A thinker’s provisional borrowings are discards, not part of their true worldview

Evidence

This selection can be made for periods of varying length, determined by intrinsic factors and not by external evidence (though that too can be utilised) and it results in a series of “discards”, that is to say of partial doctrines and theories for which the thinker may have had a certain sympathy, at certain times, even to the extent of having accepted them provisionally and of having availed himself of them for his work of criticism and of historical and scientific creation. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1359

Categorization

• QUESTION: Who gets to declare which of a canonized thinker’s sympathies are ‘discards’? Gramsci’s method invites a critique about how canon-shapers police the boundary.
• XREF: connects to: Tracing a thinker’s sources can wrongly deny their originality; A thinker’s own thought must be separated from earlier material that only stimulated it; Essentialist-sounding definitions can be adopted provisionally without belief in essence — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 453
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Tracing a thinker’s sources can wrongly deny their originality; A thinker’s own thought must be separated from earlier material that only stimulated it; Essentialist-sounding definitions can be adopted provisionally without belief in essence — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 453