Cheerskep on marginalia > Michael writes:
But I didn't. What you cite here is from the second paragraph of William's response to Miller's first message. > > "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. "I wish to show in my book that my eminent predecessors and colleagues have based a lot of their work on faulty grounds. Allow me to explain." (not his words) This kind of thing happens all the time. He published this book four years before his death, not as a hot-shot new Ph.D. who was torching the landscape with a brazen new tome to clear out some of the deadwood and underbrush and make room for himself. > And Smith's observations about professors' not professing anymore seems > almost as trivial, and, much more important, false (see below). That was far from Smith's main point. It was a way for him to move the discussion from Ruskin's moralizing art studies to the Germans who grounded their work in a stronger, more rigorous historiographical methods. > 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. Don't overlook the fact that Miller is indulging his obsessive interest in debunking the establishment by, in this case, reading a book by a retired professor who is "biting the hand that fed him." Ooooooo, how naughty. To Miller, this is entertainment, not enlightenment. He's told us this before, how he delights in controversy, iconoclasm, finding clay-feet to laugh at. And he's already told us that Smith's book "won't be even-handed" and will make straw-man arguments. Miller's parting words, "But, God help me, this is exactly the kind of thing that I like (especially since I tend to agree with him) ...'
