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Why study history of philosophy?

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 14, 2011–A VERY INTERESTING DISCUSSION IN THE COMMENTS, WHICH I URGE READERS TO REVIEW AND, IF SO INCLINED, TO CONTRIBUTE TO

An open letter to prospective PhD students from Robert Pasnau (Colorado), which makes a number of very good points; a brief excerpt:

The discipline of philosophy benefits from a serious, sustained engagement with its history. Most of the interesting, important work in philosophy is not being done right now, at this precise instant in time, but lies more or less hidden in the past, waiting to be uncovered. Philosophers who limit themselves to the present restrict their horizons to whatever happens to be the latest fashion, and deprive themselves of a vast sea of conceptual resources.  If you think you have original philosophical thoughts in you, they can wait – indeed, it’s better to let them wait until you’ve had the chance to develop the philosophical breadth and depth to make the most of them. There are a few examples of philosophers who have done important original work in their 20s and early 30s, but the list is not long. (Even Hume – the greatest prodigy of all felt the need to rewrite his youthful Treatise in the form of two later Enquiries.) In contrast, many a PhD dissertation in the history of philosophy has been published and become established as a solid and lasting contribution to its field.

[M]any philosophers today are presentists – they think that the only philosophy worth reading has been written in the last 100 years, if not the last 30 years. This attitude is hard to justify. The historical record shows that philosophy – unlike science and math – does not develop in steady, linear fashion. Perhaps the very best historical era ever came at the very start, in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. If that was not it, then one has to wait some 1600 years, for the century from Aquinas to Oresme, (Who’s Oresme?, you may ask. Exactly.) or wait 2000 years, for Descartes through Kant. I’m leaving out important figures, of course, but also many quite fallow periods, even in modern times. Maybe subsequent generations will judge 2011 and environs as the highpoint up until now of the whole history of philosophy, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Every generation of philosophers has been equally prepossessed by its own ideas.

Of course, I am no more capable than others of judging my own times, but certainly I am not alone in feeling some amount of dissatisfaction with the way philosophy looks today. Tyler Burge nicely expresses my own worries when he remarks, in the preface to his recent book, that “if philosophy is not to slide toward irrelevance and become a puzzle-game-playing discipline, good mainly for teaching the young to think clearly, some central parts of philosophy must broaden their horizons.” Burge mainly has in mind science as a broadening influence; I think the history of philosophy can play a similar role. Although a background in the history of the subject is obviously not a prerequisite for doing deep and original work, it helps, and I fear the discipline’s present collective neglect of its past contributes to its often insular character.

Thoughts from readers?  (Do real the entire letter before commenting.)  Comments must include a full name in the author line and a valid e-mail address.

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50 responses to “Why study history of philosophy?”

  1. Ben

    To the list of original and influential philosophers who started out in history, we can add Davidson, whose dissertation was on the _Philebus_.

    Reply
  2. Richard Baron

    Thinking about the philosopher with historical inclinations who follows them, and who then returns to writing contributions to current debates in philosophy, rather than in the history of philosophy, one angle to explore is the differing relevance of history to different parts of philosophy. The relevance strikes me as less in some areas than in others, and as having different characters in different areas.

    At one end, we have philosophical logic, ontology (including specialist areas like mereology) and some forms of epistemology, where the relevance of the history is not great, and where we read works from the distant past in order to understand the broad nature of the problems and, perhaps, for flashes of insight that we promptly put into modern terms, often in logical symbols.

    At the other end, we have ethics and political philosophy. Here, the history is central. I am very inclined to agree with Quentin Skinner, that the concepts in play simply cannot be understood without reference to their history, and the history of the societies and political structures within which they were developed. There is no sharp separation between philosophy and its history. (I don't mean to commit us to communitarianism of the Charles Taylor sort among political philosophers, but the accidental outcome among political philosophers might have something of that in it.)

    The philosophy of science is an interesting one. Debates over issues like categoricalism, emergence or downwards causation seem to be pretty independent of the history of philosophy. There are plenty of debates about objects, their properties and their causal powers in the history of philosophy, but those debates look too unsophisticated to have much relevance to today's debates. Debates over realism and anti-realism are routinely, and rightly, informed by historical examples. But the history in question is more the history of science than the history of philosophy.

    Finally, what should we make of the distinction between the history of philosophy and the history of ideas? As Bernard Williams put it in the preface to Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry, the historian of ideas seeks to establish what a text meant. The historian of philosophy tries to relate the text to current philosophical debates.

    Reply
  3. Simon S.

    I believe that frequently the systematic interest in philosophical problems themselves is mistakenly equated with the present-day debate. Thus, any "historical" approach is deemed either simply philological and unconcerned with tackling the actual problems or dealing with them in an out-dated manner. This leads to the forgetfulness that engaging the present debate amounts to no special way of treating philosophical problems, but is simply another way of engaging in the very recent history of philosophy – one that easily forgets its inevitable rootedness in "history".

    If philosophy is about calling into question especially those things we take to be self-evident and granted, this will not do. The past may seem too far away – but the present may be up too close to ask the truly fundamental questions.
    I am much in favor of overcoming distinctions like the "historical-systematical" one and to realize the immanent historicity of philosophy.

    This also means that we should avoid simply regarding all of philosophy as "synchronic" with the current debate. History is not a mere stone quarry for our current theorizing and just because we think a certain way does not oblige the thinkers of the past to worship the same cookie-cutter mold of "isms". Aristotle may not have had the same conception of experience, language, reference etc. that Quine had; even his questions and problems may have been different.

    I think we should use the past for learning to ask different questions, and not for excavating some handy answers for our current problems and en vogue "isms".

    Reply
  4. Michael Sevel

    Kudos to Pasnau for writing this, and to Brian for calling our attention to it. While I agree with nearly everything in the letter, he somewhat understates (at the end) the necessary, complementary task of learning foreign languages. All depends of course on what historical period or figure we’re talking about. I can speak to what I know best, the study of ancient Greek philosophy.

    First, most translation from Greek is not as straightforward as (in Pasnau's Latin example) “actus” means “act”. For example, “logos” could mean “word”, but also “explanation”, “story”, or a number of other things depending on context, and it takes hard work to become sensitized to these contexts. It also takes several years of hard work to become comfortable with the grammar and verb system in (a given dialect of) ancient Greek, in order to determine, say, the precise sense (or the possible senses) of a conditional sentence in Plato’s Republic, or the referent of a given pronoun in Aristotle’s Physics.

    Second – and I’m sure there are historians of ancient Greek philosophy who might disagree with this – what Pasnau does not mention is that in order to do any serious scholarship in ancient Greek philosophy, one must also be able to read the relevant European scholarly literature, most of which has not been translated into English. To be sure, the precise topic of research will determine the burden (e.g., if you’re writing on Xenophanes, you’d better know some Italian; if you’re working on Aristotle’s ethics, you’d better know some Latin and French; and you’d better know some German, whatever the topic). But suffice it to say that there are rich scholarly traditions in other languages which any competent scholar writing in English should at least be aware of, and that usually requires language study beyond that related to the philosophical text or figure of which one wants to be an historian.

    Third, despite these considerations, I agree with Pasnau that it’s never too late to learn. Perhaps the exemplar in this regard is the American journalist I. F. Stone, who did not study Greek until well into his sixties, and after that ended up writing a very engaging book on Socrates, which even now is cited occasionally in ancient philosophy journals. It should also be said that, at least with respect to the European languages, learning them becomes much easier after the first language or two, given the family resemblance among them with respect to grammar and vocabulary. So students should not be discouraged.

    Reply
  5. John Schwenkler

    Amen to this! Concerning the right way to approach this sort of engagement, it's worth quoting what John McDowell says at the end of his essay "Sellars's Thomism", where he discusses the treatment of Aquinas in Sellars' essay "Being and Being Known":

    "… however keen we are to stress the pastness of past philosophers, we cannot cleanly separate a concern with what they had to say from a willingness to treat them as interlocutors in a conversation, in which the living parties had better be at least open to the possibility that they might have something to learn from the dead. And on the other side, a responsible concern with what the dead may have to say to us now, … cannot allow us to forget differences between the milieu from which a dead philosopher as it were addresses us and the milieu from which we aim to understand him.

    "… we cannot avoid reading in the light of our own convictions if we are to bring past philosophers into a conversation with ourselves. But if we allow the dialogue to be shaped by a doctrine that reflects a blind spot on our part, the result will be distortion — except, perhaps, if the blind spot is shared between us and our target.

    "… Aquinas, writing before the the rise of modern science, is immune to the attractions of [the] norm-free conception of nature. And we should not be too quick to regard this as wholly a deficiency in his thinking. (Of course in all kinds of ways it is a deficiency.) There is a live possibility that, at least in one respect, Thomistic philosophy of mind is superior to Sellarsian philosophy of mind, just because Aquinas lacks the distinctively modern conception of nature that underlies Sellars’s thinking. Sellars allows his philosophy to be shaped by a conception that is characteristic of his own time, and so misses an opportunity to learn something from the past."

    Of course we could debate forever whether the "blind spot" that McDowell claims to find in Sellars – here, his inability to see around the idea that "the norm-free reality disclosed by the natural sciences is the only location for genuine relation to actualities" – is really a blind spot at all, and so whether Aquinas' immunity to this modern conception is something we should endorse. But as an approach to hermeneutics this is very good advice.

    Reply
  6. Gregory Sadler

    I am in full agreement with Pasnau's letter about the value of studying the History of Philosophy, but I would go further and say that there are more and less productive ways of studying History of Philosophy. If you are going to delve into the history of philosophy, you ought to at all costs avoid far too restrictive presentist ways of supposedly "doing history of philosophy", particularly those broadly within the traditions of Analytic or Continental Philosophy.

    For example, if you plan to read, study, think with Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, even Hobbes or Hume, studying them through an Analytic, decontextualized, essentially parochial approach — especially as an easily influenced, still-in-formation graduate student — keeps you from fully appreciating and being drawn into conversation with their works. I am not myself a Thomist, but I have had a number of conversations with "Analytic Thomists" in which I point out to them the bearing of this or that passage they've never bothered to read on an issue under discussion at the time.

    There are better models available for the history of philosophy many of them embodied in the works and approaches of real historians of philosophy — one reason for my equally jaundiced view of "Continental" Philosophy, which really represents only a fraction of European Philosophy. If you want to do History of Philosophy well, you could do much worse than to look to some of its great European practitioners — the mid-20th century French philosopher Henri Gouhier, for just one of countless examples you will hear nothing about in a Continental (or, of course, an Analytic) setting.

    Of course, given the dominance of Analytic philosophy, and the presence of Continental philosophy as its counterpoint in the Anglophone world, one will have to deal with them, and perhaps be stuck trying to do History of Philosophy in a department largely composed of those whose formation was limited to those traditions. In that case, maintain your eyes on horizons beyond their narrow canons and presentist approaches, network early on with historians of philosophy at other schools, and make contacts with the other disciplines in which, sometimes, more actual philosophy is being studied than in the Philosophy department (e.g. study Aristotle with the Classics department, or De Tocqueville, or even Kant or Aristotle with the PoliSci Department, read the Phaedrus and the Gorgias with Rhet/Comp students, etc.)

    Reply
  7. Peter Ludlow

    "If you think you have original philosophical thoughts in you, they can wait"

    I don't even know where to begin with that line.

    Reply
  8. Marc Bobro

    I've always found it intriguing that Karl Marx wrote his doctoral dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus, specifically the differences between their philosophies of nature. And didn't Russell once claim that one of the most useful (and difficult) things he did was to write a book on Leibniz?

    Reply
  9. Mark Eli Kalderon

    I disagree strongly with Richard Baron's claim here. Had he said logic, well fine. But philosophical logic benefits the insights of historical figures (I have in mind, for example, Malebranche's striking prefigurement of Frege's conception of thoughts in the Dialogues). And ontology? Please. There is plenty of metaphysics that is usefully thought about and immediately relevant to present concerns. Think about the different ways in which Kit Fine and Mark Johnston have tried to preserve potential insights in Aristotle's hylomorphism.

    One good thing as a non-historian in reading history of philosophy is the way I find it stretches my nerves. Leibniz's problems may not be my own. But sympathetically engaging with the thought of such figures is a useful exercise in thinking outside the box of one's own making.

    Reply
  10. Stephen Puryear

    A couple of relevant quotations from philosophers on Pasnau's list of those who began their careers with a focus on history:

    "I read with great intensity what Descartes had written, and I studied the leading commentators … with eager interest and expectation. I believe I learned more about philosophy by doing this than I have learned in any other way." —Harry Frankfurt (Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen, xiii-xiv)

    "Philosophy without the history of philosophy, if not empty or blind, is at least dumb." —Wilfred Sellars (Science and Metaphysics, 1)

    Reply
  11. john m. doris

    Is the study of history really undervalued, or historians underrepresented, in philosophy departments?

    I've no clear idea what to say about the evaluative component: what counts as enough history in a department?

    I've also no clear idea regards the factual component: how much history is being done?

    But it seems to me that history is a very prominent feature of many graduate programs, such as Harvard and UCLA. It is also my impression that historians fare comparatively well in national grant competitions. (And of course, the most influential philosophy blog is run by someone with a very strong presence in history!)

    –doris

    Reply
  12. Richard Baron

    Mark Eli Kalderon has a good point. My words "the relevance of the history is not great" were far too strong. What I should have said was "the history is not essential to work on current questions", marking the contrast with ethics and political philosophy, where the history is essential.

    Reply
  13. Matt Smith

    I am not at all sure what Pasnau is getting at. Is he saying that people do not do history of philosophy any longer? That seems false. There is a resurgence of interest in it! So, this (misapplication of the term) "presentism" in philosophy probably doesn't exist (in the present, although maybe it existed in the past, which, of course, doesn't exist). At least, Pasnau gives us no reason to believe it does. And all the commentators are giving us evidence of contemporary philosophers who reference and revere the past. So, methinks Pasnau errs in his accusation.

    Maybe Pasnau thinks that philosophy is bordering on irrelevant. That is the emphasis given by his appeal to Burge. But, Burge, as Pasnau notes, is concerned about science and many people have taken up Burge's suggestion! A powerful strain in philosophy – especially vibrant right now – is the interest in the roles of the sciences in philosophical thought? X-phi has become extremely popular. Recent scientific work in perception is frequently discussed by philosophers of mind. Many metaphysicians are deferential to physics. Philosophers of language and linguists have been working together for years. There has been increased interest in the intersection between neuroscience and moral psychology. In the 1980's and 1990's there was fruitful collaboration between biologists and philosophers and for all I know there still are. There are, in short, enormous and wonderful opportunities for interaction between contemporary philosophical research and research in other fields. Is this the mark of a discipline sliding towards irrelevance?

    I do not deny that everyone ought to be trained in the classics. But this applies to everyone, including non-philosophers. So, Pasnau should really be defending a requirement that liberal arts undergrads study the Western canon. Grad students should of course study the canon more intensively, but hardly exclusively, which seems to be what Pasnau proposes.

    Furthermore, what golden age of philosophy is Pasnau imagining we have irretrievably lost? It's not like Aristotle, Seneca, Aquinas, Bacon, Grotius, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Mill, Peirce, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine _only_ wrote about the history of philosophy. In fact, how much did they write about history of philosophy at all? They studied it, sure, but a lot of them clearly were looking forward not backward in their thinking. Can you imagine what would have happened if these people really took Pasnau's advice to heart: "Hey Rene, you impudent fool! Meditate on Oresme, not on the nature of knowledge!" To be clear, history of philosophy is awesome and important, but it cannot possibly be best if history of philosophy is what most people who do philosophy study.

    Really, if there is anything particularly pressing that might make philosophy "slide towards irrelevance," it might be the haughty and public dismissal by many so-called analytic philosophers of all others who do not write in English or who have some interest in political application of their views.

    I work in moral and political philosophy and I hear this sort of stuff a little too often. Extremely intelligent, extremely well-read and well-trained, and very successful philosophers – people I admire for many reasons – have shocked me by confidently dismissing Martha Nussbaum as pretty much having jumped the philosophical shark once she got interested in policy questions, or waving away Thomas Pogge's recent work as unserious philosophy since it is so focused on how to alleviate poverty and resolve a crisis in the provision of medical care. I have heard eminent people openly scoff at Habermas as being, at best, second rate, and at worst just trying to pass off Rawls's insights as his own. Finally, if there is something I've learned it's that if you are serious about publishing in philosophy, you should absolutely NEVER cite something contemporary that was originally written in French.

    If there is a serious problem then it is, at least as I see it, not so much in the failure to engage the past; it's some (not all!!) leading "analytic" philosophers being openly scornful of those who do not meet their bizarrely strict standards of legitimate philosophical inquiry.

    Let a thousand flowers bloom: philosophy is at its best – the academy is at its best – when it is filled with people doing lots of different things and being respectful of one another's work.

    Reply
  14. mark lance

    Given the discussion of McDowell on Sellars, perhaps it is worth reminding readers of Sellars's own famous dictum in this regard: "Philosophy, without the history of philosophy, if not blind, is certainly dumb."

    I also want to agree with Mark Kalderon that central issues in philosophical logic are as deeply connected to history as any other area of philosophy. Even some issues in pure mathematical logic benefit from an historical perspective, but the connection is less deep. And when it comes to something like analytic ontology, while it may be that some people are practicing it in an ahistorical manner, there is no doubt that an historical perspective creates the typical illumination on the broader issues – especially the issue of whether this is the useful way to approach the questions, whether the questions are being put in the best way, etc. (This latter, of course, is the central point of the Sellarsian pun. Our concepts- our ability to meaningfully articulate philosophical issues – arise out of engagement with our history. So we become dumb without it.)

    Reply
  15. Landon W Schurtz

    I tend to find anything written prior to Locke to be tedious and irritating, and I have no interest in specializing in the history of philosophy, so it's a statement against personal interest that I believe it's nonetheless incredibly important. Even to study dialectical "dead ends" is useful inasmuch as we can see how and why these positions developed and how and why they were eventually left by the wayside – indeed, we might even discover that some positions were not abandoned because they lacked merit, but for merely sociological reasons. It is sometimes tempting when developing an account of this or that topic to "rope off" portions of the logical space of possible positions that have already been explored and declared barren by our predecessors, restricting the search for a new, viable theory to the as-yet-untraveled ground. Studying the history of philosophy closely not only has numerous benefits already mentioned, but occasionally reveals to us that some account of the matter from the past was too hastily condemned to the flames, and that merit yet lives in its old bones.

    Reply
  16. Chris Tucker

    To those thinking about what to write for their thesis or dissertation, I give different advice:

    "If you think you have good philosophical thoughts in you and those thoughts connect with something in active debate, then try to develop them. Yes, your first attempts to develop them will likely be unsophisticated, but the sophistication will develop overtime. Indeed, it may be counterproductive for you to put those ideas on hold and start studying historical questions if they don't interest you.

    But whatever philosophical issue you decide to immerse yourself in, keep in mind that there is a lot in philosophy that is important, even though you aren't interested in it. And it might very well be that these other apparently uninteresting areas can inform what you are working on or suggest new, stimulating questions. So don't insulate yourself from other areas of philosophy. Take advantage of the local colloquia speakers, talk to philosophers outside your area, etc. But don't spend months or years working on topics you have no interest in."

    One clarification: I think undergraduate and graduate coursework should expose one to broad range of historical and contemporary philosophy, and this applies even to questions one finds uninteresting. The remark "don't spend months or years working on topics you have no interest in" doesn't apply to coursework. It does apply, however, to those thinking about spending a year or more on a research project.

    Reply
  17. Shane J. Ralston

    My first published paper was on the Sorites paradox in Ancient Phil (actually, the paper is still available on-line: http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol3/sorites.html). I later moved on to Phil Law, Social-Political Phil, Pragmatism and most recently Environmental Phil, but take a more or less historical approach to philosophical problems. Having done extensive work in the discipline of Political Science as well, I can say that we philosophers are unique in that we receive extensive training in the history of our own discipline. Since I'm naturally curious about other disciplines, I often find myself in a room with those formally trained in another discipline, sharing a narrative about how their discipline was created and developed over time. Although Philosophy has had a formative influence on most other disciplines, I still find it odd that so many scholars are ignorant about the roots of their own discipline.

    Reply
  18. Naftali

    Richard Baron's comment that issues of downward causation are independent of the history of philosophy does not seem quite right. Descartes certainly was concerned with related issues and in many of Jaegwon Kim's discussions of downward causation, he cites the American theologian John Edwards.

    Of course, no one thinks of Kim as in any way doing history of philosophy. So the real question here is how often people who do devote themselves to studying a particular figure or period are able to make lasting contributions to contemporary debates.

    Reply
  19. Colin Malcolm Keating

    "Perhaps the very best historical era ever came at the very start, in Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. If that was not it, then one has to wait some 1600 years, for the century from Aquinas to Oresme…"

    In the interval that Pasnau bemoans as apparently lacking in philosophical excellence, save for a few exceptions, philosophy was thriving in India. Nāgārjuna, Dharmakīrti, Vasubandhu, Udyotakara, Udayana and many other Indian philosophers wrote treatises on logic, metaphysics, language, epistemology, etc. More modern day analytic philosophers are recognizing the importance of this tradition, but it's worth the reminder that philosophy is not merely a Western phenomenon. It is not only temporal egoism which historical philosophy can combat, but geographical as well.

    Reply
  20. David Ebrey

    To my mind, the most important thing to say to someone interested in the history of philosophy is that you are not choosing between doing interpretive work and doing philosophy. History of philosophy can’t be done well without doing philosophy on a daily basis. Moreover, there is plenty of room for creativity when doing the history of philosophy, although of course not the same sort of creativity involved in contemporary philosophical debates. History of philosophy offers a different way to engage your philosophical skills, a different way to be creative, and if it appeals to you, you should take it up wholeheartedly. Of course, it is not for everyone.

    Sometimes Pasnau's letter reads as if he is suggesting that grad students go into the history of philosophy with the ultimate goal of working in contemporary philosophy. I don’t think that is wise advice and I don’t think it is what he means. He seems to me, rather, to be saying that if your interests are split and you go into some sub-field of the history of philosophy, it is still open for you to switch at a later point in your career – in fact, it might serve you well. But, of course, you should work on whatever topic interests you most and if that is some topic in contemporary philosophy, do that.

    We are far from the 50’s, when the history of philosophy was under serious attack, but there is still some hostility to the field, which might dissuade someone whose interests are split between history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy. I remember in graduate school someone telling me it would be a shame if I decided to devote myself to ancient philosophy. He seemed to think highly of me and so think I would be wasting my talents. It is worth combating this sort of attitude by encouraging people to work on the history of philosophy, if that is what they love.

    Reply
  21. David Chalmers

    I think that the history of philosophy is important, but there are many ways of integrating it into one's philosophical development besides the path that Bob Pasnau suggests. Here's another way: first think about a philosophical question for oneself without paying enormous attention to what the greats have said about it, and read what the greats have said later. No doubt one will discover that many of one's ideas are old hat, and that many of them have already been shown to be problematic. But one will often be richer for first thinking through an issue in this way, and doing this first can make the historical material come alive in a distinctive way. Of course there are many ways to do philosophy, and I'm not suggesting that this is the only path or the best path. But I suspect that if everyone took Bob's advice "If you have original philosophical thoughts, they can wait", the result would be fewer original philosophical thoughts.

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  22. Kate Abramson

    David Chalmers– absolutely, a thousand approaches, a thousand roses, by all means.
    But, sometimes the questions the great dead women and men asked were better than the ones we are at present asking, and if one turns to their work asking how they would answer our questions, one won't see that.

    Reply
  23. Lisa Shapiro

    I'm a bit curious about what might have prompted Bob Pasnau's letter. Perhaps a phenomenon that will seem all too familiar to historians of philosophy reading this post and blog: Most grad programs do still have history requirements for this PhD and MA programs, but they are likely not particularly demanding. With the new interest in early analytic philosophy, students are increasingly trying to satisfy those history of philosophy requirements by taking courses in early analytic, or rather, history of analytic, philosophy. Now, I would agree that early analytic philosophy is well worth serious consideration. I might even be willing to concede it should count as doing history of philosophy. But I would stop short at countenancing students taking a course in early analytic philosophy in lieu of courses on thinkers from our more distant disciplinary past. I have no doubt that most students do not enter grad school wanting to study history of philosophy. I didn't. But there is a real value in realizing that contemporary caricatures of historical figures are just that: caricatures. And one can only come to that realization if one bothers to read some writings of historical figures. So I am in favor of not simply encouraging but indeed forcing students to do something they might not think they want to do.

    The wonderful thing about philosophy as a discipline is that it has the storied history it does. We read people interested in essentially related problems — what exists? what is the good? how do signs have meaning? what are the limits of human understanding? — but approaching them from widely varying points of view. And as Descartes writes in Part One of his Discourse on Method, "reading good books is like having a conversation with the most distinguished people of past ages — indeed a rehearsed conversation in which these authors reveal to us only the best of their thoughts." What better way to continue address the questions that all got us interested in philosophy in the first place but to engage in conversation not only with one another but with centuries of people who have left us with their best thoughts?

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  24. ben wolfson

    "So the real question here is how often people who do devote themselves to studying a particular figure or period are able to make lasting contributions to contemporary debates."

    Why is that the real question, rather than an expression of just the sort of presentism Pasnau describes? I mean—why is it the impact on *contemporary* debates that we should be concerned with? Contemporary debates are—for one thing—subject to fashion. Perhaps the work of a historian on a particular figure or period is of limited utility for contemporary debate but will be seen as rich in implications for some future generation's debate. Perhaps it's just of great clarificatory power for those who are interested in no-longer-modish debates which may not ever be of widespread interest but which aren't for all that *silly* things in which to be interested. So what if they never enter the main stream of philosophical discussion? One might even have had original philosophical thoughts in those historical arenas.

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  25. Tom D.

    Pasnau claims that it is easier to get a job if you focus on history. I'm not sure it makes sense to lump all of history together nor all of non-history together. Instead, the job prospects will presumably vary according to sub-fields. Also, is there any evidence for Pasnau's claim? Is there any reason to think there are fewer applicants per job in history?

    Reply
  26. Mary Katrina Krizan

    +5 for Bob Pasnau (who, incidentally, showed me that there existed people *other* than Aristotle in the history of philosophy, and that it was probably okay if I studied them, too.) I’m one of those people who really liked metaphysics, and really liked Aristotle; of course, there’s a lot of people who like neither, but I can only share my experiences as to why I found it useful to do a dissertation in history.

    First, it seems to me that there is some – okay, a lot – of truth to the claim that we can learn about topics we’re interested in, as philosophers, by looking at the history of philosophy. It also seems to me that this is even more the case in metaphysics than in, say, ethics and political philosophy. Think about it: people and political regimes have changed a lot in 2000 years, but reality hasn’t changed much; if we’re interested in reality, as I hope metaphysicians are, then there may be fruitful answers in history. I could go on and on about how a lot of arguments in contemporary metaphysics *look almost exactly* like stuff that my dead guys said, and if you wanted, I could point you to some cool passages and talk about the etymology of the words that provide the origins for our contemporary concepts, but I’m not going to do that because I’m not completely pretentious.

    Second, the history of philosophy is a promising field of study for philosophers interested in big picture questions – questions about things like fundamental ontology, mereology, ontological dependence, and so forth. There’s some little rumor going around that maybe our contemporary philosophical investigations have become too focused on puzzle-solving; and while I don’t dispute the importance of solving puzzles, we should also admit that there are larger questions surrounding those puzzles. As philosophers who work on history, we get away with working on those larger questions – plus, the dead guys pretty successfully fill out the boundaries of logical space, and we wouldn’t know what parts of logical space have yet to be filled without reading the dead guys.

    Third, the history of philosophy is great if you like jobs. News flash: the job market is AWFUL, but despite that, there are many advertisements in the JFP that request an AOS in The Entire History of Philosophy and an AOC in logic, ethics, business ethics, or some such. A lot of us punks who didn’t go to top 10 PhD programs and maybe went to State U. for undergrad are simply not going to get the R1, maybe not now, maybe not ever. The money is in teaching philosophy, and the money in teaching is in history. An overly practical concern, perhaps, but it beats airplane mechanic school (one of the backup plans).

    Maybe that’s all missing the point, and I don’t mean to say that history is only important because it has some practical use within contemporary philosophy or that scholars who don’t look at those issues are somehow methodologically defunct or that people who really like contemporary philosophy should stop everything right now and go take a crash course in Classical Greek so that they can dive into the true meaning of Plato’s Theaetetus. All I’m suggesting is that contemporary philosophers would be smart to think about the history of philosophy, and might learn something really useful. This claim, of course, is predicated upon the assumption that philosophy, unlike the sciences, is a not an entirely progressive discipline; but to defend or reject that assumption, guess where we have to look…?

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  27. Jordan Taylor

    As a student myself, I'm very happy to see this attitude towards history of philosophy. My own interests lie in philosophy of mind and early modern philosophy, so I'm currently writing a MPhil in cognitive science; at the end of the year I'll be applying to US & UK graduate programs whose strengths lie in HoP.

    I think, however, that even at graduate level, if you're not greatly focused on HoP, then you're probably going to miss (or dismiss) a large reason for studying it in the first place: social context (and all the nuances it brings with it). Philosophers like Ryle and Searle do a pretty good job of painting a picture of Descartes as the hard-core substance dualist of freshman tutorials, but it takes a fair amount of consideration (and I'd wager that it'd be much more consideration than uninterested students would commit themselves to) to work out that Descartes' theory is much more complex than that. A certain amount of research into, say, the Scientific Revolution is crucial to properly understanding any (post-)Cartesian philosophy.

    Until the imfluences of social contexts are recognised, I think many students are often going to look down their noses at HoP as a sub-discipline. The greats will continue to be studied as exaggerated, archetypal theorists, as categorical pigeonholes for different theories (Cartesian Rationalism? Lockean Empiricism?). But if time is taken to explore the environments surrounding each theorist (how many of you would care to note that Hume spent time at La Fleche?) then perhaps students will get more out of their history classes (both in terms of enjoyment and application of ideas). The problem is, however, the notion that "we're here to study philosophy, not history".

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  28. Catarina Dutilh Novaes

    One of the significant roles that history of philosophy can have for contemporary philosophical theorizing is to tell us where our philosophical 'intuitions' come from. My general claim is that most, if not all, relevant philosophical intuitions are a product of the historical development of philosophy as a discipline. Many views which were once proposed as substantive and non-trivial then slowly but surely established themselves as truisms, as facts that nobody in their right mind would want to question. And yet, they were at some point substantive, and typically depend on a lot of assumptions, many of which we may not be prepared to endorse.
    If anyone is interested, I defend this view in more detail here:

    http://www.newappsblog.com/2011/03/history-of-philosophy-as-antidote-to-philosophical-intuitions.html

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  29. Bryan Frances

    There are good if inconclusive reasons for thinking that the history of philosophy is a waste of time—provided one is interesting in actually finding the correct answers to philosophical questions. But these are also reasons for thinking that philosophy as a whole is pretty lousy at finding answers to philosophical questions. They motivate the idea that perhaps we should abandon virtually all philosophy and focus on the combination of science and science-friendly philosophy of science. How one feels about all that will be influenced by how one views philosophical progress.

    I want to register a milder objection to all this fawning over the history of philosophy, an objection I actually endorse. In my experience many graduate students who focus on history never learn why Hume and Kant, say, struggled over perception. If you ask them ‘What is so puzzling about perception that those geniuses tortured themselves thinking about it for so many years?’, they often have no adequate answer. They can tell you that previous philosophers were interested in perception, and so that’s part of the reason why Hume was interested in it. But what they can’t do is tell you why perception is puzzling in the first place. When pressed they will articulate some bad version of the argument from illusion, or state something too general and uninformative such as ‘Well, perception is a key, if not the key, to knowledge; so we should try to understand it’. They don’t know what’s philosophically PUZZLING about perception. Of course, perception is just an illustration, as other topics have the same outcome.

    This also prevents those students from doing well in the history of philosophy, odd as that might seem. I doubt whether you can understand what Hume or Kant were saying about perception if you’ve never had a deep grasp of the problems of perception; and you won’t have the latter unless you’ve grappled with some of those problems yourself, for a significant period of time, at a high level of expertise. Moreover, you won’t be able to competently evaluate what the greats said about perception, as you don’t have an adequate grasp of what the problems are.

    Obviously, the solution to this problem is to do both vigorously: study some philosophical problems about perception on one’s own, so to speak, as well as investigate what Hume or Kant had to say about them. I think it’s probably best to do them simultaneously. If you take umpteen history courses before struggling with some problems on your own, you’ll not understand what the greats were saying (as stated in the previous paragraph) and you may well get in the habit of trying to understand what other people said about X even though you don’t understand what it is about X that drove those greats to work so hard on it. But if you start out with umpteen courses on various philosophical problems, devoid of much in the way of history, then you’ll very probably end up exceedingly narrow, employing just the problems, concepts, arguments, assumptions etc that dominate “problem oriented” portions of philosophy today. I think that past philosophers often made progress but their insights ended up largely ignored, except by historians of philosophy, and contemporary discussions suffer significantly from neglecting those insights.

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  30. Simon Fokt

    Couldn't agree more. In fact, it is surprising how far the disregard for history of philosophy is even institutionalised in the anglo-americal world. It was one of the first things that striked me after I came to study in the UK – on the continent history of philosophy modules are often one of the most important and needless to say – compulsory modules every undergraduate student needs to take. In the UK there is nothing like that. Of course, there are historical modules, but they are extremely selective, and there are (at least in my experience) hardly any general-overview modules. Modules in ancient philosophy are concentrated on Plato and Aristotle and hardly ever mention Pythagoras, Democritus, Parmenides, and a student can probably take it without ever even hearing names like Tales, Anaxymander or Agrippa. Modules in modern philosophy again, concentrate on Descartes and Hume, and a student can easily graduate without ever having heard anything about Spinoza, Berkeley, or probably even Hegel. Not to mention that modules in medieval philosophy are practically non-existent. Also, while on the continent general history of philosophy modules are often compulsory (and 2-years long, too), in the UK they are mostly optional.

    It is hardly surprising that the general knowledge and interest in history of philosophy is in poor state if noone teaches it, noone is expected to know it, and ignorance in that matter is largely institutionalised.

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  31. Phillip Horky

    Defenses of the history of philosophy often suggest that it is valuable for philosophy, but I'm not sure what the specific relationship between the two might be. I suppose what I'd like to see is more of an effort to understand what the possible positive relationships between "history" and per se "philosophy" could be. On this count, I find going back to Aristotle refreshing: the "historia", or inquiry, portion of a pursuit of understanding reality is a necessary preliminary that helps us to know what others meant and what we mean when we speak about things. This project of inquiry requires us to challenge ourselves to understand what previous thinkers thought and how they told their stories, and it therefore requires some common basis for that interrogation, in language. As a classicist who teaches ancient philosophy, I find Aristotle's approach useful for explaining why my project – teaching Greek philosophy in the contexts of the Greek language etc. – is important.

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  32. Bill Wringe

    On the other hand some of us come out of UK philosophy degrees at least able to spell 'Anaximander' and 'Thales' (even if we haven't heard of them).

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  33. Margaret Atherton

    Before my colleagues in the history of philosophy start nodding too enthusiastically at Bob Pasnau's remarks, let me assure you that in the full text, he doesn't think very much of us either. Let me quote: "Admittedly, if you attend a random history talk at the APA, it is likely to be less philosophically interesting than the average non-historical talk….If work in the history of philosophy today seems often uninteresting, that is simply a testimony to its relative neglect within our discipline." Oh, well.

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  34. Tom Ward

    Chalmers says that it is good to think through a problem on your own before consulting the greats. Frances says that we ought to ensure that we grapple with the philosophical problems themselves, at a high level of expertise, while reading old philosophers' approaches and solutions to those problems. I don't fully understand these strategies.

    The problem is that if you're reading this now and Anglophone philosophy is your lingua franca, then thinking through a philosophical problem on your own, at a high level of expertise, means thinking with the concepts of contemporary philosophy. Why think that this activity is any more useful or apt to lead one to insights than thinking with the concepts of an older philosophical milieu? We can only answer this question if we have a decent grasp of older milieux. If we don't have that, then we ought either to try to remedy that through intense study of philosophy's history (Western and non-Western), or reconcile ourselves to the inevitably parochial character of much of our ahistorical theorizing–we just don't know what's out there in the wide world, but we're happy and get by in our small town.

    On a slightly different note, I have long been perplexed by the very distinction between historical and non-historical or contemporary philosophy. How far in the past must a piece of philosophy have been written in order for it to count as historical? Literally speaking, almost every piece of philosophical research that builds on or criticizes or interprets the work of any other piece is engaging with philosophy's history. We don't say that every such piece is an example of "doing" history of philosophy, but why not? I don't have any good reasons for defending the common distinction between history of philosophy and contemporary philosophy. Does anyone else?

    BL COMMENT: Permit me to interject that I think Tom Ward raises some quite important points (other commenters have also made good points I hasten to add, but these caught my attention).

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  35. David Chalmers

    My point applies equally whether the great in question is Plato or David Lewis. The point wasn't to argue for the virtues of reading contemporary philosophy over reading the history of philosophy, but rather for the virtues of thinking about a philosophical problem before reading too much about that philosophical problem. (Again, reacting to: "If you think you have original philosophical thoughts in you, they can wait.")

    The former issue (reading contemporary work vs. reading historical work) strikes me as too complex for a simple response. It clearly depends hugely on one's philosophical values, purposes, and subject matter. Even if one restricts oneself to problem-solving purposes, presumably the relative virtues here turn in part on the extent to which the most important insights in historical work have been absorbed in contemporary work. Pasnau suggests plausibly that this varies between different fields: it happens more in physics than in philosophy, which is why fewer physicists study the history of physics. I take it that it also varies between different subfields of philosophy — it happens more in logic than in aesthetics, perhaps? — and between different topics in those subfields. There's also a great deal of variation in what one counts as important. So again there's much to be said for a plurality of approaches.

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  36. Chris Tucker

    The majority of commentators seem largely in agreement with Pasnau, which makes me wonder if I've misunderstood his point. I take the first paragraph to conclude something like "Everyone writing a philosophy dissertation should write it on the history of philosophy" or "Nearly every philosopher, early in her career, should have a significant research project in the history of philosophy." But if this is what is intended, then Pasnau underestimates either the communal nature of academic philosophy or overestimates the importance of history of philosophy.

    Furthermore,*if* Pasnau is trying to establish something so strong, then I don't think he provides a good reason to believe his conclusion. The following is a bad argument, but it seems just as strong as Pasnau's: "When we do any philosophy, even history of philosophy, we make certain assumptions about what counts as evidence or what it takes for an argument to make a conclusion rational (or at least more acceptable than its competitors). If you think you have original thoughts about the history of philosophy, they can wait. You should first study your epistemological assumptions and sharpen your understanding of key epistemic notions."

    If I've misunderstood Pasnau, can someone explain what his conclusion really is and what is meant by the your-original-ideas-can-wait remark? If I've understood Pasnau correctly, can someone explain why the case for studying history of philosophy first is better than the case for studying epistemology first?

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  37. David Wallace

    David Chalmers suggests that physics is less historically oriented than philosophy because "the most important insights in historical work have been absorbed in contemporary work". Here's a different (though compatible) slant. Perhaps putting aside post-1980 particle physics as a special case, it's pretty uncontroversial that the methodology of physics is effective at achieving physics' goals, and that the results delivered by physics are basically correct (where "correct", for non-realists in philosophy of science, doesn't have to be read as "true"). The sheer extent of the successes of physics in experimental test and in technological application means that physicists can be fairly uncritical about their methodology.

    Whatever one thinks about progress in philosophy, there's no real analogue to experimental and technological success, so conversely, philosophers have no business being at all uncritical about their methodology. It's highly relevant in most fields of philosophy to pay careful attention to what justifies the questions you're asking and the methods you deploy to answer them. One aspect of doing that is just to be, well, critical, but another aspect is being aware of the route by which a given question, or a given set of methods for answering questions, has come to be seen in the way it's currently seen. I think one thing that characterises most of the really significant historical figures (including recent-historical; Quine counts, for instance) is very careful consideration of what the enterprise they're engaged in is and what moves it permits.

    That isn't meant to suggest that historical attention is the only or even the best way to keep your philosophical methodology honest. (My own history of philosophy is pretty patchy; my language skills negligible.) Close contact between a given area of philosophy and some other, more methodologically grounded, discipline also works, for instance: formal logic, or linguistics, or philosophy of biology pass this test. (Contra Matt Smith, metaphysics largely doesn't: a very few metaphysicians are deferential to physics, but far more are deferential to a wildly inaccurate popularisation of physics.) But it is to suggest that it's one powerful way. (There are connections here with Catarina Dutilh Novaes' observations.)

    Incidentally, I think to some extent the principle applies elsewhere within academia. Economics is not remotely in the same position of methodological security as physics; hence, good economists should probably be a lot more conversant with the history of their discipline than good physicists. (If you believe Paul Krugman, failing to be historically informed is a significant part of what's wrong with Chicago-style modern economics.) And post 1980s particle physics is arguably going through a slow-motion methodological crisis precisely because the strong evidential base that used to ground the subject has largely dried up.

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  38. Brian Weatherson

    Catarina Dutilh Novaes' point about intuitions seems similar to another view, expressed in this (justly widely quoted) passage

    "But apart from this contemporary mood, the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back." (Keynes 1936, 383-4)

    I hope philosophers' intuitions are better than the voices in the head of madmen in authority, but the point Keynes is making generalises. And that is a good reason to trace where contemporary philosophy comes from.

    Having said that, I suspect the time period that would be most useful to study for this purpose would be the Wittgenstein-Kripke period. Since philosophers' intuitions seemed so different in 1973 to 1953, finding out what changed would be beneficial. But there isn't a huge amount written on the *history* of that period.

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  39. Jon Lawhead

    A few disclaimers: first, I'm a grad student, not a faculty member. Still reading? Great! Second, the motivation behind this comment is roughly two-fold; I half believe what I'm going to say, and half just think that the other side needs representation here, and enjoy playing the Devil's Advocate. So read this comment with those points in mind.

    I'm not at all convinced by this letter, but I have a suspicion that that's largely because Pasnau and I have very different conceptions of what philosophy is supposed to be _for_, not because we disagree about how awesome logic-chopping language games are. That is, I do agree with Pasnau up to a point–contemporary academic philosophy is in real danger of drifting into irrelevance (or at least into PERCEIVED irrelevance from the perspective of the rest of the scientific project). I also agree that historical engagement can be one way to slow this slide into irrelevance: forcing people to engage with globally-accessible texts at least gives a common reference point, and helps guard against the drift into la-la land. Still, supposing that philosophy is actually supposed to be making a contribution to human knowledge (isn't it?), then I'm not convinced that more history is the BEST solution here.

    I'm confused by the hostile reaction to philosophy as a puzzle-solving discipline. Surely this is exactly what we (along with the rest of the academy) are supposed to be doing, isn't it? We're supposed to be contributing to an understanding of how the world around us works, and it seems to me that the only way to go about that is to try to unravel the puzzles that we find around us. A better way to express the worry, I think, is to say that philosophy has become too concerned with solving the WRONG puzzles–that too much of what we engage with is insular and irrelevant–and that we should try to focus on identifying and solving IMPORTANT puzzles, not abandon puzzle-solving entirely. Like I said, I think this is where Pasnau is somewhat correct: attention to history can help us identify persistent problems, and engagement with great texts can serve as a common point of reference to (so to speak) get everyone on the same page. Again, though, I think there might be a better solution.

    The better solution is to point out that philosophy is at its worst when philosophers are talking primarily to/about other philosophers; the discipline withers (and slides into irrelevance) when we spend most of our time fighting among ourselves. Rather than try to guard against this by emphasizing history, why not encourage philosophy to come back and join the empirical party with the rest of science? If philosophy is at its worst when it becomes super-insular, then it's at its best when it is most interdisciplinary. A large part of why philosophy doesn't seem to have made much progress in 2,000 years, I think, is because we like to think of ourselves as floating free from the rest of the academic project (either in virtue of dealing with "deeper" issues than the rest of Science or in virtue of dealing with questions that other disciplines can't touch, e.g. moral responsibility). That's the real disease here, and the right cure isn't for philosophers to engage with more dead philosophers, but for them to engage with more living people trying to solve important problems in other disciplines.

    Hopefully someone will comment on why they think this is wrong.

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  40. Robert Pasnau

    I've been reading all of these comments with great interest, and I'm grateful for their almost universally generous tone. Perhaps this is a good moment for me to say a few things in response. I won't even try to address all the interesting points that have been made, from which I've learned a lot. Here, though, are a few remarks.

    First, I had hoped that the opening of the letter — "do what you love" — would make it clear that I am not proposing that everyone work on the history of philosophy. I am well aware that a great many philosophers have no interest in this project, and no facility for it, and it would be foolish to insist that they spend much time at it. It would also be foolish to suggest that knowing something about the history of philosophy is a prerequisite for doing important work in philosophy. Obviously, there is no end of counterexamples. The letter is intended, then, for someone who feels the pull of the history of philosophy, but worries that this is a path away from real, serious work in philosophy. My sense that such worries are widespread in the profession today has been confirmed by many of the responses I have gotten to this letter, both on this blog and in personal correspondence.

    Second, let me try to gloss the much-remarked phrase about "original ideas can wait." Of course, I did not mean that work in the history of philosophy cannot be original, or is necessarily less original than non-historical work. But I do think it's reasonable to distinguish between the central project of historical work — understanding ideas from the past — and the central project of non-historical work — making progress on philosophical problems. By contrasting historical and "original" work, I meant only to mark that distinction. Some historians of philosophy do not think of things in this way, and would defend the history of philosophy in more full-blooded terms: they think that doing history of philosophy is just another means to do philosophy, and that the difference is just a matter of focusing on one set of texts or another. — For an excellent statement of this sort of approach, see my colleague Robert Hanna's recent APA newsletter contribution, at http://www.apaonline.org/publications/newsletters/v08n2_Teaching_02.aspx. — I myself am inclined toward more of a separation between historical and non-historical work, but this is perhaps just a matter of temperament.

    In addition to seeing a distinction between the aims of historical and non-historical work, I also see an order of priority: I think the reason it is particularly important to work on the history of philosophy is that this can help us make progress on philosophical problems. This too is something that some historians would dispute: they would stress that understanding the history of philosophy has intrinsic value. I don't disagree, but I think the reason the history of philosophy is and should be an important part of the field of philosophy is that it makes an important contribution to philosophy itself. (Here is one place where a comparison to the very different situation with the history of science or math is relevant.)

    So, returning to the "original ideas can wait" claim, I am happy to grant that working on the history of philosophy is in a certain way an indirect path toward the main goal of philosophy. My letter tries to sell the notion that the path is not so long and hard, but of course it is — everyone knows languages are hard, and that the history of philosophy is hard and often obscure. But I am convinced that studying it is good for us (well, many of us) in the long run — that it ultimately makes us better philosophers, and that it is a path worth going down even if it represents something of a detour from the direct line toward the truth. Really, the situation here is no different from the situation for many other things that are good to study in graduate school. It is worth spending serious time on things like math, political theory, women's studies, physics, etc. etc. not because you want to publish in these areas, but because understanding these things will make you a better philosopher in the long run.

    Arguments like these aren't intended for everyone. Some people just love the history of philosophy, and want to do that for its own sake. I can entirely relate to that. But I'm not writing for those folk — they don't need any persuading.

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  41. Heidi Tiedke

    To play devil's advocate even further:

    I just have to ask what difference it makes to a problem qua problem whether it was discovered yesterday or 1000 years ago? Sure, by reading some historical figures, you may find out that your idea is not as original as it at first might seem, and you may even learn something about the problem you are studying. Honestly, I tend to think, after having read the "Critique of Pure Reason," that everything is in there. But I couldn't care less about it as a piece of the history of philosophy. I frankly see no value in studying the history of philosophy as such. Philosophically speaking, isn't this some form of ad hominem?

    Also, I don't agree that philosophers, to save themselves, should join in on whatever the most recent fad happens to be. If this was right, we should all be doing post-modern stuff, supposing we granted some value to inquiry in the humanities.

    As far as I am concerned, our job as philosophers is to vet the conceptual terrain and to create theories. This might require some engagement with empirical work, or it may not, it depends. It is also our job to relate various fields of inquiry, to see things from a broader perspective. This, I feel, is what is lacking these days in philosophy, and why it is becoming irrelevant. Where are the new David Lewises and Kripkes, where are the philosphers who can think about more than one single thing over their lifetime? Who can see the forest for the trees these days? I don't see this problem as being solved by paying more attention to history…

    I actually see the recent scientific turn as a mistake, insofar as it involves a kind of science-worship. It is the scientific model that leads to minute specialization, which is part of the reason that no one pays attention to philosophy anymore. More emphasis on the sciences is not the solution. Let me know when the grue-bleen problem is solved and maybe I'll consider it.

    OK, fellow philosophers, do your job, eviscerate me!

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  42. Dennis Des Chene

    Just once I’d like to see an epistemologist forced to explain why anyone should bother to learn about the externalism/internalism debate, a metaphysician why four-dimensionalism is worth anyone’s time, a modal logician why the difference between S4 and S5 should matter to anyone but another modal logician…

    In short: why is the burden on historians?

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  43. Chris Tucker

    Prof. Des Chene, I did not put any special burden on historians. If anything, if Pasnau were taking the strong stance I thought he was (more on that in a moment), then he would be putting an unfair burden on epistemologists who have no interest in history. In any event, my claim was that whatever case you could put forward for everyone starting with history, you could put an equally strong case in favor of everyone starting with epistemology. Since the latter case was bad, the former was also bad.

    Pasnau, as it turns out, is making a much weaker claim than I understood him to be making (thanks for clarifying!). I agree that, for those sufficiently interested in it, history can be a very good way of making progress on philosophical problems. Nonetheless, other things being equal, it often isn't the best way, at least not with respect to making progress on epistemological problems. Suppose my first AOS is epistemology and I'm trying to choose a second AOS that will best help me make progress on epistemological problems. Other things being equal (including relative levels of interest), I should prefer any of the following to history of philosophy: probability theory, modal logic, contemporary metaphysics, experimental philosophy, philosophy of psychology, and ethics. (A possible exception: my goal is to defend virtue epistemology.)

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  44. John Schwenkler

    "Suppose my first AOS is epistemology and I'm trying to choose a second AOS that will best help me make progress on epistemological problems. Other things being equal (including relative levels of interest), I should prefer any of the following to history of philosophy: probability theory, modal logic, contemporary metaphysics, experimental philosophy, philosophy of psychology, and ethics. (A possible exception: my goal is to defend virtue epistemology.)"

    And there wouldn't be greater value in taking the time to look closely at the early moderns, to try to understand what it was that drove them to bequeath to us the oh-so-contingent conceptual frameworks and families of philosophical positions that are still a driving force in present-day work? Or perhaps to look at ancient or medieval philosophers, to see whether they had quite different ways of thinking about the task of epistemology, which might have been superior in some ways to our own? Each of those things strikes me as more valuable to an aspiring epistemologist than x-phi, metaphysics, or modal logic, to name just three areas in the above list.

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  45. Jason Brennan

    Extolling the virtues of Burger King is not the thing as condemning the vices of McDonald's. I found this letter to be more of an uncharitable explanation of why one shouldn't bother with contemporary philosophy than an account of why one should study the history of philosophy.

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  46. Chris Tucker

    Prof. Schwenkler,

    By doing contemporary epistemology (e.g. the internalism/externalism debate), you can come to understand that, e.g., reliabilism is a response to the sort of framework that was inherited from the early moderns. You don't need to do history of philosophy for that. You don't need to do history of philosophy to be aware of the sceptical arguments put forward by Descartes and Hume. Those arguments are just part of contemporary epistemology.

    Maybe my opinions aren't representative of other epistemologists, but I think significant advances in epistemology are more likely to be made by studying the contemporary fields that I mentioned. Although I'm no historian, my undergraduate and postgraduate institutions both emphasized the history of philosophy, so I make this probability judgment with some idea of what is going on in the history of epistemology.

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  47. John Schwenkler

    I have no problem with contemporary epistemology; indeed I do a bit of it myself. But my point, which I think is close to the message of the letter, is that one thing that the history of the philosophy of X affords that contemporary philosophy of X may not is that in reading past figures (at least, in reading past figures *well*) one is repeatedly forced to confront the fact that our inherited frameworks (whether they come from the early moderns, or Lewis, or Kripke, or Wittgenstein, or …) are not obligatory, and may not be the best ones to be working within. This is something that contemporary philosophy sometimes comes around to, but very often – e.g. think of the paradigm-shifting work done by epistemologists who've taken Kant very seriously – engagement with the mighty dead is a crucial spur to it.

    P.S. In sympathy with some earlier comments I should add that these arguments apply similarly to the value of studying non-Anglophone philosophers, too; e.g. consider recent appropriations of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in the philosophy of mind and action.

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  48. C. Sistare

    I would like to echo Tom Ward's point about, to paraphrase him, the parochialism of only attending to current or very recent work in philosophy.

    It is embarrassing to listen to someone who knows nothing of the history of theorizing about X pronounce a wonderful insight, clever new argument, or newly discovered perspective when one is familiar with that history (and knows that whatever gem is being produced is, indeed, old hat and has been worked on by truly great thinkers of earlier time periods.)

    Similarly, it is painful to hear someone carry on on a topic as though there had never been quite different perspectives on it in earlier times. (Here, by way of an example, I would note what some seem to regard as the recent 'discovery' that ethics might focus on agents rather than on their actions.)

    A slightly different observation can be made about the awkwardness of 'reading back' into the history of phlosophy in which many not versed in that history engage. I have in mind the kind of situation wherein someone informs me that Plato defined 'knowledge' as true beleif, and then goes on to review the various Gettier problems. When I point out the dialogues in which Plato considered and rejected such a view [assuming, arguendo, that the contemporary version of 'justified true belief' is just like Plato's 'true belief plus an account'], I am told this cannot be so because some other contemporary philosophers say Plato did have such a view.

    As Prof. Ward suggests, this is very much a case of being stuck in one's [small] town with no appreciation of the wider world.

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  49. C. Sistare

    Please forgive one more example of the troubles that can result from ignorance of our theoretical history:

    Contemporary authors – especially authors of textbooks – often seek to categorize all normative moral theories within the straightjacket options of consequentialism and nonconsequentialism (or deontology).

    Unfortunately, this requires anyone who studies virtue theory or certain variants of Natural Law theory to try to force those kinds of views into categories that do not capture their distinctive character. That many such contemporary authors also use 'teleological' as a synonym for 'consequentialist' further muddies the waters, insofar as [historically conceived] telic ends are so dissimilar to the discrete consequences of interest to, e.g. modern utilitarians.

    Thanks for your indulgence. 🙂

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  50. Angus Lander

    Those who both are inclined to be skeptical of the value of history of philosophy and profess to be somewhat familiar with it should bear in mind that there are bunking and debunking histories of concepts. Lots of history of philosophy that appears in philosophical journals – as opposed to intellectual history journals – is basically of the bunking variety: it may quibble with a great philosopher's work, but it does not reject (as e.g. a bounded product of its time) the categories with which the philosopher is operating. So too, lots of history of philosophy courses that are taught in Anglophone departments are basically bunking – the concepts of contemporary philosophy are traced (sympathetically) from wherever the course starts to wherever it ends in order to understand how the debate progressed to (closer to) its present configuration, not to explode its terms. (Pro tip: when a philosopher teaching history of philosophy invokes the principle of charity, odds are he's about to commit an anachronism.)

    If you have not read beyond the bunking tradition – if you have not read people like Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and Raymond Geuss – then you simply have not been exposed to debunking histories of concepts. You can say that you've read or studied history of philosophy without being unsettled by it / caused to question contemporary frameworks, but you speak without ever having read any unsettling history of philosophy that questions received frameworks. From where I sit, that's a bit complacent. (On the other hand, if you have given the debunkers a chance and are still unpersuaded then carry on.)

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