The use of history by philosophers

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1. Just finished reading Hans-Johann Glock’s What is Analytic Philosophy. He dedicates an entire chapter to the problem historiophobia and anachronism in analytic philosophy, making a compelling case that the behavior has some non-trivial exceptions among analytic philosophers (I think the fact that he even wrote a chapter on this question should count as an exception to this behavior in analytic philosophy).

   I think Richard Boyd’s account of the origins of postmodern skepticism of objectivity are pretty fair for someone who is disagrees with it. There’s even an interview with Boyd on Youtube in three parts on the subject.

   Also, I like Ernest Gellner’s Postmodernism, Reason, and Religion, and happen to think he’s correct, but he’s probably harsh enough that people wouldn’t regard the historical sketches he makes as being fair.

2. My teacher Christian Thiel but I think he is an exception!

3. I don’t know of many, but I know Don Howard, who is the archetype (and evangelist!) of the genuine integration of HPS, over in the hist-phil-physics world.

4. “Who respects the source material, their context, the dialectic at the times being discussed, and historiography in general?”

   I’m a bit surprised by this query. When I was a grad student in HPS at the University of Pittsburgh (admittedly, a few decades ago), learning how to properly approach and use historical sources was half of what the first, very intense, year was devoted to — the other half was about getting up-to-speed on the current state of debates in general philosophy of science, mainly epistemology and methodology. If people who went through that program misuse the history of science, I think it’s probably due to simple human failings, rather than any lack of understanding how things “ought” to be done.

5. I would suggest John Wilkins, not come across anyone else, but so far I have ignored the history of philosophy and history of science as a rather problematic area of study.

   Just starting to deal with it now.

   I think it’s the relationship the subjects have with modern identity. But Ive not read enough to make any real conclusions and their will be any number of factors at play I suspect.

   I don’t think I would describe the approach used by some historians of science and philosophy as due to simple human failings.
   I don’t think I would use the term misuse; myth building is a very human activity and people do seem to have an expert grasp of the subject and use such an approach with ease and skill.

6. Also, H.G. Gadamer’s The Beginning of Philosophy.

7. Focault was the first philosopher I read heavily.
   He seemed rather appealing at first and his intrests were similar to my own.

   I was chatting to my brother on this subject recently. He is a modern historian and admires Focault. When questioned about his poor use of historical sources his reply was “but Jeb he is a philosopher what do you expect?”

   I expect conclusions to be grounded in something more than Focault has to offer.

8. Ian Hacking by a mile. The Emergence of Probability, Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, The Taming of Chance, Rewriting the Soul, Mad Travellers. And that’s just the books!

   Granted, some might say that some of them aren’t strictly philosophical. But Hacking has certainly done a work in which he tries to understand concepts that have interested philosophers by studying their development and the different understandings of them in different historical periods. I can’t think of a better example.

   The important thing is to distinguish getting things right from trying. Even if you think Hacking has some of his history wrong, he surely counts as someone who “respects the source material, their context, the dialectic at the times being discussed, and historiography in general”.

   1. Hacking should have occurred to me immediately.

9. I was going to suggest Hacking before I got preempted, but another philosopher who uses history well is Stephen Toulmin, especially in his work on casuistry, which, incidentally, is highly relevant to the recent discussion of the Jesuits.

   One note on Foucault: it’s perfectly reasonable to complain about the scholarly shortcomings of the man, but his program lives on because it actually makes a lot of sense. Ian Hacking, who certainly isn’t an intellectual hot dog, identifies himself as someone who works in Foucault’s tradition—I believe he even held Foucault’s old chair at the College de France.

   Last thought: Nietzsche wrote someplace that learned society imposes a limit on permissible sagacity. I don’t know about that, but sometimes I think that Foucault’s career shows that there is a limit on feasible sagacity. Once you get beyond the highly schematic and obviously erroneous teleological history favored by the scientists themselves, which even Richard Feynman knew was bullshit, it’s hard to find a place to stop. One can perhaps speak with authority and not as one of the scribes, but Foucault wanted to speak with authority as one of the scribes. A very problematic ambition, no doubt, but maybe philosophers have a professional obligation to succumb to hubris since in philosophy the rule is to phrase your question in the form of an answer.

10. I can’t ignore Foucault, my thoughts were going in a similar direction with regard to ethnology before I read him, but I don’t have to believe everything he said.

    With regard to authority I had always read him as understanding that his own authority would be “dissolved” following Claude Lévi-Strauss’s suggestions. So perhaps that was his response to “problematic ambition.”

11. I discuss this here:

    http://darwiniana.com/2009/08/28/the-use-of-history-by-philosophers/

12. Some historians of philosophy do, of course — Jorge Gracia comes to mind as an example, as do a number of people who do part of their work in medieval logic (e.g., Gyula Klima or Catarina Dutilh Novaes). I second Toulmin and Hacking.

13. In no particular order: John Beatty, Ken Waters, Mike Dietrich, Rob Skipper, Dick Burian, Michael Ruse, Lisa Gannett, Jim Griesemer, etc., etc. — i.e., a lot of people who do history and philosophy of biology.

    1. Without wishing to piss off 80% of my own profession, or any individuals in particular, I think the point is that some but not all of these individuals, most of whom are very influential upon me, have brought their philosophical standards to the history rather than vice versa. But I will say that I find Ken Waters and Jim Griesemer tend to take the history very seriously, not to imply that the others do not.

       1. And I can think of some historians who could use a little philosophy… whose way of “not doing philosophy” is to make assumptions without defending them. In other words, if you’re really going to do it right, you need to bring philosophy to your history and you need to bring your history to your philosophy. It’s a delicate balance to try to incorporate both. So, I have very little patience for the stones thrown in either direction, and I have even less patience for sweeping criticisms of the entire field.

       2. I should hope nobody thought my seeking examples of philosophy and history interacting in the right manner was a sweeping criticism of either field, Roberta. In fact, it rather implies the exact opposite.

          At worst, I was having a senior moment, and not recalling the obvious examples, of which we have had a number given in these comments. At best, I was merely asking for the question to be raised. I suspect the former is the right one.

14. Toulmin also should have occurred to me, although how much of his philosophical program is reliant upon his excellent history is moot (but I mentioned him to Lenny in the course of that discussion).

    And that is the point: how much of the philosophy relies upon actual, as opposed to reconstructed, history? Popper’s or Kuhn’s accounts of science bear little resemblance to actual science (and indeed if taken seriously I think both accounts would stop science dead in its tracks). Foucault brings his account to science rather than deriving it from the history of science (and I find his early work interesting, and relatively well founded in history, as in The order of things). What I want to know: who gets their philosophy of science out of the history of science?

    1. Funny, a lot of scientists think otherwise… they see in Popper or Kuhn many echoes of the work they do. And Kuhn, in particular, developed his views on the philosophy of science from studying the history of science. Of course, he could have gotten it wrong. Any of us can get things wrong. But to say that he doesn’t get his philosophy of science out of the history of science is simply false.

       1. (Not that the scientists own views are definitive on this point. But it is suggestive that Popper and Kuhn weren’t totally off base).

       2. It is my experience that when scientists appeal to Popper in particular, they manage to overlook that what they are trying to do scientifically is either ignored by Popper (like classification) or treated as irrelevant (like testability and verification, or discovery heuristics).

          I also think, but this is very much my own view, that Kuhn imposed his notion of incommensurable revolutions on the history, and did not derive it from it. I think he came to the history with Wittgenstein and various other philosophical notions, and found what he was looking for. His historical work is excellent, but I do not think he derived his thoeretical philosophy of science from it. For a start, none of the supposed revolutions look anything like what he claimed they would. Even the Copernican “Revolution” takes over 200 years by his own admission.

    2. What’s the difference between actual and reconstructed history? It’s not like the facts of history are there to be neutrally described. I’m not suggesting any kind of po-mo nonsense, just that the kind of teasing apart of concepts and focus on the reconstruction of thought processes that philosophers are good at seems essential to good history. I can’t imagine going in for a study of history and then, after that, trying to construct my philosophy. If Hacking counts as a good example of what you’re after, note that his historical investigations are premised on the view of history he gets in part from Foucault. So he’s in some sense gotten his history of science out of his philosophy of science.

       1. That is true, and a problem in historiography. However I am of the view that the past is not hidden from us by our present prejudices and viewpoints. We can recover the ideas of the past with sufficient accuracy that they can look and sound to us to be very foreign (I forst experienced this when I realised that the 8thC BCE Hebrew prophets had no resemblance whatsoever to the comfortable Protestant, indeed Christian, characterisation of modern theology. It is possible to understand others.

          Hacking does bring philosophy to history. That is inevitable, I suppose. But there are good ways to do that, and bad ways, and a bad way is to make your own philosophy override the philosophical ideas of the past. It doesn’t do to make Plato a Cambridge don. It doesn’t do to argue that someone is a precursor to another just because from a modern perspective they look similar. And it doesn’t do to say that the history should have gone one way, and we can safely ignore the fact that it went another as in the famous Lakatosian footnote. If you philosophy of [scientific] history claims that the sequence should have been A→B→C, and it is C→A→B, then your philosophy of history is wrong. You have to take the data of history seriously.

    3. Order of things is intresting, was thinking more of his use of the ship of fools for example.

15. I have a problem dealing with the relationship between philosophy and history as if either philosophy or history well-defined disciplines with more-or-less identifiable methodologies. It’s hard enough to solve the demarcation problem for the natural sciences. What the heck is philosophy over and beyond being a venerable word fought over by warring practices of thought?

    If you belong to a particular tradition, you have a chance to say something intelligible about the relationship between history and philosophy. For a certain sort of positivist, for example, the history of science is about the defeat of ignorance and the gradual accumulation of factual information while for somebody like Foucault or Hacking or maybe even Kuhn, what matters is defining what counted as synthetic a priori in a particular period and figuring out how these pieces of the constitution of particular sciences are modified or replaced.

    1. Whatever philosophy one has, and I reject the positivist staged history view, it must not require that the data of history are other than they are. Now it may be hard to find that out, but that doesn’t mean we cannot. And I think that the empirical content of philosophy, at least as it relates to grounded aspects of history and science , is fundamental to the credibility of the philosophy (sure, you can take a generally skeptical approach to data if you like, but when it comes to the relevance of philosophy explaining what we do manage to know, I think that is unhelpful.

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