The History of Philosophy

The HBS hosts argue for the merits of studying the history of philosophy.

In a recent essay, Hanno Sauer argued against the importance, for philosophy, of the history of philosophy. In summary, he presented a positivistic, scientistic model of philosophy, namely, that like physics, biology, and chemistry, philosophy has actually “made progress” on many of the issues that philosophy struggled with from Thales until relatively recently. Because of this progress, Sauer's argument goes, we do not need to study the history of philosophy. The model of the sciences shows why this is the case: in biology courses, no one is struggling with Aristotle, Linnaeus, or Mendel. In chemistry, no one pays attention to the history of alchemy, the theory of phlogiston, or the ether. In physics, no student learns Aristotle’s theory of why bodies “fall,” or the medieval notion of “impetus.” Is Sauer right that philosophy has similarly progressed? Should philosophy leave its history to the historians? Then, beyond Sauer, we can add that the history of philosophy is a history of both dead white guys and the history of the victors. If the history of philosophy is ethno-centric, and therefore racist, if it is phallo-centric and therefore patriarchal, why should philosophy continue to engage it?

Or is there something philosophically relevant about the history of philosophy?

Full episode notes available at this link:
http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-79-the-history-of-philosophy
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