The Legacies of Richard Popkin (review)

The essays in this volume are by fellow historians of ideas and philosophy, colleagues, and former students of Richard Popkin; its editor is his son, a historian at the University of Kentucky. The volume is in the style of a festschrift, but it has a special personal component. The notes on the contributors indicate how each came to know Popkin. The essays do not concentrate on developments of each author’s own work, but access Popkin’s work, in some instances extending it, and often relating it to aspects of his career. The final contribution is a biographical sketch of his career, done by the editor, from letters that are part of Popkin’s papers housed in the Clark Library at UCLA. This biographical sketch is preceded by a memoir by Avrum Stroll, recounting his collaboration with Popkin on their Philosophy Made Simple, which they co-authored in 1955 and which, in its multiple printings, has served as an introductory textbook for generations of students.

The fourteen essays are by B. Copenhaver, A. P. Coudent, S. Hutton, P. K. J. Park, and K. Peden (on Popkin and the history of philosophy); J. E. Force, M. Mulsow, and D. B. Ruderman (on religion and philosophy in the seventeenth century); J. C. Laursen, J. R. Maia Neto, and G. Paganini (on the sceptical tradition); and Y. Kaplan, D. S. Katz, and M. Goldish (on Popkin and the Jews).

Richard Popkin died in 2005. During his lifetime he was honored by two volumes of essays: The Sceptical Mode in Modern Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Richard H. Popkin, ed. R. A. Watson and J. E. Force (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1988), and Everything Connects: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin, ed. J. E. Force and D. S. Katz (Leiden: Brill, 1999). The first of these contains Popkin’s “Intellectual Autobiography: Warts and All,” and the second contains a continuation of it.

Against this background of assessments of his work and publication of his autobiography, the current volume is dedicated to a presentation and projection of his legacies. The central theme is that Popkin transformed the study of the history of philosophy in our time. He did this first of all in his History of Scepticism, in which he established the importance of the revival and role of scepticism for the comprehension of the development of modern philosophy. The essays in this volume address his achievement of assembling the sceptical tradition, and they proceed to address his later work, in which he focused on the interconnection between religious and philosophical issues in modern thought concerning the relationship of Judaism and Christianity.

What are the legacies of Richard Popkin? One legacy, which may not first come to mind but which is quite important, is his contribution to philosophical education. In response to a query by Richard Watson, his former student at the University of Iowa and later his colleague at Washington University in St. Louis, Popkin assessed his contribution to philosophy to be his writings plus his founding of the Journal of the History of Philosophy and the International Archives of the History of Ideas and his influence on people in various areas of intellectual history. To these very appropriate and obvious contributions he added (letter of 22 August 1987) that he hoped there would be a place for the historical approach in professional philosophy. “I don’t worry about what the analytic historians will do, but I just want to guarantee some ways young people can get the training to do historical history of philosophy” (292).

I do not know who Popkin may have had in mind as examples of analytic historians, as the various forms of analytic philosophy originally turned away from the study of the history of philosophy to focus on problem-solving and argument. But many of those who would describe their orientation as Anglo-American analytic engage in the interpretation and consideration of claims and arguments found in the major works of historical...