> Did you know him? Did you ever even see him once?
We're going to need to rewrite an awful lot of history if our standards for judging people are "knowing them and seeing them even once"
We're going to need to rewrite an awful lot of history if our standards for judging people are "knowing them and seeing them even once"
Reading history, I encounter statements about what people did and about what motivated them to do it in a way that is aligned with my deterministic outlook. I never find myself bristling at a historical biography the way I do in, eg., this thread. The author might want me to judge someone, but they don't tell me to do so or even express directly that that is their belief.
I don't think a rule like, "you can't say someone is good/bad if you didn't know them," would result in a change to any history texts I've read, though I expect there are exceptions that I have not seen.