MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM APRIL 10 TO ENCOURAGE MORE DISCUSSION
Following up on our earlier discussion of the Garber/Schneewind arguments about the place of history of philosophy, Jason Stanley remarks:
[T]his volume [the 100th anniversary issue of Mind on Russell's "On Denoting"] is good evidence of the falsity of the claim that there is a serious division between historians of philosophy and (for lack of a convenient label) those who advance philosophical conclusions with no historical premises. It is obvious that a Nietzsche scholar is a historian of philosophy. Since Frege and Russell's major contributions occurred around the same time period and slightly after, it should be obvious that Frege and Russell scholars are also historians.
I wouldn't want to quarrel about whether history of analytic philosophy is history of philosophy: in some perfectly familiar senses of history (such as, "studying the ideas of folks who are dead") it surely is. But history of analytic philosophy is also very different from much historical work in philosophy, since its subject-matter is on a recognizable continuum with today's philosophical issues, and much closer on that continuum than, say, Kant's transcendental idealism, Nietzsche's genealogy of morality, or Plato's theory of knowledge. Recall that central to the Garber/Schneewind rationale for history of philosophy was that "[w]hat properly and fully contextualized study of the past can do is to show us the many different things philosophers were doing in working on the problems we take as central." Studying Frege and Russell, while a worthy topic for historical scholarship, doesn't show us ways of doing philosophy that are very different from those that are now dominant in English-speaking universities. And thus the fact that there is such historical scholarship really doesn't establish that there aren't "serious divisions" between philosophical problem-solvers and historians of philosophy.
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