I'm sure if I actually knew what Santayana had to say more on the subject of history, he'd be saying what follows. This comes with the standard caveat that I was a political science, and not history, major.
Santayana said: "those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it". Josh over at Better Living Through Software runs through the logical fallacies involved in over-using that quote. I thought about it briefly (for about 20 minutes, and this should also be considered a caveat), and came to these conclusions:
- that if you do not know your history, that doesn't mean you will repeat it;
- that if you do know your history, that doesn't mean you won't repeat it;
- that knowing your history and trying to repeat it doesn't mean you will repeat it;
- that not knowing history but ending up repeating it isn't such a bad thing if the history being repeated was a desired result;
- that it's probably about time I stop pretending to know how to use a semi-colon and look up its proper usage.
Again, there is no claim of originality nor of accuracy here. In fact, it is expressly disclaimed. The preceding two sentences may, now that I think about it, work well in an 'about' page I'm considering writing.
Anyway, Adam has some thoughts on Josh's post too, and might be worth reading, considering that the former is a history major.
