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Reading Backwards
For some time—in part for my own sanity and in part for the edification of my students, who badly need exposure to actual diversity in philosophical judgments—I have been assiduously avoiding the scholarly and intellectual present to devote what remains of my mortal finitude to what I will call reading backwards into the discussion of modernity. By “modernity,” I mean the secular crisis in which all institutions are today immersed, including higher education.
One important characteristic of modernity is hostility to the past, which swiftly becomes ignorance of history. All “presentism,” as Richard Weaver dubbed it, is amnesiac. The amnesia
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