Aa. Vv., The Past and the Present. Problems of Understanding, Grandpont House, Oxford 1993, pp. 102.

The six papers collected in this volume are the fruit of a conference held at Oxford, under the sponsorship of Grandpont House, on the theme of “Pre-Modern Europe and the Modern Student: Problems of Understanding”. As Andrew Hegarty explains in his introduction, the conference formed part of an ongoing effort by Grandpont House to respond to John-Paul II’s appeal to Europeans to rediscover the truth of their origins. The urgency of that appeal rests not only on the obvious fact that modern (and even “post-modern”) Europe cannot fully understand itself except in light of its past and its tradition, but also on the belief that the tradition itself contains precious resources for fortifying and guiding the search for truth, both historical and otherwise. Gaining access to those resources and using them discerningly, however, is anything but easy. Learning about the past, and learning from the past, encounter obstacles on all sides: in ourselves, in the past itself, and in the very nature of such an inquiry. The conference brought together six prominent scholars—three philosophers and three historians—to reflect upon some of these difficulties and ways of dealing with them. In the first paper, “Knowledge and Belief in Human Testimony”, Peter Geach argues, with typical force and wit, for the inevitability and indispensability of human authority as a source of knowledge. He shows the significance of this claim by drawing a sharp distinction between knowledge and belief. Belief is merely a kind of disposition, e.g. to judge or to answer a question in a certain way; but knowledge is a capacity, an ability—we might say a kind of mastery of something. Geach then takes up the acceptance of authority or testimony as one of our main natural means of acquiring knowledge. He argues that although it is sometimes necessary to choose between conflicting authorities, making such a choice does not imply having independent knowledge of the matter in question; “we cannot escape from resorting to testimony and authority”. It is “only by his trusting the testimony of others” that “the experience of mankind…is made available to an individual”. Geach’s reflections bring to mind Aristotle’s dictum that he who wants to learn must trust his teacher. They also echo of Aquinas’ claim that theology, which rests on faith, is genuine science. Aquinas of course was speaking of faith in divine authority; but he did so in a cultural context in which human authority too was recognized as a source of knowledge. The medievals’ view of authority is perhaps one of the main obstacles to the modern student’s taking them seriously and learning from them. This forms the target of the volume’s second paper, “The Argument from Authority”, by Christopher Martin. Martin thinks we can learn something from the medieval view of authority—not only something about them but also something about ourselves and our own conception of knowledge. This is that we too, willy-nilly, rely heavily upon authority, precisely because we still regard knowledge as something to be taught and learned. Not acknowledging the role of authority contradicts our own standards of reasonableness, those which we ourselves have learned and teach, and prevents us from exercising it or controlling it according to those standards. The medievals acknowledged it, and controlled it. For them the argument from authority “was an argument. Admittedly it was the weakest argument of all, so that any other argument was stronger: but it was none the less an argument. You needed another argument to refute it, before you could ignore it.” The third paper, by John Haldane, presents a lucid account of four conceptions of human nature which have been prominent in the history of philosophy, and seeks to clarify and defend the one which is perhaps the least sympathetic to the modern mind: that of man as a bodily creature with a rational soul, a “psychophysical unity”, both organic and rational. This is by no means just one particular topic among many, in the domain of problems in historical understanding; it may be this very conception of man which best does justice to his historicity, which is to say, his temporal and visible personhood. As Haldane explains, to understand it is to perceive, “through observation of the multitude of activities and artifacts that constitute the human world, that there are persons, i.e. creatures such as ourselves with aspects whose souls we are everyday presented.” Limitations of space prevent much discussion here of the volume’s remaining papers, by the three historians; but they are well worth reading. Anne Duggan calls attention to various ideological obstacles to our doing “real history”—obstacles in our very conception of historical knowledge, and obstacles in our attitude toward certain dominant elements of Europe’s past, particularly our “aversion from the religious”. Jonathan Riley-Smith argues against the impossibility of an entirely neutral approach to the past—the questions we ask of it are always our questions—urging instead that we strive to be conscious of our own partial and conditioned vantage point, and that the historian seek to express “in comprehensible terms a necessary vision of society’s collective experience.” Finally, John Morrill insists that “you can get to know people in the past”, just as you can get to know people in the present: “you can come to have a sense of the rhythms of their lives, of the way in which they behave, of the way in which they respond to a certain kind of thing.” He also insists upon the value of a “horizontal” approach to the past, the effort to “re-create the contemporary context of events and actions in their fuller sense.” Doing so “teaches us something of the poverty of our understanding of our own culture.” S.L. BROCK