Reading about Jew conspiracies eh? No surprise. — Wosret
Someone suggested earlier in the thread that there is nothing that could not be a subject of history. The list of possible subjects you presented in the OP mentioned both human and non-human constructs. That's everything. Do you agree?So, to sharpen up the concern that led me to the OP: what is it that leads people to write histories of X? This is a personal decision; in theory, the historian has absolute freedom. But there must be some common trait or traits between salt, clothing, mammals, France, science, the West, the Universe and childhood; these are the stuff about which histories are written of. — Mariner
I started studying history because I came across the idea of social cycles. My ability to see and understand (broadly speaking) is dependent on my ability to see patterns. Early on in my attempt to see patterns in history, it occurred to me that my project was similar to seeing patterns in clouds. If I see a dolphin in a cloud.. where is the dolphin? Noticing that, I became bound to the contradiction. I'm blind without the pattern, but I don't have a passive relationship to patterns.The answer certainly points up to some movement of the historian's being towards the preservation (or, the bolstering up) of something cherished. People write histories because (a) they thing the subject is meaningful, (b), they want other people to know about it, and (c) they think that, by telling other people about it, they are participating in the life of the subject. The historian creates and enters the history he writes. — Mariner
So, to sharpen up the concern that led me to the OP: what is it that leads people to write histories of X? This is a personal decision; in theory, the historian has absolute freedom. But there must be some common trait or traits between salt, clothing, mammals, France, science, the West, the Universe and childhood; these are the stuff about which histories are written of. — Mariner
There can be a history of anything since everything takes place in history. If there's a problem, then, in my view, the problem is that there can be no unified history. There can only be histories, even if in order to write the history of something, it should in principle contain other histories too. — Πετροκότσυφας
So, to sharpen up the concern that led me to the OP: what is it that leads people to write histories of X? This is a personal decision; in theory, the historian has absolute freedom. But there must be some common trait or traits between salt, clothing, mammals, France, science, the West, the Universe and childhood; these are the stuff about which histories are written of.
The answer certainly points up to some movement of the historian's being towards the preservation (or, the bolstering up) of something cherished. People write histories because (a) they thing the subject is meaningful, (b), they want other people to know about it, and (c) they think that, by telling other people about it, they are participating in the life of the subject. The historian creates and enters the history he writes. — Mariner
Non-human constructs: History of Mammals. History of Vertebrates. History of the World. History of the Universe. — Mariner
That is because we can use so well math to explain the phenomena we see in astronomy.As far as I know astronomy tell us how stuff up there works and it has more to do with math and measurement than with narratives. — Πετροκότσυφας
Which would lead to nonsense. History isn't about verifying if some molecules or atoms interacted in some way or not. Yes, at the most simple level the historical question is that did something physically happen or not. This kind of question doesn't get us far and it doesn't at all tell about the reasons why something happened.If we were to pursue this reductionist model, we would end up saying that everything is micro-physics or something. — Πετροκότσυφας
Which would lead to nonsense. History isn't about verifying if some molecules or atoms interacted in some way or not. Yes, at the most simple level the historical question is that did something physically happen or not. This kind of question doesn't get us far and it doesn't at all tell about the reasons why something happened.
There remains the question of why should a historian ever decide to write a history. — Mariner
1. The "common trait" between all histories involves the sense of consubstantiality of being ("everything is interlocked").
2. That said, histories are different (compared to one another) because of the freedom of the historian to pick and filter subjects, events, data, all of the stuff he uses when writing his history.
3. In other words, a history is a creation of a historian who, being limited in being (he was born, he will die, he is not omnipresent, he has to carry the burden of his ethnicity/upringing/culture/politics/etc.), will always present a subjectively distorted viewpoint. — Mariner
Yes, like with the statistical wonder called the arithmetic mean, the average. No really, some dynamic mathematical models are not exactly useful, but the trusty average is extremely useful. Just look at how much history has math with averages... and compare it with everything else mathematical, if we skip the most simple arithmetic (adding and subtracting). As somebody said "If Mathematics is a language, so is English."History cannot be analyzed through pure mathematics, but mathematics can be a boon to historical study. — AbsurdRhetor
Perhaps first. Yet usually we ask why. What and why are two different things. Let's say in Astronomy the questions are far more of the "What" type even if naturally the objective is to find causal explanations for the events.From the History of the Cosmos to the History of the 2000's, every time we study the past, we are asking the univocal question: "What happened?" — AbsurdRhetor
Yes, but we still can distinguish between fiction and history; there is some ingredient that is present in one and missing in the other (and, or, vice versa). — Mariner
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