Rants to the Editor, Part 1/inf

This is not a post but it's definitely a placeholder for one. It's more substantial than a tweet, though not by much. All I want to complain about is the overwhelming influence of social history and contextualization in the history of thought, whether in the history of ideas, history of science or the history of philosophy. The kind of "internalist" theoretical history of thought that you see in Arthur Lovejoy and Alexandre Koyré has let itself die in the Anglophone world since the 1970s. The same thing goes for the academic literature on science fiction, since it's passed from the more serious definitional work (like you see in Darko Suvin) now right down to "none of that matters, let's just do sociology of taste." We really need that good old speculative longue durée approach soon as we can. We need people today who are willing to be speculative, and maybe even shoddy with the facts, all ready to be the Lovejoys and the Koyrés and the Collingwoods we need. This might also unfortunately become a regular (and longer) feature, so stay tuned for more rants and letters to the editor. Peace out!