I vaguely remember reading about 2 different philosophies, one where you just learn how things are understood today, e.g. to learn calculus you just learn it’s rules, vs learning the history of calculus and how it came to be in order to understand it.
Another example being learning about fire just through the theory of oxygen and combustion, vs learning about the history of fire such as the 4 elements and theory of Phlogiston.
Does anyone know the formal names for these 2 philosophies / thoughts?
I may be mistaken but I also recall the Whig Interpretation of History and Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts being related. Is the school of analytic thought more predisposed to just learning how things are now in order to understand them?
On a personal note, I always seem to learn things / theories better when I also learn about their history and how they came to be discovered and developed over time.
Lenora Fulani for instance would start a story with the Greeks and drone on and on until you were hypnotized then go off track with some obscure Russian theorist circa 1926, next thing you know you are living in a group home making and selling candles.
Whenever I invented something or figured out how to calculate something the first, second and third versions were worth forgetting about but after many iterations I really understood it and can make it look like it came easy.
Calculus is the ultimate example of something that people stumbled into and the old texts will confuse you. Sigmund Freud’s journey will drive anyone crazy.
Yet I like the early Foucault on history, like Casanova as an early literature of the sexual revolution. Once in a while you see the straight line from the past to the present, the person who was ahead of today 200 years ago. But you will suffer a lot of meandering to find those things.
1. A good environment - low/no distraction
2. Mentors - people who know more AND know how to teach
3. Repetition. The brain has 200 billion neurons with a trillion connections. Nothing is static about that network. The connnections are constantly changing depending on what gets fed in. So if you want to understand something its all about Repeating the same input again and again until connections solidify