Tuesday February 05, 2019

In American culture this flattening of the past onto the present is viewed casually, and you sometimes come across a professor of philosophy who tells you it’s irrelevant to know what Descartes had to say about our way of thinking, seeing that what interests us is what cognitive science is discovering today. He is forgetting that, if the cognitive sciences have come as far as they have, it is because a particular discussion had begun with seventeenth-century philosophers, but above all there is a failure to use the experience of the past as a lesson for the present.

— Chronicles of a Liquid Society, Umberto Eco and Richard Dixon, p.40.