Relevant to @48:11
I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of academicians' brains.
Than in the near certainty that people of equal talent lived & died in cotton fields & sweatshops.
Today, we live in a period wherein the margins of philosophical
and other academic writings are becoming unprecedentedly central.
This is the age of global forms & quantitative metrics.
Already two decades old and debated in some sciences.
Such platforms position the footnotes, endnotes, in-text references & bibliographies of academic texts, traditional marginalia of intellectual works as close to the heart of the intellectual matter.
Each is predicated upon that; the importance of an author/article can be scientifically measured.
One needs only to count the number of times it has been cited in other registered, P2P journals.
The reason is simple; establishing whether something is true about something,
its properties, causes or relations is the direct goal of a persuasive speech or inquiry.
Knowing what others have said about a subject may serve this end.
:tinythink:It cannot achieve or supplant it:tinythink:
The appeal to others’ authority, in place of more direct forms of discovery or invention,
has always rubbed up against inquiry’s openness to suspending established opinions
for long enough to undertake the search for potentially novel and transformative truths.
It is difficult to deny all qualitative difference between inquiry seeking, repeatedly-demonstrable, impersonal and transformative truths. As against thought
pre-shaped by the desire to placate, impress or provoke existing standpoints.
Such supplementary appeals to authority are unavoidable in intellectual thought.
Unfortunately, professional groups have always operated
by institutionalising forms of deference credentialisation.
Problems emerge if the need to cite authorities, or need to be cited by authorities,
is elevated to an unsustainable centrality in scholarly inquiry.
“The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who would learn.”
AND STILL WE WILL BE HERE, STANDING LIKE STATUES!
As scholars have argued, many masterworks of the Renaissance were produced, with the aid of what were called “Commonplace Books”. In these notebooks, educated men were prompted to collect the notable sayings of authorities about given subjects: Headers like the many traditional intellectual virtues; clarity, breadth, fairness, moderation, learning, scope, wit, insight and caution.
The very unfamiliarity of this lost practice from the long history of higher education however, serves as its own reminder. Continuing revaluations of the citational margins of philosophy
and inquiry form part of a long, rich history of higher education.
It is possible that scholars of future generations may think many of our practices,
if not like Montaigne’s grotesques or extravagances, then every bit as foreign,
as we today, find the Renaissance Commonplaces.
When you hold close a circumstance which binds your mind.
Eventually it'll change your perspective in time.