9.3. What was the contribution of scholars like Rene
Descartes, Voltaire and Hegel of the development
of Histontegraphy
Answers
Answer: The other challenge lay in the relativism and skepticism generated within historical discourse itself. In his Histoire des histoires et l’idée de l’histoire accompli (1599; “History of Histories and the Idea of History Accomplished”), Lancelot Voisin La Popelinière (1540–1608) asked: if history shows the ceaseless mutations of human culture, what keeps history itself from being more than a mode of perception of any particular culture, of no more permanent value than any other changeable cultural artifact? Thus, the unmasking of forgeries could lead to suspicions about every relic of the past. In a similar vein, the French Jesuit Jean Hardouin claimed that almost all the Latin and Greek classics and most of the works of the Church Fathers, including St. Augustine and St. Jerome, were written by a group of medieval Italian scholars, who then forged all the manuscripts purporting to be earlier. Hardouin, it must be said, pushed historical criticism past the boundaries of sanity.
The most influential philosopher of the 17th century, René Descartes, included history in his catalogue of dubious sciences. In his Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes asserted that, although histories exalt the mind, even the most accurate of histories, if they do not exactly misrepresent or exaggerate the value of things in order to render them more worthy of being read, at least omit in them all the circumstances which are basest and least notable; and from this it follows that what is retained is not portrayed as it really is, and that those who regulate their conduct by examples which they derive from such a source are liable to fall into the extravagances of the knights-errant of romances.
According to Descartes, history is doubtful because it is selective. Unlike the sciences, which are based on mathematics, history cannot yield knowledge.
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