===================== HES POSTING ======================= 
 
 
At 14:34 20/11/96, Bradley W Bateman wrote: 
>But please, let's return now to Tony Brewer's question. Is anyone out there 
>willing to argue that the discipline has not tended strongly toward 
>Whiggish and internalist histories in the last few decades? 
 
Not me - on the contrary.  I'm preparing a doctoral dissertation on Jevons, 
in which I try to link his personal life with his work.  By now, I 
collected almost all secondary sources on Jevons, and they are rather 
disappointing.  Most of them surely are 'Whiggish' and 'internalist', they 
deal solely with Jevons's thought 'taken for itself', and they try to 
identify 'inconsistencies' in his reasoning. 
 
There are even papers on Jevons which I really do not understand.  I read 
them over and over again, but I cannot 'grasp' the point the author seems 
to be making.  It can take a lot of time, but suddenly I 'discover' the 
'problem' : there seems to be an inconsistency between the biographical 
information on Jevons and the premises of the article I'm not able to 
understand.   I therefore want to conclude that 'Whiggish' or solely 
'internalist' history can do a lot of damage if it's not 'backed up' by 
adequate biographical information. 
 
 
------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Bert Mosselmans 
Free University of Brussels 
CFEC M418 
Pleinlaan 2 - 1050 Brussels - Belgium 
Tel. 0032/2/629.21.20 
Fax 0032/2/629.22.82 
[log in to unmask] 
My homepage : http://cfec.vub.ac.be/cfec/bert.htm 
VUB's homepage : http://www.vub.ac.be/VUB-home.html 
------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
 
 
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]