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Quentin Skinner Quotes

born 1940 England

Quentin Robert Duthie Skinner (born 26 November 1940) is the Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London and an influential intellectual historian.

England
Historians

Random Quentin Skinner quote

4 quotes

What matters for individual liberty is not the source of law but its extent.

Besides being assailed by epistemologists, the world of facts has been undermined in recent times by developments within the theory of meaning. The cardinal assumption of positivistic philosophies of language was that all meaningful statements must refer to facts, and thus that the meanings of sentences must be given by the method of verifying the assertions contained in them.

British historians are notoriously suspicious of philosophical reflections about the nature of their craft. The charge is no doubt exaggerated, but it is hard to deny that they have sometimes gloried in presenting themselves as straightforward empiricists for whom the proper task of the historian is simply to uncover the facts about the past and recount them as objectively as possible.

One of the present values of the past is as a repository of values we no longer endorse, of questions we no longer ask. One corresponding role for the intellectual historian is that of acting as a kind of archaeologist, bringing buried intellectual treasure back to the surface, dusting it down and enabling us to consider what we think of it.

Liberty Before Liberalism (1998)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Quentin Skinner (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.