Hegel on the Political Significance of Collective Self-Deceit

In a famous passage in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel claimed that ‘philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought’. But our time is very different from Hegel’s, so two approaches have developed to understanding the relevance of his work for the contemporary world. One looks to remaining points of contact, such as his criticism of a contractualist view of the state. Another tries to apply his general approach to contemporary issues. Both are valuable, but in this article, the latter is taken up, and one issue is the focus. The question is, assuming there can be collective intentionality and collective agency (what Hegel calls Geist (spirit)), how should we understand Hegel’s claim that such group agents can be collectively self-deceived? And how would that claim bear on the contemporary political world?

Progress and Historical Reflection in Philosophy

What is the epistemic significance of reflecting on a discipline’s past for making progress in that discipline? The author assumes that the answer to this question negatively correlates with that discipline’s degree of progress over time. If and only if a science is progressive, then what people have thought and argued in the past in that discipline ceases to be up to date. This chapter distinguishes different dimensions of disciplinary progress and subsequently argue that veritic progress, that is, collective convergence to truth, is the most important dimension for disciplines with scientific ambitions. It then argues that, on the one hand, veritic progress in philosophy is more significant than many current philosophers believe, but that, on the other hand, it also has severe limitations. The author offers an explanation of these limitations that suggests that the history of philosophy should play some role, though only a minor one, in systematic philosophy.

History as an Interdisciplinary Dialogue: The Case of Philosophy and Economics

This chapter explores the history of philosophy as a resource for interdisciplinary research, drawing on the author’s work on Smith and Hegel for illustration. It briefly sketches some aspects of the relation between political philosophy and economics, and then describes a ‘post-Skinnerian’ approach to the history of philosophy that enters into a dialogue with historical thinkers, taking seriously their historical context but ultimately aiming at answering systematic questions. This approach allows us to garner the insights of thinkers who reflected in an integrated way about questions that today belong to different disciplines. It can help us to uncover implicit assumptions or theoretical gaps in contemporary approaches that are made invisible by the separation of research into different disciplinary fields. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the history of philosophy can inspire us to question the boundaries of disciplines and explore new avenues of research.

On Philosophical Problems: Some Remarks on an Old Battlefield

Hanjo Glock has recently argued that, while the study of the past can be useful to substantive philosophy, it is by no means indispensable, and he advocates a pragmatic attitude which considers the study of the past as useful insofar as it allows for a better argumentative analysis of trans-historical problems. To get beyond this perspective, the chapter first examines Glock’s characterisation of philosophical problems, which resonates with Bertrand Russell’s conception, and compares it with Paul Natorp’s view, before discussing the principles underlying Hans-Georg Gadamer’s epistemology of interpretive understanding, which results from the latter’s critique of problematic history. The chapter concludes by arguing that even though engagement with classical philosophical texts might not be necessary to the solution of specific problems, it is nonetheless essential to philosophy as a whole discipline.

The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge Revisited: Relativism, Scepticism, Reductionism

This chapter revisits the author’s 1995 book Psychologism: A Sociology of Philosophical Knowlege in a critical, constructive and comparative spirit. It begins with a brief summary of Psychologism. Subsequently, it identifies two key influences and discusses two recent studies that might be seen as sociological alternatives to what the author tried to do in the 1990s. It offers critical comments on these alternatives. Finally, the author formulates two objections to his previous work before turning to the question where the philosophical relevance of the SPK might lie.

The Liaison between Analytic and Ancient Philosophy and Its Consequences

Is it reasonable to expect that the occupation with history of philosophy contributes to our contemporary philosophical debate? The scholarship on ancient philosophy seems to be a paradigm case for the discussion of this kind of question. In the 1950s and 1960s, philosophers and scholars such as John L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, G.E.L. Owen, John Ackrill and Gregory Vlastos initiated a new style of scholarship that was influenced by analytic philosophy. This analytic style of ancient philosophy scholarship encouraged philosophers to take arguments presented by Plato or Aristotle more seriously and to import ancient ideas into contemporary debates. It was objected that analytic scholars tend to be thematically narrow and to neglect the historical context. By sketching the development of the first two generations of analytic scholarship this chapter tries to show that analytic scholarship need not be anachronistic and that the gain of this method outweighs possible excesses.

Philosophy and the Historical Perspective: A New Debate on an Old Topic

Since the rise of analytical philosophy, the relation of current philosophy and its past is more hotly debated among philosophers than ever. In this Introduction, I first explain the main questions of this debate: Does the study of the history of philosophy contribute to philosophy? What is this contribution? Is there a specific method relating the historical perspective to current philosophy? What does this mean for our view on philosophy in general? Second, I critically discuss doubts about the usefulness of the debate and defend its importance. Third, I briefly discuss the relation of the historical perspective and its relation to the philosophy of philosophy, and finally I summarize the evolution of the debate and some of its main positions.

The History of Philosophy Reveals that ‘Great’ Philosophy is Disguised Moral Advocacy: A Nietzschean Case against the Socratic Canon in Philosophy

Instrumentalists think the history of philosophy is as relevant to philosophy as the history of physics is to physics: if past philosophical or physical theories are true, or help us get to the truth, then we should know about them, otherwise not. Sceptical instrumentalists (such as Carnap and Quine) think history fails on these counts, optimistic instrumentalists think it does not. By contrast ‘anti-philosophical’ instrumentalists—such as Marx, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein—are not simply sceptics, because the sceptics still believe there is something for philosophy to do, some knowledge it can produce, some truths it can reveal. The anti-philosophical philosophers think we should give up philosophy as traditionally conceived: the real lesson from the history of philosophy in the Socratic canon is that philosophy is ‘garbage’, or, as Nietzsche thought, disguised moral advocacy. For Nietzsche, this is the real lesson of the history of philosophy.

The Alienation Effect in the Historiography of Philosophy

It has often been said that we should enter into a dialogue with thinkers of the past because they discussed the same problems we still have today and presented sophisticated solutions to them. I argue that this ‘dialogue model’ ignores the specific context in which many problems were created and defined. A closer look at various contexts enables us to see that philosophical problems are not as natural as they might seem. When we contextualise them, we experience a healthy alienation effect: we realise that problems discussed in the past depend on assumptions that are far from being self-evident. When we then compare these assumptions to our own, we reflect on our own theoretical framework that is not self-evident either. This leads to a denaturalisation of philosophical problems—in the past as well as in the present. The author argues for this thesis by examining late medieval discussions on mental language.

What Has History to Do with Philosophy? Insights from the Medieval Contemplative Tradition

This chapter focuses on the corrective and complementary roles that a historically oriented approach can occupy in philosophical discussions. First, it argues that analysis of the development of key definitions, concepts, principles and so forth can often illuminate problematic prejudices that should motivate a re-examination of the philosophical considerations in their favour. Second, it claims that this re-examination should involve looking at the relevant historical context in which the idea developed. Third, it demonstrates (via the case study of medieval mysticism and modern conceptions of mystical experience) that turning to the relevant historical context can sometimes provide viable philosophical resources with which to complement existing discussions. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this approach can also help philosophers engage in meaningful interaction with scholars working on similar topics in other disciplines.