the road to me; the royal road to me; the road to a shared future (or how Soames is a Hegelian, and Michael Kremer a Skinnerian)

1. In 1969 Quentin Skinner published a famous article that promoted the idea that in doing history of philosophy (or political theory) we really encountered "alien" ways of answering philosophic questions. We find an echo of Skinner's view in Bernard Williams' famous advocacy that history of "philosophy that can help us in reviving a sense of strangeness or questionability about our own philosophical assumptions.” [To be sure, Williams' distinction between the history of ideas and history of philosophy is not Skinner's. I couldn't find an online copy of Williams' article.] Skinner didn't just deny that there are perennial questions in philosophy, but he insisted that there were only individual answers to individual questions. In fact, together with the writings of Foucault, Skinner is the locus classicus for what I have called the cult of contingency. (He believes it is a "general truth" that there are no "timeless concepts" in the history of philosophy or in describing our social institutions, although he allows this may not be so in mathematics.) Skinner's embrace of the cult of contingency is interesting because he also extracts from it a Socratic moral, that is, "history" provides a "lesson in self-knowledge," if not the Kantian message that "we must learn to do our thinking for ourselves."
2. Now in his paper, Skinner briefly discusses and dismisses an alternative view (which he associates with Hegel) that the best way to write history of philosophy is from the "present" which is, after all, the most highly evolved. Scott Soames' massive (2003) Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century heartily embraces that Hegelian perspective. In a forthcoming paper, drawing on some distinctions from the historian of mathematics, Ivor Grattan-Guinness (1990), Michael Kremer has adopted the phrase “a royal road to me” for that kind of presentist history "which aims to provide an “account of how a particular modern theory arose out of older theories instead of an account of those older theories in their own right,” thus confounding the questions “How did we get here?” and “What happened in the past?” (Kremer is quoting Grattan-Guinness, in part). Kremer goes on to to suggest that "philosophical history is always in some sense a “road to me,” but only becomes objectionable if it is treated as a “royal road to me.” Properly carried out, philosophical history will shape its practitioner philosophically." That is to say, in effect Kremer criticizes Soames for writing a history of his [and Kripke's] prejudice(s), or to put this more politely (and closer to Kremer's own words) Soames doesn't merely mis-characterize the past, in Soames' approach we can't be surprised by the past (Kremer quotes Williams on this point). Now, Kremer's point isn't to bemoan that we forgo on an exciting emotion by following in Soames' footsteps. Rather his point is that Soames' self-congratulatory history of progress (the royal road to me) is not properly a philosophic activity. As opposed to Soames style "royal road to me," Kremer embraces "untimely" history of philosophy (quoting Williams, who is echoing Nietzsche) that is a kind of "road to me." In particular, untimely history of philosophy either upends present philosophy (this is why surprise matters so much to Williams) or makes the past useful to one's present (by making one revise/improve one's philosophic orientation/doctrine, etc).

3. A brief interlude. The "royal road to me" can produce very illuminating (or deviously misleading) history of philosophy in, say, in the hands of Leibniz or Hume. My favorite bit of royal road to me history of philosophy is Quine's little history at the start of "epistemology naturalized." It draws an interesting distinction, and then tells a surprising, yet self-serving story about it. (How many people have read or even heard of Alexander Bryan Johnson???) One can distinguish philosophic royalty from philosophic royal imposters by the character of how they portray the road to them: we should contrast a road to me that is merely the road of present philosophic prejudice (couched in terms of "progress") and the Royal road to me, which announces how an original philosopher sees the world (and then one can also be more forgiving about historical omissions). A useful proxy is to what degree the royal road induces fruitful wonder, or surprise (and, thus, starts enquiry).

4. I find Michael Kremer's defense of philosophic history as a species of philosophy very congenial. It's not just that the product of philosophic history (Kremer's felicitous term) is philosophical for him, but so is the activity. Philosophical history just is philosophy. In particular, Kremer's philosophical scholar gets transformed by the practice of history. (It is no surprise that Skinner and Kremer acknowledge Wittgensteinian roots to their argument.) Even so, I offer some friendly amendments to Kremer (and not just because I defend the royal road to me as a live option within philosophic history.)

There are three connected contrasts that I wish to draw:

• First, I don't want to deny that that the past can be strange or surprising initially. If we let the past be "alien"/surprising/strange, it can never be a serious or even threatening conversation partner. So, we should also be willing to scratch beyond the surface, and try to locate similarities. 
• Second, as I have argued on NewAPPS, one of the tasks of the philosophical historian is to coin concepts that make shared horizons between the past and us possible. (I believe these concepts can be rooted in the past and in doing so can create shared meaning possible.) 
• In particular, and third, these concepts must make a shared future possible for us and our ('new') past--it is a historical-philosophic fact that many of the best philosophers of the past have coined concepts that our present activities articulate and, in doing so, help generate our futures (and not just the present).