ABSTRACT
In the history of representation—in which philosophy, experimental science, art, fiction, history, and its reenactment have all played their parts—the relation of conjecture to the production of knowledge has been complicated by the rivalry between Platonic and empirical approaches to finding things out. It is fair to say that all the great achievements in epistemology depended on two conjectures, a positive and a negative. The positive was the challenge faced by the Royal Society empiricists: “What if what I don’t know, I did?” The negative was used by Descartes and the Neo-Platonists in order to see whether it was possible to have an idea derived from a source other than sensory perception: “What if what I do know, I didn’t.” In the history of reenactment theory, it is clear that R. G. Collingwood tried to formulate the possibility of recovering history by means of ideas, whereas it seems that the bulk of reenactment in recent times is founded on varying degrees of sensory perception and affect. This is not merely a difference between a priori deduction and a posteriori induction; rather it is a question of aesthetics, and of the degree to which what is known to be the case is felt, viewed, tasted, and heard rather than conceived. Yes (pace Collingwood) we can recover the scents of the flowers in the garden of Epicurus.
