The History of Philosophy, and why to study it

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Biology is a thing. It is the study of life. The history of biology is a thing. It is the dramatic record of the development of ideas about life through the examination and review of the conversations about it in the past. The Philosophy of Biology exists. It is the interpretation of the mathematical descriptors developed by the scientists who do their nitty-gritty work answering well-defined questions amenable to empirical testing.

 

Biologists do biology. Historians do "history of biology" but they have to understand biology to some degree to do it. Philosophers do "philosophy of biology" but they are the only ones who really know what the biologists are saying and what they mean.

 

Philosophy is a thing. But the history of philosophy is also a thing. But the history of philosophy is the history of ideas, and so it cannot be done by anyone but a philosopher. No mere historian can recognize the developments of the thoughts without understanding the thoughts themselves, but that requires historians of philosophy to be philosophers.

 

Therefore, philosophy has a unique relationship to its own history. To do philosophy is to do the history of philosophy. To do the history of philosophy is to do philosophy. (there are professors, and many of them, who are called "philosophers" who I would call "chronologists of philosophy" or "taxonomists of philosophy" -- these are people who have memorized and can parrot back on a test the 12 points of Descartes's argument for the existence of God in the third meditation; but who have no understanding of these ideas and are not really incarnations of living thinking engagement with the thoughts, but stop at mere recitation---but the true philosopher or historian of philosophy is what we are concerned with here.) Further clarification of this point.

 

Philosophy is obsessed with its own history.

 

To study the history of what has become thinkable is to also study anthropology. So, we have to pull in all the rules of historiography, of interpreting texts, all the empirical side of story-telling which makes up the rules of the true historian, we have to adopt.

 

What is philosophy in general? Should we count what they did 3000 years ago as philosophy at all? But, what is philosophy? Well, philosophers disagree about this, notoriously (they disagree about everything, that is what they are, what they do!). Biologists share a methodology with every other biologist. Philosophers don’t even agree with a single method, we of course don’t agree on the answers, but we don’t agree with which questions are important as well, nor do we agree on how to approach these questions or deal with them.​

• There’s a DEEP question about whether or not we are actually going to be able to know what the writers of ancient texts thought.

  • I’m assuming that “what Plato thought” is recoverable… but with the pre-Socratics, this is iffy, we only have doxographical writings not their own writings.

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I’m assuming that there is such a thing as the historical truth.

• There are people who argue that there is no such thing as “Plato” just “Plato through this lens, or Plato through that lens” and so there is no such thing as the truth about what Plato actually said.

• But this seems to suggest that Plato is REALLY significant because he has transcended not only death, but individuality.

  • We are going to assume that there is something that we can come to understand as what Plato said. The historian’s job is to come to discover the facts of what Plato said. But THIS is a philosophical endeavor.

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The historian of other ideas, like the history of Freud’s ideas, does not care if what Freud said was true. BUT the historian of what Socrates said CARES if what Plato said had any truth in it, because, if not FORGET HIM! also: if the idea isn't really different then it isn't really a development of the HISTORY of the ideas. So, part of the study of philosophy is the study of the history of philosophy.

• One cannot do philosophy without doing the history of philosophy

• One cannot study the history of philosophy without studying philosophy

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We do this through a STORY

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Tell a coherent narrative which takes into account each person’s influence… tell a story, then we can believe there is a history there that is realistic (based in realism) and justifiable. The proof is in the pudding.

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That's like science. Ideas are tested. History is literature with empirical restrictions. (will expound on this elsewhere).

• What they said is a matter of historical fact.

• What they WOULD have said is based on what they did say and the principle of charity which says assume that they wouldn’t have contradicted themselves in any way

 

“That no agent can eventually be said to have meant or done something which he could never be brought to accept as a correct description of what he had meant or done.” Skinner “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas”.

 

Counterfactual reasoning, is what we use when we are judging the ideas of dead philosophers.

 

My concepts are often ones that Plato wouldn’t have had, but I want to use those concepts to try to make sense of their texts. There is a really important distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori. Plato didn’t have that distinction, but I’m going to use it to examine Plato.

 

I can’t engage in the process of trying to understand what Plato thought through my lens without judging him through my lens AND ALSO judging my lens through HIM! This is why it is necessary to do PHILOSOPHY to do the history of philosophy.

Before we can study the history of philosophy, we have to study pre-philosophical thought in the west

This is Part 2.