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History of philosophy vs. analytic philosophy: together we stand, divided we fall?

In the paper I want to discuss this tension between analytic philosophy and history of philosophy and to claim that nowadays it seems rather exaggerated and should be over passed. It seems that the origin of the tension lies within the concept of what philosophy should be and what are the goals philosophers aim to reach. At this metaphilosophical level it is clear that analytic tradition rebelled against Hegelian idea that philosophy is identical to history of philosophy and ended up in an opposite extreme where history of philosophy was not considered as philosophy at all and philosophy is taken to be similar to science. I want to show that negativity towards history of philosophy is unjustified since historicism if taken properly is not only compatible with analytic tradition, but analytic tradition becomes seriously philosophically impoverished without historical reflection. Therefore I will argue for the modest version of historicism based on the idea of rational reconstruction according to which historical interpretation of past philosophers is done in a philosophical way by focusing on arguments and reasons, but having in mind historical context. This will show that doing history of philosophy is in fact doing philosophy. Finally, I will claim that unlike science, philosophy has some special relations with its history that should not be neglected within analytic tradition. These special relations are aimed at elucidating important connections within particular subject that deepen our philosophical understanding of the problem in question. Since reaching understanding is one of fundamental epistemic goals recognized within analytic tradition (i.e. virtue epistemology), it follows that history of philosophy is not only valuable by itself but is also valuable and relevant for analytic philosophy as well.

analytic tradition, historicism, metaphilosophy, understanding

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