No Robots

Oh, I'm looking all right, and here's something I found from Arnaldo Momigliano (Dr. mountainman, stat!):

Spinoza went back to the fundamental principles of Greek historical research in the sense that he treated biblical history as ordinary history in the Greek manner. Furthermore, if it is generally true that Renaissance scholars soon went far beyond what Greek scholars had been able to do in the historical interpretation of ancient texts, this is particularly true of Spinoza. After all he was able to rely on the intimate knowledge of the Bible, and on the sharp observation of details of generations and generations of Hebrew scholars. He himself was aware of his debt to Ibn Ezra. Yet not even Spinoza was truly a historian of Judaism. When he said, "dico methodum interpretandi Scripturam haud differe a methodo interpretandi naturam" (Tract. Theol. Pol. 7.6) he certainly reasserted the principles of free enquiry which had made Greek historiography possible. But he was interested in eternal truths, not in historical events. His criticism of the Bible was part of his philosophy, not a contribution to a history of the Jews. He was perhaps none the worse for that; but the encounter between Spinozism and historical research was a later development which would have surprised Spinoza himself.--The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography / Arnaldo Momigliano, p. 27-28.

Momigliano was a life-long devotee of Spinoza, having a passage from the Ethics read at his funeral. As a child, he thought about "the Deus sive Natura of Spinoza as an alternative to the God of the prophets" (Preface to Essays on Ancient and Modern Judaism, p. xxvi). Unfortunately, Momigliano fell under the sway of people like Gershom Sholem, who, for religious reasons, rejected Spinoza's approach; and denied any role for it in historiography. All the same, Momigliano remained aware of the importance of Spinoza to contemporary historiography, an importance that even now is only starting to be generally recognized. Perhaps if Momigliano had been familiar with Constantin Brunner's work, he would have realized that his early intuition about the identity of Spinoza's god and the god of the prophets was right on the mark.

spin

Your job was to find out about the stuff of history.

Momigliano was very erudite and deserves more use than quote mining. That doesn't change the fact that he was a committed religionist. Can you concentrate on what you claim to be doing, ie finding out about the stuff of history? Thank you.


spin

No Robots

Here is a more recent assessment of Spinoza's place in historiography:

Spinoza's philosophy of history consists not in some master narrative of the development of nature, whether providential or immanent, but in the systematic use of exemplary narratives as a necessary feature of individual and collective human striving.--"Spinoza and the Philosophy of History" / Michael A. Rosenthal. Chapter 6 of Interpreting Spinoza / Charlie Huenemann, ed. (Cambridge University 2008), p. 111.

Rosenthal continues:

The historical narrative itself may be one such exemplary model, whether the life of Christ, or the history of the Israelite nation.

Together, these elements constitute a theory of history.--p. 118

spin

And it cannot distinguish between tradition and history, which is essentially your problem.


spin

No Robots

Spin, your problem is that you have an utter disregard for the textual evidence.

No Robots

The pendulum has clearly shifted from a relative basic trust in the information given in the Hebrew Bible to a fundamental skepticism toward textual evidence and a positivistic quest for verification of information before it can be trusted and included in the pool of reliable data used for historical reconstruction—an interpretive strategy that Hoffmeier has labeled a "hermeneutic of suspicion," an approach that has been strongly challenged, because taken to the extreme it would mean a terminal "concealment" of the past, the end of historiography.—Text and History: Historiography and the Study of the Biblical Text / Jens Bruun Kofoed (Eisenbrauns, 2005), p. 3-4.

No Robots

Kofoed's point of departure is the work of Thompson and Lemche and their "preferences for so-called 'hard data' and 'material remains' as historical correctives to the textual evidence, specifically, the biblical texts." Kofoed warns, though, that, "the results of this approach, however, are highly dependent on the validity of its assumptions."

Notice that even with the Copenhagen school, material remains are a corrective to and not a replacement for the textual evidence.

spin

There are none so blind who will not see.


venerable spin

spin

The corrective idea is simple, where narrative tradition conflicts with hard evidence, the hard evidence usually wins.


spin

spin

The approach of Hoffmeier I guess must be labeled a "hermeneutic of gullibility", if he has to reduce the issue to suspicion. Material that can't be shown to be from the period cannot be used until its relevance can be established. Otherwise you have no way of knowing the value of the material you base your research on. That's pretty gullible.

It's better to have less history -- history that you can depend on --, than more history that you can't depend on.


spin