Just finished Hill's The World Turned Upside Down. I say now it'll join Black Jacobins, Black Reconstruction, Reisch's To the Icy Slopes of Logic, Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution, Taylor's Trouble Makers ,and Cooper's Family Values as works of history that have really shaped me
I want to blog about how reading lots of history helps me be a philosopher in ways that I think are relatively unusual in analytic philosophy. I have done so a couple of times before (sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2017/02/defend… & sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2018/03/ideal-…) but never really got to the heart of things.
My guess is it reflects one weakness and one skill of mine. The skill: I read quickly and retain the info without having to take notes so it's lower cost for me to take in more. There's a sort of general "all else equal more evidence is better than less" that I thus benefit from.
The weakness: I'm *considerably* worse at abstract thinking than is normal for an analytic philosopher, like genuinely. I joke a lot about IQ but genuinely I have never done anything but just-better-than-mediocrely on standardised tests, far lower than norm in my field...
... reading lots of history (and in other contexts sociology and econ) basically allows me to overcome this deficit by seeing quite unusual situations concretely realised, and related to material circumstances. I find it easier to grasp, and can then devote time to generalising.
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