Eric Hayot - Comparative Method at the End of Aesthetic History; or, The Possibilities and Limits of Historical Relativism

The present seems to demand of us a special kind of epistemological modesty. We know that people living 1,000 years ago were wrong about many things. We may ourselves feel right about them. But we have to imagine that 1,000 years from now we will be as wrong, relative to then, as our ancestors were relative to us. This talk frames claims about the present as a problem: if we imagine that much of what we know will turn out to be wrong, if we understand that the present is partially unknowable because we do not, and cannot, know its future—then surely it pays, epistemologically speaking, to be careful.