This paper appeared last year in Marcel van Ackern (ed.), Proceedings of the British Academy 214: Philosophy and the Historical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 185-199; the British Academy would not permit it to be posted until a year after publication, which time period has now elapsed. Here is the abstract:
Instrumentalists think the history of philosophy is as relevant to philosophy as the history of physics is to physics: if past philosophical or physical theories are true, or help us get to the truth, then we should know about them, otherwise not. Skeptical instrumentalists think history fails on these counts, optimistic instrumentalists think it does not. By contrast “anti-philosophical” instrumentalists—like Marx, Nietszche, and Wittgenstein—are not simply skeptics, because the skeptics still believe there is something for philosophy to do, some knowledge it can produce, some truths it can reveal. The anti-philosophical philosophers think we should give up philosophy as traditionally conceived: the real lesson from the history of philosophy is that philosophy is “garbage,” or, as Nietzsche thought, disguised moral advocacy. For Nietzsche, this is the real lesson of the history of philosophy.
The discussion of Carnap's admiration for Nietzsche (in the course of his famous polemic against Heidegger) may interest a number of readers.
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