Dear Ken,

thank you so much for that great link what a good start for 2017

Best
Boris


Am 03.01.2017 um 16:02 schrieb Ken Friedman:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> Peter Adamson is professor of philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians- 
> Universität in Munich. Adamson hosts a podcast series titled A  
> History of Philosophy without any Gaps. You can find it at URL:
>
> http://historyofphilosophy.net
>
> Prof. Adamson recently published a small note on rules for the  
> history of philosophy to round off the old year.
>
> As I read journal articles to assign them for review — or review  
> for other journals — I find a great many common problems.  
> Adamson’s rules would help a many authors in design research to do  
> better.
>
> I’m passing these on to this list with wishes for an excellent new  
> year in 2017.
>
> Ken Friedman
>
> --
>
> 20 "Rules for History of Philosophy”
>
> 31 December 2016
>
> Rules for History of Philosophy
>
> A while ago I had the idea to suggest some guidelines encapsulating  
> what I see as good practice in studying the history of philosophy.  
> With any luck, these rules are exemplified, not routinely violated,  
> by the podcast itself. These are not really “rules” of course,  
> only suggestions of best practice based on my own limited  
> experience. I would love to hear other ideas and have further  
> discussion here on the website.
>
> The “rules” were posted on an extremely irregular basis over a  
> couple of years, and I eventually got up to 20. So that people  
> don’t have to comb back through the blog, here is the entire list  
> in one place.
>
> Rule 1: It's possible for the same idea to appear independently more  
> than once
>
> It strikes me that a common error in history of philosophy is to see  
> that two figures/traditions have put forward the same idea, and  
> immediately infer a historical connection. For instance: atomism or  
> monism emerging in both ancient Greek and classical Indian  
> philosophy. Or: al-Ghazali's and Hume's discussions of causation.  
> Yes, the similarities are striking, and there might be a historical  
> connection, but the similarity does nothing in and of itself to show  
> that there is such a connection. Rather it only raises the question  
> of whether there was influence one way or the other. Often, the  
> simplest explanation is just that people thinking about a certain  
> topic will naturally tend towards a certain, limited range of  
> positions (like, either bodies can be infinitely divided, or not -  
> and in the latter case one is an atomist).
>
> Rule 2: Respect the text
>
> This is my version of what is sometimes called the "principle of  
> charity." A minimal version of this rule is that we should assume,  
> in the absence of fairly strong reasons for doubt, that the  
> philosophical texts we are reading make sense. This holds not only  
> for outstanding famous thinkers but also for lesser lights: even if  
> they were not earth-shattering innovators, they usually didn't just  
> write rubbish. Here it's also worth bearing in mind that until very  
> recently (the last century) any text that has survived to get into  
> your hands has already been through a process of selection by  
> earlier readers. So they are likely to be reasonably good. But even  
> without this observation, it still seems obvious (to me at least)  
> that useful history of philosophy doesn't involve looking for  
> inconsistencies and mistakes, but rather trying one's best to get a  
> coherent and interesting line of argument out of the text. This is,  
> of course, not to say that historical figures never contradicted  
> themselves, made errors, and the like, but our interpretations  
> should seek to avoid imputing such slips to them unless we have  
> tried hard and failed to find a way of resolving the apparent slip.
>
> Rule 3: Suspect the text
>
> As I've frequently emphasized on the podcast, texts often have a  
> long and complicated history of transmission. A work by, say,  
> Aristotle was first written down well over two millenia ago; it's  
> not unlikely that even the very first copy/copies had mistakes,  
> given that it would presumably have been dictated to a scribe. To  
> reach us, it then had to be copied by hand many many times, with the  
> earliest surviving copies being copies of copies of copies... and  
> those earliest surviving copies come from the Byzantine period, many  
> centuries after Aristotle. Of course things aren't quite so daunting  
> with more recent works but certainly anything produced before the  
> invention of printing involves copying by hand, and there are  
> philological issues to contend with even in the case of early  
> printed works. This means that, if you are really getting into the  
> nitty gritty of a pre-modern philosophical text, you need to beware  
> of the existence of many variants in the text, which could radically  
> alter the meaning. Scribes made mistakes, incorporated glosses into  
> the main text, and made their own emendations to fix problems they  
> found in their copies (these scribes were not stupid by the way:  
> their emendations may well be right!). And that isn't even taking  
> into account the possibility of outright tampering. The podcast fell  
> afoul of this when I emphasized the salacious story about Avicenna's  
> unrestrained sexual appetite while dying of colic. I subsequently  
> became aware of a recent article showing persuasively that this was  
> a later, hostile addition to the biography of Avicenna written by  
> one of his students. (See the comments on the relevant episode.) The  
> upshot is that historians of philosophy need to be philologists too,  
> insofar as they can manage it, and to take seriously the work of  
> scholars working on textual transmission or even collaborate with  
> them.
>
> Rule 4: Respect the context
>
> Podcast listeners will know that I put a lot of emphasis on the  
> wider historical context within which philosophy was produced. To  
> some extent it should be obvious how necessary this is: how can we  
> understand, say, Plato and Aristotle's political philosophy without  
> knowing something about the political situation of Athens in their  
> day, or understand Hobbes without knowing about English history? But  
> historical context can be relevant in more surprising ways; my  
> favorite example of this is the parallel between early Islamic  
> debates over the eternity of the universe and the contemporary  
> debate over the eternity or createdness of the Koran. (Actually,  
> though I've drawn this comparison in many places including the  
> podcast, I don't know that anyone agrees with me about it, but I  
> still think it's right.)
>
> There are at least two worries we might have here. First, that  
> history of philosophy is turned into something that is more history  
> than philosophy. Sometimes people speak dismissively of the "history  
> of ideas," in which philosophical theories are nothing but  
> reflections of other historical events. But I strongly feel that  
> history of philosophy is both a kind of history and a kind of  
> philosophy. Understanding the historical context will help us  
> understand philosophical arguments, but going through and evaluating  
> those arguments is still a philosophical enterprise.
>
> Second, that this rule makes it nearly impossible to do the history  
> of philosophy. Are we really supposed to become experts, not only on  
> all these philosophers, but also on the whole context they lived in,  
> taking into account everything from political events to social  
> circumstances, economic factors, etc? My answer would be, basically,  
> yes. There is no point at which you can say, "ok, I've learned  
> enough about the historical context, nothing I learn further will  
> help or be relevant." In principle, it is always worth looking at  
> the context more carefully, no matter how well you understand it.  
> The limits are imposed by what we can manage in terms of time and  
> expertise. Like some of the other rules I'm proposing, this rule is  
> intended as an open-ended encouragement to strive for an ideal which  
> is not practically reachable.
>
> Rule 5: Take "minor" figures seriously
>
> I suppose no one is going to be surprised by this one, given the  
> "without any gaps" slogan. One of the main points I'm trying to make  
> with this podcast is that, if you want to understand the history of  
> philosophy, you can't just hop from one great thinker to another,  
> leaving out everything that happened in between. Of course the  
> famous names are those who drew us all into the subject in the first  
> place: I am not alone in having caught the philosophy bug by being  
> exposed to Plato. But even if all you want to do is understand the  
> famous figures, you have to remember that they are responding to  
> less famous figures who came right before them or who were their  
> contemporaries. We've seen plenty of examples in the podcast so far.  
> Furthermore, as we've also seen, the so-called "minor" figures have  
> made significant contributions themselves.
>
> Previously ignored authors are routinely "discovered" in scholarship  
> and pushed into the front rank. In the series on medieval  
> philosophy, for instance, we look at John Buridan who was previously  
> relatively obscure but has gotten a lot of attention in recent  
> secondary literature. Another point to consider here is that all the  
> figures who leap to mind when you think of "great philosophers" have  
> been men. So ignoring the "minor" figures means leaving out the  
> contributions made by women authors throughout the history of  
> philosophy. Historically, attitudes towards women have almost  
> guaranteed that they would be evaluated as less important than their  
> male counterparts. While some, for instance Wollstonecraft, are now  
> taken seriously as major thinkers, we have a long way to go in terms  
> of rescuing women thinkers from undeserved obscurity.
>
> None of this is to say that it is illegitimate for a historian to  
> spend much of their time reading, say, Plato, or Descartes. These  
> are complex, deep and rewarding thinkers who seem to be almost  
> inexhaustible in rewarding our attention. But as a discipline, the  
> history of philosophy would benefit if more effort being devoted to  
> the B team.
>
> Rule 6: Learn some dates
>
> This one may seem obvious, but I mention it because it does really  
> come in handy. As I've had occasion to mention on the podcast I  
> don't have a very good head for dates, so I try to remember some  
> specific ones as landmarks -- like the death dates of significant  
> philosophers, and then you can at least get a vague idea when  
> another philosopher is by knowing whether they are earlier or later  
> than that philosopher. (A good one to memorize is Socrates' death  
> date of 399 BC, because you can work backward to know when the  
> Presocratics were and forward for Plato and Aristotle.) It's also a  
> good idea to learn some other non-philosophical dates, to help with  
> knowing what the context of the philosophers' work was (see rule 4).
>
> While I'm on this subject, don't forget the timelines here on the  
> website (in the menu above) which give you the dates for all the  
> philosophers I've mentioned on the podcasts thus far, with links to  
> the episodes where they are covered.
>
> Rule 7: Ask yourself why they care
>
> This and the next couple of rules are going to be about avoiding  
> anachronism. That seems obvious enough, but anachronism is  
> surprisingly hard to avoid in the history of philosophy, so I  
> thought I would break the issue down into several aspects. This  
> first one is, I think, often overlooked. Instead of assuming that  
> the historical figures we study are motivated by the same  
> philosophical worries that worry us, we need to understand why they  
> care about each issue they raise. Often it will be because of  
> something in the historical context (again, see rule 4), a view held  
> by a predecessor, or something else in their own philosophical  
> system. Seeing what led them to a particular argument or discussion  
> will help us understand that argument or discussion.
>
> My favorite example here is the medieval debates over the eternity  
> of the world. We might even be tempted to dismiss the whole debate  
> as uninteresting, since modern physics has rendered the debate  
> obsolete. But if we dig into the motivation for the debate (as I  
> tried to do in, for instance, episodes 144, 161, and 252) we see  
> that the eternity debate was not only about eternity. It was about  
> God's relationship to the world, and more abstractly, about how to  
> understand the concepts of necessity and causation.
>
> Rule 8: Read the whole text
>
> I shouldn't even have to say this! But I do, because in fact it's  
> very common to take individual passages or arguments or claims out  
> of their textual context. Perhaps the best example of all is  
> something I mention in podcast episode 205, on Anselm's ontological  
> argument: the argument fits onto a page or two and is nearly always  
> read by itself without going through the rest of the work in which  
> it appears (his Proslogion). In fact that argument is only the first  
> step in a lengthy attempt to grasp God, and it's impossible to  
> understand correctly what Anselm is up to unless you read the whole  
> book. That's an extreme example, but it's not atypical, I think.
>
> Of course, there may be more or less free-standing bits of text that  
> don't need to be read along with the rest of the work in which they  
> appear - some philosophers write aphoristically, for instance. But  
> even in that sort of case, we shouldn't just assume that (say) a  
> collection of aphorisms and short texts by Nietzsche has been put  
> together with no thought regarding structure or thematic arc. At the  
> other end of the spectrum, it amazes me that people often read bits  
> of Platonic dialogues as if they could be understood in isolation -  
> even though it's patently obvious that Plato put immense effort into  
> the unity and structure of each dialogue. (In fact he even talks  
> about the organic unity of a good speech in the Phaedrus.)
>
> Of course, it's not always easy or even possible to read works as a  
> whole. There are texts that are preserved only as fragments, like  
> with the Presocratics and early Stoics; similar problems arise with,  
> say, anonymous glosses or notes in medieval manuscripts, where we  
> can't be sure what (if any) other material was written by the same  
> annotator. Then there are massive works where reading the whole  
> thing is a major commitment; I wouldn't tell someone it is worthless  
> to read one book of the Republic unless they are also going to be  
> reading the other nine in the near future. As with the other rules,  
> this is therefore more an ideal to shoot for. Whenever possible  
> consider textual evidence in light of the rest of the work, for  
> instance by considering what the author may have been trying to do  
> in the work as a whole, and what function this particular part of  
> the text plays in that whole.
>
> This is incidentally another way to avoid anachronism. By being more  
> attentive to the goals and project of the whole work, we are less  
> likely to jump to conclusions about one isolated passage and to  
> import anachronistic philosophical concerns into that passage.
>
> Rule 9: Learn the terminology
>
> Another obvious one, perhaps, but also worth mentioning. Not all  
> philosophers develop their own technical or semi-technical  
> vocabulary, but many do. (Sometimes even those who officially make a  
> big deal out of not worrying about terminology, like Plato.) When  
> reading any philosopher, you need to know which words have a  
> technical meaning and what they mean – this obviously requires  
> knowing at least enough of the primary language to track the terms  
> in question. (I actually considered having a more general rule to  
> the effect of “learn the primary language,” but I worry that this  
> could be discouraging: please do read Plato, even if you can’t read  
> Greek! Still, it really does go without saying that there is a  
> significant sense in which you can’t in fact read Plato if you  
> can’t read Greek.)
>
> This is another rule that has to do with avoiding anachronism. The  
> more we know about a philosopher’s language, including not only the  
> way terms were generally used at his or her time but also the way  
> that this philosopher in particular uses terms, the less likely we  
> are to import our own assumptions about what these terms must mean.  
> There are many examples where scholars have pointed out that  
> interpreters have mistakenly been taking a given word to mean what  
> we now today would mean by it, whereas actually it meant something  
> different – one that comes to mind is “cause” in Aristotle. The  
> best way to guard against such mistakes is to track the use of a  
> word across the philosopher’s works, using context (both in these  
> works and in other works of the time) to get a better grip on  
> exactly what the word means.
>
> Rule 10: Silence is not louder than words
>
> One of the most tempting things to do when you are reading a  
> philosophical text is to assume that, if the philosopher you're  
> reading hasn't mentioned something you would expect to be mentioned,  
> then they have omitted it on purpose. Allusions to predecessors,  
> suppressed premises, allusions to historical/religious context, etc  
> all may cause what seem to be loud silences when they are absent.  
> And definitely, being alive to the possibility that a philosopher is  
> purposefully not saying something should be in every historian's  
> toolkit. But it's a tool to be used with great caution. What we  
> might expect a philosopher to say is going to depend to a great  
> extent on what our own interests and philosophical worldview looks  
> like, so breaking this rule can be another souce of anachronism. The  
> same goes for our (inevitably very partial) understanding of the  
> philosopher's intellectual and historical context. How, we might  
> think, can a philosopher not mention such-and-such a historical  
> event that we think of as really crucial... they must be avoiding  
> mention of it on purpose! At its worst, this sort of reading allows  
> us to project our own concerns onto the text with wild abandon.
>
> It's an interesting question what exactly you need to have as  
> evidence before arguing from silences in this way; one kind of  
> license might be a philosopher who actually tells you that some  
> points are deliberately being suppressed (as Maimonides does in his  
> famous preface to the Guide). But generally, I think one should  
> always err on the side of working out the philosopher's priorities  
> and ideas from what they do say rather than what they don't.
>
> Rule 11: Think critically
>
> With all these worries about avoiding anachronism, you may have  
> gotten the impression that I am only worried about "getting the text  
> right," and in fact I do think that is a first step in dealing with  
> any historical source material. However, just as I said in an  
> earlier post that history of philosophy is a kind of history, it is  
> also a kind of philosophy! Philosophy comes in not only when you are  
> reconstructing the position (because you need to make sense of the  
> ideas in the text "from the inside" which is a philosophical task)  
> but also in assessing the arguments you've read and, hopefully, now  
> understood in all their complexity, historical context, etc.
>
> Here I like something that we used to emphasize a lot when I taught  
> in England (it's much less emphasized in Germany, I find): that from  
> the very beginning of their education in philosophy, students should  
> not just summarize and present a text in their essays or discussion  
> in class, but also say what they think about it, consider possible  
> counter-arguments, etc. Of course this often meant that students  
> were being asked critically to assess arguments and ideas they  
> weren't yet in a position to understand fully, but it's nonetheless  
> a good approach because it trains students to think critically about  
> what they are reading.
>
> The most obvious reason to do this is that we are probably in the  
> end interested in whether any of these philosophical views are true!  
> But even if your motivation is strictly historical, you will often  
> need to think hard about a given philosopher's ideas critically to  
> understand why later philosophers (or even the same philosopher,  
> after re-thinking) rejected, or carried forward, those ideas in  
> certain ways.
>
> Rule 12: Think about the audience
>
> All good writers, teachers and speakers know to bear in mind the  
> audience they are writing for; think about what will interest them,  
> what their concerns may be, what they already know and what they  
> want to learn. Obviously not all philosophers have been good  
> writers, teachers and speakers, and some philosophical texts seem to  
> have been written with no particular audience in mind (or even with  
> an “audience be damned!” attitude). But usually, texts are  
> written with at least some conception of the readership. This can be  
> an important guide to interpretation. It is vital to know, for  
> instance, what a philosopher could take for granted in terms of  
> background knowledge in their intended audience, or which other  
> texts the audience will be likely to know. Just to give a specific  
> example, it is almost impossible to overestimate the presence in an  
> ancient Greek’s mind of Homer and Hesiod, or the Bible in a  
> medieval reader’s mind – these texts could be brought to mind  
> even with single words or vague allusions, much as we can bring to  
> mind tv shows or movies with a single word or phrase. Likewise it  
> may be useful to bear in mind, say, that an audience member is  
> likely to have primarily theological concerns in mind, or primarily  
> political ones, in thinking about how the author has framed  
> arguments aimed at that audience: what does such-and-such an  
> argument indirectly imply about the Trinity, or about the legitimacy  
> of monarchy?
>
> The result is that the historian of philosophy needs to know as much  
> as possible about who the audience for a text was likely to be, and  
> as much as possible about what that audience would have read, known,  
> and thought. This is obviously related to knowing about the  
> historical context more generally, but it is a more specific and to  
> some extent more challenging task, one even impossible to carry out  
> fully, since for most periods we have little hope of stepping  
> entirely into the shoes of the audience members. Again, it’s more  
> of an ideal to shoot for.
>
> Rule 13: Take metaphors seriously
>
> The history of philosophy is full of metaphors, analogies and  
> similes - from Plato's cave to Neoplatonic "emanation" to Rawls'  
> "veil of ignorance". In general, I am a big supporter of taking  
> seriously the "literary" features of philosophical texts, like  
> structure or characterization and dramatic setting. Metaphors are a  
> particularly interesting case, though, because one needs to decide  
> how exactly to apply the metaphor. Obviously many philosophical  
> metaphors have been parsed and analyzed in great detail - no one  
> would say that Plato's cave has received insufficient attention.  
> Nonetheless I think there are a lot of such metaphors that bear  
> further thought. For instance I recently wrote a paper on the  
> widespread ancient tendency to compare the following things to one  
> another: the individual (or the soul); the household; the city; and  
> the cosmos. It turns out to be useful to dwell on exactly how such  
> metaphors are cashed out, and what effect they have on philosophers'  
> ways of thinking. That comparison between a city or other society  
> and the cosmos tends to push them in the direction of arguing for  
> monarchy, because the cosmos is likewise for them ruled by a single  
> divine principle. (Or was it the other way around, that they draw  
> the analogy in the first place as a way of justifying their  
> political preconceptions?) And then there is the issue of what, if  
> any, argumentative weight a metaphor has - should we be more  
> persuaded by a philosophical view just because it is illuminated by  
> a rhetorically powerful metaphor? Again, think of Plato's cave and  
> how much less resonance it would have if he had just said something  
> like, "I think people in everyday life are paying attention to  
> images of reality, instead of true reality," without giving the  
> metaphor. Yet that resonance itself doesn't make the philosophical  
> position more convincing... or does it? Again, it's just one example  
> of what could be a more general rule, which is to pay heed to  
> literary features of texts; it would be interesting to hear what  
> other examples you all might have.
>
> Rule 14: Take religion seriously
>
> Ok, this one might be controversial. But it has been much on my mind  
> recently since I have been writing episodes on medieval philosophy,  
> where religion is woven into pretty much every text I am looking  
> through. As I write the scripts I am thinking a lot about how to  
> present the material in a way that will be interesting and seem  
> relevant to listeners who don't care much about religion, without  
> misrepresenting the material or for that matter letting down  
> listeners who do have an interest in the religious side of things.  
> At any rate, it seems to me important to remember that the vast  
> majority of figures available for us to study in the history of  
> philosophy have been religious believers. This goes not only for the  
> obvious cases like the medieval Latin Christians but also for pagan  
> thinkers of antiquity. We can assume that nearly all of the people I  
> covered in episodes 1-100 (i.e. before arriving at ancient  
> Christianity) were practicing pagans, and that includes household  
> names like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. They may have had  
> culturally unusual interpretations of the religion of their day but  
> they were in some sense themselves religious (by which I mean that  
> they believed in divine entities and presumably engaged in cultic  
> practices) and more importantly for us, they felt the need to engage  
> with religion in their works. So religious issues are (to differing  
> degrees, but almost always to some degree) woven into the very  
> fabric of the philosophical works we are reading from antiquity, and  
> this also goes of course for the medieval period in various  
> cultures, and for early modernity. As we’ve seen in the series on  
> Indian philosophy, religious issues also played an important role  
> there. Nowadays most professional philosophers in Europe and the US  
> seem to be atheists, as far as I can tell, but that is a very recent  
> development, even if one can point to occasional atheists in earlier  
> periods (Hume is a favorite example).
>
> What does this mean for the historian? In the first place that we  
> need to learn about religious context just like the other aspects of  
> historical context. No surprise there. But it also means something  
> more challenging, which is that one needs to take an objective and  
> open-minded attitude towards the philosophers' religious beliefs.  
> Insofar as we are historians of philosophy, our goal should not be  
> to take inspiration for our own religious faith if we have it, or to  
> find the mistakes made by great religious authorities for the sake  
> of reinforcing our own lack of faith if we don't have it. Rather it  
> should be to understand how the religious views interacted with and  
> influenced the philosophical views – for instance, how Augustinian  
> ideas about grace affected views on free will. Actually I would go  
> further and say that we shouldn't even worry which aspects of a  
> thinker's worldview are "religious" as opposed to "philosophical."  
> Much of the time this dividing line is going to be blurry or even  
> non-existent, and there is no reason to get anxious about it. I know  
> from comments I've seen here on the website that some listeners  
> think that philosophy is antithetical to religion; whatever merit  
> that may have as a philosophical position nowadays, it is not a good  
> place to start from in doing history of philosophy.
>
> This is not to say, of course, that one's own beliefs remain  
> irrelevant. If you are an atheist you had better be ready to say  
> what is wrong with Anselm's ontological argument for the existence  
> of God, once you have done your best to understand it! It's just  
> that, as I've argued before in this series of rules, the first and  
> very challenging step is to understand the texts you are reading,  
> and taking religion seriously is part of that.
>
> Rule 15: Be broadminded about what counts as “philosophy”
>
> This is in a way a generalization of the previous rule to take  
> religion seriously. The point I want to make with this rule has as  
> its obvious starting point the frequent observation that, until very  
> recently (like, only the last couple of centuries) the word  
> "philosophy" included much more than we would include today. Still  
> during the Enlightenment people we would call "scientists" would  
> have referred to themselves as "natural philosophers." Of course  
> that by itself might just mean that the word has changed meaning.  
> But we need to remember that historical figures would have seen  
> topics of inquiry that for us are no longer "philosophical" as being  
> part and parcel of "philosophy"; they didn't recognize the same  
> disciplinary boundaries that we do, so they moved very freely from  
> topics like epistemology and metaphysics to topics like astronomy,  
> mathematics or medicine. This is why I have devoted so much  
> attention to "scientific" and even "pseudo-scientific" subjects in  
> the podcast, covering things like medicine, astronomy, and astrology.
>
> But it's not just science: historically the boundaries between  
> philosophy on the one hand, and theology or mysticism on the other,  
> have been quite blurry or just non-existent. I won't go into the  
> theology point again, except to refer back to the Islamic world  
> episodes and all the philosophy we saw being done by representatives  
> of "kalam" (systematic theology). We also saw some philosophically  
> interesting material in Sufis and Kabbalists, with mutual influence  
> and re-purposing of ideas about negative theology, the soul, and so  
> on, from philosophy to mysticism or vice-versa. Even a topic like  
> Islamic jurisprudence turned out to have important implications in  
> ethics and epistemology.
>
> The moral of this story, then, is that historicans shouldn't  
> restrict their attention to texts, figures and movements that seem  
> "philosophical" in our sense. Philosophical material is not  
> philosophical because of where it appears, but because (to make a  
> long story short) it is philosophically interesting.
>
> Rule 16: Respect texts about texts
>
> A whole genre of philosophical writing that traditionally suffers  
> from neglect is the commentary. Actually there is a whole range of  
> texts about other philosophical texts, which would include  
> commentaries but also glosses, paraphrases, epitomes, and the like  
> – I am referring to all this sort of thing, but to simplify I’ll  
> mostly just talk about “commentaries.” A good example, and also  
> an example where prejudice has largely been overcome now, is the  
> massive body of philosophical commentaries on Plato, Aristotle and  
> other philosophical works that was produced in late antiquity.  
> Thanks to Richard Sorabji’s Ancient Commentators Project (which I  
> worked with in London for some years) these commentaries are now  
> mostly available in English and have been pretty well integrated  
> into history of philosophy. There are also many commentaries in  
> Latin medieval philosophy and in the Islamic tradition. In fact, one  
> reason for the widespread myth that philosophy in the Islamic world  
> ended after the 12th century or so is that thereafter, philosophy  
> was often written in the form of glosses and commentaries, which are  
> always in danger of not being taken seriously. (I interviewed Robert  
> Wisnovsky about this here on the podcast.)
>
> There are at least three reasons why we should take such texts  
> seriously, and include them in the history of philosophy. First,  
> they can still fulfill their original purpose of illuminating the  
> text commented upon. Alexander of Aphrodisias was not only a superb  
> philosopher in his own right, but also had a thorough and intimate  
> knowledge of Aristotle’s works (plus he was a native speaker of  
> ancient Greek!). He is thus a very useful guide to textual and  
> philosophical problems in the source text – that doesn’t mean  
> he’s always right in his interpretations of course, but he is  
> pretty well always worth consulting. Admittedly not all commentators  
> reach his standard; maybe only Averroes can compete with him as an  
> insightful and interesting commentator on Aristotle. But the mere  
> fact that a commentary has survived down to the present day is  
> usually a sign that many generations of readers found it useful.
>
> Second, commentators are themselves philosophers and say interesting  
> and original things in the context of commentating – sometimes this  
> happens as a kind of digression from the commentary, but you can  
> also find fascinating material in the midst of commenting on a  
> passage. It’s often precisely when the commentator has trouble with  
> the source text that he or she is going to be innovative – a  
> Platonist commenting on Aristotle, for instance – and the  
> innovation may show itself in very subtle ways, for instance  
> slightly but significantly different word choice as a source text is  
> paraphrased.
>
> Third, there is something philosophical about the commentary  
> activity itself. Of what these older commentators were doing is much  
> like what we are doing when we read historical philosophical texts  
> today: trying to make sense of them and find what is true in them.  
> The methods and presuppositions a commentator brings to a text can  
> be illuminating for our own practice. For instance, do they use a  
> “principle of charity,” trying to offer readings that will make  
> the source text come out true or at least coherent or plausible, and  
> if so how do they do so? As you’ll know by now I’m firmly  
> convinced that doing history of philosophy is itself a philosophical  
> enterprise, and we may have no texts that illustrate this point  
> better than texts about texts from earlier time periods.
>
> Rule 17: Focus on the primary text, not secondary literature
>
> I often tell my students, "I would always rather you read the  
> primary text one more time than go read a piece of secondary  
> literature." The point of this is to encourage students to form  
> their own impressions and analysis of a historical source, rather  
> than just reproducing what scholars have already written about that  
> source. This is not to say that secondary literature is useless. It  
> would be pretty hypocritical for me to say that, given that I  
> produce it myself! But one needs to think carefully about how to use  
> it, and about the balance between reading the primary source and  
> using scholarly literature. I think that it is a good rule of thumb  
> for everyone - from beginning student to professional historian of  
> philosophy - to focus on the primary text, and to have a clear idea  
> what one is trying to get out of secondary literature when one does  
> turn to it. Some uses are pretty much unproblematic, for instance:
>
> • It may help provide historical context for the primary source,  
> e.g. what other texts the author is responding to; often you just  
> won't be able to get that out of the primary text (editorial notes  
> indicating sources or parallels in other works are, of course,  
> themselves a "secondary" intervention and not part of the primary  
> text).
> • If you want to produce new research about the primary text you  
> obviously need to know what has already been said, so that you  
> aren't just reinventing the wheel.
> • General secondary works (like this podcast and the books based on  
> it!) can give you a broad sense of what primary texts are out there,  
> and which you may want to study more closely. To employ a metaphor  
> I've used before, something like the podcast is akin to a travel  
> guide, which tells you which cities and landmarks you may want to  
> visit; but you shouldn't only read the guide book, you should go  
> visit yourself.
>
> The tricky part comes when secondary literature tries to help you  
> understand the primary text, by making distinctions or observations  
> you may not have seen yourself. Of course this is useful too; indeed  
> it is usually the point of reading published scholarship on history  
> of philosophy. But it is more treacherous, because having read this  
> scholarship you run the risk of coming to the primary text without  
> "fresh eyes" and only seeing the problems or solutions others have  
> already found in it. Hence the point of my advice to students: when  
> in doubt, make up your own mind first and then check to see how your  
> understanding of the text compares to what others have said.
>
> Rule 18 for history of philosophy: don't essentialize
>
> In reading about Indian philosophy for the podcast I have been  
> struck that, especially in older secondary literature, you'll come  
> across claims like "an interest in the self is fundamental to the  
> Indian worldview" or "non-violence is deeply rooted within the  
> humanism of Indian culture." Such claims, made by both Indian and  
> non-Indian scholars, are usually meant as compliments. But to my  
> mind they are reductive and, to be frank, silly. In one case, which  
> actually inspired me to devise this new rule, an author said that  
> non-violence (ahimsa) was fundamental to the Indian worldview, so  
> that the spectacular and tragic violence of mid-20th-century Indian  
> history must have been somehow a violation or abberation of Indians'  
> true nature! That looks suspiciously like a theory that is immune to  
> counterevidence. One sees this with other cultures too. I've often  
> seen - and not only in older literature - remarks that Islam is, or  
> isn't, a "religion of peace," is "intolerant" or "tolerant," etc.
>
> The truth is that cultures, including religious cultures, are  
> complex and marked by internal disagreement, and they develop over  
> time. So we should see them as historical phenomena, not as having  
> some sort of essential character that is acquired by all the  
> adherents of a given religion or members of a given culture.
>
> Probably it is easier to make this point about cultures or  
> geographical regions than religions. It seems just evidently  
> ridiculous to suppose that the population of India has, in general,  
> had a commitment or even tendency to any particular philosophical  
> view or ethical maxim from the time of the Upanisads down to the  
> current day. Lurking below the surface here is our urge to  
> stereotype - just as Italians are emotional and germans love  
> discipline, so Indians are supposedly fascinated by the self and  
> committed to non-violence.
>
> With religion, things are trickier. I think I would have to admit  
> that someone who is actually a Muslim might have a stake in what  
> Islam "really is committed to," e.g. on the basis that there are  
> correct and incorrect interpretations of the Koran and hadith. But I  
> see no reason for a non-Muslim, or even a Muslim historian of  
> philosophiy who is writing in his or her capacity as a historian, to  
> think in these terms. Rather the question should be, "what have  
> actual Muslims in such-and-such a period believed about their  
> religion?" Anyone who's dipped into the Islamic world episodes of  
> the podcast knows that the answer to that is as varied as the  
> thinkers that I covered, to say nothing of those I didn't.
>
> This matters for the history of philosophy in particular because of  
> the widespread tendency to expect that certain (especially so-called  
> "non-western") philosophical traditions will have a distinctive,  
> essential character - more "spiritual", more "determinist," or  
> whatever. This is a bad approach. We are much more likely to  
> discover tensions and disagreements within a tradition of any  
> significant historical scope, than we are to discover some kind of  
> enduring character that marks all thought from within that  
> tradition. And supposing that frequently recurring ideas within a  
> culture somehow derive from the "innate character" of that culture  
> is lazy, and a way of avoiding the more interesting question: what  
> historical or intellectual reasons underlie the prevalence of such  
> ideas?
>
> Rule 19 for history of philosophy: beware of jargon
>
> This is, I think, good advice for all kinds of writing in the  
> humanities but it's especially relevant for philosophers and  
> historians of philosophy. Contemporary philosophy, both analytic and  
> continental (to use some terminology that in itself is  
> questionable), bristles with off-putting jargon and also technical  
> tools like logical notation to abbreviations and numbered  
> propositions. There's certainly a place for this: philosophy is,  
> among other things, about precision and rigor, and formal languages  
> and jargon can be very precise. But analytic philosophers often make  
> things unnecessarily hard on their readers by using technical  
> symbols when normal language could say the same thing quite easily,  
> or expecting the reader to bear in mind what lots of numbered theses  
> stand for. (I recently read a book for the podcast that had so many  
> numbered propositions in it that it needed a several page long  
> appendix to list them all, forcing the reader constantly to flip  
> back and forth between the main text and the appendix.) As for  
> "continental" philosophy, the scandals of parody articles being  
> accepted for peer review speak for themselves. Every time you  
> introduce a new piece of terminology, abbreviation, or tag (like  
> referring back to some philosophical claim as P, or 4*) you make it  
> harder for the reader to stay with you, and an accumulation of these  
> devices will make your text almost impossible to read. Of course  
> their use is often justified, and what is incomprehensible for a  
> general audience is often straightforward for a specialized  
> audience. But the rule should be: don’t formalize, or use jargon,  
> unless the gain in clarity, rigor etc is worth the burden you’re  
> placing on the reader by doing so.
>
> There are two reasons that this point is especially relevant to  
> history of philosophy. One is that the use of contemporary technical  
> tools and jargon brings with it the risk of anachronism (and by now  
> you know how I feel about anachronism). My favorite example is the  
> use of the “backwards E” or existential quantifier (Ǝ), for  
> instance Ǝx which would be read “there is an x.” You can readily  
> find examples of this symbol being used in work on ancient  
> philosophy. Of course such notation was not used then, but that  
> isn’t the problem. The problem is that one can have a long debate  
> about whether ancient thinkers had a notion of existence that would  
> correspond to the use of this quantifier, where anything can be put  
> in for “x”. I would argue that they did not. Just imagine what  
> Aquinas would say if you insisted that God, a created substance, or  
> a created accident must all “exist” or “be” in the same  
> sense, because they can all be substituted for x in Ǝx. Similarly,  
> using bits of jargon from contemporary philosophy can cover up the  
> interesting fact that earlier thinkers lacked precisely the concepts  
> or presuppositions behind that jargon. Again, I’m not saying it is  
> never warranted, and I myself am willing to apply a term like  
> “compatibilist” or “physicalist” to, say, the Stoics. But you  
> have to be very clear in your own mind what these terms mean and  
> whether they truly apply.
>
> The second reason is that historical texts have their own jargon  
> (see rule 9: learn the terminology). Of course using these terms is  
> not anachronistic, unless you apply a term from one period of  
> history to another period. But again, it is a barrier to  
> understanding for the reader. I hate it when people write about  
> Aristotle and use untranslated Greek, or about Avicenna with  
> untranslated Arabic. This is like putting a note at the top of the  
> piece that says “if you can’t read these languages, I don’t  
> want to talk to you.” And same with unexplained bits of technical  
> language (say, using “supposit” in a discussion of medieval  
> philosophy without explaining it). Here too of course, the rule is  
> not absolute. You might be writing a detailed discussion of the  
> original terminology, which inevitably presupposes that the reader  
> knows the original language. Or you may intend to write only for  
> other specialists in medieval thought, who are just going to be  
> annoyed and bored if you tell them things they already know. My  
> suggested rule of thumb though is to avoid erecting unnecessary  
> barriers to understanding.
>
> Rule 20 for history of philosophy: things are always more  
> complicated than you think
>
> For this final rule I considered several options, like “learn some  
> geography” which is definitely a good idea (compare to rule 6 about  
> learning some dates), or exhorting people to explore philosophy from  
> more than one culture or more than one branch of philosophy (not  
> just ethics, but also epistemology, etc). But eventually I decided  
> the best piece of advice to close with is this: “things are always  
> more complicated than you think.” In a way this sums up the core  
> message of my so-called “rules.” Like plain old history, history  
> of philosophy is very complicated and there is no real limit to the  
> things you might want, or need, to know if you really want to  
> understand how and why ideas developed. Hence my earlier pieces of  
> advice to explore the context of historical texts, the role of  
> lesser-known authors, and so on.
>
> But I also suggest this last piece of advice with a view to the core  
> activity of the historian of philosophy, which is reading  
> philosophical texts. One thing I have learned from participating in  
> many philosophy reading groups over the years (and not least from MM  
> McCabe, who was for many years a colleague of mine at King’s  
> College London) is that a good philosophical text will keep yielding  
> insights the longer and more closely you read it. Of course you  
> can’t, for practical reasons, just keep reading and re-reading the  
> same page forever, even if that page was written by Plato or Kant.  
> But one should also resist the thought “ok, I basically get the  
> point of this text,” or “I already know what this author thinks  
> about this topic,” and swiftly move on. Slow reading, and repeated  
> reading, is crucial. Towards this end, it is useful to remind  
> yourself that the text you’re looking at is more complicated than  
> you think. Just assume you haven’t yet figured it out fully. Of  
> course not every text rewards this kind of scrutiny; perhaps there  
> are even some bits of Plato that aren’t this rich (if so I  
> haven’t found them). But with any given text, as for the history of  
> philosophy as a whole, it doesn’t hurt to assume that there is  
> always more to discover.
>
> --
>
>
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