A response to replies (to 'In Defence of Four Socratic Doctrines') by James Warren and John Shand.

Philosophy Today, 2013

2024

Even if we deny any kind of exceptionalism to philosophy as an intellectual enterprise (see Williamson, 2007), it seems easy to concede that, at least concerning relations with its own history, philosophy is different from other fields of knowledge (see Williamson, 2018). However, questions regarding the scope, role and validity of the history of philosophy for philosophical activity are as old as philosophy itself, as well as becoming relevant in the socalled "parting of ways" between analytic and hermeneutic phenomenological trends. However, it is possible to say that, at least since the second half of the last century, we have seen an important inflection about the place and importance of the history of philosophy in contemporary philosophy: both because of the "historical turn" in analytical philosophy, with works by Strawson, Sellars and, more recently, Brandom, serving as good examples of such a movement, and due to the recently renewed interest in questions of metaphilosophy. An example of this second movement is the debate between the so-called appropriationists and contextualists. Hence, this paper sets out to analyze the two main arguments against rational reconstructions-the GTRC and the causation of anachronism-and offer a defense of an inferentialist approach to the history of philosophy, based on Robert Brandom's work, which is simultaneously open to certain contextualism, as well as establishing parameters for rational reconstructions.

Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2019

This paper examines the current state of early modern scholarship. After tracing the contours of the contextualist revolution that gained momentum in the 1980s, I argue that rational reconstructionism is a thing of the past and that early modernists are now devoted to employ all available skills, both philosophical and scholarly, to maximize our understanding of an increasingly broad range of texts and topics. I propose that our current differences concern the kinds of projects we select and the skills we use to maximize our understanding.

Revista Española de Filosofía Medieval, 2019

Can the historical perspective on philosophy contribute to current philosophy? What is its contribution? Is it dependent on a specific method? To what extent do we learn what philosophy is from the history of philosophy? How do our assumptions about the relationship between the historical and the systematic perspective affect our conception of philosophy itself (and vice versa)? These questions, quoted almost verbatim from Marcel van Ackeren's introductory chapter (p. 2), constitute the horizon of problems that leading scholars seek to resolve in fourteen essays. The publication aims to make headway on a via media between two extremes of doing philosophy: between philosophy construed primarily as analysis of 'historical texts without reference to current debates and their terminology' on the one hand, and philosophy seen merely as solving 'current first-order philosophical questions without references to their predecessors' on the other hand (p. 1). In his introduction, van Ackeren reviews these tensions, chiefly within analytic philosophy, and he outlines how the subsequent essays contribute to solving the five questions above. His overview is so succinct and commendable that there is hardly any value in summarising the essays in yet another way. Nor do I dare to offer an alternative overarching theme to classify and assess the contributions, as this would amount to weighing in on the debate myself.

The main aim of this thesis is to offer a solution to questions concerning the historical nature of the inquiry into the past of philosophy. In order to provide answers, two consecutive steps are proposed: First part of the thesis is focused on contemporary philosophical discussions concerning the nature of history as a discipline and covers the issues raised by narrativists and epistemological philosophers of history in the last sixty years. It also deals with the concepts of historical realism and anti-realism. Eventually, a moderate version of historical anti-realism combined with constructivism is offered as an inclusive and fruitful account of what history is about. In the second part of the thesis, the concept of historical inquiry from the previous chapters is applied to the general issues which are often discussed in relation to the methodology of history of philosophy: historicity of philosophy, context, contextual reading, canon formation, anachronisms, etc. It is shown that the account of history, usually presupposed in philosophical discussions about the history of philosophy, is often based on the naive form of historical realism, although its disadvantages can be easily avoided. History of philosophy thus have both: philosophical and historical aspects. Historical approach to history of philosophy does not lead to a mere chronicle of past opinions, but it can provide a valuable historical and philosophical image of the world.

In the last seventy years, the philosophical community, i.e the people professionally engaged in philosophy, has faced an immense growth, due to huge public investments in universities and research after the Second World War in Western countries [Rescher 2005, Marconi 2014]. We can say that in no other period of the history of philosophy there were so many professional philosophers as in the last fifty years, as there were not so many scientists [Price 1963]. This quantitative increase questions the historian of contemporary philosophy in multiple ways. In the present paper I would like to address the methodological issues in historiography of philosophy related to this increase. Therefore I will ask which are the concepts and methods that we should use in order to understand properly the new situation of contemporary philosophical research. In particular, I will argue that traditional concepts and assumption used in writing the history of philosophy are today just partially fit to describe the contemporary evolution of philosophy. The historical object they aim to describe is transforming in such a way that they are more an obstacle than a help to its comprehension. In order to reach this conclusion, my contribution is structured in the following way. In the first part I will provide some quantitative data about the growth of philosophical enterprise in the second half of twentieth century; secondly, I will sketch an analysis of the key notions used in the traditional everyday work of the historian of philosophy. I will focus on the very workaday " toolkit " , which comprehend notions such as " author " , " text " , " tradition " , " philosophical school " and so on. In the third part, I will present some tensions to which these very commonplace notions are subject due to the quantitative growth of philosophy. In particular, I will attempt to show how the traditional notion of " author " as the central unit of history of philosophy is partially inadequate to describe contemporary philosophy. Hence, I will suggest that quantitative methods used in contemporary studies of science, such as scientometrics and science-mapping, can in part supply this inadequacy, opening at the same time new perspectives on the development of contemporary philosophy. Finally, in the light of the previous considerations, I will reflect upon the role of this non-standard history of philosophy in contemporary philosophical research, situating my view in the debate started with the collection of essays about historiography of philosophy edited by Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner in 1984 [Rorty-Schneewind-Skinner 1984].