3 responses to “Rules for doing history of philosophy…”

1. Stephen Krogh

   January 5, 2017 at 8:20 pm

   I like #14 and #15 particularly, and not just because I am a Catholic! Indeed, I've had to slog through a good deal of what is prima facie theology regarding such esoteric topics as the relationship between the persons of the trinity, with what seems to have very little contemporary philosophical import. I've been happy to find that some of the strangest medieval theological disagreements ultimately bore important philosophical or scientific fruit, e.g., 12th century debates about cultivating virtue–falling under Aristotle's category of habit–lead theologians to speculate that perhaps they should consider such growth numerically (falling under another Aristotelian category, this time the category of magnitude), i.e., when someone cultivates a particular virtue, she's "leveled up" the amount of that particular virtue. That all seems pretty obsolete today, but it was precisely this sort of thinking that led natural philosophers a century or two later to start considering whether other categories could be considered using magnitude, perhaps most interestingly various considering falling under the category of quality, such as heat, cold, and color. In other words, we can draw a direct line from medieval inside baseball to quantitative analysis of temperature, and similar such things. That seems pretty cool to me, though, it seems, not particularly so to my students (despite my best efforts!).

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2. Nick Pappas

   January 6, 2017 at 10:42 am

   Thanks for this post, Brian; and many thanks to Peter Adamson for spelling things out this way. There's a lot to be grateful for in these 20 points. Some of them pull in opposite directions, but only because practicing the history of philosophy pulls its practitioners in opposite directions — sometimes needing to accept everything an author says, sometimes needing to resist every word.

   I follow Stephen Krogh in liking the attention to religion, but because he already spoke to #14 and #15 I'll focus on #4 and #16. Indeed (regarding #4) there is no limit to the amount of history you have to know to study the history of philosophy. The further back the philosophy comes from, the more time you have to spend studying the history. What do we know about the study of grammar before Plato and Aristotle? How did people with money invest it? What was the slave population of Athens like, and how did the slaves live? As Adamson says, it is misguided to assume that some specific question like those will be irrelevant to understanding ancient philosophy — which very much means, understanding the arguments in it.

   As for #16, one of the morals that Adamson himself draws is that "doing history of philosophy is itself a philosophical enterprise." This is the consequence of almost everything he writes. But in my experience many people in our profession assume, without examining that assumption, that a distinction exists between "really doing philosophy" and "doing the history of philosophy." I will be happy enough if the only result of this post is that some people question that assumption.

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3. Peter Adamson

   January 13, 2017 at 11:21 am

   Thanks Brian for posting the link, and for the thoughtful responses!

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