May 2014
Beginner
376 pages
13h 21m
English
Mind is the material of history…If history is not a mere puppet show, then it must be the history of mental processes…[T]hose matters which come first in the rational order of things—the cognitive functions of the mind—come last from the standpoint of our awareness and our observation.
–Georg Simmel (1905, vii, 39, 43)
If, as the German sociologist and philosopher of history Georg Simmel suggested at the beginning of the last century, “the material of history” is—in the phrasing of his English translator—“the cognitive functions of the mind” (“die Erkenntnisfunktion des Geistes”; in the fifth edition of his work, he speaks also of “die psychologische Tatsätlichkeit[en]” ...
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