the fences that you cannot climb
With the hazy idea of getting out of my career rut by writing Something about what I know (history and education) I started reading Keith Jenkins' Re-thinking History at bedtime. It's a short read, but provocative. The argument is that really historians are not trying to (a la Collingwood) reconstruct mind, but to evaluate traces of the past; the mind is unknowable. All we really do in history, fundamentally, is compare traces and make arguments from intertextual comparison. That screws with a lot of other assumptions about thinking historically and the research basis for what I've been doing these past 10 years... but when I think about it, I think he's really right on a fundamental level. So it's making me think I need to reevaluate a lot of what I think I know and think it through. I'm starting to feel that way more generally about life as well.
Look, shiny!
Look, shiny!