Calling time: A reply to John Guillory

The essay by Guillory appears to rest on an essential distinction between natural and historical time, correlated with the absence or centrality of reversible monument/documents (a concept taken over from Panofsky), where the sciences inhabit natural time (devoid of monuments/documents) and the humanities inhabit historical time (in which all its objects are monuments/documents). How though is this distinction to be maintained in the face of decades of evidence and arguments from both science and philosophy that would break it down? Bauman credits Panofsky with a strong belief that historical time unites science and the humanities, whence it follows that both scientific and humanistic disciplines deal with monuments and documents—a unity that may be masked by an idealized vision of science as an ahistorical conveyor belt of endless progress.