Philosophy

This article fills a much needed hole in the literature

I have been helping to review grant proposals, mostly for history research. Scholars are asked to justify their projects, and the first thing they say is usually that their projects have not been done before: no one has studied Czech grocers on the East Side of Saint Paul in the early Twentieth Century. Beyond that, they say, sensibly enough, that there is some public interest in their topic: recent feature films, a book count from Books in Print, a proliferation of study groups get cited as evidence.

I find this whole matter quite mysterious. Any study can be described so as to make it either unique or just one among many, and surely historians should be leading Hollywood and PBS, not following them. And yet, life is short, resources are limited, and some bits of history are more worth studying than others. So what makes a piece of historical research worth doing, apart from the passion of the person doing it? Maybe the honest proposal would be the one that said, in red letters, in 16 point type: "I really really really want to do this." Maybe grants should be awarded automatically to scholars who send in fingers or toes (their own, of course).

It seems like, on this matter, history leans on philosophy. It is hard to say what it is important to study without saying something about what is important in life generally.