From: Everdell-AT-aol.com
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2000 15:02:18 EDT
Subject: Re: Lacan, Klein,  Freud, and Ptolemy: the eternal golden braid



In a message dated 6/9/00 4:52:57 PM, Howard Hasting wrote three paragraphs 
that made one historian (me), who works hard to maintain diplomatic relations 
with literature and other departments, sigh with relief:

<<If your point is "hardly to suggest that newer is better," it certainly is 
to assume a distinction between poetry and science on the basis of which can 
be superceded by later work and which cannot. In other words, it presumes a 
distinction between poetry and science which has repeatedly come under 
question in the 20th century and especially over the last 40 years, a 
distinction which melds on older metaphysics of the text with positivist 
epistemology.

And it seems to rule out all recognition of how later developments within a 
science may depend upon problems and fields opened by previous work now 
superceded, yet still playing a decisive role in current practice by virtue 
of having oriented research interest away from previous problems and towards 
new ones--thus remaining, implicitly, a part of current practice even if 
current practitioners have no direct knowledge of it.

This connection between past and present, and the insight it brings into the 
development and transmission of knowledge, are thus lost, with the result 
that objects of research which have required centuries of inquiry to appear 
as such are accepted as the naturally given measure used in sorting "true" 
theories from "false.">>

All on this lengthening thread might enjoy the new book by Steve Fuller, 
_Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times_ (U. of Chicago) for an 
exuberant example of how historians of ideas treat "theories," in this case 
philosophies of science.

-Bill Everdell, Brooklyn