The Iniquity of Oblivion Ralph Wedgwood Throughout his whole career, Bernard Williams was intensely concerned with the history of philosophy. Not only did he write seminal works on several philosophers of past – most notably, on Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes – but he also reflected deeply on the methodology of his approach to these past philosophers. In particular, starting in his 1978 book on Descartes, he firmly distinguished the kind of inquiry into these past philosophers that he was most interested in, which he labelled the history of philosophy, from another closely related inquiry, which he called the history of ideas. What is the point of the history of philosophy, of the kind that Williams was most interested in? It is only in the last ten years of his life that Williams explicitly addressed this question. We find one answer expressed in 1994 and also in his posthumously published essay on Collingwood. However, he seems to suggest a second, rather different answer in several works that he completed in the last three years of his life (2000–2003). This raises the question of which of these two answers provides a deeper insight into this field of study. In the first section of this chapter, I shall explain and defend Williams’s distinction between the history of philosophy and the history of ideas. In the second section, I shall explain the two answers that Williams seems to have given to the question about the point of studying the history of philosophy; and in the third section, I shall argue that these two answers in fact lead to two very different approaches to the subject. Finally, in the fourth and fifth sections, I shall attempt to evaluate these two answers. In the fourth section, I shall argue that the first answer is importantly true, and the approach to the history of philosophy to which it leads is an indispensable part of the discipline of philosophy. But in the fifth and final section, I shall seek to raise sceptical doubts about the second answer, and about how important or illuminating the approach to the history of philosophy to which it leads is likely to be. 1. History of philosophy vs. history of ideas Williams first introduced his distinction between the history of philosophy and the history of ideas in the Preface to his book Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978: 9). The crucial distinction that he marks with these labels is this: [T]he history of ideas is history before it is philosophy, while with the history of philosophy it is the other way round. In any worthwhile work of either sort, both concerns are likely to be represented, but there is a genuine distinction. Writing in Cambridge in the 1970’s, Williams is likely to have thought of his colleague Quentin Skinner – who was working on his notable book The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978) around the same time – as a paradigmatic exponent of the history of ideas. Today, this kind of study is often referred to as intellectual history. Williams (1978: 9) gives the following brief characterization of the history of ideas: 1 2 For the history of ideas, the question about a work what does it mean? is centrally the question what did it mean?, and the pursuit of that question moves horizontally in time from the work, as well as backwards, to establish the expectations, conventions, familiarities, in term of which the author could have succeeded in conveying a meaning. This enterprise itself cannot be uncorrupted by hindsight. … Yet what we are moved to, as historians of ideas, is an historical enquiry, and the genre of the resulting work is unequivocally history. He repeats this characterization more briefly in his article “Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy” (1994: 257): The history of ideas, as I intended the distinction, naturally looks sideways to the context of a philosopher’s ideas, in order to realize what their author might be doing in making those assertions in that situation. We may assume, I think, that in this characterization Williams is presupposing a mainstream conception of history, according to which the historian’s goal is to use the historical evidence that has survived from the past to construct an accurate and intelligible account of what happened in the past. Very often, such a historical account involves a narrative of past events. At all events, the goal is to construct a historical account that both gives an accurate description of events that in fact happened in the past, and helps to makes it intelligible why these events happened as they did. Among the events that happened in the past are the thoughts that philosophers had, and these philosophers’ acts of writing and engaging in discussions, along with the meanings that they conveyed in performing those acts. A historian of ideas who studies a group of philosophers would aim to give an accurate and intelligible account – often in the form of a narrative – of these events in the intellectual lives of these philosophers. The primary evidence that the historian of ideas would have to use in developing such an account consists of the texts that have come down to us. To use these texts to figure out what philosophers thought and what meanings these philosophers conveyed, the historian of ideas needs, as Williams says, to “establish the expectations, conventions, [and] familiarities” of the relevant intellectual community of the time. In general, to help to make it intelligible why these philosophers had these thoughts and conveyed these meanings, we need to see these philosophers as responding to their historical context – where this context consists of these philosophers’ contemporaries and predecessors, at least to the extent that these philosophers were aware of these contemporaries and predecessors. This is presumably why Williams says that the history of ideas “looks sideways to the context” and “moves horizontally in time …, as well as backwards” from the texts that constitute the primary evidence. By contrast, Williams (1978: 9–10) characterizes the “history of philosophy” in the following terms: 3 The history of philosophy of course has to constitute its object, the work, in genuinely historical terms, yet there is a cut-off point, where authenticity is replaced as the objective by the aim of articulating philosophical ideas. The ‘horizontal’ search for what Descartes meant will, if it is properly done, yield an object essentially ambiguous, incomplete, imperfectly determined by the author’s and his contemporaries’ understanding, for that is what the work – at least if it is now of any autonomous interest at all – cannot fail to have been. The present study, while I hope that it is not unaware that this is so, prefers the direction of rational reconstruction of Descartes’s thought, where the rationality of the construction is essentially and undisguisedly conceived in a contemporary style. … [T]he new work is broadly of the same genre as the original. As he puts it in the later article (1994: 257): [T]he product of the history of philosophy, being in the first place philosophy, admits more systematic regimentation of the thought under discussion. The main point here is that the history of philosophy has the goal of “articulating philosophical ideas” or offering a “rational reconstruction” or “systematic regimentation” of the thought of past philosophers. As a result, the history of philosophy “is broadly of the same genre as the original”, or in other words, it is philosophy “before” it is history. A subsidiary point that Williams (1978: 10) makes is that the sense of what is interesting in the ideas of the past that guides the historian of philosophy is itself unequivocally a product of the historian of philosophy’s own time: This study is meant to consist, to a considerable extent, of philosophical argument, the direction of it shaped by what I take to be, now, the most interesting philosophical concerns of Descartes. The argument is in twentieth-century terms; the judgement of interest is a twentiethcentury judgement; it is absolutely certain that a work which was primarily historical would represent Descartes’s concerns in a different way. In the later article, Williams (1994: 257) makes a similar point about how the history of philosophy is often concerned to relate the ideas of the past to the problems that are of most interest in the present: The history of philosophy … is more concerned to relate a philosopher’s conception to present problems, and is likely to look at his influence on the course of philosophy from his time to the present. In a number of ways, this characterization of the history of philosophy is puzzling. Isn’t the historian of philosophy’s goal in working on (say) Descartes just to figure out what Descartes thought? How could such an investigation belong to any genre other than history? In fact, I believe that a similar distinction can be drawn in other fields besides philosophy. In principle, for example, a similar distinction can be drawn with the scholarly study of literature. 4 One kind of study of literature is pursued strictly as just another branch of history.1 This strictly historical study of literature could be called, in a certain sense, literary history. The goal of this sort of literary history, like any other kind of history, is just to give an accurate and intelligible account of some of the events of the past – specifically, events in which literature was created, published, performed, read, discussed, and so on. This is parallel to the way in which what Williams called “the history of ideas” aims to give an accurate and intelligible account of events in the intellectual lives of thinkers. Just as the history of ideas treats philosophical texts as pieces of historical evidence for constructing an accurate and intelligible account of past events in the world’s intellectual life, this kind of literary history uses literary texts as evidence for constructing an accurate and intelligible account of past events in the world’s literary life. Crucially, however, to treat a literary text as a mere piece of historical evidence is not to respond to it in a way that reflects its distinctive character as a work of literature. Not all historical evidence consists of texts. Besides texts, historical evidence can also take the form of eyewitness reports, films and photographs, as well as forensic data and all the evidence of archaeology. Historians qua historians make use of all of these kinds of historical evidence in fundamentally the same way. Qua historians, they have no reason to treat literary texts as special; for historians, literary texts are just more pieces of historical evidence. This is not the primary way in which literary texts are designed to be treated, as mere historical evidence, of the kind that we can get equally well from photographs or archaeological data. The comedies of the Roman playwright Terence were not composed for the purpose of providing historians with historical evidence for understanding the society of the Roman Republic. They were composed in order to evoke a distinctively dramatic and comedic response from their audience. In general, literary works are designed to evoke a distinctive sort of response – although the exact sort of response that the work is designed to evoke varies from one literary genre to another. It is for this reason that there is room for a different kind of literary scholarship, which is not merely a branch of history. What is of interest here is not literary theory, which is more focused on developing general theories than on studying particular literary works.2 What is of interest for our purposes is the kind of literary scholarship that studies particular works, such as the works of Pindar or Goethe – just as Williams’s work in the history of philosophy involved a close study of the works of Plato and Descartes. I shall refer to the sort of study of particular literary works that is of interest here as literary criticism.3 Literary criticism of this sort does not primarily aim, like history, at producing an accurate and intelligible account of past events; instead, its goal is to respond to 1 For an example of this kind of literary history, see Miller (2001). 2 For an influential introduction to literary theory, see Eagleton (1996). 3 Another parallel to this distinction between literary history and literary criticism might be the distinction between music history and music analysis. For examples of two works on music that seem to fall on either side of this distinction, see Magee (2001) and Clark (2011). 5 literary works with something like the distinctive kind of response that those works are themselves designed to evoke from their audiences. Admittedly, most literary works were composed for a broader audience than just literary critics. So the literary critic’s response is undeniably special, to the extent that it takes the form of a publicly accessible work of scholarship. Nonetheless, the goal is to respond to literary works with an “interpretation” that has a fundamental kinship with the kind of response that those works were designed to evoke. Such scholarship can certainly use history, as a means to an end; a knowledge of the work’s original historical context can inform and enrich the critic’s interpretation. However, to put it crudely, the literary critic who studies Terence will typically want to be amused by the jokes, while the historian who uses Terence as evidence for understanding Roman society in the 2nd century BCE has no need, qua historian, to find these comedies funny at all. In a similar way, the goal of “the history of philosophy”, as Williams understands it, is to make a distinctively philosophical response to philosophical work. Here, however, we find a crucial difference between literary and philosophical works. It is not usually expected that the audience of a literary work itself consists of authors or other literary creators. With philosophical works, by contrast, it is expected that the audience of the philosophical work itself consists of philosophers – in the broad sense that includes amateur philosophers and students of philosophy, as well as professional philosophers. In this way, the response that a philosophical work typically seeks to evoke from its audience consists of philosophical thinking, of essentially the same kind as the thinking that is conveyed in the work itself. In effect, philosophical works call for their audiences to engage in a philosophical dialogue with those works. Thus, Williams’s goal in writing on the works of Plato and Descartes was to respond in the very way that those works call for, by entering into a philosophical dialogue with them. This is why he described his own book on Descartes’s work as “of broadly the same genre as the original”. If the goal of the history of philosophy is to facilitate a philosophical dialogue with these philosophers of the past, we can understand the importance of giving a “rational reconstruction” of these philosophers’ ideas. Whenever a philosopher reads any philosophical text – whether it is centuries old or written only a year ago – if the philosopher engages in a serious dialogue with that text, they have to “articulate the philosophical ideas” of that text; in that sense, they have to produce a “rational reconstruction” or “systematic regimentation” of the ideas of the text. Moreover, if we engage in a serious dialogue with any interlocutor, while we will certainly seek to understand what strikes our interlocutor as interesting and important, we will also try to learn from them, especially about what seems most interesting and important to us. This is why Williams focuses on what he takes “to be, now, the most interesting philosophical concerns of Descartes”, emphasizing that “the judgement of interest is a twentieth-century judgement.” Thus, if we are to have a serious philosophical dialogue with (say) Plato, we will have to “relate [Plato’s] conception to present problems”: we can hardly have a serious dialogue with anyone if we do not relate what they are saying to issues that we care about. We can probably also understand Williams’ suggestion that the history of philosophy is likely to explore Plato’s 6 “influence on the course of philosophy from his time to the present” in the following way: if we are to have a serious dialogue with Plato, we need to figure out what Plato means for us – and one aspect of what he means for us is the influence that he has exerted over the tradition of philosophy that we have inherited. Finally, this idea that the goal of the history of philosophy is to facilitate a philosophical dialogue with philosophers of the past can also explain why the history of philosophy needs to make use, to a significant extent, of the historical methods of the history of ideas. It is also impossible to have a serious dialogue with anyone unless one makes a serious effort to understand them and the meanings that they are actually seeking to convey.4 Strictly speaking, Williams’s point that studies in the history of philosophy belong to the same genre as the original works that they discuss needs some qualification. Notably, some of Williams’s own work on the history of philosophy sets out of explore the ethical or philosophical ideas that are conveyed in certain texts that belong to non-philosophical genres. Specifically, in several works – especially in Shame and Necessity (1993) – he sets out to articulate the ethical ideas that he finds in Homer, the three Attic tragedians, and Thucydides. We can read Williams as assuming that philosophical ideas can appear in non-philosophical works – and so the history of philosophy can aim to articulate and study these philosophical ideas wherever they appear. The history of philosophy, of the kind that Williams pursued in his historical work, is certainly not a new field. It is broadly continuous with the long tradition of philosophical commentaries on the works of earlier philosophers. A particularly notable case consists of the long tradition of commentaries on Aristotle.5 These commentators include Greeks and Romans of late antiquity such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Olympiodorus, Simplicius of Cilicia, and Boethius; it also includes early medieval Arabic scholars such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, and later medieval philosophers writing in Latin such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns This point sheds light on the relationship between Williams’s distinction and the debate that Daniel Garber (2013) had with Jonathan Bennett about the methodology of the history of philosophy. Garber is definitely closer to the “history of ideas” than other historians of philosophy (including Williams): first, Garber emphasizes the importance of understanding the past philosopher’s historical context; and secondly, he sees little value in Bennett’s focus on assessing the truth value of the past philosopher’s claims, by the lights of the historian’s own viewpoint. Instead, for Garber (2013, 353), the historian should aim for a “disinterested historical reconstruction”. Still, for Garber, the ultimate goal is not just to understand what people thought in the past for its own sake: in his view, “the history of philosophy can be important not because it leads to philosophical truths, but because it leads to philosophical questions” (356). As I read Garber, this implies that he is still primarily concerned to set up a dialogue between contemporary readers and philosophers of the past – it is just that in his view this should be a dialogue in which (so to speak) the contemporary readers mostly stay quiet, and the past philosopher does most of the talking. 4 5 The original texts of the Greek commentators on Aristotle are available in Diels et al. (1882– 1909). For discussion of commentaries in Arabic, see Druart (2020), Ben Ahmed and Pasnau (2021) and Gutas (2016). For discussion of the commentaries in Latin, see Marenbon (2021) on Boethius and Marenbon (2023) on the high Middle Ages. 7 Scotus, and William of Ockham. There is another notable case in China, with the immensely influential commentaries that the Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi wrote in the Song Dynasty on the Four Great Books of the Confucian tradition.6 In writing their commentaries, these scholars were undoubtedly engaging in philosophy, aiming at “articulating” the “philosophical ideas” of these older texts by providing a “rational reconstruction” of them. This point, however, raises an awkward question about the history of philosophy. These ancient and medieval commentators generally viewed the works of that they were commenting as having a unique kind of authority. The Neo-Confucians ascribed a unique authority to the Four Great Books of ancient Confucianism; and the ancient and medieval commentators on Aristotle believed that Aristotle represented the summit of what natural reason could be expected to achieve. These scholars wrote their commentaries because they assumed that, when correctly interpreted, the works that they were commenting on would reveal the truth about philosophy. From a contemporary historical perspective, this assumption seems entirely indefensible. For example, we now know that Aristotle’s logic – which was regarded by Western philosophers as the one true logic for the whole time from the mid-3rd century right up until the mid-19th century – is in fact just a distorted fragment of the first-order predicate calculus. We also know that Aristotle’s natural science is riddled with errors, from the spontaneous generation of insect larvae to his geocentric conception of the universe.7 In general, the insights of contemporary historians make it seem inconceivable that any philosopher of the past has the status of an authority of that kind. It is clear that Williams himself did not approach the history of philosophy in anything like that spirit. Indeed, some of his most striking contributions in this field were on the works of philosophers with whom he himself had profound disagreements, such as Plato and Descartes. This raises the awkward question: What is the point of studying the history of philosophy? Some recent writers – for example, Hanno Sauer (2022) – have argued that the history of philosophy in fact has no point. According to this argument, the philosophers of the past are so unreliable that we cannot expect to learn anything worthwhile from them. Just as contemporary students of medicine do not read the works of Hippocrates or Galen, and contemporary students of astronomy and optics do not read the works of Ptolemy, there is no reason for contemporary students of philosophy to waste their time on the works of Plato, Aristotle, or Descartes. This is the question to which I shall turn for the rest of this chapter. What is the point of studying the history of philosophy? What is the point of seeking a philosophical dialogue with long-dead philosophers who lived centuries ago? As we shall see, at different points in his career, Williams offered two quite different answers to this question. 6 On Zhu Xi, see Thompson (2021). For discussions of Aristotle’s contributions in logical theory and natural science, see Lear (1980) and Althoff (2018), respectively. 7 8 2. What is the point of the history of philosophy? In the last section, I gave an interpretation and defence of Williams’s contrast between the “history of ideas” and the “history of philosophy”, and raised the question about what point there could be in the history of philosophy (on this interpretation of what it amounts to). One way to answer this question would be by arguing that this sort of history of philosophy is in some way an important component of the discipline of philosophy; as we shall see, the two answers to this question that Williams offers both take this form. Before explaining Williams’s answers to the question of what the point of this sort of history of philosophy is, however, I should like to suggest that – in fact – this sort of history of philosophy is also valuable as a contribution to history. Even though the ultimate goal of this sort of history of philosophy, according to my interpretation, is to put contemporary readers into a dialogue with philosophers of the past, this may in fact be one of the best ways to discover certain truths about the past. Specifically, historians of ideas, with their wide-ranging explorations of archival materials and of the historical context in which past philosophers were writing, may not always be best placed to discover the fine-grained logical structure of the thought of these past philosophers. It may sometimes be that the best way to give contemporary readers a clear and accurate account of what these philosophers actually thought in the past is to aim for a “rational reconstruction” or a “systematic regimentation” of their thought. Some historical truths are best revealed by a close analysis of a small selection of carefully chosen texts, rather than by a grand synthesis of a huge array of historical evidence.8 In what follows, however, the purely historical value of the sort of history of philosophy that Williams was interested in will be set aside. Instead, like Williams, we shall focus on the value of the history of philosophy for the rest of philosophy. Williams’s first detailed discussion of the point of the history of philosophy is in the 1994 article (“Descartes and the Historiography of Philosophy”) that we have already cited. As he puts it (1994: 258–59): The point of any history, one might suppose, is to achieve some distance from the present, which can help one to understand the present. … To justify its existence, [the history of philosophy] must maintain a historical distance from the present, and it must do this in terms that sustain its identity as philosophy. It is just to this extent that it can indeed be useful, because it is just to this extent that it can help us to deploy ideas of the past in order to understand our own. We can adapt to the history of philosophy a remark that Nietzsche made about classical philology: ‘I cannot imagine what [its] meaning would be in our own age, if it is not to be untimely—that is, to act against the age, and by so doing to have an effect on the age, and, let us hope, to 8 I owe this point to Harvey Lederman. 9 the benefit of a future age.’9 One way in which the history of philosophy can help to serve this purpose is the basic and familiar one of making the familiar seem strange, and conversely, but it needs to learn how better to do this. Williams (1994: 260) claims that this role – “reviving a sense of strangeness or questionability about our own philosophical assumptions” – cannot be played so effectively by the history of ideas: [A]pplied to Descartes, … [t]he history of ideas quite properly invites us to learn about late scholastic influences and the syllabus at La Flèche, or introduces us to problems that were encountered in developing an adequate mechanics of inertia. … [This] activit[y], the history of ideas, certainly has nothing wrong with it, but, in itself, it does not yield much philosophy that can help us in reviving a sense of strangeness or questionability about our own philosophical assumptions. It may be, simply and quietly, what it seeks to be, about the past. However, if it is done properly the history of philosophy can play this role (263): What was called in the original distinction ‘the history of philosophy’ is essential to any activity that is going to give a philosophical point to writing historically about philosophy. That point is going principally to be found in the possibility of the past philosophy’s being untimely, and helping to make strange what is familiar in our own assumptions. As he emphasizes in his conclusion to this paper, to do this effectively the history of philosophy often also requires us to question the “received picture” of our philosophical tradition (264): … What we must do is to use the philosophical materials that we now have to hand, together with historical understanding, in order to find in, or make from, the philosophy of the past a philosophical structure that will be strange enough to help us to question our present situation and the received picture of the tradition, including those materials themselves. Williams (2006a: 344) makes the same point in his essay on Collingwood: “the point of reading philosophers of the past is to find in them something different from the present—and that is not just a historical but a philosophical discovery”. While these remarks are suggestive, they raise at least as many questions as they answer. What is the point of making our familiar philosophical assumptions seem “strange” or “questionable”, or of doing the converse – that is, presumably making philosophical assumptions that initially seemed strange become more “familiar” to us? Students of medicine do not find it useful to make their assumptions about the circulation of blood seem “strange” by familiarizing themselves with Galen’s idea that human blood ebbs and flows like the tides. Why should it be useful for philosophy to make our philosophical seem “strange”? I shall attempt to answer this question in 9 The quotation is from Nietzsche (1874: 88). 10 the next section. Before doing that, however, I shall turn to a second and rather different answer that Williams gave late in his life to the question of why philosophers need to study the history of thought. The works where Williams puts forward this second answer to the question come from the end of his life – especially his last full-length book, Truth and Truthfulness (2002a), and a number of essays that were written around the same time, including “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline” (2000) and “Why Philosophy Needs History” (2002b). The leading methodological theme here is what he calls a “genealogy” of our ideas and assumptions. This theme can be summed up simply as follows: a central goal of philosophy is to help us to understand ourselves; to understand ourselves, we need to understand our concepts; and to understand our concepts, we need to understand the history of our concepts. When Williams (2002b: 406) insists that a central goal of philosophy is to “understand ourselves”, whom does he mean by ‘us’? He gives a clear and blunt answer to this question: Who ‘we’ are, who else is part of ‘us’, may very well be disputed, above all in ethical and political cases. But reflection must start with us in the narrowest sense – the people who are asking the question and the people to whom we are talking – and it starts from now. The concepts that give rise to the question are ours. It seems, then, that the word ‘we’ here refers to Williams and his readers. What “we” need to understand, he says, is the “story behind these concepts: how people have come to think like this.” As he puts it, focusing particularly on the concepts of truth and truthfulness (407–08): These questions arise from our present ideas of such qualities or ideals as honesty, truthfulness, sincerity and realism. They are appropriate to philosophy, in that they involve a recognition that we do not adequately understand ourselves. It is obvious that our ways of conceiving these qualities have not been everybody’s, and that there is a historical story to be told about the way they came to be ours. Can we understand these concepts and so face the problems that they generate for us without understanding something of that story? How is it, for example, that we have a special ideal of personal authenticity? I think that philosophy can get a real hold on its task only with the help of history; or, rather, as Nietzsche put it, philosophising in such a case must itself be historical. How exactly can such a historical account, of how certain “ways of conceiving” these “qualities or ideals” “came to be ours”, help “us” to “understand ourselves”? Williams seems to think that there are two main possibilities here. One “possibility” for a genealogical account of how we came to have a certain value is the “that the value … may understand itself and present itself and claim authority for itself in terms which the genealogical story can undermine” (410). As Williams observes, Nietzsche thought that this 11 is the case with the “morality” that his historical account depicted as emerging from the “ressentiment” of the “slave revolt in morality”.10 However, there is also, Williams thinks, a second possibility. In some cases, these conceptions might be “vindicated” by this historical account. In Williams’s view, our contemporary scientific concepts and assumptions will typically be vindicated the historical account of how we came to have them. But he also thinks that such a historical account may vindicate some of our ethical concepts as well; in particular, he thinks that some of our ethical concepts of the values of truth and truthfulness will also be in a way vindicated by this historical account.11 A third possibility that Williams considers, it seems, is that our present conceptions might be neither vindicated nor undermined debunked by this historical account, but the account might nonetheless reveal these conceptions to be ones that we simply cannot give up – they are conceptions that form part of who we are, so that living with these conceptions is in a sense necessary for us.12 The last two full-length books that Williams completed can both be read as engaging with this project. Shame and Necessity (1993) can be read as offering an account of how the ethical ideas of Homer, the Attic tragedians, and Thucydides were replaced by conceptions that were closer to those of Plato and Christianity; in a Nietzschean spirit, this account is designed to undermine the “progressivist” assumption that the later conceptions were an improvement over the earlier ideas. By contrast, Truth and Truthfulness (2002a) argues that a historical understanding of the development of our ideas of truth and truthfulness provides at least a partial vindication of these ideas. In this way, towards the end of his life, Williams became convinced of the need for philosophy to engage seriously with history, in order to understand the history of our concepts, and thereby to evaluate those concepts, by either undermining or vindicating them, or at least by revealing them to be ones that we simply cannot give up. This could be taken as a second answer to the question of what the point of the history of philosophy is. 3. Two different approaches to the history of philosophy As I shall argue in this section, Williams’s two answers to the question of the point of studying the history of philosophy lead to very different approaches towards the subject. See Nietzsche (1887: Essay 2). Williams (2006a: Essay 23) discusses this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought in his posthumously published essay, “Unbearable Suffering”; for the general idea of an undermining genealogy, see Williams (2000: 190–194). 10 11 For an exploration of the idea of such a vindicatory genealogy, see especially Williams (2002a and 2002b). 12 That is, these conceptions are, as Williams (2000: 195) puts it, unhintergehbar. 12 If our goal is to find philosophical ideas that initially seem strange to us, and to make them seem less strange and more intelligible, we should presumably look far beyond the canon of Western philosophical classics. For example, we should certainly look at non-Western philosophy. In this spirit, it would surely be valuable to study the works of ancient Chinese philosophers: this would include the ancient Confucian tradition (as expounded in the Four Great Books of the Confucian canon), as well as Mohist and Daoist traditions (including Zhuangzi). It would also be valuable to investigate the Neo-Confucian thinkers of the Sung dynasty (such as Zhu Xi) and the Ming dynasty (such as Wang Yangming). It would similarly be important to explore the rich traditions of Indian philosophy, including the various schools of Hindu philosophy (such as the Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika schools) and of Indian Buddhist philosophy (such as the Mādhyamaka and DignāgaDharmakīrti traditions). When studying Western philosophy, it would be particularly valuable to investigate thinkers whose works have long been ignored: instead of studying nothing but Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hume all the time, we could look at the three Hellenistic schools – the Epicureans, Stoics, and Sceptics – whose works were lost and largely ignored between the 3rd and the 15th centuries; in the early modern period, we could study the lesser-known philosophers, such as Samuel Pufendorf, Ralph Cudworth, and Richard Price, as well as the women philosophers whose work was rarely taken seriously until recently, such as Anne Conway, Margaret Cavendish, Émilie du Châtelet, and Mary Wollstonecraft. By contrast, if our goal is to understand our concepts, we should only look at the parts of history that can plausibly be claimed to have played a significant role in leading to our now having these concepts. Assuming that ‘we’ here refers to Williams and the readers whom he had in mind, “we” in this sense are all Westerners. So, non-Western philosophy played little or no role in leading to “our” concepts. Equally, long-forgotten philosophical works presumably also played a negligible part in this historical story. Moreover, it is not clear that much of this historical story need consist of the history of philosophy.13 Many other developments – for example, in public political discourse, or in scientific, religious, legal, and political thought – are at least as important, if not more important, than the work of philosophers. Philosophers, after all, have always been a small group, and for most of human history they have had limited influence on the culture in which they lived. If our approach to the history of philosophy is guided by the first answer to the question about what the point of the subject is, we should go on a quest to rescue strange and interesting philosophical ideas from the risk of being forgotten. Moreover, for reasons that I shall explain in the next section, we need to focus most intensely on the work of philosophers – as it were, our colleagues from centuries past. By contrast, if our approach is guided by the second answer, ideas that have long been forgotten are unlikely to have played a large role in the development of “our concepts”; if our goal is to understand this development, we may as leave these ideas to remain forgotten – regardless of these ideas’ intrinsic merits. We also have little reason to focus 13 This is a point that Williams himself recognized; see Williams (2002b: 405–06, and 2006a: x). 13 our attention on works of philosophy: a more general investigation of the history of human thought is what is principally required. In this way, Williams’s two different answers to the question about the point of the history of philosophy lead to very different approaches to the subject. One response, of course, would just be to say that we should let a thousand flowers bloom. Some scholarly investigations should take the first path, and some others the second. In the rest of this chapter, however, I shall take a more invidious line. In the next section, I shall argue that the kind of history of philosophy that follows the first of these approaches is of central importance to our field. But then, in the fifth and final section, I shall raise some sceptical doubts about the kind of history of philosophy that follows the second of these two approaches. 4. Salvaging philosophical ideas from unmerited oblivion In this section, I shall offer a defence of the first answer to our question about the point of the history of philosophy – and of the approach to the history of philosophy to which this answer leads. The central claim of my defence of this first approach to the history of philosophy is that we philosophers, as a community, are prone to forget philosophical ideas that it would be better for us to remember. In other words, one central justification for this approach to the history of philosophy is that it enables us to salvage these philosophical ideas from being undeservedly forgotten. It is crucial to this justification of the first approach to the history of philosophy that not everything that is forgotten deserves to be forgotten. As the 17th-century English medic and polymath Thomas Browne (1658: 75–76) famously complained: But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity … Who knows whether the best of men be known? or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot, than any that stand remembered in the known account of time? As I shall argue here, one central reason why this first approach to the history of philosophy is valuable that it rescues important philosophical ideas from the iniquity of oblivion. We might wonder: What has this to do with Williams’s talk of “making the familiar seem strange and the strange seem familiar”? It is clear how salvaging philosophical ideas from the iniquity can make “the strange seem familiar”. Forgotten ideas will often seem strange at first, but after they have been salvaged, they will come to seem familiar. But how will this approach make “the familiar seem strange”? The point seems to be that these forgotten ideas are often, in a sense, alternatives to the ideas that were familiar before we were reminded of them: after we have been reminded of these alternatives, the previously familiar ideas may come to seem more doubtful – and it may seem strange that such doubtful ideas used to have so much more influence on philosophers than those forgotten alternatives. 14 In fact, history contains numerous examples of philosophers who were convinced that they benefited from older philosophical ideas that were salvaged from oblivion. For example, in the 12th century, the Latin-using Western half of the Christian world rediscovered the works of Aristotle, after some 500 years when only a handful of his works were known (namely, those that had been translated into Latin by Boethius). This rediscovery was of fundamental importance for the development of medieval scholasticism, as is clear from the authority that Aquinas and later scholastic philosophers ascribed to Aristotle.14 Later, especially in the 15th century, the West rediscovered a large number of other ancient works. These included Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, the works of Sextus Empiricus, and most of the works of Plato, after a period of about 800 years when only parts of Plato’s Timaeus were known (thanks to the Latin translations of Cicero and Calcidius). These rediscoveries of long-forgotten ancient philosophical works had a profound influence on the development of philosophy in the Renaissance and early modern period. 15 To give one more example, it has recently been established that, when Frege revolutionized the study of logic in 1879, he was profoundly influenced by the evidence that has come down to us about ancient Stoic logic – which for centuries had been completely eclipsed by Aristotelian logic, ever since the time when ancient Stoicism faded away amid the rise of Neo-Platonism in the 3rd century CE.16 In all these cases, one of the principal effects of the rediscovery of previously forgotten philosophical ideas was either to enable philosophers to conceive of philosophical concepts, problems, and theoretical options that they had not previously been aware of, or at least to encourage them to take these concepts, problems, and theoretical options more seriously than they had previously done. For example, the rediscovery of Epicureanism in Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things in the 15th century encouraged philosophers to take a host of theoretical options more seriously than they had previously done – including an atomistic conception of matter, a non-teleological mechanistic conception of nature, and a hedonistic conception of ethics. As is made clear by the examples of Aristotle’s influence on medieval scholasticism and of Stoic logic’s influence on Frege, the rediscovery of long-forgotten philosophical ideas often has its effect through the later generation’s engaging with the fine detail of the earlier ideas. One way in which philosophical ideas can come to seem promising is when it becomes clear that these ideas can be worked out in detail. If it is reasonable to doubt whether there is any way of working out a philosophical idea in detail, it seems equally reasonable to doubt whether we need to take it very seriously. For a long-forgotten idea to have this sort of fruitful impact, it is usually not enough if 14 For an authoritative survey of medieval philosophy, see Marenbon (2023). 15 For a famous discussion of the impact of the rediscovery of Lucretius, see Greenblatt (2011). 16 For this point about how Frege drew on the logic of the ancient Stoics, see Bobzien (2022). 15 all that is remembered is a vague general idea: usually, it is crucial for later philosophers to be reminded of some of the fine detail of these earlier philosophers’ work. As noted above, in most of these cases, these rediscovered philosophical ideas are alternatives to the ideas that had previously been taken seriously. But why is it beneficial to consider alternatives to the currently dominant ideas and theories? In the natural sciences, the alternatives to the currently accepted theories are theories that have been discarded. These theories are generally regarded as superseded – such as the phlogiston theory in chemistry, or Aristotle’s theory of the spontaneous generation of insect larvae in biology. Natural scientists would not normally benefit from devoting more attention to these superseded theories. Why is the situation different in philosophy? The difference, I propose, lies in the fact that, in the natural sciences, it is typically known which of these alternative theories are true – while philosophers typically lack such knowledge. This is not to say that philosophers have no knowledge of philosophical truths. Admittedly, such philosophical knowledge rarely if ever takes the form of knowing that an illuminating explanatory philosophical theory is true. But philosophers can know that some such philosophical theories are false. For example, it seems to me that philosophers now know that knowledge cannot be defined as justified true belief.17 Philosophers often also have knowledge about the logical and rational relationships between philosophical theories. For example, it seems to me that philosophers know many propositions of the form ‘Given assumptions P, Q, and R, theory S is true only if theory T is also true’. In general, however, philosophers only know the answers to relatively small philosophical questions. One of the main ways in which philosophers make progress is in accumulating knowledge of these small questions. The situation is different with the big questions: What is knowledge, and how is it possible? What is it is be a good person, or to lead a good life, or to act well? Do we have a fundamental nature or essence, and if so, what is it? If these questions are couched at a sufficiently abstract level, then my historical judgment is that they are perennial: they have gripped reflective human beings, in many different cultures, at least since the time of Heraclitus, Confucius, and the early Upanishads, in the 6th century BCE. Strikingly, these big philosophical questions are as wide open today as they have always been. In a sense that I shall explain below, philosophers may have slowly made progress towards a better understanding of these big questions. But we are at best only marginally closer to knowing the answers to these big questions than we were centuries or even millennia ago.18 17 18 The discovery is due to Gettier (1963). In this way, I am in agreement with Lin (2013) that the fact that philosophy makes progress so slowly is essential to explaining the value of the history of philosophy. What I add to Lin’s argument is a more detailed methodology that explains the slowness and the distinctive character of philosophical progress – specifically, my distinction between big and small philosophical questions, my holistic conception of philosophical method, and my idea that we should aim for philosophical understanding instead of just knowledge of the answers to philosophical questions. 16 The reason for this seems to be that knowing the answer to any of these big philosophical questions would require a tremendously difficult investigation. Ideally, all possible philosophical theories would have to be compared, on the basis of well they fit with everything that we believe, and how well they explain everything that such philosophical theories are called upon to explain. To know the answer to any of the big philosophical questions, one would have to have identified the philosophical theory that is in fact the best of all these alternatives, and to believe it precisely because it is the best theory in this way.19 On this view, then, the appropriate method for answering philosophical questions is deeply holistic. Part of the reason for this is that every part of philosophy seems inseparably connected to every other. Philosophers have occasionally claimed that some branches of philosophy have a kind of “independence” or “autonomy”, in the sense that they can be fruitfully studied without taking any account of the results of other fields of study.20 But on closer inspection such claims seem dubious. For example, it is hard to study ethics without having to confront the idea that is expressed by the slogan that “‘ought’ implies ‘can’”; but any attempt at an adequate evaluation of that idea needs to look far beyond ethics – to the areas of the philosophy of language that study modal terms like ‘ought’ and ‘can’, to the areas of the philosophy of action that study the notion of “abilities”, and to the areas of metaphysics that study the nature of possibilities. These kinds of interconnections are ubiquitous in philosophy. This holistic conception makes philosophy methodologically different from many other fields. In many fields, hyper-specialization is an effective way to make progress. Such hyper-specialized researchers can ignore everything that is not directly relevant to the particular question that they are studying. For example, biochemists can often come to know truths about the chemistry that is characteristic of certain biological processes without worrying about the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics. However, if my proposal about philosophical methodology is correct, this kind of hyper-specialized research will never enable us to know the answers to any of the big questions of philosophy. Indeed, if this view of philosophical methodology is correct, it may well seem doubtful whether we will ever know the answers to these big questions. A more realistic goal of philosophical study, as it seems to me, is not to know the answers to these questions, but to understand these questions. But what exactly is it to achieve the sort of “philosophical understanding” that we can realistically aspire to? I propose to interpret this sort of philosophical understanding of a question as a kind of precursor to achieving knowledge of how to answer the question. Specifically, I propose, the degree to which philosophers understand a question is also a holistic matter, corresponding to the degree to 19 For this view of philosophical methodology, see Wedgwood (2014). For a particularly most notable example, see John Rawls’s (1974) idea of the “independence of moral theory”. 20 17 which philosophers see the connections that this question has with other questions, and the pros and cons of all the various alternative systems of interconnected answers to these questions. This conception of the goal of philosophical inquiry as consisting in this kind of holistic understanding is undoubtedly controversial.21 However, if this conception is correct, then the achievement of philosophical understanding requires awareness of as many philosophical problems and questions as possible, and of as many theoretical options for answering those problems and questions as possible. Forgetting philosophical questions and theoretical options is directly destructive of philosophical understanding, and so directly inimical to the goal of philosophical inquiry. It follows from this proposal about the goal of philosophy, then, that work on the history of philosophy of the sort that I have described – work that aims to preserve and salvage philosophical ideas from the iniquity of oblivion – is an utterly central part of our discipline. Another way to make this point is to reflect on the crucial role of discussion and dialogue in philosophy. Philosophers need to consider many different questions and problems, and many ways of looking at these questions and problems, and listening and responding to other philosophers is practically indispensable for this purpose. The kind of dialogue that philosophers need is inclusive – it should include as many different voices and perspectives as possible. Voices from the past form a large class that contemporary philosophers would be foolish to ignore. Just as it would be unwise to ignore the voices of our contemporaries who are inclined to defend very different views from one’s own, it would be equally unwise to ignore the voices and perspectives of our predecessors from past centuries. Admittedly, merely having a dialogue with actual philosophers (past or present) is not always enough for making progress towards philosophical understanding. It is also important for philosophers to imagine philosophical ideas that no actual philosopher has yet articulated. There are some huge areas of theoretical space that remain underexplored. Indeed, in principle, some particularly imaginative philosophers might even be able to make significant progress while ignoring the history of philosophy, and simply conjuring up a vibrant virtual debate with imaginary philosophers. In practice, however, it seems unlikely that many of us possess such extraordinary powers of imagination. For most of us, it is as I put it above “practically indispensable” to engage in an inclusive dialogue of the kind that I have described; and at least for many philosophers, it will be highly valuable for this inclusive debate to include the voices of philosophers from the past. 21 It is not clear if Williams would have endorsed this conception. As we have seen, he implies that one central goal of philosophy is to “understand ourselves” (2002b: 406). But this hardly seems like a unique feature of philosophy, since many fields – including history, psychology, and all the social sciences – all seem more directly relevant to “understanding ourselves” than research on (say) the philosophy of physics. But It is arguable that a holistic understanding of the questions of philosophy could form at least part of such an understanding of ourselves. 18 5. The genealogy of concepts: Some sceptical doubts In this final section, I shall turn briefly to Williams’s “genealogical” project. As he describes it, the goal of this genealogical project is to understand our “concepts”; and he insists that, to understand our concepts, we need to understand their history. It is undeniable that it is important for us to understand our concepts. But why should we assume that understanding the history of how we came to possess these concepts, or the history of our use of these concepts, is a particularly important element of understanding these concepts themselves? If our goal is to understand the concepts that we have now, surely it is primarily to psychology, and not to history, that we should look. The general theory of concepts is a central part of the discipline of cognitive science. More specific concepts – including all the broadly ethical concepts that Williams was particularly interested in – can be studied in social psychology or moral psychology. For the concepts that play a crucial role in our political life, branches of social science such as political sociology seem likely to be particularly important. On the face of it, the assumption that understanding our concepts centrally involves understanding the history of our concepts seems to commit the genetic fallacy. The facts about something’s origins in the past do not determine the character and properties that it has now. When the ancestors of birds originally developed feathers, their function was probably just to keep those animals warm; it was only later that feathers acquired the function of enabling these animals to fly. The etymology of the word ‘wrong’ lies in a word that originally meant twisted (‘wrong’ is cognate with the verb forms ‘wring’ and ‘wrung’); but it has long since lost that meaning, and has a completely different meaning in contemporary English. To be fair to Williams (2002b, 406), he recognizes this concern. He agrees that it is not particularly helpful for understanding the contemporary concept of an atom to consider how the term ‘atom’ was used by Democritus in the 5th century BCE. He responds to this concern just by asserting that things are otherwise with other concepts, such as the concept of freedom (407). However, he does not illustrate this point with any clear account of how a history of the concept of freedom can help us to understand the concept that we now have; he also does not consider whether moral psychology or political sociology may be a more fruitful way to understand our current concept of freedom. Moreover, in the great book where Williams (2002a) applies his genealogical approach to the concepts of truth and truthfulness, there is in fact surprisingly little detailed history: most of the book consists of more abstract theoretical considerations of the role that these concepts will inevitably tend to play in societies that are broadly similar to ours. As I explained in Section 2 above, Williams’s genealogical project does not just study the history of a concept in a purely disinterested way. On the contrary, it is fundamentally concerned with evaluating the suggestions that the history of a concept may either “undermine” or “vindicate” the concept. Unfortunately, it is obscure what these suggestions amount to. In fact, at this point, Williams often switches from talking about the history of a “concept” to talking about the history of a “value” or an “assumption”. However, on most of the ways in 19 which philosophers have used this terminology, “concepts” are importantly different from “values” and “assumptions”. An assumption has a propositional content; and so, vindicating an assumption presumably involves demonstrating that the assumption’s propositional content is true – while undermining an assumption presumably involves raising doubts about this propositional content. Similarly, when we speak of a person’s “values”, we seem to be speaking of the person’s evaluative beliefs, which also have propositional content. By contrast, a concept is not usually taken to have a propositional content in the same way, and so it is not clear what vindicating or undermining a concept could amount to. At all events, undermining a concept need not involve showing that there is any rational defect in simply possessing the concept. When Oscar Wilde said at his trial, “‘Blasphemous’ is not a word of mine”, he could not plausibly deny that he possessed the concept of blasphemy.22 It is clear from everything that we know about Wilde that it was precisely because he possessed the concept of blasphemy, and fully understood the meaning of the word ‘blasphemous’, that he refrained from using the word. So, even if a concept deserves to be discarded – in whatever sense Wilde may have had in mind – we can still possess the concept, and our possession of the concept need not involve any rational error on our part. But if the undermining of a concept need not involve showing that there is a rational error built into possessing the concept, what does it involve? This remains obscure. For this reason, it is unclear what Williams’s talk of vindicating or undermining a concept is supposed to amount to. When it comes to beliefs or assumptions, the idea that a historical account of why we hold a belief can undermine or vindicate that belief is familiar to contemporary epistemologists. However, it is also intensely controversial in exactly which cases a historical account of our holding a belief has this undermining effect. For example, according to a well-known argument that is due to Sharon Street (2006), any purely naturalistic explanation of why we hold moral beliefs will undermine those beliefs, if those beliefs are to be interpreted along moral realist lines – but not if a “constructivist” interpretation of those beliefs is correct. However, Street’s argument would certainly not suit the purposes of Williams’s “genealogical” project. For Williams – unlike for Street – it crucially matters what the details of this historical explanation are, since he assumes throughout that some historical explanations of our “values” or “assumptions” are undermining, while some other explanations are vindicatory. It also seems that Williams is not limiting his focus to the moral realist’s interpretation of “values”: his genealogical project seems to be premised on the assumption that, on any reasonable metaethical interpretation of these values, some historical explanations will have an undermining effect, while other historical explanations will have a vindicatory effect. The central problem behind this aspect of Williams’s approach to history is that this assumption is just too controversial. Indeed, it is not obvious that such historical explanations of our ethical concepts or ethical beliefs ever have either an undermining or vindicatory effect. Even if they do sometimes have such an effect, it is not obvious under what circumstances they have such an effect. While it is interesting to explore the assumption that historical explanations of our beliefs 22 For the transcript of Wilde’s first trial, see Holland (2003). 20 or concepts can have this sort of undermining or vindicatory effect, the assumption seems much too controversial for it to play a foundational role for a central subdiscipline within philosophy. For this reason, Williams’s second answer to the question of what point there is in philosophers’ studying history seems like a shaky basis for a defence of the history of philosophy. As I noted in Section 3 above, this second answer anyway does not support the conclusion that there is anything particularly important about the history of philosophy, as opposed to a more general history of human thought. But it is also unclear whether such a study of the history of human thought can really make the important contribution that Williams imagines to the quest to “understand our concepts”. Concepts are psychological phenomena, and prima facie it seems that the various branches of psychology are where we should look in order to understand them. For all these reasons, then, the first answer that Williams proposed to the question of what point there is in philosophers’ studying history seems to me a much sounder basis for a defence of the history of philosophy. Conclusion In the last section, I tried to raise some doubts about Williams’s idea of the importance for philosophy of a “genealogy” of our concepts. But the main goal of this paper was to defend and elaborate on some of Williams’s other ideas about the distinctive value for philosophy of studying the history of the subject. 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