Professional History of Philosophy: Why Not?

I sometimes wonder if everything I think is a reaction to Eric Schliesser. But here we go again. In a recent post, Eric asks why we have professional history of philosophy. I had myself given some thought to this question after reading Marilyn Adams's evocative Dewey Lecture.

In his less conciliatory moods, Eric says, he thinks that though there are four approaches to HoP, only two are properly philosophical:

(1) You can take it as "a store-house of potentially promising" positions, or as "a cautionary . . . tale of error."

Or

(2) You can take it that philosophy is just the history of philosophy, an "activity that understands and questions itself."

Personally, I take a slightly different position: the history of philosophy engages me only if it is "just"  philosophy. (Please note that I do not mean this as a notational variant of 2, above.)

When one is young, one philosophizes through others. Some take up the big figures of their own time—Tim Williamson, David Lewis, etc.—and engage with Reality on their terms. Others take up the big figures of the past. I am thinking of this as a way of doing philosophy when one is either too young or not brilliant enough to do it for oneself. When I came out of graduate school, I would have liked to think about non-contradiction. But I didn't have the courage/the brains. Some in this position took up or opposed the dialethism of Graham Priest. I decided that I would discuss Aristotle. Those others were "philosophers"; I was a "historian of philosophy". All of us were vicarious.

That young man's motive for doing history of philosophy treated it as a proxy for philosophy. As such, it was not professional history of philosophy, which aims to be historically accurate (however that gets operationalized). But the attitude was essentially the one that Gareth Evans takes in his brilliant paper on Molyneux's question. Having stated one position (which it would be proper, but un-Professional, to attribute to Descartes) Evans says: "The opposing position is essentially that advanced by Berkeley . . . though I shall call its proponent 'B' so as to allow him to deviate a little from the historical Berkeley." In other words: I don't really care what Berkeley said, since I want to deal with the best position of the Berkeley ilk.

My question is this. Why would a philosopher do history of philosophy if she wasn't interested in the "best position" of various ilks? Why would a philosopher do "professional" history of philosophy?

Now, this is not to deny that PHP has a vital role. When one reads Julia Annas or Margaret Wilson or Michael Friedman one thinks: Gee that's really interesting. Could Aristotle or Descartes or Kant really have thought that? (I am still haunted in just that way by a talk that I once heard Lisa Shapiro give about Descartes.)

And then one thinks: Oh who cares? It's so interesting that's it's worth tackling on its own. But, no doubt, it gives the question a certain beautiful frisson that Kant could have held it.