Historians of thought pursue their profession with the conviction that their particular areas of interest exclusively consist of ideas and works from the past. Old eras and cultures when these ideas were born, and which were perhaps also influenced them. They do hope that their activity will produce benefits also for others, and that their contemporaries will not simply regard it the ‘superstition of an antiquarian’ (as it was by Edmund Burke), yet they are not fundamentally driven by this intention. For them the past deserves respect in and for itself, and not because one can directly learn from it. And in the meantime they may not even have the slightest idea that by evoking the past and selectively reviving its different characters and ideas, they in fact tell something important about their own era and its intellectual struggles. (Attila M. Demeter)
A kosár üres
