Human human history
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| Missoula County Courthouse, Missoula, Montana |
It's been awhile since my last post - I've been quite wrapped up (I wouldn't say busy) with reading lots of stuff, including these three:
Two non-fiction, one sci-fi... one common theme: the nature of history, or, how humans remember things. This has been my passion and consolation since I first read Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances. Actually, reading Barfield was a response to my own readings and studies in the history of science. Here's the short version of the story...
Back in 1986 I was recently married, with a baby on the way. I had a BS in Secondary Education, certified to teach English or Physical Science (not Physical Education, but Physical Science - a kind of basic chemistry and physics). I wasn't working in my field, and got a job offer to teach high school sciences at a small private school. I jumped at it.
The first semester of teaching, I studied more - and more efficiently - than in the entire four years I was in college. In the first few weeks of class, in every class, there was a short introduction to the science at hand - chemistry, biology, earth science. In every text book, it was the same basic story: humans had been guided by superstition for most of human history, up until around the 1600's, when it started dawning on people that you could actually observe nature, and start to understand cause and effect.
The simplicity of these stories put me on my guard. I started reading outside of the textbooks - biographies of some of the early figures in the recent history of science, like Lavoisier; some original texts, like Darwin's Origin of the Species and Galileo's writings. I was also put on guard regarding the claims of contemporary science as well. I read David Ehrenfeld's The Arrogance of Humanism, and assigned it to my senior Physics students. And a fellow science teacher at another school recommended Saving the Appearances.
From there I was directed to Immanuel Kant's The Critique of Pure Reason; and a friend gave me his copy of Phenomenology and Existentialism by Robert Solomon. When my teaching contract wasn't renewed after the second year, I took the opportunity to apply to graduate school in Philosophy. I came to Missoula to study at the University of Montana. Seven years later, with a thesis manuscript and no degree, I moved on. And am still moving on...
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