Cultivate Your Own Garden—Some Reflections on Martin Kusch’s Overview of Relativism in Medical History

In the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Immanuel Kant compares sceptics to nomads, who despise the cultivation of soil and therefore dissolve the civic communities of their opponents from time to time (Kant 1929). This process of construction and destruction continues afterwards. Although scepticism and relativism are two different philosophical positions, relativists may show enough similarities with sceptics to count them among Kantian nomads. Historiographical relativists despise the claim that a settlement was always built on the same foundation. This raises a couple of questions: Who are these people? What are their reasons? What is more basically their general motivation? And how convincing are both—their reasons and their motivations?