04-07-2006, 01:31 PM
Visit a bookshop, any bookshop, and you will find silly books on ancient history. E.g., "Was Jesus Christ Julius Caesar?" by Carotta, and the opera omnia by Von Däniken, Velikovsky, and -here in Holland- Charles Vergeer.
I referred to this in another thread (Caesar Sôter) and remarked that academics appear to be willing to publish lousy books as well. Here is a link to a thread about book that is not sold as "alternative history", but as serious history, but is in fact substandard: link from old RAT.
Quoting my earlier message:
However, serious academics also write books and are not interested in truth any more; had our Amsterdam professor been a true scholar, he would have shown that he was devoted to truth by correcting errors. This is the only thing, I guess, we may request from the people of the universities: that they have a passion for finding the truth and are willing to be corrected. I notice that our Amsterdam professor lacks this quality.
So my question is: how can we do something against barbarism now that the barbarians are inside the fortress of scholarship?
I referred to this in another thread (Caesar Sôter) and remarked that academics appear to be willing to publish lousy books as well. Here is a link to a thread about book that is not sold as "alternative history", but as serious history, but is in fact substandard: link from old RAT.
Quoting my earlier message:
Quote:Worse, if people are employed by a university, that is not a guarantee that they don't write rubbish. Here in Amsterdam, a professor has published a book on the history of the Roman empire. It contains more than 340 factual errors. Titles are misquoted, there are inconsistencies, he mentions wrong regnal years and other dates, makes geographic errors, accepts propaganda for fact. On a map of the Roman empire in the second century before Christ, he shows the Taunus limes.This last thing is worrying me most. Scholarship is threatened by alternative histories (Black Athena, Chariots of the gods, Was Jesus Christ Julius Caesar?, etc.). I can not blame the authors, because they are no academics and do not pretend to be really scholars. If a reader buys their crap, so be it.
Because I know this man, I wrote him about an error that he could easily admit without loosing face. I hoped he would reply by asking that if I noticed other errors, I would tell him. He did not ask for it. Still, I had eleven pages with constructive criticism. Now it happens that he and I share our publisher. So I wrote the publisher and asked if he could tactfully send the professor my comments. In his reply, the publisher referred to taking back the book from the stores; so he knows that the book is bad. Still, it has been reprinted twice, without revision.
So here we have a professor who publishes a lousy book; a publisher who knows that it is lousy; people who trust the professor spend their good money and are fooled; and -worst of all- a professor who thinks that he does not have to look for the truth.
However, serious academics also write books and are not interested in truth any more; had our Amsterdam professor been a true scholar, he would have shown that he was devoted to truth by correcting errors. This is the only thing, I guess, we may request from the people of the universities: that they have a passion for finding the truth and are willing to be corrected. I notice that our Amsterdam professor lacks this quality.
So my question is: how can we do something against barbarism now that the barbarians are inside the fortress of scholarship?