A Quote by Simon Critchley

I am opposing it with an idea of the history of philosophy as a history of philosophers, that is, a history of mortal, fragile and limited creatures like you and I. I am against the idea of clean, clearly distinct epochs in the history of philosophy or indeed in anything else. I think that history is always messy, contingent, plural and material. I am against the constant revenge of idealism in how we think about history.
I feel history is more of a story than a lesson. I know this idea of presentism: this idea of constantly evoking the past to justify the present moment. A lot of people will tell you, "history is how we got here." And learning from the lessons of history. But that's imperfect. If you learn from history you can do things for all the wrong reasons.
All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atlantic history is national history. We're still suffering from that.
I am interested in constitutional history, political history, the history of foreign affairs, but I think you can get at those subjects through the details of daily life.
It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is a history of their struggle against the state.
Can one understand politics without understanding history, especially the history of political thought, and will this distinguish political philosophy from some other kinds of philosophy (such as, perhaps, logic) to which the study of history is not integral?
I think where you're born brings a history with it - a cultural history, a mythical history, an ancestral history, a religious context - and certainly influences your perception of the world and how you interpret everyday reality.
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.
Real Madrid is like Manchester United or Liverpool or Bayern Munich. There is so much history, and you need to play and win against that history. It's difficult to play against them because you fight against everything - the history, the players - but because of that, the motivation is always so high.
Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.
I think that as a poet, I am always concerned about history and baring witness to history. But so often, it's through the research that I do, the reading.
Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certain qualities of feeling that found expression in music can be recorded by being notated on paper, have become so remote that we can no longer inhabit them as feelings, can get a grasp of them only after long training in the history and philosophy of music, the philosophical history of music, the history of music as a history of the feeling soul.
(on A History of Western Philosophy) I was sometimes accused by reviewers of writing not a true history but a biased account of the events that I arbitrarily chose to write of. But to my mind, a man without a bias cannot write interesting history - if, indeed, such man exists.
We must consider how very little history there is--I mean real, authentic history. That certain kings reigned and certain battles were fought, we can depend upon as true; but all the coloring, all the philosophy, of history is conjecture.
I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.
There has always been interest in certain phases and aspects of history - military history is a perennial bestseller, the Civil War, that sort of thing. But I think that there is a lot of interest in historical biography and what's generally called narrative history: history as story-telling.
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