1
The$Necessity$of$History$for$Philosophy$–$Even$Analytic$Philosophy.$$
Paul Redding
To appear in a special issue of The Journal of the Philosophy of History, 2013.
Philosophers who identify with the “continental” mode of doing philosophy often
remark on the ahistorical attitudes of analytic philosophers. However, if the
contributors to a collection of essays on analytic philosophy and the history of
philosophy are at all representative,
1
it would seem that historians of philosophy
trained in the analytic tradition and working within predominantly analytic
departments also think of analytic philosophers as at best indifferent to and at worst
antipathetic to the historiography of philosophy. To give but two examples, Tom
Sorell describes analytic philosophy as “not only unhistorical but anti-historical, and
hostile to textual commentary”,
2
while John Cottingham talks of the “disdain felt by
contemporary analytic philosophers for the history of their subject”.
3
Of course, history-based courses are often encouraged as a normal part of
philosophical education, but I suggest that for many their pedagogic value is thought
to reside in features that are not, from a contemporary point of view, of particular
philosophical interest. For example, they might be thought as appropriate for
beginners in philosophy, because of their neat and perhaps exotic exemplifications of
various common philosophical approaches, attitudes and forms of argument. Or they
might be considered as pedagogically valuable because written with a literary flair not
common in the average journal article—think of Rousseau for example. But these are
issues in the pedagogy of philosophy rather than philosophy itself, and even where the
history of philosophy is engaged with in this way, it is, I suggest, often done so within
what could be described as an ahistorical spirit. Thus classic works from the past are
commonly taken as responses to problems—say, the problem of skepticism or the
mind-body problem—that are themselves assumed to be timeless and ahistorical. If
the “historians”, that is, those philosophers who chose to do philosophy from a
predominantly historical perspective, protest along this line, this only goes to show
that they actually do belong to the genus “historicus”. Toleration of their presence in a
philosophy department might be the most they can expect.
If the attitudes of analytic philosophers to the work of their historically
1
Tom Sorell and G. A. J. Rogers (eds), Analytic Philosophy and the History of
Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
2
Tom Sorell, “Introduction” to Sorell and Rogers (eds), Analytic Philosophy and the
History of Philosophy, p. 1. “The tradition [in which philosophy takes the form of history of
philosophy, as in France and Germany] is alien to most philosophers in the English speaking
world. Philosophy written in English is overwhelming analytic philosophy and the techniques
and predilections of analytic philosophy are not only unhistorical but anti-historical, and
hostile to textual commentary.” Ibid., p. 1.
3
John Cottingham, “Why Should Analytic Philosophers Do History of Philosophy”, in
Sorell and Rogers (eds), Analytic Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, p. 26. Catherine
Wilson of the widespread assumption that “intellectual historians are intellectually inferior to
non-historians” (p. 67).
2
oriented colleagues are as negative as the experiences recounted above seem to
indicate, we might ask, “Why?”. I approach this question in the first instance not in
the sense of asking for historical reasons—treating this as an historical question
would be to already adopt the attitude being resisted by the analyst. Rather, the
question is posed as a way of trying to get of sense of the sorts of reasons that might
be offered by analytic philosophers to justify this purported hostility and suspicion.
What is it about the way of practicing philosophy in the analytic mode that appears to
make historical questions be experienced as external intrusions, when this doesn’t
seem to be the case in contemporary continental philosophy? It is in this spirit that in
the following section I suggest some factors that might go into a prima facie case
against the place of history in philosophy, and after that turn to the more general issue
of how such an attitude might be regarded within the project of analytic philosophical
considered more generally. I will suggest that the anti-historical attitude is most likely
grounded in an approach to philosophy that I call “autonomous normativism”, and
that is itself at odds with an equally deeply entrenched naturalist orientation within
analytic philosophy. From the perspective of naturalist inclinations, the approach of
autonomous normativism may look to be grounded in an underlying super-naturalist
account of human cognition. This seems to mean that attempts to construe the
normativity of thought in ways that accommodate some form of naturalism should
work to undermine the sorts of intuitions underlying analytic philosophy’s anti-
historical attitudes as well. However, I go on to suggest a stronger case for history
than this. Using the example of Wilfrid Sellars’s attempted reconciliation of
normative and naturalist dimensions approaches to the mind, I suggest that such an
approach, if successful, would actually open up a necessary place for historical
considerations in the mind’s reflection on its own capacities. If one takes this
reflection as the core of philosophy, it thereby suggests the necessity of an historical
dimension for philosophy itself.
!
1.!A!prima!facie!case!against!an!historical!approach!to!philosophy!
A case against a substantively philosophical role for history might be thought to
include arguments dismissing claims for its relevance on the one hand, and arguments
focusing on the dangers of an unnecessary historical turn on the other. Regarding the
former, Daniel Garber seems to put his finger on a type of justification that many
analysts might feel for an anti-historical attitude when the notes that “analytic
philosophy doesn’t mix well with this history of philosophy” because “what seems to
count in analytic philosophy is the argument, not its pedigree”.
4
Here the reply by his
anti-historical opponent will most probably be: “Exactly! Isn’t that simply the
appropriate attitude of philosophy? Isn’t that what we value about it?” From this
attitude, philosophers are interested in simply whether views are right or wrong, and
the way to settle competing philosophical claims is to examine them in relation to
supporting and opposing arguments.
5
But to adopt an historical approach to a view, to
4
Daniel Garber, “What’s Philosophical about the History of Philosophy”, in Sorell and
Rogers (eds), Analytic Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, p. 130.
5
Simon Glendenning discusses the limitations of the “argumento-centric” character of
analytic philosophy, especially in relation to ethics in “Argument All The Way Down: The
Demanding Discipline of Non-Argumento-centric Modes of Philosophy” in Jack Reynolds,
James Chase, James Williams and Edwin Mares (eds), Postanalytic and Metacontinental:
3
be interested in where it comes from, is to adopt an approach that will be taken to be
largely indifferent to the question of its truth or falsity.
Proponents of a sharp “argument rather than pedigree” position might treat the
history of philosophy as fine in its place, that is, within the discipline of cultural
history. The worry here would be that only confusion can come from mixing these
different genres, an issue that will be important for those concerned to keep lines of
philosophical argument clean and uncluttered. It is my guess that many analytically
trained philosophers would find it difficult to locate the actual theses being argued for
within a work such as Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method,
6
a work from the
continental tradition that both exemplifies and argues for an historical approach to
philosophy. Thus it might be thought, for example, the Gadamer’s unnecessary course
through the history of the discipline in this work simply blurs the (presumably)
epistemological point being made. In short, analytic philosophers work hard to keep
their argument clear, and if thought unnecessary, the layer of history in a
philosophical work will just be regarded as an obstacle to the achievement of clarity.
A variant of this objection may have it that the insistence on history within
philosophy effectively privileges past philosophical views over present ones by
demanding that historical figures have a place in the curriculum, and that this attests
to an attitude of slavish antiquarianism or even a type of “ancestor worship”.
Cottingham finds such an attitude in Gilbert Harman’s reported warning against
treating historical texts as “sacred documents that contain important wisdom”.
7
Such an attitude already presupposes what I referred to as the “ahistorical
spirit” above: the idea that philosophers throughout history can be seen as offering
competing answers and solutions to the same questions and problems. If we consider
that the historiography of philosophy is unlikely to stray outside of the fairly narrow
range of philosophers in the western tradition, it is easy to come to the conclusion that
surely philosophers alive now constitute the vastly greater part of what could be
considered the European philosophical community stretching from, say, the Greek
pre-Socratics to the present.
8
In comparison to the entire philosophical community
existing through history, surely the pool of philosophers from which “historical”
figures are drawn will be tiny. Contemporary philosophers have to earn a place in the
debate; why should a group of thinkers be afforded a privileged presence simply
because the quite accidental status of having come earlier?
It is significant here that the critique of slavish antiquarianism is hardly unique
to philosophers from the time of the “analytic turn”—a fact made clear by the
repeated appearance of Descartes as representing an anti-historical attitude throughout
the volume in question. It is surely the attitude of a broader cultural stance that came
to be known as “the Enlightenment” and that was presaged by classic early modern
Crossing Philosophical Divides (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 71–84.
6
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated (London: Bloomsbury Academic
Press, 2004).
7
Quoted by Sorell, in ibid., p. 43.
8
There are, it would seem, over current 10,000 living members of the American
Philosophical Association alone. See “History of the APA”, on the website of the American
Philosophical Association, < http://www.apaonline.org/?page=history>.
4
philosophers. It is an attitude neatly expressed by the sixteenth-century philosopher
that Cottingham quotes, Francisco Sanches: “To say ‘thus spake the Master’ is
unworthy of a philosopher”.
9
Could it be that even the development of the history of
philosophy within analytic philosophy, with its predominantly early modern focus,
has paradoxically served to reinforce the anti-historical prejudice? In this respect,
comments by John Searle in the 1990s on the softening of the negative “history of
mistakes” attitude to the history of philosophy within the analytic community are
suggestive. Searle reports on the development of “a feeling of the historical continuity
of analytic philosophy with traditional philosophy in a way that contrasts sharply with
the original view of analytic philosophers, who thought that they marked a radical, or
indeed revolutionary break wit the philosophical tradition”.
10
In this way, the anti-
historical forces might, oddly enough, be thought of as turning the tables on the
“historians”, claiming to be the upholders of tradition. The early analytic philosophers
had certainly represented themselves as breaking with Hegel-influenced approach of
the preceding generation, a generation that could then be portrayed as having taken of
a wrong turn. Reconnecting with an earlier tradition, the anti-historical attitude of the
analysts thus becomes portrayed as the default attitude of philosophy itself, with the
much-maligned Hegelian direction taken by Anglophone philosophy in the latter
second half of the nineteenth century being held up as a warning.
11
If the anti-historical mode has been the default mode of the practice of analytic
philosophy, then it is not surprising that one does not often encounter specific
defenses of this attitude: defenses typically occur in the face of contestation and
uncontested attitudes tend to “go without saying”. So short of surveying the opinions
of philosophers I don’t know how representative this “prima facie case” might be, but
I suspect that considerations something like these lie beneath the surface of the
indifference-to-hostility that historians of philosophy apparently encounter from their
non-historical colleagues. On the face of it these look like genuine worries, so, we
might ask: what’s wrong with the generally anti-historical attitude? Why should
history of philosophy per se have any claim within the discipline of philosophy or
within the curriculum?
To make a start here, in the following section I attempt to set up the
framework within which a case for the necessity of an historical dimensions for
philosophy might be made, and made from within the general parameters of analytic
philosophy itself. I do this by locating the anti-historical attitude in relation to what I
see as a deep divide running through the history of analytic philosophy itself—a
divide between two opposed methodological attitudes that I label “autonomous
normativism” and “exclusive naturalism”. Autonomous normativism is an attitude
founded on the belief that the problems of analytic philosophy are, as Jonathan Cohen
9
Quoted by Cottingham, “Why Should Analytic Philosophers Do History of
Philosophy”, p. 25
10
John R. Searle, “Contemporary Philosophy in the United States”, in Nicholas Bunnin
and Eric Tsui-James (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, second edition (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), p. 20.
11
I have suggested elsewhere that the break initiated by Russell and Moore with the
generation of their teachers quickly came to function as a type of “creation myth” within
analytic philosophy, distorting the actual historical story profoundly. See, “Introduction” to
my Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
5
has put it, “all normative problems connected in various ways with rationality of
judgment, rationality of attitude, rationality of procedure, or rationality of action”.
12
We might think of this attitude as continuous with that expressed by Frege’s anti-
psychologistic stance in logic: “laws of thought” should not be confused with
empirical regularities within psychological processes. In contrast, the attitude of
naturalism appeals to the intuition that when we talk of judgment, attitude, procedure
and action in his way, we are thereby talking about our activities—that is, the
behaviors of the members of a natural species. “Exclusive” or “scientific” naturalists,
impressed by the achievements of the natural sciences in our understanding of the
natural world, thus wish to limit the investigation of these behaviors to the methods of
the natural sciences, leaving no room for “normative facts”.
13
The strongly naturalistic
orientation of Carnap or Quine may here be taken to exemplify this side of the divide.
In its favoring of “argument” rather than “pedigree”, I am suggesting, the anti-
historical attitude expresses the orientation of autonomous normativism. This is the
stance that, in a different context, was labeled by Mark Sacks as the “egological”
conception of the subject, which “regards the subject as one whose core normative
structures are autonomous, independent of contextual features”.
14
To accept such a
conception, Sacks had written, “is to render the subject independent of environmental
features, such that the individual can be stripped of all contextual coloration to reveal
what it essentially is”.
15
“Autonomous normativism” is more commonly directed
against naturalistic anti-normativist stances, reflecting the fact that the challenge to
the normative stance has much more commonly come from proposed naturalistic
models of explanation in analytic philosophy than from historical ones, but were
historically expressed challenges to autonomous normativism to be more common,
one might expect “naturalism” to be linked to a parallel “historicism” in the way that
Edmund Husserl had done in the early twentieth century in his normativist defense of
phenomenology as a “rigorous science”.
16
Of course, “exclusive naturalists” will most likely be critical of the role of
history in philosophy for another reason—the reason being that history is not natural
science. But I am not really concerned to defend the historical turn against such
naturalists, just as I’m not concerned to defend it against autonomous normativists. I
will be content to rely on normativist objections to exclusive naturalists and naturalist
objections to autonomous normativists here, on the supposition that the contrary
12
Jonathan L. Cohen, The Dialogue of Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 49.
13
De Caro and Macarthur put the issues here succinctly: “Plausibly, the sciences
describe how things are, particularly the causal powers of causal regularities that exist in the
world, lawlike or otherwise. Consequently, if one follows modern Scientific Naturalism in
supposing that natural science, and only natural science, tells us what there is in the world,
then there seems to be no room for the existence of normative facts—or at least this will be so
insofar as they cannot be reduced to the kind of objective, casual facts with which natural
science deals.” Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p. 1.
14
Mark Sacks, “Subject, normative structure, and externalism” in Anat Biletzki and
Anat Matar (eds), The Story of Analytic Philosophy: Plots and Heroes (New York:
Routledge, 1998), p. 88.
15
Ibid., p. 89.
16
Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology and the
Crisis of Philosophy, (New York: Harper 1965).