From the issue dated July 11, 2003
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Rescuing the History of Philosophy From Its Analytic AbductorsBy CARLIN ROMANODo philosophers respect the history of their field? In the heyday of 20th-century analytic philosophy -- rigidly designated by its true believers as the ahistorical probe of piecemeal issues in logic and language -- you didn't have to look far for the answer. Or, to put it another way, it was everywhere you looked. The canon of early modern philosophy, for one thing, consisted of a handful of white, male figures organized like Motown singing groups (Locke, Berkeley, and Hume formed the Empiricists; Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz toured as the Rationalists). That structure flourished even though the great historian of philosophy Paul Oskar Kristeller decried the leaps of faith in the standard philosophy survey course, such as the giant step taken from Aquinas to Descartes. At Harvard, regarded by the analytic establishment as a premier department despite its weaknesses in history, W.V.O. Quine, analytic epistemology's towering figure, declared philosophy and history of philosophy to be separate fields. A Harvard professor teaching early modern philosophy could abashedly ask his charges, as one did, "Descartes -- was he before Newton or after Newton?" At Princeton, similar to Harvard in its ahistorical orientation, a philosophy professor famously posted a sign on his door, "Just Say No to the History of Philosophy!" Folks there frequently referred to major figures from the past as "Locke starred" or "Hume starred" to signal that the version of the philosopher cited wasn't historically accurate. "Locke starred" could be stipulated (for argumentative convenience) to hold a particular theory about color or consent, even though the real Locke didn't. It was a kind of "Do asterisk, don't tell" policy. Over the past 20 years, however, a new generation of philosophers -- including a surprising number trained at those two institutions -- have tried, in the words of Princeton's own current expert in early modern philosophy, Daniel Garber, "to find a more historical way of doing the history of philosophy." Now the question is whether the news will ever trickle down to deans and undergraduate courses, still locked into models imposed by the analytic epistemologists. One could witness both the pleasures and frustrations of "new historians of philosophy" when an exaltation of the species gathered for a conference at Princeton's Harold Helm Auditorium this spring. Enthusiasm percolated through the room for organizer Jerry Schneewind, of the Johns Hopkins University, author of The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and a strong advocate of replacing epistemology at the heart of the philosophy curriculum with a historically shaped concept of morality. For Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, who believes that philosophy "took a wrong turn in 1782," the recognition by peers that her recent book, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton University Press, 2002), sketches a replacement narrative stressing "evil" instead of "skepticism" appeared uplifting. Two beliefs certainly united the conference participants: "Old" history of philosophy is seriously flawed, and "new" histories, not a new history, must replace it. Consensus also appeared solid on the history of the history of philosophy, especially its stylistic evolution. As Donald R. Kelley, of Rutgers, recounted in a paper, "the history of philosophy began in antiquity, especially in the doxographical work of Diogenes Laertius," and took hold in German universities in the 17th century. Over time, the encyclopedic, laundry-list approach to the history of philosophy, detailing thinkers and their beliefs, stirred criticism from those inclined to a developmental story of ideas and arguments largely shorn of local historical context. So began a tradition of logically oriented philosophers bashing old-style history of philosophy. Kantian J.C.A. Grohmann asserted that "the history of philosophy is the end of all philosophizing." That attitude, several participants concurred, grew into a staple belief for many hard-core 20th-century analytic philosophers. But local historical context matters, many of these scholars insist, because powerful contingencies influence philosophical history. Neiman, for instance, argues that the traditional reception of Kant as primarily concerned with epistemology, and the "theory of knowledge" paradigm of academic philosophy ever since, partly turns on an epistemologically weighted assessment of his Critique of Pure Reason, the Garve-Feder review, and Kant's response to it. The work of "new historians of philosophy" abounds in examples of putative bad history from standard accounts of philosophy. Ian Hunter, of the University of Queensland, in Australia, criticizes the interpretation of Samuel Pufendorf as a second-rate water carrier for Kant rather than as the founder of a quite un-Kantian secular civil ethics. Neiman rejects, in regard to Descartes, the "attempt to sanitize his work by reading out the theology." Penn State's Nancy Tuana, who edits her university press's series of "Feminist Interpretations" of great philosophers, observes that the marginalization of female philosophers such as Princess Elisabeth, Descartes's correspondent, leads later commentators to denigrate the importance of emotions in his thought. Tuana points out that female philosophers disappeared from standard histories between the 17th and 19th centuries, a process documented by Eileen O'Neill, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. How would the history of philosophy look, Tuana asks, if we took seriously what women produced in salons and convents, as John J. Conley does in his recent book, The Suspicion of Virtue (Cornell University Press, 2002)? Princeton's Garber best summarizes his generation's disgruntlement over what came before. He cites "tendencies" to "substitute rational reconstructions of a philosopher's views for the views themselves"; to "focus on an extremely narrow group of figures" and only those few works that fit current privileged notions of philosophy; and to "work exclusively from translations and to ignore secondary work that was not originally written in English." Disdain for history of philosophy took still further forms in the era that Garber describes. Some analysts used the great white males of the past for target practice, presenting them as fairly bright fellows committing provocative errors that modern-day technicians efficiently corrected. Argumentative form, for the analysts, always counted more than context, even though context often affects the persuasiveness of an argument. Schneewind drives home the curricular force today of a misplaced emphasis on epistemology within philosophy departments. Almost all "require a course in the history of modern philosophy for the major," he reports, but that almost exclusively means "a course on the history of metaphysics and epistemology." An examination of 200 college catalogs found that "only about eight schools allowed a course on the history of moral philosophy to count." But why not, Schneewind asks, a standard course in moral philosophy from Montaigne to Kant? Boston University's Knud Haakonssen, editor of the forthcoming The Cambridge History of 18th-Century Philosophy, contends that the belief "that the theory of knowledge is at the core of all sound philosophy" is itself just a paradigm resulting from a few "episodes at the close of the 18th century." As Garber jibes, "It's a historical construction of the 19th century that Descartes was the father of modern philosophy." In fact, Haakonssen maintains, "the epistemological paradigm for early modern philosophy" clashes with "that period's own philosophical self-understanding." Its protagonists, he says, did not automatically think it "more or less incomprehensible," in the manner of modern analysts, that metaphysics and epistemology might derive from political and moral philosophy. Nonetheless, epistemology-obsessed professors have managed, over time, to marginalize or ban subjects such as ethics, aesthetics, and politics within philosophy departments. Looked at more rudely than collegial "new historians" might feel comfortable doing, their findings suggest that, for several generations, an internationally cohesive crew of self-anointed "analytic" philosophers ("ana-lazy" seems the more accurate term) has hoodwinked deans and presidents into believing that its narrow-minded, monolingual, ahistorical research constitutes the most prestigious, high-quality work in philosophy. In a stinging irony, the "new historians" have turned the analysts' most self-promoted assets -- precision and clarity -- against them. The "new histories" movement challenges those deans and presidents, who have permitted the oligarchy of analytic epistemologists to hijack philosophy departments at top universities, to get "un-lazy." Among their peers, Neiman, Schneewind, and Haakonssen seem most to sense the large implications of "new histories of philosophy," beyond the proper connecting of canonical dots, for the very shape of undergraduate courses. Neiman has declared that the old history "gets too much too wrong to be salvageable," that "the core of the field is radically misdescribed." Haakonssen goes even further: "We seem to have questioned the historical coherence of the concept of philosophy itself, as far as the standard history is concerned." Regime change, anyone? Carlin Romano, critic at large of The Chronicle of Higher Education and literary critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, is currently a Fulbright professor of philosophy at St. Petersburg State University, in Russia. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 44, Page B14
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education