Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy (Ideas in Context, Series Number 1)

Ideas in Context

by Richard Rorty (Editor), J.B. Schneewind (Editor), Quentin Skinner (Editor)

The sixteen essays in this volume confront the current debate about the relationship between philosophy and its history. On the one hand intellectual historians commonly accuse philosophers of writing bad - anachronistic - history of philosophy, and on the other, philosophers have accused intellectual historians of writing bad - antiquarian - history of philosophy. The essays here address this controversy and ask what purpose the history of philosophy should serve. Part I contains more purely theoretical and methodological discussion, of such questions as whether there are 'timeless' philosophical problems, whether the issues of one epoch are commensurable with those of another, and what style is appropriate to the historiography of the subject. The essays in Part II consider a number of case-histories. They present important revisionist scholarship and original contributions on topics drawn from ancient, early modern and more recent philosophy. All the essays have been specially commissioned, and the contributors include many of the leading figures in the field. The volume as a whole will be of vital interest to everyone concerned with the study of philosophy and of its history.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Politics, Economics

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Reviews

[Theo · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book did so much for me. many of the high points in this book feel like obvious observations in retrospect, but of course, that's why it's so good. i think this book should be required reading for all philosophy students before doing a history-of-philosophy class. a brief review of the best essays in this book:

taylor: a great start to the collection. it helped make clear to me why history is something important for philosphy to study, while sweeping clear our overly-idealistic aims for a "philosophy of the present" free of historical baggage.

macintyre: rest in peace. this essay is about kuhn and paradigm shifts but in the context of history. it was odd reading philosophy of science here, but his point is well-taken. good essay

rorty: BEST ESSAY IN THE COLLECTION. it describes four methods of history-of-philosophy, and i think if you read nothing else, read this one. it's informative, and totally emblematic of rorty's approach. the bit about intellectual history digging up all the thought and subsequently we decide what philosophy felt very freeing.

kulick: this essay put into context the philosophical big thinkers and why they feel so ubiquitous. it offers a story of how they rose to prominence throughout academies in the west. it made the otherwise arbitrary feeling of seeing these thinkers a little more historically contingent.

lepenies: the progression of the history of philosophy can be described in many ways, sometimes with a logic, othertimes not. and big thinkers have stances on them! the way lepenies presents hegelian rehearsals, dilthey's archives, husserlian beginnings, as philosophies of the history of philosophy, made me feel like reflecting on the historical canons I aim to put together.

skinner: SECOND BEST ESSAY IN THE COLLECTION. skinner has this amazing style that makes me feel like I've understood so much more than I really have, which is the sign of an amazing writer. he almost made me feel like I should go back and read machiavelli again, and i hate machiavelli. i will never tire of your radical highlighting of republican freedom in history. skinner you will live forever in my heart.

frede: this put so much of skepticism into place for me. it starts with a very funny story of a philosophers's contradictory stances and actions. it shows a much more nuanced approach to skepticism than I think I've ever been presented in my life. it made me feel like there's so much left to think about in skepticism as a philosophical topic. in addition, it made me re-think what a "live issue" is in philosophy- and whether many issues i've dismissed as irrelevant were issues I failed to understand properly in their historical context.

sluga: this essay was about the young mathematical frege, the pre-philosophical frege. it's mostly biographical, but i think learning about philosophical development can help place why we prefer to think about certain things over others, and as well, the primacy of certain things (like logic) in our thought. i think of so many individual issues as social issues, so maybe it's because of my upbrining. i wonder if there was an essay about me what central events or people they would highlight as core to my thought.

hylton: i hate russell so much and i'm glad to see hylton perform some layups on early 1900s russellian theory of judgment and propositions. but it made me see why it was so important for russell contra idealism to theorize about propositions. more than anything this essay made me realize that, if i was alive then, i would have been an idealist because what the hell was russell doing.

[Naranovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Отсюда прочел только эссе Ричарда Рорти «Историография философии: четыре жанра» в русском комментированном издании 2017 года. Великолепная статья!

[Mahdi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for every philosophy students. This book made the reading of the history of philosophy a self-aware process for me. It is essential especially for non-western readers since they are dealing with non-western/ not-philosophical intellectual traditions and canon formations.