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profile.gif David Ng is Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia - this is a just a fancier way of calling himself a science teacher.

profile.gifBenjamin Cohen is an Asst. Professor of Science, Tech., and Society at the University of Virginia. He studies the place of S & T in environmental history, policy, and ethics. He also writes other stuff.

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"The world is full of light and life, and the true crime is not to be interested in it." A.S. Byatt

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« Clearly, it's holiday season, so let's switch gears a little. Share your musical recommedations. | Main | A Christmas Poem »

On Modern Exceptionalism

Category: Knoxville '82: Where Miscellany Thrive
Posted on: December 21, 2007 10:40 AM, by Benjamin Cohen

"And each generation, full of itself,/ continues to think/ that it lives at the summit of history" -- so ends Affonso Romano de Sant' Anna's poem "Letter to the Dead" (as posted here last year).

In the same spirit of questioning Modern Exceptionalism, here is a quote by the German author Daniel Kehlmann from his book Measuring the World (a novel using Humboldt and Gauss as main characters, a novel, I might say, about epistemology):

It was both odd and unjust...a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.

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