Michael writes: "Marginal "scholars" don't contribute to the discourse but instead try to find, usually erroneous or trivial -- by means of relabeling -- issues that they purport will topple the whole domain. Revisionism of course is always an opportunity and even a demand, but it must be substantial, conceptual, historically valid, born of a new world-view, as it were."
It seems to me, Michael, if Chris's excerpting is right, Smith is evidently convinced that he has come up with something of immense significance in noting that later writers have called the development of perspective "mathematical" or "scientific" (when there was no "science" in the modern sense of "scientific method", and mathematics doesn't seem to be an element at all). And that strikes me as mistaking a minnow for a whale. And Smith's observations about professors' not professing anymore seems almost as trivial, and, much more important, false (see below). If this is a characteristic reflection of the way Smith thinks, he's no one I want to spend time reading - given how many other worthy books are around. "It must be substantial, conceptual, historically valid, born of a new world-view," you say, and I say it sure doesn't seem that way. (I wrote earlier: Chris -- The questions below feel bogus. It's not wondrous that perspective should have been devised at a time when there were "no scientists". Technologies can be developed discretely. Certainly the accomplishments in architecture, nautical crafts, aqueducts etc in "ancient" times all required what we'd be content to call "science" -- in the sense of systematic "knowing" accrued through seeing what works and what doesn't. And the notion that "professors" no longer "profess" is wrong. It suggests that university teachers no longer do original work and then talk about it, teach it, in class. But of course they do. This is particularly true in philosophy. In the twentieth century, from Russell to Wittgenstein, Derrida, Kripke and others, that's exactly what those leading thinkers did. Wittgenstein was famous for walking up and down in front of his class "thinking out loud" as he painfully wrestled with problems.)
