Historiographies of philosophy 1800–1950 PDF

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British Journal for the History of Philosophy ISSN: 0960-8788 (Print) 1469-3526 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbjh20 Historiographies of philosophy 1800–1950 Leo Catana & Mogens Lærke To cite this article: Leo Catana & Mogens Lærke (2020) Historiographies of phil...

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British Journal for the History of Philosophy

ISSN: 0960-8788 (Print) 1469-3526 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbjh20

Historiographies of philosophy 1800–1950 Leo Catana & Mogens Lærke To cite this article: Leo Catana & Mogens Lærke (2020) Historiographies of philosophy 1800–1950, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 28:3, 431-441, DOI: 10.1080/09608788.2019.1709153 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2019.1709153

Published online: 07 May 2020.

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BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 2020, VOL. 28, NO. 3, 431–441 https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2019.1709153

INTRODUCTION

Historiographies of philosophy 1800–1950 Leo Catanaa and Mogens Lærkeb a

Section of Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark; bCNRS, Maison Française d’Oxford, Oxford, UK ARTICLE HISTORY Received 11 November 2019; Revised 29 November 2019; Accepted 22 December

2019

It is trivial fact that history of philosophy itself has a history. How long that history stretches back is a question of interpretation. Philosophy has always, from Antiquity onward, entertained some kind of relation to its own past. We should, however, probably trace the institutionalization of history of philosophy as a discipline not too far back, about three centuries, to the work by Christoph August Heumann (Acta philosophorum, 1715–26), André-François Boureau-Deslandes (Histoire critique de la philosophie, 1737) and, above all, Johann Jacob Brucker (Historia critica philosophiae, 1742–4). Since it was constituted as a discipline in the early or mid-eighteenth century, histories of philosophy have been written in very different ways, depending on author, place, and time; they have varied according to institutional frameworks, cultural settings, philosophical and non-philosophical contexts. At each stage of the discipline’s development, in the various forms its evolution has taken, philosophy has constantly instrumentalized its own history in order to promote specific philosophical and non-philosophical agendas, using the history of philosophy for its own purposes by adapting it, transforming it, rejecting it, embracing it, rewriting it at every step of the way. This special issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy is concerned with some of these ways in which the history of philosophy was written in the 150 years up to around 1950, and the ways in which it has been informed and guided by institutional, cultural, political and, of course, philosophical factors. It is concerned with the methods deployed by historians of philosophy, the epistemological foundations laid down for those methods, and the philosophical (or non-philosophical) aims pursued. Before saying a few things about the motivations behind the issue, it is necessary to clarify some key concepts, namely ‘history of philosophy’ and ‘historiography of philosophy’, both of which are used by historians of philosophy in two distinct meanings. First, generally, by ‘history of philosophy’ is CONTACT Mogens Lærke © 2020 BSHP

[email protected]

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meant either the actual past of philosophy or accounts of that past; by ‘historiography’ of philosophy is meant, either accounts of past philosophy – overlapping with the second sense of ‘history of philosophy’ – or meta-historical reflections about the tools, methods, aims, and epistemology proper for accounting for philosophy’s past. Authors writing on these issues have not as yet established any fixed and generally accepted terminological practice; according to circumstances, they use these terms in one or the other meaning, sometimes even within a single text, but in practice the lack of uniformity in terminology rarely occasions misunderstanding. As editors, we have not given the contributors to this special issue any specific instructions about how to navigate these terminological ambiguities. But we have asked them to ascertain that the context of use of these terms in each article leaves no doubt as to the sense in which they are to be understood. But why do we think the history of the historiography of philosophy is an important topic to address? It certainly is an understudied topic in the Englishspeaking philosophical tradition. It is, perhaps, because the historiography of philosophy – in all its diversity – has experienced some trouble in establishing itself as a sub-discipline of philosophy equal to others, and equally philosophically legitimate.1 The political historian is not a politician; the war-historian does not wage war. So should we not also conclude that the historian of philosophy does not do philosophy? What can the history of philosophy, as history, really do for philosophy? Those were, until recently, the kind of questions which dominated the discussion, and the question that historians, when asked about methodology, felt that they had to engage with and provide answers to. As a result of being constantly prompted in this way to justify themselves in an academic landscape dominated by analytic philosophers in favour of ahistorical approaches to philosophizing, historians of philosophy have published a great many English-language texts and volumes concerned with the philosophical legitimization of the discipline over the last halfcentury – texts and volumes mostly dedicated to showing what is philosophical about the historiography of philosophy (see e.g. Rée et al., Philosophy and Its Past; Holland, Philosophy, Its History and Historiography; Hare, Doing Philosophy Historically; Rorty et al., Philosophy in History; Sorell and Rogers, Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy; Lærke et al., Philosophy and Its History; Scharff, How History Matters). At the same time, however, and partly because of this particular configuration of the discussion-field, the fact that there is also something historical about the historiography of philosophy has been somewhat overlooked, even swept under the carpet, consciously or not. Historical, as opposed to philosophical, reflection on the historiography of 1

For a critic going as far as doubting “that there is a separate and objective study called the history of philosophy”, arguing that the historicity of past texts is entirely irrelevant to whatever philosophical value they may have, see Graham, “Can There be History of Philosophy?”.

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philosophy itself has been perceived as a derivative line of enquiry that would serve only as a historical spade to dig a deeper hole for the historians of philosophy, not the required philosophical ladder to climb out of that hole. This is not to say that notable exceptions do not exist, that no Englishlanguage work has been forthcoming on the history of the historiography of philosophy, or that no works have been written about how philosophers have reconstructed the past of their own discipline. We can think of a recent book such as Dmitri Levitin’s Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science on the histories of philosophy in England in the seventeenth century; Leo Catana’s monograph on Brucker, The Historiographical Concept ‘System of Philosophy’; or the numerous articles and chapters on the nineteenth-century German historiographical tradition published in English by Ulrich Johannes Schneider (see e.g. Schneider, “Historical Contributions to Philosophy” and “Teaching the History of Philosophy”; for his major work in German, see Schneider, Philosophie und Universität). Still, such works are few and far between, and it is clear that, in the English-speaking world, the history of the historiography of philosophy is not a firmly constituted or clearly circumscribed thematic field, or even acknowledged as a separate field of study at all. It is not to say, either, that such a constituted field does not exist in other, non-Anglophone, historiographical traditions. German scholarship on the history of philosophy is very strong, and has been since the nineteenth century, but interest in the historical development of the discipline itself has been modest, apart from a few isolated studies (Renz, “Philosophiegeschichte”; Hartung, Eduard Zeller; and the works by Schneider already mentioned). Numerous studies in German on the theoretical foundations of historiography of philosophy have appeared, of course, but they rarely explore the history of the discipline (see Sandkühler, Geschichtlichkeit der Philosophie; Beelman, Theoretische Philosophiegeschichte; Flasch, Historische Philosophie and Theorie der Philosophiehistorie; Stekeler-Weithofer, Philosophiegeschichte). In French and Italian, however, we find several defining studies dedicated to the history of the historiography of philosophy written over the last century. Leaving to one side smaller studies such as Victor Delbos’ attempt in a 1917 article on the “Conception of the History of Philosophy” (translated into English in 1918), or Émile Bréhier’s brief survey in the “Introduction” (sect. III) to the first tome of his Histoire de la philosophie (1928),2 we must mention three comprehensive attempts at writing the history of the historiography of philosophy. First, in the 1930s, the prominent French historian of philosophy, Martial Gueroult, undertook to write a four-volume work on the philosophy and history of the history of philosophy. He was 2

For an early nineteenth-century work, we can add three lessons by Victor Cousin, published in 1928 (Leçons, lessons XI–XIII).

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preoccupied with the work throughout his entire remaining four-decade career, but it was only published after his death, in 1979–88 (Gueroult, Philosophie de l’histoire; Histoire de l’histoire, vols. 1–3). This ‘dianoematics’, or ‘theory of doctrines’ as he called it, analysed the way in which philosophy had written about its own past, from ‘the origins to our days’, basically from Greek antiquity to the first half of the twentieth century, in the French and German context in particular. Second, in 1973, a professor of philosophy at the University of Strasbourg, Lucien Braun, published a generally excellent Histoire de l’histoire de la philosophie, accompanied by a theoretical counterpart in 1985, the Théorie de l’histoire de la philosophie – the latter a generally overlooked and badly distributed work. Finally, over some twenty-five years, from 1979 to 2004, Giovanni Santinello edited his five-volume collective work Storia delle storie generali della filosofia. Under the direction of Santinello’s former student, Gregorio Piaia, the first three volumes of an English translation have appeared in 1993, 2011, and 2015, respectively, under the title Models of the History of Philosophy, covering the period from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. The remaining two volumes on Hegelian and late nineteenth-century historiography are still in preparation. It is not surprising that it is principally in the French and Italian traditions that we find such studies. French historiography, especially the kind of university philosophy associated with the ‘historian-philosophers’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty called them, from Charles Renouvier to Émile Boutroux, Victor Delbos, Émile Bréhier, Étienne Gilson and Léon Brunschvicg, to Ferdinand Alquié and Martial Gueroult, has always been caught up in a deeply reflexive debate about the philosophical underpinnings of the historiography of philosophy (Merleau-Ponty, Les philosophies de l’antiquité, 1362–74). In the French context, still coming to terms with a complex Cartesian heritage, the question is sometimes stated in terms of philosophical legitimacy. As Bréhier writes in 1928, as the very first phrase of his Histoire de la philosophie: “It has sometimes seemed as if the history of philosophy can be nothing but an obstacle to living thought”, working against “the freedom of the mind, the autonomy of reason’s development, which Descartes defended against the forces of the past”. And yet, given the way in which the history of philosophy, ever since Victor Cousin in the mid-nineteenth century, has been at the institutional core of almost all philosophy-teaching in France, the problem is never genuinely one of justification: less than ten lines further down, Bréhier already brushes off his own objection, now writing that “far from being a hindrance, history is, in philosophy as everywhere, a true liberator”. Instead, what we find among the French historian-philosophers are competing methodologies for the study of past philosophy which, each in their own way, aim at providing ‘scientific’ or ‘neutral’, as Gilson put it, frameworks for the historical study of past philosophy (see Gilson, Le Philosophe, 42; see also AA.VV., L’Histoire de la philosophie; Perelman, Philosophie et Méthode; Vuillemin, La Philosophie et

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son histoire; Zarka, Comment écrire l’histoire). As for the Italian context, out of the post-war constellations and controversies in the entourage of figures like Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Gentile, Eugenio Garin, and Paolo Rossi, a historical approach to philosophical study became deeply entrenched in the institutional framework of Italian philosophy, providing a particularly propitious atmosphere for historiographical self-reflection among historians of philosophy (see e.g. Garin, “Osservazioni preliminari”, “Ancora della storia”; Piaia, Il lavoro storico-filosofico, 41–54; Malusa, “Le ‘avanguardie’ della storiografia”). Perhaps with the exception of R. G. Collingwood’s 1946 Idea of History and the historical reconstructions of past philosophers his philosophy of history involves, the contrast to the situation among English-speaking philosophers is striking. The works by Gueroult, by Braun, and by Santinello and Piaia and their collaborators, are all indispensable and invaluable resources for any student who takes an interest in the history of the historiography of philosophy. They do, however, all limit themselves to the study of so-called ‘general histories of philosophy’, i.e. historiographical projects taking a global approach to philosophy’s past, as opposed to historiographical approaches concerned only with some specific past philosophy or philosophical tradition. The papers included in this special issue are of a different variety; they do not generally focus on general histories of philosophy. Moreover, the overall aim is not to provide any systematic overview of the field. Instead, by focusing more narrowly on the historiographical work by or about individual philosophers or philosophical traditions, they aim a giving a sense of how the history of the historiography of philosophy can inform the discussion about the philosophical uses and implications of the historiography of philosophy in more specific ways, according to the case at hand. This choice is partly guided by the format and size of a special journal issue which only allows us to present a set of examples and case studies. We have mostly focused on traditions in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, although we have not entirely respected that temporal framework, sometimes bringing the history all the way up to present times. Some important historiographical traditions are not represented. To give just a couple of evident examples: The volume includes no contribution about the historiographical tradition in Italy which, today, is one of the most prominent in the world. We have not been able to include a contribution about the historiographical tradition for the study of Oriental or Arabic philosophy. Other omissions are easy to list. In some of these cases, these omissions reflect the fact that these historiographical traditions have been discussed extensively elsewhere; sometimes, in relation to less well-known traditions, they reflect the sheer difficulty of finding qualified researchers willing and available to contribute; finally, sometimes, they simply reflect that painful choices had to be made. But these obvious gaps

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also testify to the fact that the field of enquiry is both broad and varied enough to make it impossible to circumscribe it in some twelve articles. Hence, without in any way aspiring to being exhaustive, the present issue is intended simply to highlight the importance of historical investigation into the historiography of philosophy as a worthwhile, but neglected field among English-speaking historians of philosophy. It is conceived as an invitation to enter and better occupy this thinly populated sub-field, by showing what kind of insight the study of the uses (and abuses) of the history of philosophy can afford us about philosophizing as such. Finally, we should stress that this shift of focus in the methodological discussion from the philosophy of the history of philosophy to the history of the history of philosophy should not be taken as a capitulation to those who deny the genuine philosophical relevance of the history, or a request on our part to be relocated to the history department. Rather, it should be understood as a way to explore the theoretical intuition – and a meta-theoretical intuition at it – that any satisfying account of the philosophical relevance of the historiography of philosophy must take the detour through the systematic interrogation into the historical genesis of the discipline itself; it should be understood as a way to explore the intuition that we will never genuinely understand what philosophical purpose the history of philosophy has if we do not question what purpose the history of philosophy has in fact been given throughout its own history; or, to put the point as succinctly as possible, that what is genuinely philosophical about the history of philosophy must be sought out in the history of the history of philosophy. Let us now briefly consider how each individual contribution engages with this issue. In the first article, Sabrina Ebbersmeyer examines the representation of past female philosophers in German histories of philosophy produced between the eighteenth and twentieth century. She argues that female philosophers were extensively discussed in accounts of past philosophy produced in Germany in and before the eighteenth century, but that this changed in the course of the nineteenth century. In this century, female philosophers were not regarded as systematic philosophers and therefore not considered worthy of inclusion in the canon. Ebbersmeyer argues that this marginalization of female philosophers in general histories of philosophy in Germany was symptomatic of a general attempt in nineteenth-century Germany to keep women out of academia, philosophy in particular. Pavel Reichl explores the role of Salomon Maimon in Immanuel Kant’s conception of the history of philosophy. Kant, most students learn when first encountering his texts, rejected previous philosophy as dogmatic and globally subject to illusion. His corresponding understanding of historical enquiry into philosophy was that it is unphilosophical in itself: critical philosophy operated a separation of philosophy from its past. Reichl, however, argues that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason reflects a double attitude toward the history of

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philosophy: one, negative, focused on the ‘transcendental illusions’ of past philosophers; the other, positive, more willing to place the development of Critique itself within a longer, historical narrative. Pavel shows, moreover, how Maimon’s contribution in 1792 to an essay competition issued by the Royal Academy of Prussia led Kant to lean more strongly toward this latter, positive understanding of the philosophical uses of the history of philosophy. Reviewing over a century ...