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History of Philosophy vs. Analytic Philosophy: Together We Stand, Divided We Fall?

Although history of philosophy is part of almost any philosophical curriculum (even those at analytic departments), analytic philosophy takes rather negative or even hostile stance towards history of philosophy. Analytic philosophers consider themselves as dealing only with philosophical problems such as the problem of knowledge, free will or truth, for which the historical background come as an unwanted or even limiting baggage. On the one hand this is not a surprise since analytic tradition is established in response to dominantly historical approach in philosophy. Moore and Russell thus repudiate Hegelian idealism, Carnap strongly criticized Heidegger’s metaphysics and finally Popper offered an overall critique of historicism. In the second part of 20th century attitude towards historical approach in philosophy had increased to a deep antagonism usually illustrated with a story about a sign Gilbert Harman pinned to his office door saying, “Just say no to the history of philosophy”. 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.

history of philosophy ; analytic philosophy ; rational reconstruction ; understanding

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