Against History

In my previous two posts, I attacked Continental philosophy and Analytic philosophy, respectively. But some philosophers remain unoffended, so now it’s time for me to attack the third main thing that people do in philosophy departments: the history of philosophy. I don’t understand why we have history of philosophy. I’ve taken several courses in history of philosophy, and listened to many lectures on it over the years, and occasionally I have raised this question, but no one has ever told me why we have this field.

1. What Is History of Philosophy?

Don’t get me wrong. I understand why we read historical figures, and why we cover them in classes — because the famous philosophers of the past are usually interesting, and they gave canonical formulations of very important views that are often still under discussion today. They also tended to have a breadth of scope and a boldness missing from most contemporary work.

What I don’t understand is why we have history of philosophy as a field of academic research. For those who don’t know, philosophers in the English-speaking world have whole careers devoted to researching a particular period in the history of philosophy (almost always within Western philosophy), and sometimes just a single philosopher.

What are these scholars trying to find out? Are they looking for more writings that have been lost or forgotten? Are they trying to trace the historical roots of particular ideas and how they developed over the ages? Or are they perhaps trying to figure out whether particular theories held by historical figures were true or false?

No, not really. Not any of those things. Scholarship in the history of philosophy is mainly like this: there are certain books that we have had for a long time, by a certain list of canonical major figures in philosophy. You read the books of a particular philosopher. Then you pick a particular passage in one of the books, and you argue with other people about what that passage means. In making your arguments, you cite other things the philosopher said. You also try to claim that your interpretation is “more charitable” than some rival interpretation, because it attributes fewer errors, or less egregious errors, to the great figure.

What you most hope to do is come up with some startlingly new way of interpreting the great philosopher’s words, one that no one thought of before but that turns out to be surprisingly defensible. It’s especially fun to deny that the philosopher said one of the main things that he’s known for saying. For instance, wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow argue that Kant was really a consequentialist?*

*Kant might actually be a consequentialist — just a weird kind of consequentialist, who thinks that a good will is lexically superior to (of infinitely greater value than) any mere object of inclination.

2. History of Philosophy Isn’t History or Philosophy

Now, let’s suppose that you have a really good historian of philosophy, who does a really great piece of work by the standards of the field, which also is completely correct and persuasive. What is the most that can have been accomplished?

Answer: “Now we know what philosopher P meant by utterance U.” Before that, maybe some people thought that U meant X; now we know that it meant Y.

This is of no philosophical import. We still don’t know whether X or Y is true. You might think that, because the great philosopher thought Y, this is at least some evidence for Y. But that would be extremely weak evidence (almost all of the major doctrines of the major philosophers are false). It would also be a crazy way of going about investigating the issue. It would be much better to just directly consider what philosophical reasons there are for believing Y.

It is also of minimal historical import. “What thoughts were occurring in the mind of this specific person, when he wrote this specific passage?” is technically a historical question. But it is a trivial historical question, unrelated to understanding any of the major events in history. It’s not as if, for example, we’re going to understand why Rome fell, if only we get the right interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Gamma.

Even when it comes to purely intellectual history, what is historically important is how Aristotle was understood by the people who read him, whether or not what they understood was what Aristotle truly meant.

Historians of philosophy, in brief, are expending a great deal of intellectual energy on questions that do not matter.

You might ask: What’s wrong with that? At least the historians seem to like what they’re doing, so it’s interesting enough to them. True. But intelligent people are a scarce resource in society. It’s fine for you to use your brainpower on questions that don’t matter. But the rest of society has no reason to pay you for doing that, when there are important questions that society would benefit from having more brainpower devoted to.

3. Why Do We Have History of Philosophy?

Why, then, does this field of academic research exist?

Because research-oriented philosophy departments (like all philosophy departments) have courses in the history of philosophy. When they hire someone to teach these courses, they think they have to hire someone who specializes in history of philosophy. That person will also be expected to do research in addition to teaching, since they are at a research school. So they do the stuff I described above.

A solution: You don’t actually need a historian to teach history of philosophy. Any ordinary philosopher can teach history of philosophy, because any ordinary philosopher can read a few major works of the given historical figure, and explain them well enough for undergraduate students. The more complicated, subtle interpretive questions that scholars in history of philosophy debate are not suitable for undergraduate courses. Scholars in history might even be worse at teaching it than ordinary philosophers, since the history specialists are more likely to confuse students by talking over their heads and getting lost in small interpretive details.

So, just hire any philosopher.

4. When History Is Bad for You

The Problem with Religious Texts

Being too focused on history of philosophy is bad for your mind, in something like the way that being overly religious can be bad for your mind.

Religious people are sometimes prevented from looking at and understanding the real world, because of their focus on a religious text. If you take the Bible, the Koran, etc., as a sacred text, then you might try to understand the whole world in terms of it, and thus have an overly narrow perspective. There is also a good chance that the book contains errors or misleading passages, and that the religious person will arrive at false beliefs by trying to rationalize those errors.

Folie a Deux

The great texts in the history of philosophy are not treated quite like religious texts. But they aren’t treated entirely unlike religious texts. Historians commonly treat their chosen historical figures with more respect and deference than you would treat any contemporary figure, and probably more than you should treat any human being. They try everything in their power to avoid admitting that the great philosopher was wrong or confused about a major philosophical point.

Almost all philosophers are mostly wrong. But if you spend too much time studying a particular philosopher, you get drawn into a sort of folie a deux, in which you start to perceive the world in terms of that philosopher’s ideas. Most historians of philosophy appear to believe that the philosopher they study was basically right (though they do not argue for this in their work, which, as noted above, focuses instead on exegesis).

Prima facie, it’s really unlikely that you should be a follower of some philosopher of the distant past (say, over 200 years ago). One reason is that human knowledge as a whole was in a completely different state two hundred and more years ago. Science scarcely existed when most great philosophers wrote. Even philosophy has developed a great deal in the last two centuries. Contemporary philosophers have the advantage of access to earlier philosophers’ work, as well as more rigorous training, and fruitful interactions with a very large, diverse, and active group of other professional philosophers.

Now, if your philosophy basically corresponds to that of some philosopher who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, then you’re basically saying that none of the vast expansion in human knowledge that has occurred since then, nor any of the work done by philosophers themselves in the past couple of centuries, is philosophically important. None of that has taken us significantly farther, when it comes to philosophical questions, than some guy who lived in prescientific times.

I think that’s super-unlikely.

Please Don’t Be an Aristotelian

To give one important example, there are people today who are followers of Aristotle. I think that’s crazy. If Aristotle lived today, there is no way that he would be an Aristotelian. If we brought him through time to the present day, he would swiftly start learning modern science, whereupon he would throw out his outdated worldview, and he’d probably laugh at the modern Aristotelians.

Aristotle might have been the greatest thinker of all time. But being a great thinker, even the greatest, is not as important as having access to the accumulated human knowledge of the last 2,000 years. This is why the work of much less-great thinkers who are born today is more likely to be correct than the work of Aristotle. Aristotle’s philosophical method is largely about reconciling the opinions of the many and the wise (the endoxa). But of course, those would be the opinions of the people of his day — who knew next to nothing.

To be a little more specific, Aristotle’s philosophy is shot through with teleology. Things are supposed to have built-in goals or functions — not just conscious beings and artefacts, but everything in nature. This is just a completely false conception of the world. It’s not a dumb thing to think if you’re living 2,000 years ago. But we now have a vast body of detailed and rigorously tested scientific explanations of all manner of natural phenomena. Natural teleology — purposes or ‘functions’ that exist in nature apart from any conscious being’s desires — contributes nothing to any of them.*

*I know that someone is now going to post a comment claiming that natural functions appear in biology. But evolutionary functions are not equivalent to Aristotelian teloi. All biological phenomena are explicable by mechanistic causation.

So if you’re still talking about natural functions, I think that’s kind of like a doctor who’s still worrying about imbalances of the four bodily humors.

Look Outside the Text

Part of the attraction of doing history of philosophy, I believe, is its insularity: one can simply dwell entirely within the world of Philosopher A’s texts. You can read all of those texts, and you can know that there will never be any more, since the philosopher is now dead. (Though, admittedly, there will be more secondary literature.)

If you’re a regular philosopher, you have to worry about objections and evidence that could come from anywhere. Some philosopher could devise a completely new argument that you have to address. Some scientific development (not even a development in your own field!) could cast doubt on one of your theories (unless, of course, you have carefully defined the questions you talk about so that they are ‘purely conceptual’; see previous post).

If you’re a historian, you don’t have to worry about all that, because you’re not arguing that any philosophical thesis is true. You’re just saying that some philosophical thesis is supported by the texts. That makes life simpler and easier.

But that is also why history of philosophy is bad for you. Because people actually should think about the big questions of philosophy. And when we think about them, we need to do so in a way that is open to the many different considerations that are relevant to the truth.

We should think, for example, about what is the right thing to do, not what Kant said was the right thing to do; we should think about what is real, not what Plato said was real.

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Michael Huemer

Michael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is the author of more than seventy academic articles in epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, and political philosophy, as well as six amazing books that you should immediately buy.

31 thoughts on “Against History”

  1. > Prima facie, it’s really unlikely that you should be a follower of some philosopher of the distant past (say, over 200 years ago).

    Do you also extend this to philosophies? It seems that some like Stoicism have a lot to offer and much more than many modern philosophies (although Stoicism is quite incomplete and I meld it with Intuitionism).

    1. Apparently, we owe modernity to the philosophy of Epicurus; according to the 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction book: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Professor Stephen Greenblatt. So, I’d have to recommend reading Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things over Marcus Aurelius 😛

  2. Try this: You don’t actually need a philosopher to teach philosophy. Any ordinary person can teach philosophy, because any ordinary person can read a few major works of the given philosopher, and explain them well enough for undergraduate students. The more complicated, subtle interpretive questions that philosophers debate are not suitable for undergraduate courses.

    1. Non-philosophers lack the capacity to have a general ability to understand what they are reading well enough to teach even its basic points. Give Naming and Necessity, or On the Plurality of Worlds, or any number of other works to, say, your average English professor, and they will have no idea what the hell is going on. This isn’t true of philosophers outside an area reading works in other areas they don’t specialize in. The skill set required of all philosophers makes us capable of teaching undergraduates most classes if we take a little time to read up on the area. Certain 400 level courses and certainly graduate courses require specialized training. Standard undergrad courses really don’t, though.

      1. “Non-philosophers lack the capacity to have a general ability to understand what they are reading well enough to teach even its basic points.” – You don’t seem to think very highly of non-philosophers:)

        On a more serious note: I doubt that many philosophers have a good grasp even of the so-called classics (unless they had some proper training). Read, say, Jerry Fodor’s “Hume Variations”, and you’ll see a really talented thinker fail miserably at understanding Hume’s basic points.

        As for teaching skills, you’d indeed assume that academics should be “capable of teaching undergraduates most classes if we take a little time to read up on the area”. But in my experience, academic teachers hardly undergo any proper teacher training. “Reading up” doesn’t automatically turn anyone into a good teacher. So even if you think you “get” a classic text well enough to drone on about it, that doesn’t entail any ability in teaching undergraduates.

        1. When it comes to the more technical knowledge, I prefer to learn from teaching-stream professors. But I don’t think it’s wrong to suggest that major advances in most disciplines are generally driven by the tenure-track professors.

        2. If actually you’ve observed “ordinary” people learning philosophy you’d have a lower expectation of their philosophical abilities.
          Do you deny that a certain aptitude is selected for—and nurtured—by persisting with training in philosophy?

        3. “Read, say, Jerry Fodor’s “Hume Variations”, and you’ll see a really talented thinker fail miserably at understanding Hume’s basic points.” – well, thats can be true only in case that we have an objective and verifiable spreadsheet of his main point. In any other case, its open to discuss and interpretation. As once was written – “philosophy isn’t about discovery, but a creation and assembly”.
          But i agree, that to properly handle and manage thoughts, you need to practice a lot. And ewen if you teach philosophy, you need a mental ability to recreate an assembly process of that particular idea, that you are lecturing about. And without proper training, you will fail miserably.

      2. Who cares whether you get it right? Why should explanations and interpretations of texts be ‘accurate’ in the first place?

        Just do whatever and be hand-wavy when it comes to details and inconsistencies in interpretation.

        After all, if you were to take accuracy and depth serious, you’d end up having to hire historians of philosophy! Shudder…

        Also, as we all know, the REAL smart people are the physicists, chemists, and neuroscientists. Why not let them teach philosophy in the first place? Philosophers are a superfluous lot, and an unpleasant one at that.

        In fact, why even read and study these books you mentioned? You don’t need philosophy to build an iPhone, nuclear bomb, late-stage capitalist society, or to spy on your citizens. Philosophy is about as useful as its history.

        1. Regarding competency, I once heard a statistician share his analysis of the botched “statistical expert” testimonies – made by a physician incompetent in statistical sciences – at some trial which led to the wrongful conviction of innocent people; this was to urge caution against dishonest and arrogant overextension of personal competencies.

          Bertrand Russell has shared that science is limited in what answers it can tell us, that those questions science cannot answer are contested by philosophy and religion; with philosophy in the middle.

          Professor Huemer has written previously about Professional vs. Amateur philosophy.

          I prefer professional philosophy to provide solutions to those answers science cannot yet or may never answer.

        2. If we care about accuracy, I’m not sure people whose publication opportunities require them to cleverly misinterpret people so they can say something new are the best source. People who are happy to let the author mean what they seem to be saying are more likely to be reliable. People who are happy to acknowledge that even really smart people often say stupid things, and therefore don’t feel the need to pretend they must have been saying something else are even better.

        3. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water!

          Which would you rather have; a “correct” interpretation that’s uninsightful or irrelevant to contemporary life and thought.. or a misreading that ends up enriching your pursuit of a philosophical problem? In other words, is the “accuracy and depth” you value a correspondence with a singular mind long dead or with the community of explorers on the current frontiers?

  3. “But intelligent people are a scarce resource in society.”

    Are they? Is this assertion related to an actual stat? Perhaps we could use some more *educated* people but is *intelligence* really scarce amongst humans? Aren’t most people of average intelligence? And isn’t that good enough for our purposes?

    “It’s fine for you to use your brainpower on questions that don’t matter. But the rest of society has no reason to pay you for doing that, when there are important questions that society would benefit from having more brainpower devoted to.”

    I do agree that brainpower can be wasted, and I agree with you that history of philosophy could be an example of such waste, but then I would also say the same thing about metaphysics and epistemology. I like this blog and your assertive take-downs of “most of philosophy” and so I’d love to see your similar treatment of epistemology, or your defence of it being part of the minority good of philosophy, if that’s your view.

    I tend to consider ethics/aesthetics/meaning as being the only area pf philosophy that tackles the questions that really matter to human flourishing. How shall we live well? I don’t see how epistemology can help us with that but correct me if you think otherwise. 



    As for Aristotle, I don’t believe that nature intended to make things with purpose but it happened anyway. I think you were born to be a philosopher, and Ken Burns was born to make documentaries, and I grew up with a few guys who were definitely born to be in the military (born warriors). I have no problem characterizing this as teleology in nature even though no conscious entity planned it. Nature seems to make personality types that have a division of labour type of functionality in human tribes. I was definitely not born to be a warrior or an auto-mechanic or a nurse but I thank nature that some people were.

    Keep up the good work. I am loving this blog. I just found it last week and I scrolled through and read most of the previous articles. I will probably buy and read some of your books at some point. My back-log is so huge right now. Which book would you recommend first?

    1. Thx. My most popular book is _The Problem of Political Authority_. Also, the _Dialogues on Ethical Vegetarianism_ are very readable and ethically important (also affordable, compared to my other books).

      Re epistemology: A fair amount of it has the problems mentioned in my post on analytic philosophy. However, the field can and should help us to form more rational beliefs, which I think highly valuable.

      Re intelligence: it depends on what you’re doing, but it looks like an increasing number of jobs in our society require intelligence, and merely average people will be bad at them. E.g., an average-intelligence person cannot provide satisfactory technical support.

  4. I agree with what you say here, to a certain extent. But I think you underestimate the extent to which a discipline like philosophy is a collective enterprise, involving a division of labour. Not everything that everyone does had to immediately speak to meaningful questions to be valuable.

    For instance, one way that the history of philosophy could be useful is this: if I’m trying to solve some meaningful problem in philosophy, it’s probably important what the implications of my view are to other areas of philosophy. If my solution to a particular problem commits me to some totally implausible view in another area, then this is presumably a mark against it. However, it may not be immediately obvious that this is the case. One benefit of history of philosophy, then, is the systematisation of thought. If I want to start thinking about what certain assumptions commit me to more widely, I can look at what historians of philosophy have said about other philosophers who have made similar assumptions. They’re likely to do a far better job than I at tracing those implications, since this work is their bread and butter.

    Do I think that history of philosophy is an end in itself? No, of course not. Would I want to spend time on it myself? Not really (not least because I think it relies on a slightly different skill set than philosophers who take a problem-based approach). But do I think it therefore has no value? No. I’m glad SOMEONE is doing it, so that I don’t have to.

    I feel much the same way about a lot of social science. Much is nothing more than the collection of data to no purpose. But I’m glad someone is collecting that data, so that I can use it if I need to, without having to collect it myself (because I would not enjoy it, and would probably be bad at it).

  5. That’s a very good question that we should have an (obvious) answer to, but we don’t.
    I think it may be that we do not regard philosophy as simply a search for truth. We also see it — or at least see the great works of philosophy — as literary works that deserve to be interpreted and reinterpreted, the way English professors might interpret and reinterpret Shakespeare.

    Poet and English professor emeritus William Wilborn told me once that he thought philosophers read literature as philosophy and that this is not how literature is meant to be read. I should have said in response that this may be true but that it is also true that they sometimes read philosophy as literature. So it all balances out.

  6. There are arguments and positions we wouldn’t know existed if not for the work of some historians — take Ripstein on Kant, for example. Those arguments and positions could’ve been discovered independently of the historical scholarship, but what are the odds?

  7. You say

    (1) “almost all of the major doctrines of the major philosophers are false”

    and

    (2) that a piece of historical work, however accomplished by the standards of the field, accomplishes nothing of philosophical import.

    But (1) has philosophical import — it’s decent evidence for some sort of skepticism about philosophical knowledge — and it rests directly on evidence from historical work: you don’t know that most major philosophers’ doctrines are wrong unless you know what most major philosophers’ doctrines are; and you don’t know that without high-quality historical work.

    It’s not obvious how you can deny that historical work has philosophical import when it’s necessary for the assessment of one of your philosophically important claims.

  8. Hegel thought somewhat as Dr Huemer said that just knowing what people thought [history of Philosophy courses] is not worth anything. But Hegel also thought that philosophy makes progress. This he thought happens by a “give and take” kind of conversation along the lines you would see Socrates do. Except Hegel expanded Socrates to say that that same process happens even after Socrates.

  9. Ancient Greeks and Romans at least had no concept that corresponds to our concept of consciousness. Likewise, it’s hard to find any proper analogue to ‘free will’ before later Hellenistic Stoics as it is used in contemporary debates about free will. So maybe these problems–the hard problem of consciousness, the puzzles about free will–are problems in the way we conceptualize the world, and so insight into these problems is more likely to come from careful conceptual genealogy. Not saying that’s true, but it’s plausible enough to deserve a research program. Most ‘history of philosophy,’ when done well, is engaged in this sort of research, I think.

  10. In Physics things tend towards a minimum energy level. Sometimes like in optics they tend towards a max energy level. But in any case they seem to know what they want to do.

    In terms of telos in evolution, it clear that that is as Dr Huemer said that that is not how evolution works. But it is hard to eliminate telos from individual animals or from human beings. In fact in trying to eliminate the concept of telos from people seems to be the reason that psychology has no concept of human psychology.

  11. I could be wrong, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Huemer thought, not only that almost all doctrines of almost all historically important figures are false, but also that they are obviously so, and that the arguments for them are not only unsound, but obviously so. In other words, if someone were around today making arguments like Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Descartes, Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Aquinas, Mill, etc., did, not only would we not be convinced, but we would also think him a very bad philosopher. Call the conjunction of this pair of views the “great philosophers are not great” (GPANG) view.

    If Huemer endorses GPANG, then it dovetails nicely with his work on moral realism, where he thinks that it’s extremely hard to arrive at liberalism, despite how obvious its doctrines seem to many of us nowadays. It also seems to have important implications for the limitations of any individual philosopher, and the admiration we should have for those philosophers who managed to add their stones to the edifice of liberalism.

    Of course, I think there’s only about a 50% chance that Huemer endorses GPANG. I certainly don’t. But it would have interesting consequences if true!

    1. lmao this person just did a history of philosophy post about the man who just wrote an article about his utter disdain for history of philosophy.

  12. I get the provocative tone, and I agree with some of the points you make. The most exegetically oriented history of philosophy resembles the way religious people assume the authorial nature of supposedly sacred texts. History of philosophy journals do not typically allow contributors to criticize authorial figures, but their work is treated with (too) much respect. I think focusing more on topics instead of figures could remedy some of this.

    What you say about truth; I guess history of philosophy is about exploring different ways of thinking. You seem confident that systematic contemporary philosophy gets the truth. How is this done? What kind of criteria a philosophical theory needs to satisfy in order to be true? In case of various philosophical positions, how do you know which one of them is right? Can there be more than one right philosophy? Why are newer philosophies true and older philosophies false?

    I also do not see why expertise in history is somehow different from other subdisciplines within philosophy. A good teacher sure has some research background in the topic they are teaching.

  13. I came across this post on The Browser and sent it to a philosopher friend who turns out be have been one of Michael Huemer’s professors. His reply:

    “The key paragraph for me is:

    ‘Now, if your philosophy basically corresponds to that of some philosopher who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago, then you’re basically saying that none of the vast expansion in human knowledge that has occurred since then, nor any of the work done by philosophers themselves in the past couple of centuries, is philosophically important. None of that has taken us significantly farther, when it comes to philosophical questions, than some guy who lived in prescientific times.

    I think that’s super-unlikely.’

    It could, of course, be super-likely, if a big part of what philosophy has traditionally been concerned with is not knowledge in the sense that Mike understands it.

  14. i like to study the history of philosophy because i think it’s cool and funny (i usually treat philosophy as a type of joke, toy or second hand literature). moreover, a talented writer could sure publish some great short stories on that subject, from a parodical point of view (see Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth and J. D. Salinger, for example). on the other hand, i’d feel really bad if i had to call myself a philosopher. that sounds so anachronic to me! i mean, what can you actually do with words besides poetry? even scientists seem to use them as a kind of ladder. it is the philosopher who insists on looking for hidden meanings or artificial solutions (“So Plato was wrong after all! Who could have imagined it!”). the world is just the world, right? i don’t see any philosophical problem on it (i. e., “Das Rätsel gibt es nicht.”). teehee….

    sorry for writing such a bad reply. english isn’t my main language. i’m just a poor japanese woman living in brazil, even though i can already read many european languages and that makes me feel really happy :)))))

    bye!!

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