Word: vaguest
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...essay with: "David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. If this be the spirit of the age in which he lived, then he was representative of it." This generality expert has already taken his position for the essay. Actually, he has not the vaguest idea of what Hume really said, or in fact if he ever said anything. But by never bothering to define empiricism, he may write indefinitely on the issue virtually without contradiction...
Professor Henry Graff of Columbia points out that in the 19th century most Americans had only the vaguest idea what their President looked like. Today everyone can "see" the President practically every day. We now know so much about the man while he is in office, and about his career before he got there, that it might seem there is nothing left for "history" to say. But in this age of paper and microfilm, Government and its officials are generating documentation at a prodigious rate. As scholars mine all this material (some of it under security restrictions for 20 years...
...fact, of course, no one even remembers what sort of time one has on summer vacation, because the mind is not itself. All we ever have are the vaguest recollections, preserved for a brief time in their rich excitement before they fade like...
Take a student who has never been to Italy, never really seen, let alone looked at Italian art, never read any Italian literature, hasn't the vaguest notion about the mind-bending complexity of Italian history. Don't tell him who Lorenzo de Medici was, or make him read the Florentine historians, but instead make him read Lopez's theory of the relation between economics and culture in the Renaissance. Then make him read what some scholar said about some other scholar's interpretation of Lopez. Then ask him for his opinion about the Renaissance. This is the scenario...
...remembers them. If Harvard Faculty ever composes its memoirs, more than likely the chapter on the 1969 and '70 merger debates will not make the final edition. Most of Holton's colleagues do not recall a debate ever taking place and the few who do, have only the vaguest notion what anyone said. Even John R. Marquand, assistant dean of the Faculty and often dubbed 'Harvard's unofficial historian,' knows he went to the meetings concerning the merger, but confesses uncomfortably, "I don't remember anything." James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, was also around at the time...