Good point: books have utility beyond accuracy and immediate usefulness—it’s useful to know about historical ideas, for example. But it’s important to know about them as historical facts—these aren’t really useful sources of ideas in and of themselves (at least not in the present—there are a lot of useful ideas here that have since been picked out and refined in more useful forms).
Not every book is there to provide good ideas, just as not every staff member at a university is there to curate and develop them. I’m not too concerned about the the academic opinions of he architect, or the IT manager—they are there for different reasons.
There may be many reasons to keep a book around, but “contains terrible ideas dismissed for really good reasons” is not one of them. Each of the books you list has a significance beyond the (often horrible) ideas contain, making it worthy of shelf space. If they had no such historical import, then no, they would not be a great use of shelf space.
There may be many reasons to keep a book around, but “contains terrible ideas dismissed for really good reasons” is not one of them.
Actually, even that is. “Really good reasons” are things you want to keep track of. When they’re really good reasons against something, you want to keep track of the thing they’re against to fully understand the good reasons.
Intellectual history is a series of arguments. If any institution should remember and analyze the bad arguments, it’s academia. Consigning them to the memory hole loses information about the good arguments as well as the bad. That goes beyond the historical argument—that’s an argument based on information loss regardless of historical circumstances.
Good point: books have utility beyond accuracy and immediate usefulness—it’s useful to know about historical ideas, for example. But it’s important to know about them as historical facts—these aren’t really useful sources of ideas in and of themselves (at least not in the present—there are a lot of useful ideas here that have since been picked out and refined in more useful forms).
Not every book is there to provide good ideas, just as not every staff member at a university is there to curate and develop them. I’m not too concerned about the the academic opinions of he architect, or the IT manager—they are there for different reasons.
There may be many reasons to keep a book around, but “contains terrible ideas dismissed for really good reasons” is not one of them. Each of the books you list has a significance beyond the (often horrible) ideas contain, making it worthy of shelf space. If they had no such historical import, then no, they would not be a great use of shelf space.
Actually, even that is. “Really good reasons” are things you want to keep track of. When they’re really good reasons against something, you want to keep track of the thing they’re against to fully understand the good reasons.
Intellectual history is a series of arguments. If any institution should remember and analyze the bad arguments, it’s academia. Consigning them to the memory hole loses information about the good arguments as well as the bad. That goes beyond the historical argument—that’s an argument based on information loss regardless of historical circumstances.