If history of philosophy is about anything, it is about understanding historical texts accurately…The first goal is to understand the texts, which might be an end in itself (as it is for me) or might be a step towards doing something else afterward, like playing around with the ideas on one's own, comparing them to other ideas from history, etc. -Peter Adamson
I believe that the fundamental purpose of the history of philosophy (which is continuous with the fundamental purpose of history more generally) is to accurately capture what philosophers of the past were trying to say. If that's not what the history of philosophy is, then I am ready to be corrected. - Sam Rickless
Rickless, an important scholar, turns the history of philosophy fundamentally into inferring intentions of authors. The published texts are means to this end, but obviously one can also draw on unpublished material and other sources of evidence (biography, letters, etc.). We can't always trust what authors say about this, of course, they may be deluded about their intentions or they may deliberately or playfully mystify. They sometimes may discover their own intentions in the process of writing—texts and arguments take on a life of their own, or -- if one dislikes the anthropomorphism in that -- have an internal logic constrained by form and genre (etc.). For example, I did not set out to write on depression in graduate school last week; rather I think (now after the fact) I wanted to capture a vague sense of disconnect and empathy with younger scholars at a conference and, more romantically, try to convey some long-distance encouragement (etc.). But while writing in a tightly constrained format (a blog with a certain voice, history, and trajectory, etc.) I found a form in which to make some such point while simultaneously being (especially after I settled on a particular headline) about something else. Even if a future historian of philosophy were interested in my writings, they would not be very interested in capturing the canonical intentions of that particular blog, or even the whole as of yet indefinite series of Digressions that I know will follow. This is not to deny I have insanely ambitious ambitions for these blogs—to change our philosophical culture, to touch the hearts of some and draw them into a philosophical life, to promote projects I think noble, to showcase Schliesser's ideas, to redefine how we understand what philosophy can be, to hit the ball out of the philosophical park with an essay a day, etc. But the interest, if any, in these Impressions is not the ways they reveal the self-fashioning of an author, but rather their sporadic effects on others and what they reveal about our profession in my times. (I return to this below.)
Adamson, in responding to my post, offers us a subtly different goal than Rickless's for the history of philosophy: it's about understanding texts. (Neither comments on this difference.) Author's intentions may play a privileged role in Adamson's enterprise, but what matters is capturing meanings. The benefit of this approach is that one need not infer to invisible attitudes, but can resolutely stick with the textual evidence. But the moment you start putting pressure on this idea things start to unravel. What exactly is the textual meaning that needs to be understood, and whose understanding are we to privilege? Now, in a famous (1969) article, Quentin Skinner, tried to settle this with an appeal to a counterfactual, privileged observer. To folk interested in learning from sophisticated explorations of this issue I wholeheartedly recommend the papers by Mogens Lærke, Justin Smith, Julie Klein, Ursula Goldenbaum (in this volume). They all offer ways to avoid Skinner's mysterious counterfactuals while using means to stabilize and fix the meaning of a text in time and over time such that (alas, competing) understanding is possible. For some texts this is a very fruitful enterprise.
But there are philosophical authors (paradigmatically I am thinking of Plato, Nietzsche (recall)), who self-consciously may well want (a) affective responses from their readers and (b) may intend different audiences to discern different things in their texts. (Note that with Nietzsche we are in decent position to get at his intentions, with Plato not so.) The way I like to put it is that they expect different readers' souls to disclose different features of the text. A historian of philosophy setting out to get at the meaning of the text will miss this feature. In fairness, Adamson's approach does not rule out an understanding of these texts that can account for (a) and (b), but by sharply separating the understanding of a text from its effects and from doing something with it, he puts himself in a bad position to grasp all the features of a text. (That is to say, his rules are self-defeating.) For, one need not be a pragmatist to understand that often we only understand all the systematic entailments of a text by applying some or its all ideas to new (or old) problems. It's only after reading Rocknak (proto-Transcendental), Baxter (analytical metaphysics), and Bell's (Deleuzian) Hume that it becomes visible that Hume, for whom the law of non-contradiction does quite a bit of work, is simultaneously willing to bracket, when doing metaphysics, self-identity (or A=A).* Of course, this understanding can be contested (probably by all three just named authors), but the key is that the understanding of a text is a hard-won result by way of application. For a lot of folk the denial of self-identity is itself a sign of philosophical incompetence or lack of intelligibility, etc., so it would never be a starting point.
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