Materialist Philosophy of History by Branko Mitrović

Author:Branko Mitrović
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: undefined
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Essentialism and Anachronism

Essentialism in the form that Kripke presents it is unlikely to be controversial for a historian. Nevertheless, one needs to be careful because in some formulations it can easily lead into anachronistic perspectives. Putnam’s analysis of Archimedes’s use of the Greek word for gold, χρυσός, shows what happens when essentialism is combined with the belief that words are translated between languages straightforwardly and one-for-one. In most cases, what Greeks called χρυσός is what we would call “gold.” Nevertheless, the techniques that ancient Greeks used to identify gold were not technologically as advanced as ours and it may have happened that some items that passed Archimedes’s test for χρυσός would not count as “gold” for us today. In Putnam’s view:

when Archimedes asserted that something was gold (χρυσός) he was not just saying that it had the superficial characteristics of gold . . . ; he was saying that it had the same general hidden structure (the same “essence” so to speak) as any normal piece of local gold.[10]

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