That would be an ecumenical matter
Last week I posted some thoughts in response to the discussions at A Historian’s Craft and Civil War Memory about history and philosophy. In that post I took some of the philosophical problems that affect history and tried to restate them in scientific terms. As Brett pointed out, this really amounted to stating the obvious in fairly uncontroversial terms, but I think that was worth doing in order to bypass the unproductive hostility between both extremes in the postmodernism wars (although the extent to which those extremes even exist is debatable). Whether the major problems we face as historians are philosophical, scientific, or a bit of both, the question remains: how much time should we spend thinking about these problems? In this post I’ll be discussing that question, but I have to warn you in advance that I can’t answer it. So there might not be much point reading any further…
