Ancient philosophy, however, is a philosophical way of engaging with these texts; that is what distinguishes it from other ways of studying them. And philosophy develops differently at different times, so we should reasonably expect the state of ancient philosophy to reflect its engagement with philosophy.--Julia Annas "Ancient Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century," (25).
Summer is arriving so it's time (despite two more rounds of grading ahead and too many deadlines) to read around a bit. When I first encountered the passage above at the start of Professor Annas' self-congratulatory essay -- "engagement with analytical philosophy restored the study of ancient philosophy to philosophical vigour" (41) --, I was surprised because I thought it meant that Annas was going to historicize the practice of "ancient philosophy" (by which she means the philosophical, analytical engagement with folk like Plato, Aristotle, and others). The surprise following from the fact that I would not expect her to have an interest in such an enterprise. (The rest of the essay suggests, she doesn't really, although she admits "we do well to be aware of" our own "philosophical assumptions and methodological preferences." (42))
One might also read the passage above as reflecting on the danger that fashions in contemporary philosophy are echoed (perhaps with some delay to let these fashions be reflected in graduate curricula) in the interpretation of past thinkers. (While researching my dissertation I noticed that Ayer gives us a Hume as seen from Vienna; Garrett gives us a post-Quine-ean Hume; it made me wonder if my Chicago Hume would be a funny mixture of Wittgenstein and Kant.) Indeed this is what she has in mind (e.g., p. 27). Now, one might think that once such a diagnosis is offered one is well down the road of debunking the enterprise so diagnosed. While there are glimpses of a debunking attitude ("we can now see that a great of the time and fuss [about "the 'Third Man'"--ES] was off the point" (31; [undergraduates could always see it and those silly enough to say so would be told they lacked rigor]), it's not the main point of Annas' narrative of "progress" (26ff.). Rather, she celebrates the hard-won autonomy of "ancient philosophy" from present concern:
"Ancient Philosophy has increased in self-confidence and (yes) in self-esteem. We no longer defer to the interests of ahistorically minded philosophers, or take the concerns of late twentieth-century analytical philosophy to be unquestioned presuppositions of any properly philosophical enquiry." (40)
To paraphrase loosely: ancient philosophy has become a professional enterprise with its own questions and interests on equal footing with other philosophical enterprises within the division of intellectual labor within analytical philosophy (characterized as "the concern...for precision and rigour in argument," (4o)). My editorial partners, Mogens Lærke and Justin Smith, argue for a similar autonomous stance of early modern philosophy (although Lærke and Smith have very different ideas about proper methodology from each other and from Annas).Now, one need not be Derrida to note that Professor Annas' account implies that not so long ago ancient philosophers working within analytic philosophy (a) lacked "self-confidence and (yes) self-esteem" and (b) did allow the concerns of their peers "to be unquestioned presuppositions of any properly philosophical enquiry." Indeed, on (b) earlier in the piece we find the following footnote: "it is also true, though that the early years of analytical argument with ancient philosophers saw a lot of now fortunately forgotten journal articles in which Plato and Aristotle were dismissed in a couple of pages for having committed the 'naturalistic fallacy' or the like." (28 n. 3)
Unfortunately, for those of us with an interest in the history of the history of philosophy, the anxiety that once fueled (a) is not explored more fully in Annas' essay. It is, however, revealed by the incessant reminder of the refrain of "rigour in argument" said to be characteristic of "analytical philosophy" (e.g., 33, 34, 40, 41, 42) coupled with the "vigour" noted above (Brian Leiter's "introduction" echoes this language of vigour in his praise for the "valuable legacy of the "analytical takeover" of Continental scholarship over the past quarter century" (16)). But one need not look far below the surface to see the source of the anxiety: "ancient philosophy got taken up into the mainstream of analytical philosophy at the latter's most ahistorical point," (28; this is a "general irony," she says without a hint of Kierkegaard.)
So, ancient philosophy had to justify its historical seat at the professional, mainstream analytical philosophy table by emphasizing that it, too, was genuinely (analytically) philosophical (i.e., with "rigourous training" (28)). Unfortunately, Annas never explores the personal or intellectual costs associated with such anxiety. Even so, one of the most disarming moments in Annas' piece is the footnote (5) that she adds to her claim that: "Taking ancient philosophy up into the mainstream of analytical philosophy was a tremendous catalyst. It produced brilliant work like the articles of Gwilym Owen." (28; I have always been bored to death by Owen.) The disarming footnote reads: "Owen's work, difficult and densely argumentative, has not survived as well; as has that of easier and more accessible authors." (28 n.5 [no word of Owen's obsession with the "Third Man," which Aristotle and Plato are made to fit!].
Now, I have to admit that if I were working in ancient philosophy I would react with alarm to Professor Annas' celebratory claim that ancient philosophy is now an autonomous enterprise with its own questions that "shares little of the assumptions and priorities of non-historical analytical philosophy" (40), especially if true. For this diagnosis might mean that the now autonomous practice of ancient philosophy is simply irrelevant to present philosophy; such irrelevance might be the necessary condition for the elimination of ancient philosophy in serious graduate programs (or be relegated to the status of, say, aesthetics in the 1980s--a niche discipline dispensable to 'core' programs).
But, I want to extract a more hopeful point: twice in her paper Annas reminds us of the fact that "ancient philosophy can feed back into the mainstream" (4o; in context she is describing the revival of so-called virtue-theory in ethics, but earlier (34) she praises the impact of Martha Nussbaum's work on love and friendship in similar fashion). Now, this feeding back is really an understatement; for as Annas makes clear, the "mainstream" is transformed because topics deemed not worthy of attention in the present are made to appear (when handled rigorously in the context of ancient philosophy) as philosophically interesting. This is a far more exhilarating possibility: by studying the past we can transform the philosophical future (recall this).
Of course, if the previous paragraph is right then there is no reason to expect that such a transformation respects our current conception of philosophy. This is why Professor Annas is mistaken in the idea that "history of philosophy is of its nature a hybrid and impure activity. We are not doing 'pure' analytical philosophy, but we are not just doing history either." (42) I have some sympathy for hybrid activities. Even so, this 'hybrid' conception of the history of philosophy is not a timeless feature of doing history of philosophy--rather it is a consequence of not fully embracing the transformative potential inherent in the history of philosophy.
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