Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Panofsky, quoted below (and all of this is a repeat from years ago):
"The humanist, then, rejects authority. But he respects tradition."

Simon Blackburn in The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy:
Humanism—Most generally any philosophy concerned to emphasize human welfare and dignity, and optimistic about the powers of unaided human understanding.
To be fair that's from the 1994 edition and Blackburn has updated it and made it at least a bit more historically accurate; nonetheless another demonstration that Enlightenment Humanism, as it's come down to us, is an oxymoron.
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Philology. The narrative of Modernism is of synchrony and formalism supplanting narrative. The only place philological argument is central is in constitutional scholarship. The word's been sitting there, unused, and I never caught it.

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