The History of Philosophy and the Reputation of Philosophers

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 113 of the nonnarrative historian, hut his interests are philosophical, not historical. These interests are speculation about the real. And here narrative conceptions arise dialectically between what the past philosopher can be interpreted to have said and what speculative insight the philosopher may find in what is said. In this way the voices of the past may live again in a new idiom. And the identity of the old voice in a new idiom is a narrative relation where significance from present interests are read into the past. Watson pictures what I have called the nonnarrative historian as embalming dead philosophers. But he observes that "philosophers who use the history of philosophy do not care all that much about authentic museum pieces. Cheap imitations better serve their purposes, anyway." On the problem-solving image of philosophy, a cheap imitation is enough: anything that will set off the problem and the philosopher's dramatic solution or dissolution of it will do. But the matter is quite different on the conversation model. Past philosophers are not museum pieces but voices that speak, and one does not "use" past philosophers, one listens to them, takes delight in them, and is modified by them. One engages past philosophers as friends with which to speculate about the real and to gain self-knowledge. Pascal said he read Montaigne to learn about Montaigne but came away learning about himself. To sum up. If we may think of shadow history as a narrative engagement with past philosophers, then Watson is right to insist on their legitimacy. My disagreement is with the conception of philosophical activity implied in the account. Philosophy is conversation, not problem-solving as in the analytic tradition. And one can be a bad conversationalist. A voice may refuse to listen, refuse to be modified, become insular, and seek to dominate the conversation. Such a voice soon becomes boring. The shadow histories of Bennett, Russell, Ayer, Ryle, and Rorty are legitimate but tedious voices in the philosophical conversation of mankind. DON^LD LXVlNGSTON Emory University The History of Philosophy and the Reputation of Philosophers There can be no doubting that great philosophers have often constructed simplistic and distorted versions of past philosophies, and used these as foils for the presentation of their own philosophy. Often such foils are presented as the representation of the inadequacies, or worse, of a particular philosopher, and Richard Watson gives us examples of this in Russell's account of Hegel in The Problemsof Philosophyand Ryle on Descartes in The Conceptof Mind. He calls such presentations shadow histories of philosophy and he claims that the "shadow history" of philosophy so generated is at least as important as the (true) history of those great (usually dead) philosophers because sometimes the distorted version of a past philosopher or philosophy has been more influential on the development of philosophy than a faithful representation. Russell's hostile account of Hegel is offered as one such case, and Rorty's version of I_x~ke is taken as an another. What should we make of this? An immediate problem arises with the metaphor: shadow histories are, he says, "wrong," mere pretensions to history and not history 114 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:1 JANUARY 1993 itself. Yet it is not clear that Watson really is so severely committed; perhaps they are merely inadequate. And, we can ask, inadequate to what end? Despite such doubts, there is a clear sense in which much of what Watson claims may be true. It is quite possible that Russell's disparagement of Hegel so influenced English-language students of philosophy that they never gave Hegel further serious consideration. To establish this would be no litde matter--not something done in one paper, for example . There are a variety of other possible reasons why interest in Hegel might decline. Students might, perhaps, have found other, better, reasons for not reading him. In the first decades of this century they might have been more excited by reading, say, The Principles of Mathematics.' One central example that Watson employs is that of the contrasting views of Locke that we have from Yolton and Rorty. It is, he suggests, the...