Different Forms of the Historiography of Philosophy
This chapter discusses the different forms of the historiography of philosophy. Among the large variety of projects and enterprises that are pursued under the heading ‘history of philosophy’ there are, in particular, three which deserve to be distinguished. These are ‘philosophical doxography’, ‘philosophical history of philosophy’, and ‘historical history of philosophy’. The conceptual or ideal difference between the three enterprises is clear enough if one looks at the history of the historiography of philosophy. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, concern with the history of philosophy is almost exclusively doxographical. But the assumptions on which the doxography of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries rests come to be questioned at the end of the eighteenth century, and their rejection gives rise, in the final decade of the eighteenth century, to the philosophical history of philosophy. This in turn rests on very strong philosophical assumptions concerning the history of philosophy. And so its principles come to be questioned in the first half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, all three enterprises continue to be pursued in one form or another. And for a variety of reasons, there is little awareness of their difference and they tend in actual practice to shade into each other and to be confused, though in principle they are quite different.