Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://ebookmass.com/product/the-historiography-of-philosophy-with-a-postface-by-j onathan-barnes-michael-frede/
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Katerina Ierodiakonou 2022
Preface © Katerina Ierodiakonou 2022
Except Postface © Jonathan Barnes 2022
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2022
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942903
ISBN 978–0–19–884072–5
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198840725.001.0001
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
In the autumn term of the academic year 1989–1990 in Oxford, Michael Frede delivered the Nellie Wallace Lectures under the general title The Historiography of Philosophy. After returning to Princeton, NJ, he entrusted his manuscript to the secretary of the Philosophy Department, either Ann Getson or Bunny Romano; one or other of them usually typed his work for publication, since he himself never used a computer. It is this typed version of Frede’s lectures that we still have, for when he moved to Oxford in 1991, Frede threw away the manuscript, but at least kept safe, in a folder with a hard black cover, the only copy of the typed version of his lectures. In 2005, he brought this folder to Athens, along with the rest of his papers and books; unfortunately, he never found the time to read through this typescript and make the necessary corrections before his death in 2007.
Although in general the secretary in Princeton did a careful job, there is no doubt that it would have been better to have Frede’s own manuscript. For the secretary left gaps at some places in the text and added a number of question marks, where she could not decipher his handwriting or could not understand the German terms he used. Moreover, she seems to have skipped parts of Frede’s sentences, which often are deliberately repetitive. Indeed, while copying the typed version of the lectures onto my computer in Word format, I was at times reminded of just how tricky the copyist’s job is. For I had to be particularly vigilant not to leave
* I would like to thank Charles Brittain, Benjamin Morison, and Wolfgang Mann for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this preface.
out whole sections of Frede’s text, in which the same words and phrases occur again and again. On the other hand, his repetitive style proved of great help to me in deciding how to fill in some of the gaps the secretary had left.
Although I sometimes needed to modify the typed version of the Nellie Wallace Lectures, such changes were kept to a bare minimum, in order to preserve Frede’s rather idiosyncratic style. For he famously wrote the way he talked, so that anyone who reads these lectures and who had the chance to meet him in person will easily be able to hear his voice. Thus, I decided to retain the long sentences and distinctive syntax, but to introduce changes in the punctuation and separation of paragraphs in order to make the text more readable. To facilitate such decisions, I also sought the advice of Frede’s students and colleagues. In a two-day workshop at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi in June 2017, James Allen, Chloe Balla, Charles Brittain, Damian Caluori, John Cooper, Paul Kalligas, Vaso Kindi, Richard McKirahan, Benjamin Morison, Spyros Rangos, and Voula Tsouna met to discuss the difficulties in editing The Historiography of Philosophy. I would like to thank them all from my heart for their constructive suggestions. I would like also to thank Wolfgang Mann and Stephen Menn, who kindly sent me constructive comments on Frede’s text. Finally, thanks are due to François Nolle, who compiled the notes with a view to providing bibliographical references for those readers who may be interested in exploring more thoroughly the issues that Frede raises.
The notes refer, in addition, to a set of lectures Frede had given at the University of California, Riverside in January 1986, which differ on several points from the Nellie Wallace Lectures, but mostly overlap with them. On account of this overlap, I decided not to publish the earlier lectures. On the other hand, Frede’s three published articles on the historiography of philosophy are included in this volume for the sake of those who want to study and understand the development of Frede’s views: ‘The Study of Ancient Philosophy’ dates from 1987 and its scope, as the title indicates, is restricted, whereas the scope of the Nellie Wallace Lectures is broader. ‘The History of Philosophy as a Discipline’, from 1988, can be read as a summary or epitome of the salient claims of the Nellie Wallace Lectures. ‘Doxographical, Philosophical, and Historical
Forms of the History of Philosophy’, from 1992, is a postlude, which, in certain parts, supplements the Nellie Wallace Lectures. (For completeness, I should also note Frede’s short review of J. J. E. Gracia’s book, Philosophy and Its History: Issues in Philosophical Historiography in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994), 233–6; it touches upon similar issues, but not in sufficient detail to justify its inclusion in this volume.)
Given that we have Frede’s published articles on the historiography of philosophy, one could argue that I should have let the Nellie Wallace Lectures fall into oblivion. In addition, there can be absolutely no doubt that he himself would not have published them in their present form. In fact, he would have rewritten them again and again from beginning to end, as he always did with his work, also taking into consideration the discussions that followed his lectures. But the Nellie Wallace Lectures contain Frede’s most detailed and most systematic thoughts on the topic of the historiography of philosophy, a topic that was dear to him and occupied him for a long time. It would, therefore, have been a pity not to make them available to anyone interested in them. It is, of course, true that many relevant articles and books have been published since the time of the lectures and perhaps some of Frede’s central notions and assumptions have, by now, been superseded. To my mind, however, the Nellie Wallace Lectures have not lost their explanatory power and Frede’s proposal for a historical history of philosophy retains its value; it should thus be easily accessible, carefully studied, and critically assessed.
Right from the beginning, Frede distinguishes the history of philosophy (i.e. the account of what philosophers have done) from the historiography of philosophy (i.e. the account of what historians of philosophy do); and he makes clear that what he is interested in is to study how historians of philosophy ‘proceed the way they do’ and to make sense ‘of the actual practice of historiography in terms of the principles, presuppositions, assumptions which would justify it’ (p. 4). The aim of his lectures, he asserts, is normative: ‘what I am interested in here is not the
factual question why historians of philosophy do what they do, but the theoretical question, the question how we ought to conceive of and explain what they are doing’ (p. 4). For he believes that:
(i) ‘reflections on the history of philosophy and its study may throw considerable light on history in general and its study’;
(ii) ‘It may also benefit one’s understanding of what philosophy is, of how one should think about philosophical problems, whether and in what sense they are real problems’; and
(iii) ‘this kind of reflection might help one to get clearer about the relation between philosophical activity, for instance, what philosophers do nowadays, on the one hand, and the history of philosophy and its study, on the other’ (p. 5).
According to Frede, there are three systematic approaches to the history of philosophy, of which the first two are philosophical and the third historical. They all fall under the same heading, ‘history of philosophy’, and deal with the same material, but they are distinct enterprises. In presenting these three approaches, Frede also outlines their historical development:
I. Philosophical doxography: ‘a very old philosophical enterprise of looking towards the history of philosophy for views and positions of continued philosophical interest’ (p. 14). The doxographer disregards the fact that the philosophical views of the past are of the past and treats them ‘as if they were contemporary, perhaps even as views which might be defended nowadays’ (p. 26). Hence, the doxographer does not attempt to trace the development of philosophy from its beginnings and does not follow a chronological order. The prime example of a doxographer in antiquity is Diogenes Laertius, but among other ancient writers who share the same approach with him are Ps. Plutarch, Nicolaus of Damascus, and Arius Didymus; next, around the middle of the fourteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, we have a renewed tradition of philosophical doxography in the works of Walter Burleigh, Thomas Stanley, Georg Horn, and Jacob Brucker; and finally, in the first
half of the nineteenth century, a new kind of doxography arises, whose famous exponent is Friedrich Trendelenburg but also, later on, figures like Bertrand Russell and Bernard Williams.
II. Philosophical history of philosophy: ‘a much more recent historical enterprise which tries to reconstruct the actual, historical evolution of these views and positions’ (p. 14). The philosophical historian regards the philosophical views of the past ‘as essentially of the past, overcome, replaced by more recent and more advanced views’ (p. 26). In fact, the philosophical historian adopts the viewpoint of a particular philosophical position and interprets the history of philosophy as an advance leading up to this particular privileged position. Christoph Meiners’ history of 1786, Grundriss der Geschichte der Weltweisheit, initiates this tradition and, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the histories of Dietrich Tiedemann, Johann Buhle, and Wilhelm Tennemann follow his paradigm. Also, Frede stresses, ‘it will be in this spirit that Hegel will give lectures on the history of philosophy in 1818–1819 in Berlin’ (p. 39).
III. Historical history of philosophy: the historian adopting this approach is interested in the philosophical views of the past ‘as historical views, i.e. as views that were maintained by a particular individual in a particular historical context’ (p. 26). This particular kind of history of philosophy is not a philosophical, but a historical discipline, which focuses on trying to understand ‘how philosophy as a matter of historical fact got started and how it in fact evolved in the way it did up to the present day’ (p. 10). The historical history of philosophy emerges as a discipline with Eduard Zeller’s magisterial work Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung, in which he tries to reconstruct the development of philosophy by employing throughout the tools of the historian.
Frede regards all three enterprises as perfectly legitimate, which means that neither the philosopher nor the historian should attempt to mend their ways:
Philosophers quite rightly often object to historians that philosophers of the past need to be taken seriously as philosophers, that it requires a good amount of philosophical sense and philosophical competence to do justice to philosophers even of the more distant past. Historians equally object to philosophers who often seem to have little sense of what is involved in treating philosophers of the past in a way which historically is adequate and sometimes do not even seem to care about historical adequacy. It sometimes seems to be assumed that this controversy can be laid to rest and the interests of both sides will be satisfied if we begin to write history of philosophy in a way which is both philosophically and historically adequate. But this seems to me to be fundamentally mistaken. The interests of the historian and of the philosopher are fundamentally at odds. The historian is interested in the history of philosophy as history, the philosopher is interested in this history not as history, but insofar as it continues to have something to offer which is of philosophical interest. Hence we need at least two forms of the study of the history of philosophy. (p. 18)
Frede’s own preference, though, is clearly with the historical history of philosophy, to which he gives:
a privileged status, a certain kind of priority in that the other forms of study of the history of philosophy ultimately have to rely on its findings. For it is the historical discipline which determines, as well as we can determine, which position a philosopher of the past, as a matter of historical fact, took and for which reasons he did, in fact, take it. (p. 10)
‘Once we have such a historical study’, Frede claims in his article ‘The history of philosophy as a discipline’, ‘we are in a much better position to judge whether philosophical positions of the past continue to be of philosophical interest or not’ (p. 669).
But it is interesting to note that, in his Riverside Lectures, Frede employs somewhat different terminology when presenting the different approaches to the history of philosophy; in particular, he there calls ‘philosophical history of philosophy’ what the Nellie Wallace Lectures refer to as ‘historical history of philosophy’. This may at first seem
confusing, since in his more recent lectures, Frede clearly differentiates the historical history of philosophy from the philosophical history of philosophy by stressing the historical character of the former and the philosophical character of the latter. It seems, however, that the Riverside Lectures aim to establish a somewhat different distinction between the different approaches to writing the history of philosophy—more specifically, between the philosophical one and what he calls ‘the cultural history approach’. The philosophical history of philosophy is presented, in these lectures, as:
an internal history of philosophy, that is, an account of the history of philosophy, as far as possible in terms of the philosophical considerations which led philosophers to abandon one view and adopt another, drop one line of reasoning and replace it by another one etc., a philosopher’s history of philosophy, as it were. (p. 4)
The cultural history of philosophy, by contrast, ‘conceives of itself as properly historical. It aims at the historical views. It proceeds on the assumption that philosophy is an integral part of the culture of a time, that philosophical views are another expression of the spirit or style of the culture of the time and hence have to be understood as such. If we want to understand Plato, we have to learn as much as we can about Athenian culture and history of the fifth and fourth centuries, and only then will we be able to identify and to fully understand Plato’s philosophical views. This approach, which I will call ‘the cultural history approach’, is quite common in Europe and among classicists and historians. Properly understood, it seems to me to be perfectly legitimate. But it tends to be combined with further assumptions, which seem to me to be objectionable. There is a tendency to assume some kind of cultural holism such that the neglect of philosophical arguments which characterizes this approach now finds a theoretical justification in the assumption that it is not really for these philosophical reasons that a philosopher adopted a certain philosophical view. There is also a tendency to think that philosophical views are so much tied to their historical context that they, almost by definition, can be of no philosophical interest to later times. (p. 11)
So, this is the reason why Frede says in the Riverside Lectures, ‘I do want to advocate a philosophical history of philosophy’ (p. 4), and why there is no discrepancy between this account and his more developed views in the Nellie Wallace Lectures.
Furthermore, again in the Riverside Lectures, Frede makes clear that there are many other enterprises that may be called ‘history of philosophy’, but that involve yet further different perspectives; for instance, what he calls ‘the psychological history of philosophy’:
if one thinks that there are a limited number of basic philosophical positions which just get repeated in various forms and disguises over and over again, one may think that it is a matter of human psychology that we, or at least philosophers, have to think in one of these ways. On this approach to the history of philosophy we try to reduce the bewildering variety of philosophical positions to a limited number of, as it were, natural kinds and try to explain those as arising out of the human mind. It is for this reason that I call this kind of approach ‘psychological’. But this form of the psychological approach has also been called ‘classificatory’, because according to it the history of philosophy primarily offers a vast sample of philosophical positions to be classified appropriately. This approach is exemplified by Victor Cousin and by Charles Renouvier, and in a way, already earlier, by De Gerando in his Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie (Paris 1804). Here the term ‘history of philosophy’ seems to have yet another sense, analogous to that of ‘natural history’. The aim is not to give a history of philosophy, but to present, under appropriate headings, an exhaustive collection of philosophical views. (p. 14)
In the Nellie Wallace Lectures, though, Frede aims to focus on the historical history of philosophy, in order to present a thorough account of how he conceives of his preferred enterprise. More specifically, in chapters 1–4, he shows how the historical history of philosophy differs from philosophical doxography, as well as from the philosophical history of philosophy; in chapters 5–11, he considers the historical history of philosophy in detail; and in chapters 12–13, he looks at some consequences of the practice of the historian of philosophy. But I will leave Frede’s text
to speak by itself; in the rest of this preface, I would like simply to sketch the historical background to Frede’s Nellie Wallace Lectures and to trace some of their influence.
Frede’s Nellie Wallace Lectures are clearly an attempt to vindicate Eduard Zeller’s approach to the history of philosophy and to criticize the one that was dominant in analytic philosophy at the time when these lectures were given. It is telling that, in his article ‘Doxographical, Philosophical, and Historical Forms of the History of Philosophy’, Frede openly contrasts his views with those adhered to by the ‘new form of doxography, whose most impressive representative was perhaps G. E. L. Owen’ (p. 324). For Frede objects to the fact that:
(1) the new doxography is selective; it is concerned by its nature only with rather exceptional philosophers, whose thought seems to have retained a genuinely philosophical interest; (2) in this new doxography, the aim is to reconstruct, using all the resources of contemporary philosophy, including modern logic, the arguments which were or could have been advanced in favor of a position from the past—and it does so with a subtlety which is sometimes very impressive. (p. 324)
In the Nellie Wallace Lectures, though, he does not explicitly refer to Owen or to other scholars who, in spite of their different personalities and styles, advocated an approach to the history of philosophy similar to Owen’s; for instance, J. L. Ackrill or G. Vlastos.1 In these lectures, Frede criticizes strongly Werner Jaeger’s psychological explanations of the inconsistencies in the Aristotelian corpus. For, according to him, it is
1 For more information about the different ways analytic philosophers dealt with the history of ancient philosophy before and during Frede’s academic career, see J. Barnes, ‘Aristote dans la philosophie anglo-saxonne’, Revue Philosophique de Louvain 26 (1977), 204–18; C. Rapp, ‘The liaison between analytic and ancient philosophy and its consequences’, in M. van Ackeren (ed.), Philosophy and the Historical Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018, 120–39.
not Aristotle’s biography that can provide us with the reasons behind his change of mind, but rather philosophical considerations that only the historian is capable of pointing out in an unbiased way (pp. 81–2). No doubt, at the time of the Nellie Wallace Lectures, Frede was not alone in trying to reassess the way the history of philosophy should be written. In fact, right at the start of his Riverside Lectures, he recounts some of the background that explains his interest in the subject:
There has been a renewed interest in the history of philosophy. But there recently also have been signs of a renewed interest in the nature of the history of philosophy, the historical character of philosophical activity, and the way one studies this history. In 1965 John Passmore edited a series of articles under the title The Historiography of the History of Philosophy in the series History and Theory (Beiheft 5, ’s-Gravenhage: Mouton). In 1969 the Monist had an issue on the topic of Philosophy of the History of Philosophy with an introductory article by L. W. Beck. And most recently, Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner have published a volume of papers entitled Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984). Beck, in the paper mentioned above, has a long list of earlier articles and books on the history and the historiography of philosophy. But he also points out that these earlier discussions for the most part are not particularly useful and that the topic would deserve more attention. Given the renewed interest, I thought it might be useful if a practising historian of philosophy tried to specify his view of the enterprise of the historian of philosophy. (p. 1)
In particular, Rorty’s contribution in the volume Philosophy in History, ‘The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres’ (pp. 49–75), also proposes a distinction between different attitudes toward the history of philosophy, but Frede seems to have disagreed with it and did not adopt it. For Rorty claimed:
I have distinguished four genres and suggested that one of them be allowed to wither away [i.e. doxography]. The remaining three are indispensable and do not compete with one another. Rational
reconstructions are necessary to help us present-day philosophers think through our problems. Historical reconstructions are needed to remind us that these problems are historical products, by demonstrating that they were invisible to our ancestors. Geistesgeschichte is needed to justify our belief that we are better off than those ancestors by virtue of having become aware of those problems. Any given book in the history of philosophy will, of course, be a mixture of these three genres. But usually one or another motive dominates, since there are three distinct tasks to be performed. (pp. 67–8)
And there were other books and articles at that time dealing with similar issues. Some of them discussed the character of the history of philosophy by raising both the question of whether it should be thought of as philosophy or as history and the related question of whether a historian or a philosopher is better suited to writing the history of philosophy. Others focused more on the question concerning the relation between philosophy and its history, that is, whether or not the history of philosophy can be of some help to contemporary philosophical debates.2
But have Frede’s views on the historiography of philosophy been rebutted, superseded, or taken on board by working historians of philosophy? There are historians of philosophy who praise his approach and claim to follow his lead, and there are others who criticize his reconstruction of the historiography of philosophy.3 It is important to note,
2 See, e.g. the articles in the volumes Philosophy and Its Past (ed. J. Rée, M. Ayers, and A. Westoby, Brighton: Harvester 1978) and Doing Philosophy Historically (ed. P. H. Hare, Buffalo N.Y.: Prometheus Books 1988).
3 C. Normore, ‘Doxology and the history of philosophy’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, suppl. 16 (1990), 203–26; C. Normore, ‘The methodology of the history of philosophy’, in H. Cappelen, T. Szabó Gendler, and J. Hawthorne (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2016, 27–48; W.-R. Mann, ‘The origins of the modern historiography of ancient philosophy’, History and Theory 35 (1996), 165–95; A. Laks, ‘Histoire critique et doxographie. Pour une histoire de l’historiographie de la philosophie’, Les Études Philosophiques 4 (1999), 465–77; A. Kenny, ‘The philosopher’s history and the history of philosophy’, in T. Sorell and G. A. Rogers (eds), Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press 2005, 13–24; H.-J. Glock, ‘Analytic philosophy and history: A mismatch?’, Mind 117 (2008), 867–97; L. Catana, ‘Philosophical problems in the history of philosophy: What are they?’, in M. Laerke, J. E. H. Smith, and E. Schliesser (eds), Philosophy and Its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, 115–33; L. Catana, ‘Doxographical or philosophical history: On Michael Frede’s precepts for writing the history of philosophy’, History of European Ideas 42 (2014), 170–7; K. Saporiti, ‘Wozu überhaupt Geschichte der Philosophie?’, in L. Cesalli, P. Emamzadah, and
though, that all of his followers and critics base their judgements primarily on the reading of his published articles, since the Nellie Wallace Lectures have not been available. Frede’s more systematic proposal for a historical history of philosophy, therefore, still needs to be carefully studied, both in its historical and in its normative aspect, before we can assess his overall contribution to the relevant more recent discussions. To mention just a few details, it is clear that certain points stressed in the Nellie Wallace Lectures are now regarded as generally agreed upon, at least in secular histories of philosophy, and thus as rather obvious, and even trite:
What I do want to reject is a delineation of the history of philosophy from the point of view of a contemporary philosophical conception of philosophy which reflects a certain contemporary philosophical position. This obviously would make for biased partisan history only acceptable to the followers of this position. It would make the enterprise unhistorical, since the choice of this position could not be justified on historical grounds. And it would, of course, mean that the history constantly would have to be rewritten as philosophical positions change. (p. 75)
On the other hand, there are other points that are highly debatable; for instance, his conviction that the person best qualified to write the history of philosophy is the historian:
I want to insist right from the beginning that the historical history of philosophy truly is a historian’s enterprise and not some joint venture in which one has to watch for the proper balance between history and philosophy. I want this enterprise to be as independent as possible from philosophy and not just an ancilla to philosophy . . .
H. Taieb (eds), La philosophie et son histoire—un débat actuel, Studia Philosophica 76 (2017), 115–36; W. Kühn, ‘Ein Plädozer für rationale Rekonstruktion’, in L. Cesalli, P. Emamzadah, and H. Taieb (eds), La philosophie et son histoire—un débat actuel, Studia Philosophica 76 (2017), 171–86; M. van Ackeren, ‘On interpreting historical texts and contributing to current philosophy’, in M. van Ackeren (ed.), Philosophy and the Historical Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018, 69–87.
So I want to insist that the historical historian of philosophy genuinely is a historian, though he needs to have a good amount of philosophical competence. (pp. 60–1)
In addition, Frede’s rehabilitation of doxography and his attempt to free it from all pejorative connotations, as well as his seemingly outright exclusion of Indian and Chinese philosophy from the history of philosophy (p. 70), would likely raise eyebrows nowadays.
In the time since the Nellie Wallace Lectures were originally delivered, quite a number of publications on the historiography of philosophy have appeared and, I think, Frede’s subtle and nuanced position in favour of a historical history of philosophy should find its place among those currently being discussed.4 There is, moreover, a renewed interest in
4 See, e.g. H. J. Sandkühler (ed.), Geschichtlichkeit der Philosophie. Theorie, Methodologie und Methode der Historiographie der Philosophie, Franfurt am Main: Peter Lang 1991; G. Santinello (ed.), Models of the History of Philosophy: From Its Origins in the Renaissance to the ‘Historia Philosophica’, Vol. 1, trans. C. Blackwell and P. Weller, Dordrecht: Kluwer 1993; G. Boss (ed.), La philosophie et son histoire, Zurich: GMB Éditions du Grand Midi 1994; R. A. Watson, ‘What is the history of philosophy and why is it important?’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002), 525–8; M. Osler, ‘The history of philosophy and the history of philosophy: A plea for textual history in context’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 40 (2002), 529–33; A. Martinich, ‘Philosophical history of philosophy’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003), 405–7; T. Sorell and G. A. Rogers (eds), Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press 2005; L. Catana, ‘The concept “system of philosophy”: The case of Jacob Brucker’s historiography of philosophy’, History and Theory 44 (2005), 72–90; L. Catana, The Historiographical Concept ‘System of Philosophy’, Leiden: Brill 2008; L. Catana, ‘Lovejoy’s readings of Bruno: Or how nineteenth-century history of philosophy was “transformed” into the history of ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 71 (2010), 91–112; L. Catana, ‘Tannery and Duhem on the concept of a system in the history of philosophy and history of science’, Intellectual History Review 21 (2011), 493–509; L. Catana, ‘Intellectual history and the history of philosophy: The genesis and current relationship’, in R. Whatmore and B. Young (eds), A Companion to Intellectual History, Hoboken N.J.: John Wiley & Sons 2016, 129–40; S. Knuuttila, ‘Hintikka’s view of the history of philosophy’, in R. E. Auxier and L. E. Hahn (eds), The Philosophy of Jaakko Hintikka, La Salle: Open Court 2006, 87–105; I. Hunter, ‘The history of philosophy and the persona of the philosopher’, Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007), 571–600; K. Vermeir, ‘Philosophy and genealogy: Ways of writing history of philosophy’, in M. Laerke, J. E. H. Smith, and E. Schliesser (eds), Philosophy and Its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013, 50–70; M. Kremer, ‘What is the good of philosophical history’, in E. H. Reck (ed.), The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy, New York: Palgrave 2013, 294–326; S. Hutton, ‘Intellectual history and the history of philosophy’, History of European Ideas 40 (2014), 925–37; M. R. Antognazza, ‘The benefit to philosophy of the study of its history’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (2015), 161–84; L. Cesalli, P. Emamzadah, and H. Taieb (eds), ‘La philosophie et son histoire—un débat actuel’, Studia Philosophica 76 (2017); M. van Ackeren (ed.), Philosophy and the Historical Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2018; M. Della Rocca, The Parmenidean Ascent, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2020, ch. 7; L. Catana and M. Laerke (eds), ‘Historiographies of Philosophy 1800–1950’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28:3 (2020), 431–41.
doxography, as well as in Zeller’s academic achievements,5 which could help us to assess Frede’s perspective and the principles underlying it in a more informed way. We may thus be in a better position to understand more fully why he insisted on referring to himself as a ‘historian’6 and why he was so proud of it.
5 See, e.g. A. Laks, ‘Qu’est-ce que la doxographie?’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 97 (1992), 307–9; J. Mansfeld and D. T. Runia (eds), Aëtiana: The Method and Intellectual Context of a Doxographer. Vol. I: The Sources, Leiden: Brill 1997; Vol. II: The Compendium, Leiden: Brill 2009; Vol. III: Studies in the Doxographical Traditions of Ancient Philosophy, Leiden: Brill 2010; Aëtiana IV. Papers of the Melbourne Colloquium on Ancient Doxography, Leiden: Brill 2018; L. Steindler, ‘Les principes d’Eduard Zeller concernant l’histoire de la philosophie’, Revue de la Métaphysique et de Morale 97 (1992), 401–16; G. Hartung (ed.), Eduard Zeller: Philosophieund Wissenschaftsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, Berlin: De Gruyter 2009.
6 See M. Frede, ‘Review of J. J. E. Gracia’s Philosophy and Its History: Issues in Philosophical Historiography’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994), 234.
Michael Frede, who died in 2007, held positions in the History of Philosophy at the University of California (Berkeley), Princeton University, and Oxford University.
Jonathan Barnes was Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Oxford University, University of Geneva, and University of Paris-Sorbonne. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Charles Brittain is Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Cornell University.
Katerina Ierodiakonou is Professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Athens and Associate Professor at the University of Geneva.
François Nolle is PhD student in Ancient Philosophy at the University of Geneva.
Historians of philosophy, that is to say those scholars who study the history of philosophy with the expertise appropriate for the systematic, scholarly study of this history, do go about their work in a certain way. Usually they do not stop to think much about the way they go about studying the history of philosophy. And one might think, not entirely without justification, that there is no urgent need for them to stop to think about what they are doing. After all, many of them produce excellent work without thinking about this. So perhaps they should rather continue being busy with their work, than waste their time with reflections on it. Indeed, one might suspect that here, as in so many other cases, the good practitioner is not necessarily particularly well equipped to talk about and explain what he is doing. What is more, one might be afraid that the historian might well form the wrong view of what he is doing and that this view will then interfere with his practice in a way detrimental to it. There is a certain wisdom embodied in good practice, and maybe our ability to capture the principles underlying good practice cannot but fall short of this highly complex, though perhaps rather tacit wisdom.
Nevertheless, it quite definitely is not the case that it is an obvious matter why the historian goes about doing things the way he does. It quite definitely is not obvious that one should do things the way the historian does. This is clear because over time historians have proceeded quite differently, and because even nowadays there are surprising differences in the way different historians approach the history of philosophy. One cannot, for instance, but be struck by the fact that, in general, there is an enormous difference between those who concern themselves with ancient philosophy, those who concern themselves with medieval philosophy, and the students of the history of modern philosophy. And,
across this distinction, there are a great variety of approaches. There is, for instance, an enormous difference between the way A. J. Ayer, on the one hand, and Barry Stroud, on the other, deal with Hume, and there is an enormous difference in the way Jonathan Bennett and Michael Ayers deal with Locke.1 We will have to return to these differences. What matters here for the moment is that there are such enormous differences that differences in the treatment of a given philosopher of the past are not just a matter of a difference in interpretation, but might reflect a very different way of going about things. So it cannot be the case that there is an obvious way to go about things here, a way so obvious that it does not require explanation why historians proceed in this way.
Now, if we raise the question why they proceed the way they do, it seems that this question can be answered in two different ways. It would seem that, on the one hand, we can try to give a factual answer. We can point out that there is a tradition, or rather that there are various traditions, of systematical study of the history of philosophy. One just, to a good extent, follows a tradition in which one is raised, in which one has learnt to do this. One’s practice will be, to some extent, modified by the reaction to one’s work one encounters. It may also be modified by a certain amount of reflection. So there will be a complex answer to the question why a particular historian proceeds the way he does. But there is another way to answer the question: one can try to make sense of the actual practice in terms of the principles, presuppositions, and assumptions which would justify it.
I think that for an understanding of our actual historiography the first kind of answer is quite important. We should not forget that the historiography of philosophy itself in many ways is a product of history and reflects the historical context in which it is pursued. Nevertheless, what I am interested in here is not the factual question why historians of philosophy do what they do, but the theoretical question, the question how we ought to conceive of and explain what they are doing; though they themselves in this work may not in fact be guided by these assumptions and principles, there must be such principles to the extent that their activity is a rational activity. I am interested in this primarily for theoretical reasons, because it raises interesting theoretical questions. And this in various regards.
Philosophers have had a lot to say about history in general and about the systematical, expert study of it. Equally historians have had a lot to say about history and about how it ought to be treated. And, as a result, general historiography has undergone considerable changes. Philosophers of science and historians of science have had a lot to say about the history of science, as a result of which, again, the historiography of science has undergone enormous changes. But philosophers, when it comes to the history of their own discipline and its systematical study, though they may not lack strong views on the matter, seem to content themselves with rather unreflected convictions. But reflections on the history of philosophy and its study may throw considerable light on history in general and its study, for instance, on the question whether and in what sense history is progressive or the question of the role of the individual in history, or the role of intellectual disciplines in the evolution of a society, or the nature of historical explanation. Similarly such reflection may benefit reflections on the history of science. It may also benefit one’s understanding of what philosophy is, of how one should think about philosophical problems, whether and in what sense they are real problems. It raises questions concerning relativism. There is a host of interesting theoretical problems involved here, which reflection on the history of philosophy and its study can be expected to shed a good deal of light on. Moreover, this kind of reflection might help one to get clearer about the relation between philosophical activity, for instance, what philosophers do nowadays, on the one hand, and the history of philosophy and its study, on the other, a matter philosophers tend to have very strong views about, which, though, often do not seem to be grounded in an adequate consideration of the relevant facts. There are, as I hope will become clear, a host of facts and questions here which one first of all would have to take notice of and to get clear about before one is in a position to make more or less sweeping claims about the relation between philosophy, its history, and the systematical study of the histories of both.
But this is also a practical matter. It is a practical matter, for instance, for the simple reason that the activity of the historians of philosophy is accompanied by a lot of criticism. And this criticism is not just the kind of criticism of detail we find in any intellectual discipline. It often is a
criticism of the very way the historian goes about his business, of his approach, of his attitude towards history. Philosophers tend to criticize historians of philosophy as being unduly historical and not sufficiently philosophical; historians raise such criticisms against each other; there is the criticism that Bennett is not concerned with historical truth, that Bertrand Russell does not really understand the philosophers of the past he is talking about,2 that Aristotle should be studied in such a way that his relevance to contemporary philosophy becomes apparent, that some interpretation is onesided. Many of these criticisms are based on confusion and wrong expectations. One has to realize that there is no such thing as the way to treat the history of philosophy, that there are several quite different enterprises one may be engaged in when one is studying the history of philosophy, and that there are different expectations which are appropriate for the different enterprises. There is a historical way of treating of the history of philosophy which is not concerned with what might be, or might not be, of interest to the contemporary philosopher. There is a way of treating of the history of philosophy whose primary aim is not historical truth, but philosophical interest, and this is such a way that a certain kind or measure of anachronism not only is perfectly justified, but unavoidable.
So for practical reasons one has to distinguish the various things one might be doing when one is studying the history of philosophy, because different kinds of expectation and criticism are appropriate for the different enterprises. But there not only is little awareness of this among the critics, there is little awareness of this among the historians when they do their work. And this lack of awareness does in a way affect their work. It makes it difficult for them to see what precisely they are doing and that they might, and might want to, be doing something else which would be more appropriate to what they think they are doing. Thus a lot of history of philosophy, quite appropriately, is written from the point of view of the contemporary philosopher, his interests, his questions, his views, say on logic. But one might want to write about Aristotelian or Stoic logic not from this point of view, but from the point of view of a philosopher of the time; how, say, Stoic logic arose out of interests and questions of that time and how, seen in this light, lots of details begin to make good sense and even have a certain subtlety, which from the
contemporary, retrospective point of view must appear as strange oddities, due to an insufficient grasp of the problems at issue. Once one realizes the different possibilities, one realizes that these are different possible projects which also must be pursued in a different way appropriate to each.
So, though it is no doubt true that good historians do good work anyway, and that they do not do this because they are following one set of principles or another, it nevertheless also seems true that some awareness of the different possible sets of principles involved might help with the actual work, might make it clear what needs to be done, if one has chosen one rather than another approach, might make it clear what to expect and what not to expect from such an approach. It seems to me that the study of the history of philosophy has become a very traditional enterprise, which one has come to pursue guided by an apparently stable tradition. Perhaps reflection on the principles involved will help to bring about not only more clarity and awareness as to the particular approach one is following but will also help to bring about shifts and changes in approach that parallel the shifts in the study of general history or the history of science. There has been, since the end of the eighteenth century, a worry about a strongly felt tension between the demand for historical accuracy and the demand for philosophical adequacy, relevance, and interest, but even this worry does not seem to give rise to a serious consideration of what one is doing when one is studying the history of philosophy.
It is not as if no consideration was given to the topic at all. In fact, in recent years a good number of papers have been written on it, whole conferences and lectureseries have been devoted to it. But the results have been curiously disappointing. It seems easy enough to make some sensible observations which everybody will readily agree with, but as soon as authors try to go beyond the obvious they seem to lose orientation and to be ready to make the most implausible claims. Thus, to take just one example, Jonathan Rée, in a recent paper entitled ‘History, philosophy, and interpretation’,3 by the time he has gotten to the fourth page of his paper, is ready to say ‘In philosophy, too, meticulous historical accuracy may distort a work, or obscure its author’s intentions’. One perhaps can see what he is trying to say, but it still seems to me that the
statement is truly amazing in a paper which is devoted to reflection on the proper study of the history of philosophy.
One moral which one may draw from the fact that the discussion of the topic so far has been rather disappointing is that the topic itself is unyielding and unprofitable. But I doubt this. It rather seems to me that the discussion so far has been disappointing because it suffers from too much confusion even on rather elementary matters. Authors have been too eager to quickly reach rather strong results they had settled on in advance anyway, instead of patiently and systematically pursuing the great numbers of small and not so small questions that need to be clarified and answered, before anything of interest can responsibly be said about the study of the history of philosophy, something which substantially goes beyond what we all would be ready to say anyway.
Philosophy has a history, the history of philosophy, which itself is the subject of a special discipline. For lack of a different name, this discipline itself, like the subject it studies, carries the name ‘history of philosophy’. I am talking about the discipline ‘history of philosophy’ which systematically studies the history of philosophy. I do, indeed, believe that there is such a discipline, which studies the history of philosophy very much in the way a historian of architecture studies the history of architecture or a historian of astronomy the history of astronomy. And it is this discipline which, in the following, I will be mainly concerned with. But reflection on this discipline is made difficult by the fact that a good number of rather different enterprises have come to be associated with the term ‘history of philosophy’. This has tended to confuse the issues, especially since there is very little awareness of the difference between these enterprises, and they accordingly tend to be conflated and confused. What I have called ‘the discipline “history of philosophy”’ is just one of these enterprises, and to be able to focus on it, we first of all have to concern ourselves with the distinctions between the various enterprises which run under the same heading ‘history of philosophy’. This task is complicated by the fact that, though these enterprises ideally are clearly distinct, though they have quite distinct historical origins, and though the distinctness of their origin is readily apparent, they in practice and in their total development, due to lack of reflection, tend not to maintain their pure form, but to get contaminated.
Among the large variety of projects and enterprises that are pursued under the heading ‘history of philosophy’ there are in particular three Michael
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198840725.003.0002
which deserve to be distinguished, and which I will concentrate on. I will call them ‘philosophical doxography’, ‘philosophical history of philosophy’, and ‘historical history of philosophy’, respectively. It is the last of these three, the historical discipline ‘history of philosophy’, which is the one I am mainly concerned with. For it is this discipline, rather than the other enterprises that go by the name ‘history of philosophy’, which is related to philosophy roughly in the way the discipline ‘history of medicine’ is related to medicine, or the discipline ‘history of mathematics’ to mathematics. Just as the history of medicine is not a medical discipline and the history of mathematics is not a mathematical discipline, but a historical discipline, so the particular kind of history of philosophy I want to focus on is not a philosophical, but a historical discipline. It studies, in the way historians characteristically do, a particular history, or a particular aspect of history, namely the history of philosophy, in such a way that we can understand how philosophy as a matter of historical fact got started and how it in fact evolved in the way it did up to the present day.
But this, as I already indicated, is not the only way the history of philosophy is studied systematically. Nor do I want to suggest that this is the only way the history of philosophy ought to be studied. I am just claiming that it is a perfectly legitimate way to study the history of philosophy. I want to focus attention on it, since it is a much neglected way of studying the history of philosophy, so much neglected that there seems to be little awareness of it (at least among philosophers) as a distinct enterprise. Moreover, I do think that it has a privileged status, a certain kind of priority in that the other forms of study of the history of philosophy ultimately have to rely on its findings. For it is the historical discipline which determines, as well as we can determine, which position a philosopher of the past, as a matter of historical fact, took and for which reasons he did, in fact, take it. The philosophical doxographer and the philosophical historian can then proceed to subject this position and the reasons for which it was advanced to philosophical scrutiny and to consider it with its philosophical relations to earlier and to later positions. Moreover, it is this historical discipline to which the name ‘history of philosophy’ most naturally applies, given the way we have come to use the expression ‘history of X’, whereas it requires, as we will see, some
special historical explanation to understand why the two other enterprises are covered by the term.
But before we can turn to a more precise determination and an explication of the historical discipline ‘history of philosophy’ and to some of the questions it raises, we need to distinguish more clearly the three rather different enterprises which are pursued under the heading ‘history of philosophy’. I will turn to this distinction in the remainder of this section. I will then discuss in some detail philosophical doxography in the third section and philosophical history of philosophy in the fourth section, before, in the fifth, I will turn to the details of historical history of philosophy. In this way, I hope, it will become clear that the distinction I want to make is not one which I arbitrarily impose on the practice of historians of philosophy, but is one suggested by the history of the historiography itself, though the historical differences may require some idealization to yield sufficiently clear and simple conceptualizations. At the same time we, in this way, will get, by contrast, a clear view of the distinctive nature of the enterprise of the historical historian.
The conceptual or ideal difference between the three enterprises is clear enough if we look at the history of the historiography of philosophy. Up to the end of the eighteenth century concern with the history of philosophy is almost exclusively doxographical. But the assumptions on which the doxography of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century rests come to be questioned at the end of the eighteenth century, and their rejection gives rise, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, to philosophical history of philosophy. This in turn rests on very strong philosophical assumptions concerning the history of philosophy. And so its principles come to be questioned in the first half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, all three enterprises continue to be pursued in one form or another. And for a variety of reasons, for instance because there is little reflection on them, there is little awareness of their difference and they tend in actual practice to shade into each other and to be confused, though in principle they are quite different.
Consider, first, the difference between doxography and historical history of philosophy. Part of the confusion which surrounds the use of the term ‘history of philosophy’ is due to a misleading, but generally unrecognized ambiguity in the term ‘history of philosophy’ itself. The term
seems to come into use towards the middle of the seventeenth century as the title of a certain kind of treatise. One of the earliest treatises of this kind is Georg Horn’s Historia philosophica (Leiden 1655), the best known presumably is Jacob Brucker’s multivolume Historia critica philosophiae (Leipzig 1742–1744).4 It is authors like Brucker whom Kant has in mind when he, for instance at the very beginning of the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, talks about historians of philosophy. But if we look at these treatises called ‘Histories’ we are surprised to find that they are, in spite of their name, not histories in our sense at all. They do not try to trace the history of philosophy from its beginnings to the present day, and they certainly are not histories in the special sense I am interested in, in which a history tries to describe and to explain how philosophy actually, in fact, evolved to come to have its present form. They rather are histories in the sense in which Pliny’s Natural History or Aristotle’s History of Animals are histories, namely collections of materials to be considered, to be studied, if one wants to arrive at a wellfounded, wellgrounded view on a subject matter, in this case the central questions of philosophy. Thus these histories of philosophy amount to collections of what the different philosophers have had to say on the different philosophical questions, so as to enable us, by considering these different views, to form a view for ourselves which takes into account these different views one may have on the subject, or to arrive at the conclusion that it is really impossible to opt for one view rather than another. The authors of these works are quite aware of a historical development in philosophy, but it is not an interest in this historical development which motivates or even provides the basic framework for their work. Their work rather is motivated by the assumption that the historical positions they report on continue to be of philosophical interest, as positions one should consider in making up one’s mind on a particular philosophical question, perhaps even as still viable options. In this regard these socalled ‘histories’ reflect an attitude towards philosophers of the past and their study which is already characteristic of the study of the history of philosophy in antiquity. Almost from the beginning, certainly from Aristotle onward, there have been philosophers who have studied the history of philosophy, not out of an interest in this history as history, but out of an interest in the
philosophical views and positions which emerged in the course of this history, to the extent that these continued to be of philosophical interest. One was looking for views or positions which were still worth philosophical consideration, perhaps even basically true, but in need of some qualification, perhaps also just true, but perhaps also just false, but false in an interesting, revealing way, a way which shows the limitations of a certain approach and which guides us in the right direction. One in this way dealt with individual philosophers as, for instance, Aristotle did with Democritus, but one could also systematically scan the whole of the history of philosophy for such views and positions as were thought to be still relevant to the contemporary discussion. And since one assumed that there is a basic set of philosophical questions, one organized one’s findings either by reporting the different answers of continued interest under the heading of a given philosophical question or by reporting under the heading of a certain philosopher or group or school of philosophers the views he or they took on the different philosophical questions. The latter approach gave rise, for instance, to Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and these Lives in turn served as the model for the socalled ‘histories of philosophy’ of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century I referred to above.
Now, philosophers from the nineteenth century onwards no longer shared the rather generous view philosophers or the socalled ‘historians of philosophy’ of the seventeenth and eighteenth century had taken of which views or positions continued to be philosophically worth considering. But, understandably enough, they basically continued to take the same position towards the philosophers of the past and the history of philosophy as a whole. They took an interest in philosophical views and positions of the past, not as historical objects, but insofar as they continued to be of philosophical interest. And they treated them accordingly. This, I assume, is the basic attitude of philosophers towards views of the past even nowadays. They treat them as if they were the views of some contemporary of theirs. They ask whether they are true or false, which philosophical reasons in fact are advanced in their favour, whether these reasons are adequate or not, and which reasons could be advanced in their favour or against them. In this respect philosophers nowadays are much more sophisticated than their predecessors in the
seventeenth and the eighteenth century. And they also are more sophisticated in their awareness of how difficult it may be to adequately identify a view of the past, especially of the more distant past. And so they are ready to grant that it may take some special expertise, a good deal of philological and historical learning, to study the history of philosophy properly. And hence they might be inclined to use the term ‘historian’ not for anybody who happens to consider the history of philosophy or some part of it, but to reserve it for those who have some special expertise in properly reconstructing the views and positions of the past. But the study, even the expert study, of the history of philosophy in this philosophical tradition basically remains what it always has been: a study of philosophical views and positions of the past to the extent that these continue to be philosophically worth considering, a study which crucially involves a proper philosophical consideration of these views. Since this is a tradition which has its origins in ancient doxography, and since, in spite of significant differences in other respects, it continues to have the same aim as ancient doxography, I call it ‘doxographical’. The term ‘doxographical’ here, obviously, is not meant to have any pejorative connotations. If the term sometimes is used pejoratively, because ancient doxographical works seem so inadequate, this, I want to argue, largely is due to a lack of understanding of the aims ancient doxography sets itself and of the assumptions under which it pursues these aims. Most of what philosophers nowadays write on the history of philosophy, on philosophers of the past, clearly falls under the category ‘doxography’.
Thus we see that the term ‘history of philosophy’, to some extent due to a simple ambiguity in the word ‘history’, covers two quite different and clearly distinct enterprises, a very old philosophical enterprise of looking towards the history of philosophy for views and positions of continued philosophical interest, and a much more recent historical enterprise which tries to reconstruct the actual, historical evolution of these views and positions.
This clear distinction gets confused, though, by a new form which the philosophical study of the history of philosophy often takes from the end of the eighteenth century onwards, namely the form of what I have called ‘philosophical history of philosophy’. Up to the end of the eighteenthcentury philosophers had studied the views of the past as philosophical