With apologies for the Delphic headline . . . TypePad doesn't allow italics. The question is this: shouldn't the history of philosophy be the study of philosophical content in historical texts? Should it be the study of something else? And really, I don't care whether you are an analytic philosopher or something else. The question remains: shouldn't the history of philosophy for you be concerned with what you find interesting in old texts?
Eric is alarmed by Julia Annas's notoriously provocative article on the state of ancient philosophy. Annas recounts how in the nineteen fifties and sixties, pre-Socratic philosophers such as Parmenides and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle (and in the seventies, the Hellenistic philosophers) began to be treated as "equal partners in philosophical debate," with the result that "For some time it has been taken for granted, in the major philosophical departments, that ancient philosophy is part of philosophy."But, she records, later scholars turned away from the ahistorical stance.
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.
Fortunately, things are not so bad. For it is a crucial juncture in Annas's narrative to record the broadening of interests that resulted from the attention paid to ancient texts: the investigation of love and friendship, virtue ethics, the disinterment of the sceptical tropes and the sceptical way of life, the rediscovery of "grounding," the revivification of functionalism and immanent teleology, renewed interest in essence, and so on. (Annas was herself an important figure in many of these new turns.)
Philosophy marches in a much larger parade ground now than it did in the sixties, and ancient philosophy has contributed to this (as has inter-disciplinary philosophy, generally speaking). Nonetheless, Eric's worry is justified: why would philosophy departments support history that doesn't advance philosophical understanding (whether or not that understanding is analytic in nature)?
Annas's article strikes two discordant notes, though. The first is that she dismisses the close analytic scrutiny of certain ancient texts. (This is what I found most compelling about ancient philosophy when I was writing about it. When it abated, I thought it was time to take my leave.) For example, she dismisses the Vlastos-inspired feeding frenzy regarding the Third Man Argument: "a great deal of the time and fuss was off the point," she says (and Eric agrees).
Well, I am shocked. For whatever you might think was the upshot of the Third Man in Plato, the discussion of it from Gregory Vlastos through Marc Cohen and on to Gail Fine and others was metaphysically rich and fruitful. It showed that Plato and Aristotle were playing at a very high level indeed, much higher than the philologically trained scholars of the time were able to appreciate.
Equally distressing is Annas's verdict on G. E. L. Owen (which is sympathetic in intent): "Owen's work, difficult and densely argumentative, has not survived as well as that of easier and more accessible authors." Oh dear! I don't know how many students read Owen today. (Eric says he has "always been bored to death" by him.) He certainly had a dense prose style. But his great achievement was to show that Plato and Aristotle were great analytic thinkers (whatever else they might have been), and not easily dismissed by smaller philosophical minds. As many will recall, it was Owen who took on Harold Cherniss, that great scholar but mediocre philosopher, who made it his life's work to show that Aristotle misrepresented Plato. I don't want to pronounce on whether Cherniss was right or wrong in the bulk of his work—I will remark, though, that he often displayed a kind of personal animus against Aristotle that I found off-putting and out of place. The bottom line is that Owen certainly showed that you couldn't attack Aristotle without a deeper understanding of philosophy than Cherniss possessed.
A second theme in Annas's article is a seeming assertion of historicity for its own sake.
Those of us working in ancient philosophy no longer feel called upon to show that Plato is already of interest to people uninterested in the history of philosophy (never a sensible endeavour in the first place). The project of showing that Plato is (despite appearances) interesting because he had a problem that would be solved by introducing the distinction between transparent and opaque reference, or the project of showing that Aristotle is interesting because he has some kind of functionalist theory of mind, are projects that for some time have had no future.
As I have indicated, it was precisely these kinds of projects that engaged me personally, and the kinds that bring out starkly how philosophical progress is made. Of course, the whole notion of philosophical progress is one that strikes Eric as deeply suspicious, and that is a topic for another day. I'll content myself with observing that whatever the cultural differences between ancient and contemporary philosophy might have been, the great achievement of Vlastos, Owen and Bernard William, and of their younger followers such as Myles Burnyeat, Jonathan Barnes, and Julia Annas herself, was precisely to show that there is contemporary benefit in engaging with the ancients as if they were writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Philosophy.
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