Rendezvous
28 August 07 : 11.25 PM
I'm reading a book, a thesis by this old guy. Not for fun, but because I'm in the midst of a project that requires me to know everything he has to say. Or something like that. Arguments against historicism (which unlike what most people think, is NOT the study of history). He's so philosophical and yet makes so much references to empirical science that it becomes bothersome to read his stuff.
I hate him and I hate him and I'm stressed out because it's 12am and I'm not even done with it. I have to be up by 8 in the morning, and I need at least 130 hours of sleep everyday.
But this. This is priceless.
...history does make use of universal laws contrary to the emphatic declaration of so many historians that history has no interest whatever in such laws. To this we may answer that a singular event is the cause of another singular event—which is its effect—only relative to some universal laws. But these laws may be so trivial, so much part of our common knowledge, that we need not mention them and rarely notice them.
If we say that the cause of the death of Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake, we do not need to mention the universal law that all living things die when exposed to intense heat. ...
Fucking priceless.