Philosophy, its History and Historiography (Royal Institute of Philosophy Conferences)

PHILOSOPHY, ITS HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

Edited by A. J . H O LLAND Department of Philosophy. University of Lancaster

D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER

ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication

Data

Main entry under title: Philosophy, its history and historiography. (Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference; v. 1 983) Includes index. I. Philosophy, Modern-Congresses. 2. Philosophy, Modern-Historiography-Congresses. I. Holland, A.J. . II. Series. (Alan John), 1939190 B791.P44 1 985 85-11898 ISBN 90-277-1945-4

All Rights Reserved

© 1985 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland

TAB LE O F C O NTENTS

vii

SERIES PREFACE

ix

PREFACE P A RT I : CONCEPT IO N S O F P H I LO S O P H Y ' S H I S T O RY JONATHAN REEjThe End of Metaphysics: Philosophy's Supreme Fiction?

3

M. R. AYERS j 'The End of Metaphysics' and the Historiography of Philosophy

27

ANTHONY MANSER/The End of Metaphysics: A Comment

41

JONATHAN REE/Reply to Ayers and Manser

47

, MARY HESSE/Epistemology without Foundations

49

PHILIP PETTIT/ Philosophy after Rorty

69

ADAM MORTON / Comment on Rorty

85

MA.RY HEssE/'Heterodox', 'Xenodox', and Hermeneutic Dialogue

87

PHILIP PETTIT/Reply to Mary Hesse

91

PART I I : P H I L O S O P H Y I N THE S EVENTEENTH CENTURY G. MacDONALD ROSS/ Occultism and Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century

95

SIMON SCHAFFER/Occultism and Reason

1 17

G. MacDONALD Ross / Reply to Simon Schaffer

145

GARY HATFIELD/First Philosophy and Natural Philosophy in Descartes

· 149

DESMOND M. CLARKE/Cartesian Science in France, 1 660-1 700

1 65

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FRANCKS / Caricatures in the History of Philosophy: The Case of Spinoza

RICHARD

STUART BROWN/Leibniz's EDWIN 1. R.

Break with Cartesian 'Rationalism'

McCANN / Lockean Mechanism Appendix: Was Boyle an Occasionalist?

MILTON / Lockean Mechanism : A Comment

1 79 1 95 209 229 233

PART I I I : P H I L O S O P H Y IN THE E I GHTEENTH CENTURY M. A . STEWART/ Hume and the "Metaphysical Argument A Priori" NICHOLAS

CAPALDI/ The Historical and Philosophical Signifi-

cance of Hume's Theory of the Self ECKART FORSTER/Kant's

P.

Refutation of Idealism

B. wooD / The Hagiography of Common Sense: Dugald Stewart's Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid

INDEX

243 271 287 305 323

S ERIES PREFACE

The Royal Institute of Philosophy has been sponsoring conferences in alternate years since 1 969. These have from the start been intended to be of interest to persons who are not philosophers by profession. They have mainly focused on interdisciplinary areas such as the philosophies of psychology, education and the social sciences. The volumes arising from these conferences have included discussions between philosophers and distinguished practitioners of other disciplines relevant to the chosen topic. Beginning with the 1 979 conference on 'Law, Morality and Rights' and the 1 98 1 conference on 'Space, Time and Causality' these volumes are now ' constituted as a series. It is hoped that this series will contribute to advancing philosophical understanding at the frontiers of philosophy and areas of interest to non-philosophers. It is hoped that it will do so by writing which reduces technicalities as much as the subject-matter permits. In this way the series is intended to demonstrate that philosophy can be clear and worthwhile in itself and at the same time relevant to the interests of lay people.

General Editor, Royal Institute of Philosophy Conference Series

vii

STUART BROWN

PREFACE

This volume contains papers presented at the conference on Philosophy and its History organised by the Royal Institute of Philosophy and held at the University of Lancaster in September 1 983. On this occasion, philosophers, historians of philosophy and historians of science from Britain and overseas met together to consider not simply the history of philosophy but more especially its historiography. Received views of the history of philosophy were discussed and challenged both in general terms and through detailed studies focussing on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when many of the categories and questions of so-called 'modern' philosophy were being formulated. Both the prepared contributions and the remarks from the floor yielded evidence in plenty that the rewriting of the history of philosophy is, once again, under way, informed by fresh findings and perspectives from the history of science in particular, but also from the histories of literature, theology, politics and other disciplines. Nor was there any mistaking the widely held view that only through the abandoning of ahistorical perspectives can the history of philosophy be the source of stimulus and inspiration for contemporary philosophy that it has the capacity to be. It is perhaps appropriate to record at this place that the conference was partly instrumental in provok­ ing the formation of a new British Society for the History of Philosophy. The conference format was a blend of commissioned symposia, all of which are included here, and submitted papers, of which a selection are included. Most of the papers in this volume were prepared specially for the Lancaster conference, one or two being written up later or extensively revised. Professor Hatfield's paper was accepted for the conference but is not the one he actually delivered there. The rejoinders by Professor Hesse, Professor Pettit and Mr Ree, and the chairman's comments of D r Milton and Professor Morton were written specially for the volume, and for these we are most grateful. None of the papers has appeared elsewhere. The volume is in three parts. In the first part past and present con­ ceptions of the history of philosophy are compared and one particular conception, that presented by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature, is extensively explored. In the second and third parts individual ix

x

PREFACE

studies relating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively provide varied points of reference for the preceding general discussions. I wish to thank first and foremost Dr Stuart Brown, who played a major role both in the conception of the conference and in its organisation; also Dr M. R. Ayers, Professor P. Jones, Professor S. Korner, Professor G. H. R. Parkinson and Dr M. A. Stewart for their guidance and help in planning the programme. I am indebted to Dr Stewart also for his ungrudging and patient advice throughout the preparation of this volume. ALAN HOLLAND

PART I

CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY'S HISTORY

JONATHAN REE

T H E E N D OF M ETAP H Y S I C S : P H I LO S O P H Y ' S S U P REM E FICTIO N?*

We reason of these things with later reason And we make of what we see, what we see clearly And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves Wallace Stevens I

Most intellectual work, if not all, involves some sense of the past - with founding fathers , prodigal errors, fearful ordeals, internecine disputes, marvellous discoveries, and decisive battles, all leading up to the present state of the question : built-in historical maps, so to speak, with little flags stuck in, saying 'we are here'. These 'integral histories', as I shall call them, are sometimes explicitly elaborated, either as a quaint and colourful folklore or as an exactly controlled scholarly enterprise ; but often they are assimilated implicitly and unawares, by unconscious imitation. In literate cultures, in particular, the normal activities of the intellectuals - lawyers, teachers, priests, poets, scientists, or preachers - constantly confront them with texts: that is, with writings, which come, obviously enough, from the past and, in some cases, from time out of mind.2 And the very act of referring to these texts - the form and manner of the glosses, citations, and allusions, or indeed of misprision or neglect - will inevitably if un intention­ ally express some attitude to the relation between the past time of compo­ sition and the present moment of interpretation, and will tend to breed stories to fill, imaginatively, the interval. The stories will try to persuade you that whereas people once held this opinion, and then that, the view for today and the future is the one you are now being offered; they will present an argument whose logic ends where you are now being asked to stand. Of course, integral histories are not usually supposed to be taken very seriously: they are material for rhetorical padding in introductions and conclusions, or for remarks by the way. Allowing one's interest to be detained by them is, it is generally agreed, a mark of a minor thinker. Even granting their marginality, however, I think it is possible that integral histories exert a fateful influence nonetheless (or allthemore) on 3 A . J. Holland (ed.), Philosophy, Its History and Historiography, 3-26.

4

JONATHAN REE

intellectual life. By furnishing adoptive lineages for intellectuals, integral histories otTer them a sense of direction, an aspiration, and an identity around which to organise their work. It would, I think, be worth exploring how far intellectual history might be written as a history of integral histories, of the stories intellectuals have told about their place in history. In this essay, I shall attempt a small part of the task, confining myself to self-styled 'philosophical' writers within Western Christendom. I shall try to make a case for seeing transformations in the field of philosophical inquiry in terms of a succession of integral histories of philosophy. For memory's sake, I shall schematise the development into four phases, medieval, renaissance, enlightenment, and modern, and I shall try to explain how it has come about that philosophy, in its latest phase, has been characterised by its protracted arias about its own recent, overdue and richly deserved demise: the modern philosopher's curious theme, in other

words, of 'the end of metaphysics'.

I. MIDDLE AGES: PHILOSOPHY AS ANTIQUE PAGANISM

The magic of stories is that they make meanings blossom from the dry twigs of chronology, by marking events as belonging, intrinsically, to the beginning of a plot, or the middle, or - not least - the end, rather than simply occurring at a particular date. The elementary structure of a well­ made story - as Hegel (great if facile raconteur) knew all too well - has undivided possession at the beginning; wandering, loss and nostalgia in the middle; and return, retrieval and a sigh of relief at the end. And a most appealing kind of integral history, it seems , is a three-part invention which arranges its canon of texts and authors into a beginning and a middle whose significance is revealed, or perhaps conferred, by occupying a particular vantage point - this one - in the present. It will tell of an ancient age (perhaps golden); then a middle age (certainly dark); and now, at the beginning of the end, it must be the modern age (surely brave).3 Most of the weight of these tripartite histories, clearly, is borne by the concept of renascence, of anamnesis or revival of some original radiance and splendour. The literate intellectuals' daily business of textual inter­ pretation naturally intensifies their sense of the present as a time of reclamation of buried sense. But the idea of renascence had an additional pertinence for Christian thinkers, since, having translated their religion from the language of its founder into those of the Roman Empire, they found that the institutions which supported these languages - especially

THE END OF METAPHYSICS: PHILOSOPHY'S SUPREME FICTION? 5 the Imperial Schools - were crumbling.4 The Christian Grammar Schools, along with the Universities which eventually developed from them, were thus allotted the incongruous task of preserving a dead language whose classics were Pagan, and of piously performing the awkward duty of breathing new life into godless texts. And it was in this context that the word 'modern' began its interesting career s as a term which seems to designate a simple date, whilst actually implying an obligation too - the challenge to stop dozing amongst the time-wasting obscurities of the past, and wake up to what really matters. The most embarrassing point for a Christian intellectual, trying to be modern in a culture whose classics were Pagan, was philosophy: for anti­ quity, it seemed, had given to a theoretical discipline called philosophy the pre-eminence which Christians should be givmg to the spiritual disciplines of worship instead. The early Fathers of the Church had attempted to unite philosophy with Christianity, but in vain;6 and so, for the first thousand years of organised Christian culture, philosophy remained a stubbornly Pagan affair: the supreme philosopher was Aristotle, not Christ, and the study of his texts - Ethics, Physics, and Metaphysics, or 'the three philo­ sophies' - crowned the work of the Arts Faculties of the early Univer­ sities. ? Christian scriptures were segregated from the Arts, and belonged to a separate and senior teaching body, the Faculty of Theology. (The calamities of Peter Abelard warned of the risks involved in annexing Christianity to philosophy.) For medieval Christendom, therefore, the story of philosophy's past was mostly implicit in citations or explanations of Aristotelian texts, genuine or spurious. But explicit histories were also available, some of them staging stylised debates between representatives of established schools , on the pattern of Cicero's Academica, and others taking the form of prefatory surveys of past opinions on a given point, modelled on Book One of Aristotle's Metaphysics. In addition, there had been several ancient works completely given over to the history of philosophy, and one of these Diogenes Laertius' third-century Lives �f Eminent Philosophers - survived into the Christian era, and is perhaps the clearest representation of medieval Christianity's view of philosophy's past. Diogenes begins by mentioning 'barbarian' philosophers - Magi, Chal­ deans, Gymnosophists and Druids - but after a few lines these make way for eighty or so civilised Greeks and Italians. To the extent that Diogenes marshalls these characters into groups, his organising concepts refer to lines of succession personally transmitted from masters to pupils, rather

6

JONATHAN REE

than to points of theoretical agreement or difference. The principal dynasties of diadochai were the Ionic, terminating in Theophrastus, who could trace his pedagogical ancestry back, through teachers and teachers' teachers, to Thales' pupil Anaximander, and the Italic, stretching in a continuous tradition from Pythagoras down to Epicurus. Informative and entertaining as it often is, Lives of Eminent Philosophers is short on theory : as its modern editor observes, it is not so much a history of philosophy as a "contribution to the biography of men of letters who happened to be philosophers". 8 However, its conception of philosophy as having a history that begins with Thales and ends with Epicurus was adopted in its entirety by medieval Christians. Diogenes was eventually translated into Latin in the fourteenth century, and achieved enormous renown and popularity in printed versions in the sixteenth. If renaissance philosophers wished to distance themselves from Aristotle, it would most likely be by identifying with another character from Diogenes, such as Pyrrho, Carneades, Epicurus, or of course Plato.9 Up to the middle of the seventeenth century, philosophical erudition was devoted to establishing the texts of the authorities mentioned in Diogenes , and clarifying the issues between them, whilst so-called 'Histories of Philosophy' were no more than embellished, interpolated and annotated translations of his Lives. I O 2. RENAISSANCE: PHILOSOPHY AS CRYPTIC CHRISTIANITY Given Christianity's awkward relation to its Pagan classics, it is not sur­ prising that historians can argue, for almost any period of Christian intellectual history, that it was really a renaissance too, much like the one which, as was once taken for granted, was sparked off by the fall of Constantinople in 1 453. The epidemic renaissance of the fifteenth century can be distinguished from the chronic renascence of Christianity by its sense of the irretrievable distance of really venerable antiquity - a period which, as the renaissance progressed, was relegated to an ever earlier date, displaced backwards by an expanding middle age whose gloom, it seemed, was only darkened by the feeble flickerings of its scattered attempts to rekindle the old brilliance. But in the same movement, an unprecedented accommodation was arranged between Christian piety and ancient Paganism. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Erasmus began to promote the programmatic concept of a 'philosophia ChristI", I I which was to strain and eventually snap the philosophers' attachment to the kind of history of

THE END OF METAPHYSICS: PHILOSOPHY'S SUPREME FICTION? 7 philosophy told bY'Diogenes Laertius. For Erasmian Christian humanism, the story had to be altered so that Christianity could emerge as its epitome, with Christ as a higher Socrates, and his followers as his philosophical pupils. And this project required that a process of deep interpretation be applied to the traditional philosophical texts, aimed at the discovery, behind their surface disagreements, of a concealed 'perennial philosophy' which could be taken to underlie Christian scripture too. 12 In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, Peter Ramus became an influential head of this movement. He made a career of denouncing Aristotle and the 'scholastic' dialectic which had dominated the curriculum of medieval schools, and he contrasted it with a virtuous 'true dialectic', essentially Christian, which, though known to Plato, Aristotle and their followers, had unfortunately not been entrusted by them to the written record. Galen, according to Ramus, had finally "closed the door of dialectic, which was never after opened until our day". 13 Ramus's ambition, therefore, was to restore what he called the 'single method' in logic : this, he argued, would enable all fields of knowledge to be reduced to simple principles, easily taught and readily recalled; and .this in turn - as he insisted with relentless practicality - would increase the productivity of teachers and reduce the time a boy would need to spend getting his education. 14 Ramist writings are full of the idea of a present strife between those who are moving with youth toward the future and those who cling to the habits of the scholastic past. It was the spirit, not the letter, of classical philo­ sophy that Ramus revered; in fact, to him, antiquity was identical with living spirit, as against the dead letter of scholasticism. So references to classical philosophers were made less as specific citations, more as open­ ended lists, designed to evoke the single, secret philosophy common to all authorities - "men like Pythagoras, Euclid, Plato and Aristotle," as Everard Digby put it, "by whose living voice we might be guided to knowledge step by step, as by a magic wand". IS Descartes too considered, or at least stated, that his own 'method' was only a revival of a knowledge kept secret by the ancients. 16 The idea that the true philosophy had been disguised and enigmatised by the classical authors enabled a decisive step to be taken in freeing the history of philosophy from the limits within which Diogenes Laertius had confined it. This was the publication in 1655 of the compendious Philo­ sophical Histories by Georg Horn, Professor of History in the Arts or Philosophical Faculty of the Protestant University at Leyden, "A man of vast reading, rather than great parts," according to an early account, which

8

JONATHAN REE

was more interested in telling its readers that the unfortunate Horn was "a little maniacal towards the end of his life ; which disorder was supposed to be occasioned by the loss of 6000 florins he had entrusted with an alchemist at the Hague" . 1 7 The condescension is characteristic, for Horn has seldom received due credit for his creation of a new model past for philosophy. IS Horn's originality is, first, that his history ranges, as its subtitle says, "from the creation of the world to the present day" ; and secondly, that it unhesitat­ ingly puts Holy Scripture on a par with the Pagan Classics. The story begins with Adam, blessed with complete innate philosophical wisdom 'naturalis sapientia ' or "what we now call Dialectic". With the fall, however, the human mind was "darkened by heavy shadows of ignorance"; philosophy could now be acquired only by arduous exertion, and even then, in this life, never better than partially. So began 'the old philosophy', and the school of Adam divided into the Cainites, who prospered, and the Abelites, who did not. In the second of his seven compact books, Horn tells his readers how Cainism was washed away by the flood, and philosophy could start again thanks to the teachings and writings of Noah. In Book Three, he presents the heroic and theological periods of Greek thought, before calmly condensing the 'philosophical period' - all the philo­ sophers recognised by Diogenes Laertius, the 'classics' of the medieval canon - into about forty pages. The B arbarians, Romans, and Jews came next, making way for the arrival of Christ in Book Five - as the S aviour of the Human Race, and also the Instaurator of True Wisdom, author of the knowledge which had been lost and polluted in Adam. Christ trans­ mitted his philosophy to the Apostles, who did their best to drive out all remnants of Paganism, until eventually overwhelmed by B arbarian invaders. Book Six deals with the three phases of 'scholasticism', from the ninth to the fifteenth century; and with that, in Horn's story, the 'old philosophy' came to an end. The 'new philosophy', for Horn, had its origins in a 'philological period' initiated by Petrarch and Erasmus ; but 'our age', or 'the period of philoso­ phy', had been opened by Vives and Ramus, and now flourished in the works of Campanella, Hobbes, Descartes and many others. Their achieve­ ment was to have set aside the 'sectarianism' of the 'old philosophy'; and Horn allowed himself to speculate that a new 'syncretism', unifying Plato, Aristotle and everyone else, might be under way, thanks to the work of Goclenius and Pico. But rather than risk an analysis of the rise of syncretism in the brave new

THE END OF METAPHYSICS: PHILO SOPHY'S SUPREME FICTION ? 9 world, Horn concluded with a seventh book, which dealt with the life-styles of philosophers through the ages, and then described the Degrees - Bachelors, Masters and Doctors - into which a modern Philosophy Faculty is organised. 19 Thu s Horn's textbook supplied Arts students with an integral history explicitly linking them, through their academic study of philosophy, not only to the classics of Ancient Greece, but to Eden and the philosophia Christi too. The antagonism of philosophy to Christianity seemed to have been overcome at last. 3 . ENLIGHTENMENT: PHILOSOPHY AS LOSS AND RECALL OF COMMON SENSE

The Renaissance division between the benign spirit of natural wisdom and the cryptic texts of the philosophical authorities could, however, cause discomfort as well as complacency. The story of how philosophers, from Cain to Campanella, had tried in vain to formulate what Adam had known by nature might be a comedy rather than an epic. Its protagonists, so it might seem, were simply puffed up with deluded enthusiasms arising from a ridiculous conflation of reality with romance ; the annals of philosophy, mere chronicles of wasted time, the adventures of some scholastic Don Quixote. Cicero had once written that "there is nothing so absurd as not to have been said by one of the philosophers", and, through a citation by M ontaigne, the formula became a commonplace of s eventeenth-century philosophy. 2o Descartes adopted it, for instance,2 1 and claimed that of all the "distinguished minds" which had ever been applied to the problem of method, "none have had the patience to find their way out of their difficulties". He compared the development of philosophy to a journey but one where the voyagers kept getting side-tracked, and never reached their destination - if indeed they ever had a destination outside their own deranged fantasies. He lamented that "nearly all" the characters in the history of philosophy "have followed in the footsteps of these travellers who, abandoning the main route in favour of a cross-road, find themselves lost amongst briars and p recipices". 22 Elsewhere, Descartes broke off from an enumeration of the four ways of knowledge (clear notions, sensation, conversation and reading) to reflect on those "who have tried to find a fifth road by which to arrive at wisdom, incomparably more elevated and assured than these other four. . . . I do not know that up to the present day there have been any in whose case this plan has succeeded", he continued,

10

JONATHAN R�E

adding that "those who have made this their special work have been called philosophers". 23 On the face of it, this denunciation of philosophers makes a paradoxical and self-confounding introduction to a book called The Principles ofPhiloso­ phy: the author explicitly claiming intellectual descent from a line of theoretical vagabonds and outlaws. But of course he was also putting himself in a good light by associating his own philosophy with a perennial common sense, whose steadiness he took to be a standing reproach to the "extravagant errors" of those who had, hitherto , "aspired to be philoso­ phers".24 Much like Ramus, Descartes claimed to be an innovator only in having renounced the obsession with novelty which had marred the achievements of the vain philosophers of the past. The principles of his own method, he felt, were so obvious that they must be "accepted by all men"; in fact, they must also have been approved, secretly, "by Aristotle and all the philosophers of every time; so that this (my) philosophy, instead of being new, is the most ancient and common of all".2 5 From Descartes onwards, the habit of decrying the wayward voyages of the old philosophers, who, as represented in Paradise Lost, "found no end, in wandering mazes lost" ,2 6 became a characteristic mannerism of philo­ sophical writings; and it enabled philosophers to make an intriguing invitation to their readers, of joining a democratic, commonsensical alliance against the baseless, self-deceiving conspiracy by which philo­ sophers had imposed on public opinion in the past. Bishop Berkeley - to take one striking example - proclaimed that "I side in all things with the mob", and pledged himself"to be eternally banishing Metaphisics, &c, and recalling Men to Common Sense". 27 The trouble with studying the history of philosophy - as he confided to his readers in the opening paragraph of the Principles of Human Knowledge - is that, however diligently we pursue it, "at length, having wander'd through many intricate mazes, we find ourselves just where we were, or, which is worse, sit down in a forlorn scepticism". But, he continued, we must not despair: "I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves. That we have first raised a dust, and then complain, we cannot see". Ifwe trust our author, though, we will soon have the comfort of rejoining "the illiterate bulk of mankind that walk the high-road of plain, common sense".2 8 In the Dialogues, the offer is repeated: Berkeley undertakes to dispel "the prejudices of philosophers, which have so far prevailed against the

THE END OF METAPHYSICS: PHILOSOPHY'S SUPREME FICTION ? 1 1 coinmon sense and natural notions of mankind". Some readers, he warned, would be disappointed that, "when they have taken a circuit through so many refined and unvulgar notions, they should at last come to think like other men : yet, methinks, this return to the simple dictates of nature, after having wandered through the wild mazes of philosophy, is not unpleasant. It is like coming home after a long voyage". 29 Ironically, though, the self-styled 'Philosophy of Common Sense' was created in deliberate reaction against the would-be common-sense philo­ sophies of Descartes and Berkeley - both of whom, according to Thomas Reid, had wandered blindly into scepticism. "A traveller of good j udgment may mistake his way, and be unawares led into a wrong track", he wrote in 1 764, " . . . but when it ends in a coal-pit, it requires no great j udgment to know that he hath gone wrong, nor perhaps to find out what has misled him". The truth was, that philosophy "has no other root but the principles of common sense"; and the trouble was that "men of genius in former ages" had made philosophy ridiculous by building castles in the air and making "their own dreams to pass for her oracles". In the time of Descartes, they had failed to deal with common sense "so favourably as the honour and interest of philosophy required"; in the time of Berkeley, they had gone even further and "waged open war with common sense". But now things were changing at last, and �'happily for the present age, the castle builders employ themselves more in romance than in philosophy". 3o So philosophy, for Reid, as for Berkeley and Descartes, was, or ought essentially to be, the dull sameness of perennial common sense; but the history of philo­ sophy was the record of repeated disobediences to this unvarying ideal. 4. MODERN: PHILOSOPHY AS CRITICISM OF METAPHYSICAL SYSTEMS

One of the things which helped philosophy to separate itselffrom empirical and technical fields of inquiry during the eighteenth century was its distinctive attitude to its past. Other subjects had integral histories which boasted a canon of exemplary classics. Philosophy, however, flaunted what one might call an anti-canon - a set of death's-head texts to wart). the unwary of the dangers of philosophical pride. For philosophers, a text accused of error need not be threatened with deletion from the canon: on the contrary, exemplary erroneousness was what made the history of their discipline special: it contained anti-classics, so to speak, rather than classics. And their chosen history furnished them, as they slowly began to Fi'�'"OS0P�V f":ibr