I hate people who do what I did: start blogs and then don’t finish them. This blog has along way to go–in spite of what they say, the history of philosophy is not finished even today, let alone in Kant’s time. But I plead for forgiveness on the grounds that I was trapped in Chicago by an evil virus. I flew there just before the 2020 elections, fearful of my reactions if the Bad Guy won. My plan was to return sometime after Thanksgiving. But then there arose such a fearful surge of COVID-19 that I stayed on, and on….until my resourceful daughter got my wife and me vaccinated and I could return to my workplace in Los Angeles. resuming these meanderings through the history of Western philosophy.
The word “meanderings” brings up another matter that troubles me. Shouldn’t I be publishing these in reverse order? When you open this blog, the last is the first: what confronts you is the most recent posting, and the ones that follow it down the list get earlier as you go along. So the story is being told backwards.
But then: isn’t that how we discover history? Something confronts us. it seems cloudy in places, confusing in others. So you ask where it came from, and usually some things get cleared up. But that explanatory factor has clouds of its own, so you ask where it came from, and so on down the line. And that’s the way you have to confront this blog, So I’ll leave it like this.
And with my Two Maxims Regarding History: Everything we see ordeal with is there replacing something else that didn’t work out; and, everything in history could have been different; that’s what “history” is.