embrace the proper attitude is that they all get a sense of historical time. Yes, this does mean that you understand what came before this or after that. You must get into the habit, difficult as it might at first seem, of putting things into historical and chronological perspective. You must make yourself aware of historical time. Look at the big picture (Europe 1100-1650) even while you are studying the small one (the Renaissance) or the even smaller one (Florentine diplomacy). You must be able to eventually "image" a timeline in your head so that when your professor rambles on about Dante, Rabelais, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, you'll have an approximate idea of how his discussion might all be tied together. I think that once you get in this habit, your appreciation for history, in a word, your attitude, will begin to show signs of improvement as well.
Another important attribute which may assist in creating the proper attitude is television and film. I mean this seriously. How else can you actually understand a lecture on say, the Black Death of 1347-1351, unless you have some real images in your head? Your textbook will contain the obligatory photographs, of course. And this will help. So too will an instructor who can really instill the terror, uncertainty and anguish of the people at that time. But, I have always found that my memories of watching Ingmar Bergman's film, "The Seventh Seal", has always helped me visualize mid-fourteenth century Europe. Think of all the films you might have seen. Go ahead, do it right now.....do any of them provide you with images of history past? Where else do our images of the past come from?
For instance, up to a certain point in time, my image of World War Two was fashioned by watching Hollywood films, you know, John Wayne, Dana Andrews, Gregory Peck and so on. Americans charging up hills toward victory. The hero, shot in the final scene, asks for a smoke with his dying breath. Blatant or subtle propaganda? You decide. The point is that I grew up with a sort of idealized--mythical--version of war that just does not stand up to the historical record. However, the images remain. "Image" as much as possible.
Here's an example before we pass on to the next section. In my introductory lecture on the Scientific Revolution I ask my students to "image" a scientist. Go ahead. Do the same thing right now. What does a scientist look like? How is the scientist dressed? What does his office look like? Is the scientist a man or a woman? Okay, what did you "image"? I'm almost certain I know what you are seeing because that image of the scientist---wild hair, disorganized, absent-minded, dedicated to truth, unemotional---are all images we've silently digested from Hollywood.
Can you successfully complete a course in history without having the proper attitude? Of course you can. But why take the short cut? Why not make the effort. Rather than go through the motions, make history part of your life. After all, that's exactly what history is--it is your life.
Why Study History?
Let's face it, our first experience with History is that it is a course that we have to take in order to graduate. As a junior and senior high school student we are confronted with American history, state history and perhaps even a general course in western civilization or world history. We didn't have a choice. And the fact that we are forced to take history puts us on the offensive. We begin to build that grandiose brick wall that will prevent us from getting anything important out of history.
The main problem as I see it, is not history itself. The study of history can be fun. But there's only one thing that can make our first experience with history a miserable thing indeed: and that's a poor instructor. I was fortunate. I managed to have a number of excellent history instructors throughout my high school years and this was at a time when I was leaning toward the physical sciences, geology and biology to be exact. I might not have been an excellent history student, but I do remember having excellent history teachers.
Fine. That's my experience. But experience aside, why study history in the first place? What could history offer the business major? The student intending to study web page development? the student taking her first psychology class? or pre-med student? or the lawyer? or the worker on the shop floor? Well, simply stated, everything has a history, whether we like it or not. Even history itself has a history. Try hard as we might, we can't escape the past. We can't let go of the past. And we celebrate the past all the time.
You may have been told that we study history so that we won't repeat the mistakes of the past. This is the wishful thinking school of historical interpretation. It's too clean. If we have learned from the past then over the centuries we ought to have accumulated so much knowledge that things like war, poverty, injustice and immorality ought not to exist. Of course, we've still got a long way to go in this respect.
You may also have heard that everything repeats itself, so if we study the past, we can be sure to know something of the future. I don't hold to this view either. To insist that the study of the past will reveal something of the future is a nice idea, but what I really want to know about is the present. History cannot "tell" the future. History can, on the other hand, reveal all that is the present. So, faced as we are with the question "why study history?" I can only hope to answer by telling you why I study history.
Well first off, by studying history you can study anything for the simple reason that everything has a history: ideas, wars, numbers, races, windsurfing, coal miners, pencils, motherhood and yes, even toilet-training. I first began to appreciate the study of history as an undergraduate studying political philosophy at Boston University. I was pretty keen on Plato, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Locke, Godwin, Marx, Mill and a host of other "greats." But what I soon discovered was that my lack of understanding of history, i.e. the actual historical context in which these writers conceived and executed their theoretical work, made my understanding of their philosophy one-sided. Sure, I knew what they had to say about liberty, or the proletariat, or monarchy or the franchise. But what was the historical environment that gave rise to their ideas? Ideas are not akin to balloons hanging from the ceiling of Clio's den, waiting to be retrieved by a Marx, a Mill or a Plato. Ideas have a history. They undergo a process of development. They change, are modified, are distributed or are forgotten only to reappear years, decades or perhaps even centuries later.
Once I realized this fact it was quite natural that I turn my attention to history itself. And why not? I could still study Marx or Mill or Plato. Only this time I could do it from the ground up, so to speak. This sort of approach makes me better able to visualize history in a different way. It gives some sense of "pastness" to the past.
But why do I bother? What's the point? Well, for me, it's a Socratic issue. Socrates was a man of knowledge but not that much knowledge. As a freshman in high school you probably knew more than Socrates. But, Socrates was a wise man. He had wisdom because he knew only one thing: that he knew nothing. His "job," so to speak, was to question the Athenian youth. It was not enough to know something. You had to know why you knew it. And this, of course, brought him to the greatest question of all: what is knowledge? What can we know? Well, for Socrates, again, his knowledge consisted in the realization that he knew nothing. This Socratic irony leaves us rather high and dry but I think there is a greater issue at stake here.
For Socrates, perhaps the highest virtue can be summed up in the phrase, "Know thyself." In other words, of all the things in the phenomenal world, there is not one so important as yourself. To know yourself means to be aware of what it is that makes you who you are. And in this respect, the one thing which reveals this knowledge is history. But people do not live alone, they live in society. And it is in society that the individual comes into contact with other individuals, all of whom are on the same quest, in varying degrees. So, for Socrates, knowledge of self does not hinge upon reflection or introspection, but conversation, hence the Socratic dialogue.
The Socratic dialogue implies that instructor and student meet on an equal footing. Dialogue means conversation between two or more people. And what is the point of Socratic dialogue? Improvement. Self-improvement of the instructor and self-improvement of the student.
So why do I study history? or why do I teach history? Well, for me it's a form of selfishness. I wish to improve myself. And by improving myself I also improve others. This classical pedagogical method is called the Socratic method. If your instructor isn't at least familiar with it, then I'm afraid your historical education is going to suffer as a result.
Can you learn history without the Socratic dialogue as your guide? Yes, it can be done. All I am trying to suggest here is that your experience with history will be a much richer one if you keep in mind that history means self-knowledge and as students, that should be one of the most important things to you.
Why Write History?
To study history is to do history. And the only way we can do history is to examine the available records from the past and then write about them. So, doing history means writing history. To learn about the past we have two alternatives. The first is to go to the primary sources themselves. In other words, if you wanted to learn about Galileo's astronomical and philosophical arguments for the motion of the earth, you could do no better than read his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems--Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632). The second alternative and the one more likely chosen by most students at the high school or undergraduate level is to go to the secondary sources. In this instance, we have a number of works from which to choose, for example: Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (1955); Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic (1987); Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (1978).
Notice that this list of secondary sources pertain to Galileo in general and not specifically to his ideas on the motion of the earth. The secondary sources offer a broader appreciation of the topic. They are an example of "doing history," writing history. When students write about this secondary literature, they are entering into the discourse of history by the simple fact that they are now adding their own perspective.
This is fine, but why write history? After all, you plan to become a doctor, or a professor of economics, or a cabinetmaker or a webmaster. What good does it do you to know how to write history? Why must you do history?
Writing history will help you learn history. We have already discussed the importance of becoming actively engaged in the subject of history. What better way to do so than to actually do it? In other words, writing about history means a personal involvement with history and this will necessarily produce a greater understanding of history, a good thing in itself!
Writing history will force you to understand history to a much greater degree. Listening to a lecture, or viewing a film, or reading a monograph, or taking part in a class discussion is one thing. But writing about this "experience" will demonstrate your general understanding of history. As you write, you demonstrate evidence. You produce a logical argument. However, there are also times when writing allows you to express your confusion regarding a particular idea, event or thing. Writing allows to you to bring that confusion to the surface and hopefully, you'll be able to answer your own question. At the very least, you'll be able to show that something needs to be more fully explored.
Writing history gives you the chance to render your opinion. Since the interpretation of history is always subjective, writing allows you to persuade the reader of your argument. For instance, many historians have interpreted the Thirty Years' War as an example of what would later be called a world war and therefore a modern war. There are other historians who disagree. They say that the Thirty Years' War is an example of a medieval war, or even the last medieval war. This is where you step in. Having read a variety of interpretations, you are now prepared to voice your own. You may agree or disagree, that much is clear. But the real issue at stake here is that now is the chance to submit your interpretation.
Writing history gets you in the habit of synthesizing large quantities of material. Evidence must be gathered and prioritized. General thesis statements must be fashioned from the evidence at hand. You begin to learn about the general topic upon which you are writing as well as several topics which appear on the peripheries of your topic.
Lastly, writing history will help you to better organize your thoughts, that goes without saying. The historian must exhibit some kind of logic or the analysis falls apart. Studying history, thinking history, writing history--in a word, doing history--is not easy. No, it is difficult and requires much sustained effort. Some people are not capable of that kind of sustained effort.
Take charge of your efforts to do history. Gain as much confidence as you can. Develop your own historical perspective. Remember, the study of history and the writing of history is not a passive response to the historical past. No, it is much more than that. History involves the active engagement of your life with all life. The pastness of the past is the key to the present.
How to Read a History Assignment
The study of history means reading. There's no escaping that simple fact. And reading history can be a satisfying experience, regardless of what you might have heard. It all depends on the book you are reading. For instance, there are quite a few books that I have read which literally transported me in time and space. The medieval scholarship of Jacques LeGoff and George Duby fall into this category. In the field of intellectual history, the works of Peter Gay, John Herman Randall, Isaiah Berlin, H. Stuart Hughes and Frank Manuel have always impressed me. But what "works" for me may not work for you. Most often, it's a matter of personal preference.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard students admit that they hated a certain text because it was boring or too long or too complicated. What makes such a comment sometimes harder to accept is that often, some of the texts instructors assign are those books which made a difference in their own lives. Still, having been a student myself, and not a great one I might add, the reflection that a text is boring or too long is sometimes just.
A case in point. I often assign Modris Eksteins' Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age in my course on Twentieth Century Europe. It's a wonderful book which juxtaposes Stravinsky's ballet, "The Rites of Spring" with all those cultural, intellectual and psychological forces surrounding the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. But when my students first start reading the text, they become confused. Why? Quite simple. They expect a book about World War One. Instead, they begin reading about a ballet. What relationship could a ballet possibly have with a world war? Of course, they have to read further in order to grasp what Eksteins is really trying to do. That's why I assign this text: it makes the students think differently about war, a war they thought they all understood.
For my own courses, I try to assign books based on a number of variables such as: price and availability, length, closeness to both the general topic and my approach to it, and complexity. There's no sense assigning, say, E.P.Thompson's magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class, in a survey class on modern European history. No, that would be a bit much. Also, I only assign four or maybe five texts per course because that seems a reasonable amount given the fact that most of my students work full time. My typical student is what I could call non-traditional. With an average age of twenty-five, the majority of my students hold down full-time jobs and many of them are married with kids. So, assigning more than 100 pages per week would be asking too much. I realize their limitations. On the other hand, as a graduate student taking an advanced undergraduate course in United States Cultural and Intellectual History, I well remember that all of us had to read nine or ten books.
In order to make the reading of history more satisfying and more purposeful, you must make an effort. This means that you must have a general sense of the subject matter. You can't just jump into a text and expect to get much out of it especially if the subject matter is genuinely alien to you. If you do just jump in, you will quickly become lost as the information presented will make little sense.
Okay, so it's the beginning of the term and you've been given your first reading assignment. Let's say you are enrolled in my 20th Century Europe course and you have been asked to read Modris Eksteins' The Rites of Spring. How do you begin?
1. Pick up the book, look at the covers. See anything interesting?2. Who wrote the book? Does the publisher give you any information?3. When was it written? Do you think this makes a difference? Why?4. Scan the Table of Contents. See anything you like?5. Read the Preface and Introduction.6. Are there any illustrations? footnotes? a bibliography?7. Can you determine the general thesis of the book?8. Read the first sentence. Does it hold your attention? Or, do you then put the book down and say, "I'll start reading this tomorrow"?9. Does it look like a good book? worthy to be read?10. Why might your instructor have assigned this particular text?
That's actually quite a bit of investigative work on your part and you haven't even really started to read your assignment. Still, this is something you must do. Reading involves engagement. Reading is not passive. You must make the effort. If you don't, disaster, and that's what we're trying to avoid.
In the example above, the text under review is what is called a monograph. Written by a historian, the monograph deals with a very specific portion of the historical record. In Eksteins' case, the subject is World War I and the birth of modernism. In terms of chronology, Eksteins only considers the period 1900-1930 and his subject matter is specifically European. When reading a monograph, you need to pay special attention to the author's general thesis. Your instructor has assigned the monograph because (1) it covers the material he wants to cover and (2) it provides a specific interpretation. That interpretation may be an accepted one or simply one that your instructor agrees with. In some cases, your instructor may have deliberately assigned a book whose thesis is at variance with his own. Why would an instructor do this? Simple! To force his students to clarify their own position and to show them that there are indeed various historical interpretations.
The monograph aside, the most common history assignment, however, is the reading of a textbook. Textbooks are rarely exciting stuff and so you need to approach them a bit differently. For one thing, they are usually the work of several authors. This means that a variety of interpretations are at work. So many, in fact, that oftentimes, the end result is no interpretation at all. You are left with 1000 pages of "stuff" without an interpretive structure. Of course, like films and food, there are bad textbooks and good ones. Bad textbooks either cover too much material or just the opposite, they don't cover enough. As you might have guessed, the better textbooks make the attempt to balance length with coverage.
Check out the textbook the same way you checked out the monograph. Thumb through the book, look at the pictures, tables and maps. Anything strike your eye? Take a look at one chapter. How is the chapter organized? Get familiar with the layout because there's a good chance the textbook will be your main focus for the duration of the semester.
If you've been assigned a textbook you should always make every effort to read those chapters which are directly related to the lectures presented in class. If your instructor is any good, the structure of the class will follow the organization of the textbook. Underline and somehow mark information which seems to be important. However, you must be able to distinguish between what is truly important and the evidence the historian draws upon to fashion his conclusions. Don't underline everything! If you like, make notes in the margins of the text. Look at the photographs, maps and illustrations. Do they help you in any way or do you just gloss over them as perhaps unnecessary?
You may also be tempted to make notes on your reading. While I guarantee that this technique will improve your chances for greater understanding, you will also be spending a great deal more time on your assignments, perhaps more time than is really necessary. Again, you really need to learn to "read" your instructor. You must ask yourself why your instructor is making you read this assignment. If you insist on taking notes from the text it is perhaps best to organize them into outline format, otherwise you will be re-writing the book!
It's also worth asking yourself how much time you plan to devote to reading your history assignments on a weekly basis. If your instructor has carefully organized the class, you should know, by a quick glance at the syllabus, just how many pages you are responsible for per week. So add up the pages for the assignment. You can then split the reading into equal sections or perhaps just plan on reading for a specified period of time per day. An hour per day ought to suffice although in the end it all depends on how quickly you read. And of course, reading a textbook takes a different kind of attention than does reading a monograph. Keep asking yourself, "What does my instructor want me to get out of this?"
You may also be assigned a book of readings for your course. I use this type of text frequently. These books usually contain a series of primary sources as well as secondary sources which help to explain the primary sources. These texts are sometimes called sourcebooks or readers. If you are assigned such a text your instructor expects that you read the selections and be able to highlight the general argument, for that is the whole point of the sourcebook. The primary documents usually become the groundwork for in-class discussions, hence their importance. Do not take these readings lightly. For example, in the past I have based an entire ninety minute discussion on a primary source as short as one paragraph.
To sum up, the only way you are going to get through all the reading is to approach it with the proper attitude, something I have already discussed. Approach the reading in a positive way--don't build brick walls! Most instructors assign readings because they want their students to read. (Then again, there are also professors who assign reading because they know they are supposed to assign reading!) Lectures are one thing. Books are another. And whether your instructor assigns textbooks, monographs, sourcebooks or even novels, the above rules all apply.
One last thing. Feel free to assess the assigned readings. Although end of semester course evaluations often contain a section where the student can assess the books, why not tell your professor as you are reading the text. Is it any good? Should it be used again? Why is it good? or bad? I've always had the habit of asking students about the books while they are reading them. After all, I need to know whether of not these books are worth using again. And by asking the students their opinion of a text is an excellent way to develop a relationship between instructor and student. I don't know about you, but I've always thought it a good thing when an instructor asks a class, "Well, what do you think?"
Taking Notes in Class
Okay, you are in the classroom, you've got the proper attitude, your instructor seems eager and energetic and you're ready to learn. Your instructor starts talking about the diffusion and popularization of science in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. You listen to the first few words and then you begin to take notes. Copious notes. At the end of 90 minutes you have literally re-written the lecture. Your hand is sweaty from the constant writing and you've filled up seven pages of your notebook. But one thing is missing. You forgot to listen to the lecture.
This is a common problem not only in history classes but in all classes. You are so afraid that you might miss something "important" that your tendency is to write everything down. I know this for a fact. We all do because we have all committed this error at one time or another. I realize it's easy for me to say this, but it is much better to listen to the lecture carefully and record only those things that were genuinely important. Fine. Just how is this done?
[1] If your instructor has assigned reading for that particular day, make sure you have read it. The reading assignment is there because your professor plans to discuss that topic on that particular day. If you have read the assignment, and perhaps even taken notes on your reading, then the lecture is going to make that much more sense. And instead of listening to your professor covering unknown territory, you will already have an idea of the subject, thus making listening to the topic a bit more enjoyable and in the long run, more worthwhile.
[2] Since your professor will undoubtedly give you some type of exam on the material--whether essay or objective--be sure to determine which points of the lectures are given more weight than others. Some instructors will come right out and say something like "This is important." Others will not. In the last analysis, you have to read between the lines to determine the importance of those points being made during a lecture. Of course, a conscientious professor will hand out an outline so that you can, at a glance, grasp the meaning of the entire lecture.
Because so much of your understanding of history depends upon interpretation, you have to be able to differentiate your interpretation from your professor's and from the assigned reading. In my own classes I stress individual interpretation. That is because (with the exception of lower division courses, like Western Civilization), I always assign essay questions on exams, exams which are more often than not, completed at home rather than in class. However, if you are confronted with an essay question which demands an interpretation, realize that you must be knowledgeable of many interpretations and not just your own, or your professor's. Of course, some professors will demand that you parrot back only information that they themselves have given you. While I regard this as most facile, you should make every effort to "read" the desires of your instructor.
[3] It goes without saying that your notes should be written legibly. I wouldn't suggest re-writing your notes after every class but sometimes this will help you understand and recollect the material better. Organize your notes into brief sections. Do not write everything out in paragraph form. If you do, you will find your notes nearly impossible to understand when exam time rolls around. Use arrows, stars, asterisks and other notational devices to highlight things that seem really important. If there are some things you wrote down which were not adequately explained then you have to bring them to the attention of your instructor. If he's worth anything, he will explain them to you. As a rule, if there is ANYTHING you don't understand, bring it up during the next class section. If not, you will be doing yourself, and everyone else in the class, a great injustice.
I can't tell you how many times I've lectured about one topic or another only to find that one or more students were confused about something fundamental to the entire argument at hand. Why didn't they raise their hands? This is education, you know. They are afraid. I know that because I was once there myself. You have to raise your hand and ask away. Embarrassed as it makes me feel, it was quite late in my academic studies that I finally understood the meaning of the expression, "the end/means justifies the means/end." So today, when I teach, I stop every so often and ask whether everyone understands the word "hegemony" or "ideology" or "aphorism" or the concept of a renaissance. And if you find yourself attending a class where the terminology escapes you, it is your responsibility to bring this to your instructor's attention. Unless you make your difficulties known, there's a good chance your instructor will never know. So, raise your hand and ask your question!
[4] Always record the title and date of the lecture since your instructor may refer to it in the future. This is good organizational practice as well. Make sure the notes follow the order in which the professor conducted the lecture. After all, your notes will later serve as a basis for reviewing when studying for a test or writing assignment. Feel free to revise your notes at some point after the lecture, usually the same day. You may even want to get into the habit of underlining or highlighting topical headings or defined words or ideas. And speaking of definitions, it's also a good idea to keep a glossary of frequently used names, ideas, and words in your notebook for future reference. You'd be surprised at how helpful this becomes later down the road.
For instance, in my Twentieth Century Europe class I announced on the first day that all students should write the word modernism at the top of a sheet of paper and every time they read or hear or think about something that has to do with modernism, they should write it down. Since the first six weeks of the class are about modernism, and they will be writing an essay on modernism, such an exercise seems necessary.
In another class, A History of European Socialism, I demanded that while my students were reading a number of works by Marx and Engels, they ought also to keep a running Glossary. Since Marx and Engels use so many words and expressions (ie., proletariat, ideology, means of production, ruling ideas, capital, etc.) that are unique to themselves and their historical period, students will become lost unless they have a common vocabulary from which to obtain their ideas and valuations.
In fact, a glossary of important words, events, ideas, and people would be an aid even to the best of students. Why settle for less when you are easily capable of more?
[5] If your professor has a film scheduled that does not mean it is an excuse to sleep or to not pay attention or to not show up at all. The film is there for a purpose. I assign several films in many of my courses and they always end up as integral parts of the course as a whole, otherwise I would never have included them. Every paper topic I assign asks the student to consider a specific film as well as lectures and readings. Should you take notes? Well, the only way you can take any notes is if you know beforehand why in fact your instructor has decided to show you the film in the first place. So, you should ask your professor if he does not tell you.
I routinely show Kubrick's "Paths of Glory" and "Dr. Strangelove," Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," Chaplin's "Modern Times" and Lucas' "THX-1138." A film, like a novel, can be "read" on several different levels. The task for you as a viewer is to determine how this or that film might fit into the topic under discussion. Again, if your professor doesn't tell you, ask!
Studying for the Exam
When a test is announced, be sure to find out what kind of an exam it will be: objective, multiple choice, short answer, essay, maps etc. Make sure your instructor is clear about this. If he doesn't specify this information, raise your hand. You should also know what material is being covered by the exam. If you haven't done all the reading necessary for the exam, then get going. You haven't much time. If you missed a lecture, get the notes from someone whom you trust.
Now that you've done all that, how do you proceed? How do you study for the test? First, look at the syllabus and note all the lectures that are covered by the exam. Next, go through your notes and mark those lectures which pertain to the exam. Next, get all the books that were used in that specified period. Sit down. Relax.
Start with the lecture notes. Read them through date by date (you did remember to date your lectures, didn't you?). Underline or highlight those remarks which your professor specified as important. Organize the lecture in your head. If your instructor used an outline, refer to it while you are reviewing your notes. Rather than memorize everything he said, it might be a better idea to re-write your notes in outline fashion, paying special attention to things you know are important. Depending on the amount of material covered by the exam (let's say five weeks), this ought to take you a few hours.
Next, start looking at your books. If you underlined or highlighted your textbook, now is the time to go back and re-read those passages that you marked. That is, after all, why you marked them in the first place. It's a good idea to have your outline notes next to the text so that you can fill in the gaps in knowledge or elaborate upon your understanding of the material. You treat any assigned monographs in the same way. However, keep in mind that the approach of the monograph is quite different from the general textbook. You need to be much more aware of the author's interpretation. This is most important if your professor intends to include essay questions on your exams. Will he want his own interpretation, the author's interpretation or your own? Be sure you know before you start studying.
Should you study with friends or alone? That's up to you. Personally, I always studied on my own. That has its ups and downs but then so too does studying with friends.
A final word or two: If you have prepared yourself for the exam by knowing what is expected, you will have the confidence to do well. If you are confident about your abilities then chances are very good that you also understand the material. What does this all mean? Study to the point where you become confident. Confidence is everything! What more can I say?
Second, the purpose of this site is the empowerment of the student. I must share my knowledge with students rather than hide it as if it were my property only. It's not! Knowledge is power, but only if you have access to it!
In general, the study of history requires certain skills--skills which are somewhat different from those used in other disciplines. Hopefully this Guide will force you to consider those skills as you go about your studies.
Remember, this is only a guide and it is not the only guide available to you. There are several guides which have been published in the past decade but very few have been published on the Internet. (See Patrick Rael's Reading, Writing and Researching for History for a point of comparison.) Given the broad resources -- some excellent, some downright horrible -- that are available on the Internet, it seems to me that the time is right to publish my own thoughts on the study of history --- And these are my thoughts. That much said, let's get down to business.
The Proper Attitude
In History as in life in general, your attitude is everything. In other words, to make your experience with History as enjoyable and worthwhile as possible requires the proper attitude. You have to be able to place yourself in the right frame of mind and that frame of mind is one in which exploration, discovery and self-awareness are integral.
History has always gotten a bad rap in part because what students remember of their experience in history classes is that sort of mindless memorization of facts: dates, events, wars--what I routinely refer to as "the history of kings and queens." This sort of history has its place, I suppose. It does qualify as History, but of a most basic sort. A case in point: go to your local bookstore, go to several in fact, and take a look at what they have on the shelves under history. Unless you are at one of the larger stores like Borders, Barnes & Noble, or at a university bookstore, I'm willing to bet that most of what falls under History is really little more than war. We have a fascination for war--I don't know why. But, the fact remains, that for most people, the study of history means little else than the study of war.
This confuses me! All these facts. All this stuff of history crowding my mind. A number of surveys over the years have pointed to the disturbing fact that Americans don't know history. They don't know their own history. Here is a typical question from one of those surveys: Did the Civil War take place before, or after 1850? Hopefully, you did not need to find your textbook for the answer to that one. But there is a deeper issue here. To know, to have the knowledge, to have committed to memory the simple fact that the Civil War took place after 1850 is, to me relatively unimportant. After all, anyone can learn to memorize, well, anything. Is this history? What have you learned? What I would like to suggest is that you learned a fact--you have obtained knowledge. But, far more important to me is wisdom. Does the knowledge that the Civil War took place after 1850 give you wisdom? Does it make you wiser? Or, are facts and wisdom gained through knowledge two distinct entities?
Some people like to read about war. For these people, it is war that "makes history come alive" (as if it needed any prodding in the first place). Military history is fascinating but, in my opinion, only meaningful (historically) when put into the context of the "other" history that is occurring at the same time. What is that "other" history? Simple. It's the history which explains why that war took place in terms of the economy, culture, diplomacy and perhaps a hundred other variables. In general, most Americans would rather be "entertained" by passively watching a film about war rather than listen to someone talk about the origins and consequences of that war.
So, this much said, what sort of attitude do we need to have when studying history? Well, the first thing is that you should not enter a history class--any history class--looking for answers. The study of history reveals that there is no clear cut answer for anything. Since understanding history is based on individual--and therefore subjective--interpretation, you must decide for yourself what kind of meaning you will attach to the topic. Go into history with an open mind. Don't expect the answer to be presented to you as if written in stone. It's not. History is not a science--it's a form of literature and the historian is little more than a writer of non-fiction.
A number of years ago I was teaching the second part of a western civilization course at a community college. We had just spent four or five lectures running through the French Revolution. The students had heard lectures on the origins of the Revolution, the moderate stage, the radical stage, Robespierre and finally Napoleon. Now it came time to review. Twenty of us sat in a circle and set out to "discuss" the meaning and significance of the French Revolution. Was it successful? Was it a failure? Did the Revolution come as a result of the Age of Enlightenment? Was it a bourgeois revolution? I began the discussion by reviewing the "great days" of the Revolution, events like the Oath of the Tennis Court or the Flight to Varennes and people like Robespierre and so on. So, we eventually got to the point where we were discussing interpretation. Some students spoke up and said the Revolution was a success, others said it was a failure. This went on for ten or fifteen minutes until one student raised her hand and said, plain as day, "Well, which is it? Was it a success or a failure?" She sat in her chair, her pen poised to write...the answer! All I could say was, "Well, what do you think?" I immediately saw a brick wall. She didn't get it. Some of us don't. We build brick walls as a short cut to thinking. "There must be an answer. What is it? I don't want to think. I want to know." So much for wisdom.
You can avoid this trap. It's not that hard. You have to open your eyes, open your mind. Tear down the walls. Study history with a sense of wonder and enjoyment. After all, this "stuff"' is all happening in the past. Study history with a sense of engagement. There ought to be a sense of "what was it like" when you study history. Really good professors will instill this sense of wonder, that is, if they are worth anything at all. More about this later.
I've seen a great many students come and go in my own classes in Western Civilization and European History. And one thing that will help them embrace the proper attitude is that they all get a sense of historical time. Yes, this does mean that you understand what came before this or after that. You must get into the habit, difficult as it might at first seem, of putting things into historical and chronological perspective. You must make yourself aware of historical time. Look at the big picture (Europe 1100-1650) even while you are studying the small one (the Renaissance) or the even smaller one (Florentine diplomacy). You must be able to eventually "image" a timeline in your head so that when your professor rambles on about Dante, Rabelais, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Cervantes, you'll have an approximate idea of how his discussion might all be tied together. I think that once you get in this habit, your appreciation for history, in a word, your attitude, will begin to show signs of improvement as well.
Another important attribute which may assist in creating the proper attitude is television and film. I mean this seriously. How else can you actually understand a lecture on say, the Black Death of 1347-1351, unless you have some real images in your head? Your textbook will contain the obligatory photographs, of course. And this will help. So too will an instructor who can really instill the terror, uncertainty and anguish of the people at that time. But, I have always found that my memories of watching Ingmar Bergman's film, "The Seventh Seal", has always helped me visualize mid-fourteenth century Europe. Think of all the films you might have seen. Go ahead, do it right now.....do any of them provide you with images of history past? Where else do our images of the past come from?
For instance, up to a certain point in time, my image of World War Two was fashioned by watching Hollywood films, you know, John Wayne, Dana Andrews, Gregory Peck and so on. Americans charging up hills toward victory. The hero, shot in the final scene, asks for a smoke with his dying breath. Blatant or subtle propaganda? You decide. The point is that I grew up with a sort of idealized--mythical--version of war that just does not stand up to the historical record. However, the images remain. "Image" as much as possible.
Here's an example before we pass on to the next section. In my introductory lecture on the Scientific Revolution I ask my students to "image" a scientist. Go ahead. Do the same thing right now. What does a scientist look like? How is the scientist dressed? What does his office look like? Is the scientist a man or a woman? Okay, what did you "image"? I'm almost certain I know what you are seeing because that image of the scientist---wild hair, disorganized, absent-minded, dedicated to truth, unemotional---are all images we've silently digested from Hollywood.
Can you successfully complete a course in history without having the proper attitude? Of course you can. But why take the short cut? Why not make the effort. Rather than go through the motions, make history part of your life. After all, that's exactly what history is--it is your life.
Why Study History?
Let's face it, our first experience with History is that it is a course that we have to take in order to graduate. As a junior and senior high school student we are confronted with American history, state history and perhaps even a general course in western civilization or world history. We didn't have a choice. And the fact that we are forced to take history puts us on the offensive. We begin to build that grandiose brick wall that will prevent us from getting anything important out of history.
The main problem as I see it, is not history itself. The study of history can be fun. But there's only one thing that can make our first experience with history a miserable thing indeed: and that's a poor instructor. I was fortunate. I managed to have a number of excellent history instructors throughout my high school years and this was at a time when I was leaning toward the physical sciences, geology and biology to be exact. I might not have been an excellent history student, but I do remember having excellent history teachers.
Fine. That's my experience. But experience aside, why study history in the first place? What could history offer the business major? The student intending to study web page development? the student taking her first psychology class? or pre-med student? or the lawyer? or the worker on the shop floor? Well, simply stated, everything has a history, whether we like it or not. Even history itself has a history. Try hard as we might, we can't escape the past. We can't let go of the past. And we celebrate the past all the time.
You may have been told that we study history so that we won't repeat the mistakes of the past. This is the wishful thinking school of historical interpretation. It's too clean. If we have learned from the past then over the centuries we ought to have accumulated so much knowledge that things like war, poverty, injustice and immorality ought not to exist. Of course, we've still got a long way to go in this respect.
You may also have heard that everything repeats itself, so if we study the past, we can be sure to know something of the future. I don't hold to this view either. To insist that the study of the past will reveal something of the future is a nice idea, but what I really want to know about is the present. History cannot "tell" the future. History can, on the other hand, reveal all that is the present. So, faced as we are with the question "why study history?" I can only hope to answer by telling you why I study history.
Well first off, by studying history you can study anything for the simple reason that everything has a history: ideas, wars, numbers, races, windsurfing, coal miners, pencils, motherhood and yes, even toilet-training. I first began to appreciate the study of history as an undergraduate studying political philosophy at Boston University. I was pretty keen on Plato, Aquinas, Dante, Hobbes, Locke, Godwin, Marx, Mill and a host of other "greats." But what I soon discovered was that my lack of understanding of history, i.e. the actual historical context in which these writers conceived and executed their theoretical work, made my understanding of their philosophy one-sided. Sure, I knew what they had to say about liberty, or the proletariat, or monarchy or the franchise. But what was the historical environment that gave rise to their ideas? Ideas are not akin to balloons hanging from the ceiling of Clio's den, waiting to be retrieved by a Marx, a Mill or a Plato. Ideas have a history. They undergo a process of development. They change, are modified, are distributed or are forgotten only to reappear years, decades or perhaps even centuries later.
Once I realized this fact it was quite natural that I turn my attention to history itself. And why not? I could still study Marx or Mill or Plato. Only this time I could do it from the ground up, so to speak. This sort of approach makes me better able to visualize history in a different way. It gives some sense of "pastness" to the past.
But why do I bother? What's the point? Well, for me, it's a Socratic issue. Socrates was a man of knowledge but not that much knowledge. As a freshman in high school you probably knew more than Socrates. But, Socrates was a wise man. He had wisdom because he knew only one thing: that he knew nothing. His "job," so to speak, was to question the Athenian youth. It was not enough to know something. You had to know why you knew it. And this, of course, brought him to the greatest question of all: what is knowledge? What can we know? Well, for Socrates, again, his knowledge consisted in the realization that he knew nothing. This Socratic irony leaves us rather high and dry but I think there is a greater issue at stake here.
For Socrates, perhaps the highest virtue can be summed up in the phrase, "Know thyself." In other words, of all the things in the phenomenal world, there is not one so important as yourself. To know yourself means to be aware of what it is that makes you who you are. And in this respect, the one thing which reveals this knowledge is history. But people do not live alone, they live in society. And it is in society that the individual comes into contact with other individuals, all of whom are on the same quest, in varying degrees. So, for Socrates, knowledge of self does not hinge upon reflection or introspection, but conversation, hence the Socratic dialogue.
The Socratic dialogue implies that instructor and student meet on an equal footing. Dialogue means conversation between two or more people. And what is the point of Socratic dialogue? Improvement. Self-improvement of the instructor and self-improvement of the student.
So why do I study history? or why do I teach history? Well, for me it's a form of selfishness. I wish to improve myself. And by improving myself I also improve others. This classical pedagogical method is called the Socratic method. If your instructor isn't at least familiar with it, then I'm afraid your historical education is going to suffer as a result.
Can you learn history without the Socratic dialogue as your guide? Yes, it can be done. All I am trying to suggest here is that your experience with history will be a much richer one if you keep in mind that history means self-knowledge and as students, that should be one of the most important things to you.
Why Write History?
To study history is to do history. And the only way we can do history is to examine the available records from the past and then write about them. So, doing history means writing history. To learn about the past we have two alternatives. The first is to go to the primary sources themselves. In other words, if you wanted to learn about Galileo's astronomical and philosophical arguments for the motion of the earth, you could do no better than read his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems--Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632). The second alternative and the one more likely chosen by most students at the high school or undergraduate level is to go to the secondary sources. In this instance, we have a number of works from which to choose, for example: Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (1955); Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic (1987); Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography (1978).
Notice that this list of secondary sources pertain to Galileo in general and not specifically to his ideas on the motion of the earth. The secondary sources offer a broader appreciation of the topic. They are an example of "doing history," writing history. When students write about this secondary literature, they are entering into the discourse of history by the simple fact that they are now adding their own perspective.
This is fine, but why write history? After all, you plan to become a doctor, or a professor of economics, or a cabinetmaker or a webmaster. What good does it do you to know how to write history? Why must you do history?
Writing history will help you learn history. We have already discussed the importance of becoming actively engaged in the subject of history. What better way to do so than to actually do it? In other words, writing about history means a personal involvement with history and this will necessarily produce a greater understanding of history, a good thing in itself!
Writing history will force you to understand history to a much greater degree. Listening to a lecture, or viewing a film, or reading a monograph, or taking part in a class discussion is one thing. But writing about this "experience" will demonstrate your general understanding of history. As you write, you demonstrate evidence. You produce a logical argument. However, there are also times when writing allows you to express your confusion regarding a particular idea, event or thing. Writing allows to you to bring that confusion to the surface and hopefully, you'll be able to answer your own question. At the very least, you'll be able to show that something needs to be more fully explored.
Writing history gives you the chance to render your opinion. Since the interpretation of history is always subjective, writing allows you to persuade the reader of your argument. For instance, many historians have interpreted the Thirty Years' War as an example of what would later be called a world war and therefore a modern war. There are other historians who disagree. They say that the Thirty Years' War is an example of a medieval war, or even the last medieval war. This is where you step in. Having read a variety of interpretations, you are now prepared to voice your own. You may agree or disagree, that much is clear. But the real issue at stake here is that now is the chance to submit your interpretation.
Writing history gets you in the habit of synthesizing large quantities of material. Evidence must be gathered and prioritized. General thesis statements must be fashioned from the evidence at hand. You begin to learn about the general topic upon which you are writing as well as several topics which appear on the peripheries of your topic.
Lastly, writing history will help you to better organize your thoughts, that goes without saying. The historian must exhibit some kind of logic or the analysis falls apart. Studying history, thinking history, writing history--in a word, doing history--is not easy. No, it is difficult and requires much sustained effort. Some people are not capable of that kind of sustained effort.
Take charge of your efforts to do history. Gain as much confidence as you can. Develop your own historical perspective. Remember, the study of history and the writing of history is not a passive response to the historical past. No, it is much more than that. History involves the active engagement of your life with all life. The pastness of the past is the key to the present.
How to Read a History Assignment
The study of history means reading. There's no escaping that simple fact. And reading history can be a satisfying experience, regardless of what you might have heard. It all depends on the book you are reading. For instance, there are quite a few books that I have read which literally transported me in time and space. The medieval scholarship of Jacques LeGoff and George Duby fall into this category. In the field of intellectual history, the works of Peter Gay, John Herman Randall, Isaiah Berlin, H. Stuart Hughes and Frank Manuel have always impressed me. But what "works" for me may not work for you. Most often, it's a matter of personal preference.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard students admit that they hated a certain text because it was boring or too long or too complicated. What makes such a comment sometimes harder to accept is that often, some of the texts instructors assign are those books which made a difference in their own lives. Still, having been a student myself, and not a great one I might add, the reflection that a text is boring or too long is sometimes just.
A case in point. I often assign Modris Eksteins' Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age in my course on Twentieth Century Europe. It's a wonderful book which juxtaposes Stravinsky's ballet, "The Rites of Spring" with all those cultural, intellectual and psychological forces surrounding the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. But when my students first start reading the text, they become confused. Why? Quite simple. They expect a book about World War One. Instead, they begin reading about a ballet. What relationship could a ballet possibly have with a world war? Of course, they have to read further in order to grasp what Eksteins is really trying to do. That's why I assign this text: it makes the students think differently about war, a war they thought they all understood.
For my own courses, I try to assign books based on a number of variables such as: price and availability, length, closeness to both the general topic and my approach to it, and complexity. There's no sense assigning, say, E.P.Thompson's magnum opus, The Making of the English Working Class, in a survey class on modern European history. No, that would be a bit much. Also, I only assign four or maybe five texts per course because that seems a reasonable amount given the fact that most of my students work full time. My typical student is what I could call non-traditional. With an average age of twenty-five, the majority of my students hold down full-time jobs and many of them are married with kids. So, assigning more than 100 pages per week would be asking too much. I realize their limitations. On the other hand, as a graduate student taking an advanced undergraduate course in United States Cultural and Intellectual History, I well remember that all of us had to read nine or ten books.
In order to make the reading of history more satisfying and more purposeful, you must make an effort. This means that you must have a general sense of the subject matter. You can't just jump into a text and expect to get much out of it especially if the subject matter is genuinely alien to you. If you do just jump in, you will quickly become lost as the information presented will make little sense.
Okay, so it's the beginning of the term and you've been given your first reading assignment. Let's say you are enrolled in my 20th Century Europe course and you have been asked to read Modris Eksteins' The Rites of Spring. How do you begin?
1. Pick up the book, look at the covers. See anything interesting?2. Who wrote the book? Does the publisher give you any information?3. When was it written? Do you think this makes a difference? Why?4. Scan the Table of Contents. See anything you like?5. Read the Preface and Introduction.6. Are there any illustrations? footnotes? a bibliography?7. Can you determine the general thesis of the book?8. Read the first sentence. Does it hold your attention? Or, do you then put the book down and say, "I'll start reading this tomorrow"?9. Does it look like a good book? worthy to be read?10. Why might your instructor have assigned this particular text?
That's actually quite a bit of investigative work on your part and you haven't even really started to read your assignment. Still, this is something you must do. Reading involves engagement. Reading is not passive. You must make the effort. If you don't, disaster, and that's what we're trying to avoid.
In the example above, the text under review is what is called a monograph. Written by a historian, the monograph deals with a very specific portion of the historical record. In Eksteins' case, the subject is World War I and the birth of modernism. In terms of chronology, Eksteins only considers the period 1900-1930 and his subject matter is specifically European. When reading a monograph, you need to pay special attention to the author's general thesis. Your instructor has assigned the monograph because (1) it covers the material he wants to cover and (2) it provides a specific interpretation. That interpretation may be an accepted one or simply one that your instructor agrees with. In some cases, your instructor may have deliberately assigned a book whose thesis is at variance with his own. Why would an instructor do this? Simple! To force his students to clarify their own position and to show them that there are indeed various historical interpretations.
The monograph aside, the most common history assignment, however, is the reading of a textbook. Textbooks are rarely exciting stuff and so you need to approach them a bit differently. For one thing, they are usually the work of several authors. This means that a variety of interpretations are at work. So many, in fact, that oftentimes, the end result is no interpretation at all. You are left with 1000 pages of "stuff" without an interpretive structure. Of course, like films and food, there are bad textbooks and good ones. Bad textbooks either cover too much material or just the opposite, they don't cover enough. As you might have guessed, the better textbooks make the attempt to balance length with coverage.
Check out the textbook the same way you checked out the monograph. Thumb through the book, look at the pictures, tables and maps. Anything strike your eye? Take a look at one chapter. How is the chapter organized? Get familiar with the layout because there's a good chance the textbook will be your main focus for the duration of the semester.
If you've been assigned a textbook you should always make every effort to read those chapters which are directly related to the lectures presented in class. If your instructor is any good, the structure of the class will follow the organization of the textbook. Underline and somehow mark information which seems to be important. However, you must be able to distinguish between what is truly important and the evidence the historian draws upon to fashion his conclusions. Don't underline everything! If you like, make notes in the margins of the text. Look at the photographs, maps and illustrations. Do they help you in any way or do you just gloss over them as perhaps unnecessary?
You may also be tempted to make notes on your reading. While I guarantee that this technique will improve your chances for greater understanding, you will also be spending a great deal more time on your assignments, perhaps more time than is really necessary. Again, you really need to learn to "read" your instructor. You must ask yourself why your instructor is making you read this assignment. If you insist on taking notes from the text it is perhaps best to organize them into outline format, otherwise you will be re-writing the book!
It's also worth asking yourself how much time you plan to devote to reading your history assignments on a weekly basis. If your instructor has carefully organized the class, you should know, by a quick glance at the syllabus, just how many pages you are responsible for per week. So add up the pages for the assignment. You can then split the reading into equal sections or perhaps just plan on reading for a specified period of time per day. An hour per day ought to suffice although in the end it all depends on how quickly you read. And of course, reading a textbook takes a different kind of attention than does reading a monograph. Keep asking yourself, "What does my instructor want me to get out of this?"
You may also be assigned a book of readings for your course. I use this type of text frequently. These books usually contain a series of primary sources as well as secondary sources which help to explain the primary sources. These texts are sometimes called sourcebooks or readers. If you are assigned such a text your instructor expects that you read the selections and be able to highlight the general argument, for that is the whole point of the sourcebook. The primary documents usually become the groundwork for in-class discussions, hence their importance. Do not take these readings lightly. For example, in the past I have based an entire ninety minute discussion on a primary source as short as one paragraph.
To sum up, the only way you are going to get through all the reading is to approach it with the proper attitude, something I have already discussed. Approach the reading in a positive way--don't build brick walls! Most instructors assign readings because they want their students to read. (Then again, there are also professors who assign reading because they know they are supposed to assign reading!) Lectures are one thing. Books are another. And whether your instructor assigns textbooks, monographs, sourcebooks or even novels, the above rules all apply.
One last thing. Feel free to assess the assigned readings. Although end of semester course evaluations often contain a section where the student can assess the books, why not tell your professor as you are reading the text. Is it any good? Should it be used again? Why is it good? or bad? I've always had the habit of asking students about the books while they are reading them. After all, I need to know whether of not these books are worth using again. And by asking the students their opinion of a text is an excellent way to develop a relationship between instructor and student. I don't know about you, but I've always thought it a good thing when an instructor asks a class, "Well, what do you think?"
Taking Notes in Class
Okay, you are in the classroom, you've got the proper attitude, your instructor seems eager and energetic and you're ready to learn. Your instructor starts talking about the diffusion and popularization of science in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. You listen to the first few words and then you begin to take notes. Copious notes. At the end of 90 minutes you have literally re-written the lecture. Your hand is sweaty from the constant writing and you've filled up seven pages of your notebook. But one thing is missing. You forgot to listen to the lecture.
This is a common problem not only in history classes but in all classes. You are so afraid that you might miss something "important" that your tendency is to write everything down. I know this for a fact. We all do because we have all committed this error at one time or another. I realize it's easy for me to say this, but it is much better to listen to the lecture carefully and record only those things that were genuinely important. Fine. Just how is this done?
[1] If your instructor has assigned reading for that particular day, make sure you have read it. The reading assignment is there because your professor plans to discuss that topic on that particular day. If you have read the assignment, and perhaps even taken notes on your reading, then the lecture is going to make that much more sense. And instead of listening to your professor covering unknown territory, you will already have an idea of the subject, thus making listening to the topic a bit more enjoyable and in the long run, more worthwhile.
[2] Since your professor will undoubtedly give you some type of exam on the material--whether essay or objective--be sure to determine which points of the lectures are given more weight than others. Some instructors will come right out and say something like "This is important." Others will not. In the last analysis, you have to read between the lines to determine the importance of those points being made during a lecture. Of course, a conscientious professor will hand out an outline so that you can, at a glance, grasp the meaning of the entire lecture.
Because so much of your understanding of history depends upon interpretation, you have to be able to differentiate your interpretation from your professor's and from the assigned reading. In my own classes I stress individual interpretation. That is because (with the exception of lower division courses, like Western Civilization), I always assign essay questions on exams, exams which are more often than not, completed at home rather than in class. However, if you are confronted with an essay question which demands an interpretation, realize that you must be knowledgeable of many interpretations and not just your own, or your professor's. Of course, some professors will demand that you parrot back only information that they themselves have given you. While I regard this as most facile, you should make every effort to "read" the desires of your instructor.
[3] It goes without saying that your notes should be written legibly. I wouldn't suggest re-writing your notes after every class but sometimes this will help you understand and recollect the material better. Organize your notes into brief sections. Do not write everything out in paragraph form. If you do, you will find your notes nearly impossible to understand when exam time rolls around. Use arrows, stars, asterisks and other notational devices to highlight things that seem really important. If there are some things you wrote down which were not adequately explained then you have to bring them to the attention of your instructor. If he's worth anything, he will explain them to you. As a rule, if there is ANYTHING you don't understand, bring it up during the next class section. If not, you will be doing yourself, and everyone else in the class, a great injustice.
I can't tell you how many times I've lectured about one topic or another only to find that one or more students were confused about something fundamental to the entire argument at hand. Why didn't they raise their hands? This is education, you know. They are afraid. I know that because I was once there myself. You have to raise your hand and ask away. Embarrassed as it makes me feel, it was quite late in my academic studies that I finally understood the meaning of the expression, "the end/means justifies the means/end." So today, when I teach, I stop every so often and ask whether everyone understands the word "hegemony" or "ideology" or "aphorism" or the concept of a renaissance. And if you find yourself attending a class where the terminology escapes you, it is your responsibility to bring this to your instructor's attention. Unless you make your difficulties known, there's a good chance your instructor will never know. So, raise your hand and ask your question!
[4] Always record the title and date of the lecture since your instructor may refer to it in the future. This is good organizational practice as well. Make sure the notes follow the order in which the professor conducted the lecture. After all, your notes will later serve as a basis for reviewing when studying for a test or writing assignment. Feel free to revise your notes at some point after the lecture, usually the same day. You may even want to get into the habit of underlining or highlighting topical headings or defined words or ideas. And speaking of definitions, it's also a good idea to keep a glossary of frequently used names, ideas, and words in your notebook for future reference. You'd be surprised at how helpful this becomes later down the road.
For instance, in my Twentieth Century Europe class I announced on the first day that all students should write the word modernism at the top of a sheet of paper and every time they read or hear or think about something that has to do with modernism, they should write it down. Since the first six weeks of the class are about modernism, and they will be writing an essay on modernism, such an exercise seems necessary.
In another class, A History of European Socialism, I demanded that while my students were reading a number of works by Marx and Engels, they ought also to keep a running Glossary. Since Marx and Engels use so many words and expressions (ie., proletariat, ideology, means of production, ruling ideas, capital, etc.) that are unique to themselves and their historical period, students will become lost unless they have a common vocabulary from which to obtain their ideas and valuations.
In fact, a glossary of important words, events, ideas, and people would be an aid even to the best of students. Why settle for less when you are easily capable of more?
[5] If your professor has a film scheduled that does not mean it is an excuse to sleep or to not pay attention or to not show up at all. The film is there for a purpose. I assign several films in many of my courses and they always end up as integral parts of the course as a whole, otherwise I would never have included them. Every paper topic I assign asks the student to consider a specific film as well as lectures and readings. Should you take notes? Well, the only way you can take any notes is if you know beforehand why in fact your instructor has decided to show you the film in the first place. So, you should ask your professor if he does not tell you.
I routinely show Kubrick's "Paths of Glory" and "Dr. Strangelove," Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," Chaplin's "Modern Times" and Lucas' "THX-1138." A film, like a novel, can be "read" on several different levels. The task for you as a viewer is to determine how this or that film might fit into the topic under discussion. Again, if your professor doesn't tell you, ask!
Studying for the Exam
When a test is announced, be sure to find out what kind of an exam it will be: objective, multiple choice, short answer, essay, maps etc. Make sure your instructor is clear about this. If he doesn't specify this information, raise your hand. You should also know what material is being covered by the exam. If you haven't done all the reading necessary for the exam, then get going. You haven't much time. If you missed a lecture, get the notes from someone whom you trust.
Now that you've done all that, how do you proceed? How do you study for the test? First, look at the syllabus and note all the lectures that are covered by the exam. Next, go through your notes and mark those lectures which pertain to the exam. Next, get all the books that were used in that specified period. Sit down. Relax.
Start with the lecture notes. Read them through date by date (you did remember to date your lectures, didn't you?). Underline or highlight those remarks which your professor specified as important. Organize the lecture in your head. If your instructor used an outline, refer to it while you are reviewing your notes. Rather than memorize everything he said, it might be a better idea to re-write your notes in outline fashion, paying special attention to things you know are important. Depending on the amount of material covered by the exam (let's say five weeks), this ought to take you a few hours.
Next, start looking at your books. If you underlined or highlighted your textbook, now is the time to go back and re-read those passages that you marked. That is, after all, why you marked them in the first place. It's a good idea to have your outline notes next to the text so that you can fill in the gaps in knowledge or elaborate upon your understanding of the material. You treat any assigned monographs in the same way. However, keep in mind that the approach of the monograph is quite different from the general textbook. You need to be much more aware of the author's interpretation. This is most important if your professor intends to include essay questions on your exams. Will he want his own interpretation, the author's interpretation or your own? Be sure you know before you start studying.
Should you study with friends or alone? That's up to you. Personally, I always studied on my own. That has its ups and downs but then so too does studying with friends.
A final word or two: If you have prepared yourself for the exam by knowing what is expected, you will have the confidence to do well. If you are confident about your abilities then chances are very good that you also understand the material. What does this all mean? Study to the point where you become confident. Confidence is everything! What more can I say?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
