93. Whether believers or not, we are agreed today that the earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone. For believers, this becomes a question of fidelity to the Creator, since God created the world for everyone. Hence every ecological approach needs to incorporate a social perspective which takes into account the fundamental rights of the poor and the underprivileged. The principle of the subordination of private property to the universal destination of goods, and thus the right of everyone to their use, is a golden rule of social conduct and “the first principle of the whole ethical and social order.” The Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable, and has stressed the social purpose of all forms of private property.
95. The natural environment is a collective good, the patrimony of all humanity and the responsibility of everyone. If we make something our own, it is only to administer it for the good of all. If we do not, we burden our consciences with the weight of having denied the existence of others. That is why the New Zealand bishops asked what the commandment “Thou shall not kill” means when “twenty percent of the world’s population consumes resources at a rate that robs the poor nations and future generations of what they need to survive.”
As the late, renowned American psychologist Charles R. Snyder summarized, even on a personal basis, “high-hope persons consistently fare better than their low-hope counterparts in the arenas of academics, athletics, physical health, psychological adjustment, and psychotherapy.”
Oxfam estimated that the wealth of just sixty-one people equaled all the wealth of humanity’s poorest half, nearly four billion people.
Richard Holmes, the ‘romantic’ biographer of Coleridge and Shelley, put it memorably when he described biography as a broken bridge into the past: You stood at the end of the broken bridge and looked across carefully, objectively, into the unattainable past on the other side … For me, it was to become a kind of pursuit … You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.
The philosophy of history now has its home in the Anglophone world, thanks mainly to Collingwood, who acted as a kind of trait d’union between German (and Italian) philosophy of history on the one hand and its contemporary practitioners in the Anglophone world on the other. Without Collingwood the discipline might well be dead by now and we should be profoundly grateful to him for having prevented the discipline’s premature death. Nevertheless, a price had to be paid for this. Not being able to read German, Collingwood had an only rudimentary grasp of what had been achieved by German philosophers of history. And since most Anglophone philosophers of history have come to the discipline via Collingwood, several of the latter’s blind spots were unfortunately passed on to the contemporary Anglophone philosophy of history. Above all because Collingwood’s writings are the Anglophone philosopher of history’s customary introduction to the discipline’s main problems.
I question Ankersmit's contention that Collingwood was not able to read German. The article in The New World Encyclopedia indicates that he read German, and this comports with my memory from other sources (that I won't take the time to check now). Ditto with the contention that RGC had "only a rudimentary grasp of what had been achieved by the German philosophers of history." Has Ankersmit read The Idea of History?
On a neurological level, the anticipation of failure is stress.
The boundaries of the reality-based community are fuzzy and frothy, not hard and distinct, and the same is true of knowledge itself. What has and has not been validated? Who qualifies as an expert reviewer? Who is doing good science or journalism, who is doing bad science or journalism, and who is not doing science or journalism at all? Distinguishing science from pseudoscience and real news from fake news and knowledge from opinion will never be cut and dried.
With the rise of postmodern values comes a rejection of what are seen as the stale materialistic values of modernism and the chauvinistic and oppressive values of traditionalism.
“Truth, for Goethe, is “a revelation emerging at the point where the inner world of man meets external reality.... It is a synthesis of world and mind, yielding the happiest assurance of the eternal harmony of existence.”
