A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography by Tucker Aviezer;

Author:Tucker, Aviezer;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2011-06-23T16:00:00+00:00

Historical Fallacies of Philosophers and the Relationship of Philosophy to its History

Contemporary academic philosophy generally grants that the history of philosophy has some sort of interest, but this interest is seldom justified with reference to a genetic account of contemporary philosophical theories. Rather, contemporary philosophers tend to believe that they need not understand the history of their current problems in order to adequately understand the problems themselves. This view that the history of philosophical theories and problems has little or no bearing on their systematic analysis has made for an institutional environment in which the historical approach to systematic problems has become suspect. It is therefore understandable that the question of contemporary philosophy’s relationship to its past is a topic which is frequently passed over.

In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel emphatically states his own philosophical conception of the history of philosophy. Philosophy is, for Hegel, historical in two senses. It is historical in the sense that it progresses through its development in time, and is intimately related to its place and time, though not simply determined by them. Philosophy is, however, also historiographic in its methodology, for in order to understand what is actually true in the philosophical present, one must study its generation in the philosophical past. A philosophical understanding of the current state of philosophy always involves an understanding of the philosophical past. This view of the relationship of philosophy to its past proved highly influential for both historians of philosophy and for philosophers such as Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, and has been echoed by more recent philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams. Furthermore, recent work in the “history of concepts” (Hampsher-Monk et al. 1998) suggests that the history of philosophy is valuable because the conceptual possibilities of the present are the result of what was known and thought in the past. Thus, to a certain degree at least, a proper understanding of our current philosophical problems may indeed call for a proper understanding of their past.

It follows from the above that our outline of historical fallacies of philosophers is not meant to imply that those philosophers interested in a systematic approach to problems should disregard the history of their discipline altogether. It is only meant to argue that the methodological framework in which the historiography of philosophy is to be practiced cannot be provided by philosophy alone. By invoking the negative methodology outlined above, we have tried to show that this methodological framework will have to be provided by a theory of historiography. The question whether philosophical research is empty without knowledge of its history remains an open and fiercely discussed topic; what can be asserted in concluding this entry is that history of philosophy without a proper historiographical methodology remains blind. This is particularly true of the philosophy of historiography.

Bibliography

Barnes, A. and Barnes, J. (1989). “Time Out of Joint: Some Reflections on Anachronism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47, pp. 253–61.

Bevir, M. (1994). “Are there Perennial Problems in Political Theory?” Political Studies, 42, pp.

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