``The following generalizations may be advanced. Medieval philosophy tended to debate whether the sole true objects of rational understanding were not universal categories or propositions which were independent of time and space. The process of arriving at knowledge of them had indeed to be carried out within time and space, but recognition of their truth or reality was grounded upon perceptions independent of either; there was a self-evidence which was timeless and non-circumstantial, Reality of this order consisted of universals, and the activity of reason consisted of the intellect's ascent to recognition of the timeless rationality of universals. The truth of a self-evident proposition was self-contained and did not depend upon contingent recognition of some other proposition, still less upon evidence transitory in time and space; it was in this self-contained quality that timelessness largely consisted. In contrast, the knowledge of particulars was circumstantial, accidental, and temporal. It is based upon the sense-perception of the knower's transitory body, and very often upon messages transmitted to his senses by other knowers concerning what their sense-perceptions had permitted them to sense, to know, or to believe. Both for this reason and because propositions concerning particular phenomena had to be constructed by moving through a dimension of contingency, in which one proposition was perpetually dependent up another, knowledge of particulars was time-bound, just as the phenomena of which it was knowledge, localizd by particularity in space and time, were time-bound themselves.'' (4-5p)
One of the interesting art parallels to this changing phenomenology of the Medieval or Scholastic mind into its Renaissance incarnation was the transition from rather coldly stylized figures, say as chess pieces still are, and the specific and `life' like detail and character of Donatello for example. The materialism of the body is still deeply problematic. We lavish it as pronography.
I think I will like Pocock (what a name), but it's five hundred pages. Why do these guys have to write so damned much? Hoping for big margins and lots of pictures...probably not. Anyway it is remarkably similar to Cassirer's ideas. The concept of a sense of evolving time, seriatim, also corresponds to some of Octavio Paz's writing in Children of the Mire.
It looks very much like the antithesis of LS. Strauss was working backward, into the Medieval mind of timeless rationality of universals. That's why after Spinoza, he went to Maimonides and the concept of The Law. This is a return to a Talmudic method and concept of text. His ideological program was to be rid of historicism of exactly the above kind. He considered it to be relativistic in the sense of deeper conceptual changes in worldviews, which means you have no authentic worldview. He believed that sort of thought was equivalent to a belief in nothing, as in nothing lasting. The Pocock approach suffers from the three greatest sins: historicism, relativism, and nihilism.
Thanks to James Heartfield. The Macpherson work is The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. There is also an essay by Hegel on Hobbes, which I scan read. It gives a pretty good standard account and Hegel doesn't present any argument against---usually a sign of approval.
And Thanks to Jordy Cummings, Ellen and Neal Wood's, Trumpet of Sedition. This is only 140pp, but twice as expensive. It slso sounds too ideological. I want to de-nude and dissemble Strauss in a particularly empirical way which can't be attacked for its ideology.
You know folks all these historical figures are still so hotly debated that I've had a very difficult time trying to tease out some standard liberal academic consensus. Everybody seems to have their version. Each one of these guys has a damned school associated with him were scholastic wars still rage.
CG