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Gardening & Philosophy
Deeply Rooted and Growing
Looking forward by looking backward
When I was a teenager, I watched a ten-episode series from the BBC. Hosted by science historian, James Burke, the series, Connections: An Alternate View of Change, probably doomed me as scholar. It was released in 1978; and it changed my entire view of the world. No longer were technological and social milestones atomized events that just happened without predicate or influence. Rather, they were the organic result of synthesized thinking across vast spans of time that pushed them into being.
If you’ve ever read an academic journal article (in the social sciences anyway), there’s typically a section called the Literature Review. The function of this section is to establish the scholarly provenance of the research you’re about to present. The lit. review answers the question ‘who’s studied this topic before and what did they conclude about it?’ Mine tend to be long, too long.
In graduate school I was taking a course taught by the recently passed Hans Toch. Prof. Toch was a giant in the field, and he made me read things that have become important to me — things I never would have read otherwise. I was assigned to review a book on corrections. I chose Michele Foucault’s notoriously difficult Discipline and Punish. Having become…
