Lughnasa                                Waxing Harvest Moon

Breaking news from the 16th century.  Revolution gets legs from philosophical ideas.  When I grew up in the study of philosophy, the history of ideas was the primary teaching method.  Ideas, this approach claims, grow up in contest with each other, one claiming this and another positing that.  Idealism, like Platonic forms, would find itself ground down by realists or materialists.  Empiricists would find rationalists bugging them at every turn.  The metaphysicians became prey for the logical positivists and linguistic analysts.  From time to time someone would start out on a brand new tangent like Descartes cogito ergo sum, or  Immanuel Kant’s masterly synthesis of empiricist and rationalist approaches.

It was the first way I learned how to think in an academic sense and a history of ideas approach still comes most naturally to me when I examine big problems, like the roots of liberalism, for example.  Thus, it shocked me a bit to learn, in reading Israel’s Contested Enlightenment tonight that the last few decades have seen the history of ideas bashed in academic circles, especially by those claiming material and social reasons for such historical events the Enlightenment and the Revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries.

The argument apparently has been made that ideas cannot matter in real history since so few people take an intellectual stake in big ideas at any point.  If they do not appreciate them intellectually, the argument goes, they cannot be affected by them.  This underestimates the

This thought broken off by another escaped dog.  Rigel broke the truck gate open and escaped.  Frustrating.