Timeline for Why do the titles of scholarly works sometimes begin with the word "on"?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 26, 2017 at 23:44 | comment | added | alephzero | I think "comprehensive" would be a better word than "definitive" here. The title "On X" means "this paper adds something to the total human knowledge about X," not "this paper contains everything that humans know about X". But the additional knowledge may be "definitive" even if it is a small part of the total. | |
| Jul 26, 2017 at 20:11 | comment | added | talrnu | @PeterShor I think you're drawing an illogical conclusion from this answer: that all works not named "On [subject]" claim to be the definitive work on their subject. This answer only suggests that adding the word "On" clarifies that the work is not intended to be definitive. A work not intended to be definitive could just as easily not be named "On [subject]" and this answer would still stand. Also a work named "On [subject]" could happen to become definitive, and this answer would still stand. | |
| Jul 25, 2017 at 16:48 | comment | added | Peter Shor | So you think (say) Isaac Newton was overly presumptuous in naming one of his books Opticks, and he should have called it On Opticks, and waited for a committee of scholars to rename it Opticks 100 years later? | |
| Jul 25, 2017 at 16:03 | comment | added | Unrelated | Unfortunately a text usually doesn't have that status when it is named | |
| Jul 25, 2017 at 12:45 | review | First posts | |||
| Jul 25, 2017 at 12:53 | |||||
| Jul 25, 2017 at 12:37 | history | answered | earthman2 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |