It seems to me that we have really cracked this can of worms open in the past couple of weeks, with regard to the questions of history and time, power and justice... And academic scholarship, of course (we can't forget ourselves ; )...
I'm unable to spend a great deal of time on this just at the moment, but I wanted to share a couple of things:
First, there is this video from one of the most brilliant dudes working on this stuff: Daniel Kahneman. He starts out here talking about happiness, but what this is really about is our relationship to time. Specifically, Kahneman describes two different ways of handling, or relating to time; an experiencing self and a remembering self. They handle information very differently, and relate with one another in very specific tendential ways...
Here is a little article about brain research that supports Kahneman's theories. Basically; the parts of the brain that we use to remember are the same as the parts that we use for imagination.
I think this stuff raises some very important considerations (I would call them interdisciplinary) regarding our study of Thucydides, Herodotus, and Plato. For example, how does our handling of history affect our experience of contemporary reality? What about vice-versa?
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