Why Minutia Matters

It is common, perhaps especially among Christians, to reduce cultural history to intellectual history and to trace intellectual history by hopping from philosopher to philosopher. Hume poses problems that Kant tries to solve, and Heidegger tries to undo Descartes.

Not false, but very one-sided. Philosophers are supposed to reflect on fundamental Reality, but in order to do that most (not all) attempt to make sense of realities . But then they have to know what those realities are, and since they are not themselves specialists they rely on the best that scholars have to offer. The realities they reflect on aren’t established in the towers where philosophers are supposed to do their work but in the laboratories and archives where scholars are obsessed with minutiae. The minutia matters because scholars help to establish the “common knowledge” of an era.

(This is overly schematic, but I think the point stands even if the connections of philosophy and scholarship is more complicated.)