Thursday, January 20, 2011

chronological snobbery

This is a wikipedia entry for Chronological Snobbery, a logical fallacy noted by C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield.

3 comments:

Mike Gantt said...

Thanks for calling attention to this.

By the way, I'm wondering if there is a generalized explanation for why this attitude seems to be employed selectively. That is, many people adopt it as an excuse to disregard the Bible while they will seek wisdom in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and others.

Anonymous said...

"By the way, I'm wondering if there is a generalized explanation for why this attitude seems to be employed selectively. That is, many people adopt it as an excuse to disregard the Bible while they will seek wisdom in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and others."

It's called the Star Trek principle.

Across Plage said...

Chronological snobbery may be seen to work both ways -- for example, when anti-evolutionists attack the model set forth by Darwin, as if it were the last word in the field and had not been improved upon, if not outright superseded in many respects by the very scientific methods of study Darwin himself championed.