Students and scholars are often taught to frown on anachronism (recall this post, and this one) and to embrace so-called actors's categories (recall this polemical post). The Reductio ad absurdum <grin> of this habit is to leave terms from the past untranslated and in foreign script (recall here and here). But as Dan Schneider (a post-doc in Ghent) pointed out, as an aside, in a recent presentation,* when one deploys terms from the past in describing the past, then one is often unwillingly (or unwittingly) siding with one side or another in a past debate. Schneider's observation is important because in philosophy often the key concepts are especially -- if not essentially -- contested. (It is especially ironic that this is so often forgotten by those scholars who most pride themselves on their Geisteswissenschaftliche objectivity, if not neutrality.) Often when we use actors's categories, we generate histories that basically (and predictably) replay the historical schemata of past thinkers (and that makes reading history of philosophy often so boring to those familiar with the denouement [recall this post]).
Let me give an example that is close to my own heart because I have been guilty of it. Hobbes, Descartes, and Spinoza all use the term 'conatus.' One can find it in English language dictionaries, but I would be seriously upset if my wife used it during Scrabble. The relatively straightforward translation ('effort' or 'striving'), does not quite do justice to what the term might mean in any of these thinkers. It is possible, but I am open to arguments to the contrary, that 'conatus' is some kind of technical term for some or all of these seventeenth century thinkers--accordingly, I have left it untranslated in Latin in some of my papers. But just because they use the same term, it does not follow they mean the same thing. The claim of the previous sentence is reasonably obvious for 'adequate' and 'idea,' which really mean different things for, say, Descartes and Spinoza. When modern scholars only write about, for example, Spinoza this need not generate many problems (and so we often use 'adequate idea' happily), but when we write about both Descartes and Spinoza it is worth alerting the reader that while the terminology is shared they have different positions (or so I say).
Things get even dicier, of course, when one is trying to characterizing positions -- say by appeal to actors's categories -- without awareness that there is a polemic (or obscuring that there is one). For example, it is extremely common to say of eighteenth century thinkers that they are 'Newtonian,' especially when such thinkers are engaged in something we and they (!) find -- to use anachronism -- scientific and they deploy metaphors ('attraction') and concepts ('law') that do figure in Newton's explanations. The term 'Newtonian' does get used during the eighteenth century, so it is not anachronistic as such. But, as I learned and have argued, quite a few thinkers ordinarily classified as 'Newtonian' are really (intentionally) critical of quite a bit of non-trivial features of Newton's and the Newtonian edifice (in particular, the high prestige accorded to applications of mathematics by Newton and his followers and/or the development of natural religion/theology by Newton and his followers).
So, sometimes, in order to characterize the past without taking sides in their debates it is wiser, if not more informative, to use anachronism or specially designed (and thereby anachronistic) new jargon. (I introduced 'anti-mathematicism' to characterize those thinkers with reservations about the high prestige of applications of mathematical techniques that are often mistakenly labeled 'Newtonian.') One does this not to give oneself a veneer of neutrality as such (something that may well be undesirable if not impossible for a historian of philosophy), but in order to characterize past debates in a relatively neutral fashion (or not). That is to say, if one adopts actors's categories one can inherit the omissions and polemics of these actors--for some purposes that's fine, of course: a Kantian historian, say, may wish to extend, after all, Kantian philosophy by the story she tells and retells, but to simply adopt actors's categories because of some (often inherited) methodological desideratum is like using a map prepared by the CIA: some of the most exciting destinations will be obscured.
*Schneider's paper is titled, "The Clear and Distinct VS. The Forceful and Vivid;" I discuss Schneider's insight with permission.
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