if you have to pick an era for inspiration/obsession pick something sexy like antiquity. Nobody sits in bed at night thinking about Hume etc. one way or another. This is an affectation picked up to appeal to academics and some media
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but advantages of Enl interp of ancients is, where material is handled well, it is beautifully written and made very engaging more ppl have gotten gist of Livy, Plutarch from Rousseau than recent critical historians of Rome
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Enl authors also v learned, embrace wider range of sources - they fought vicious battles over ancient writers literally no one reads today... 21st century gives skewed view of *which works* are important
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idea of a “canon” is - i say often - petty bourgeois straitjacket was an attempt to portray understanding of antiquity as tho intelligible to ppl who don’t like to read too much... just 50 authors and you’re done! oh that’s too much? okay can you do 12
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I think even then one is seeing through enlightenment advances in historiography, anthropology, philology, if only in second hand way. Question is how to break free and see past that completely, which is a hermeneutical challenge without an easy solution
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right agreed - eg Sorabji’s recovery of Peripatetic commentaries preserved only in Armenian impossible w/o previous generations of philology But that is diff from ultimate relevance q, where the current alternatives are themselves outcome of Enl debates (Hume, Montq etc)
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