The Historiography of Philosophy: With a Postface by Jonathan Barnes PDF
Preview The Historiography of Philosophy: With a Postface by Jonathan Barnes
The Historiography of Philosophy The Historiography of Philosophy MICHAEL FREDE Edited by KATERINA IERODIAKONOU With a Postface by JONATHAN BARNES 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Katerina Ierodiakonou 2022 Preface © Katerina Ierodiakonou 2022 Except Postface © Jonathan Barnes 2022 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2022 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021942903 ISBN 978–0–19–884072–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198840725.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Preface Katerina Ierodiakonou* 1. The Nellie Wallace Lectures: The Manuscript and Its History In the autumn term of the academic year 1989–1990 in Oxford, Michael Frede delivered the Nellie Wallace Lectures under the general title The Historiography of Philosophy. After returning to Princeton, NJ, he entrusted his manuscript to the secretary of the Philosophy Department, either Ann Getson or Bunny Romano; one or other of them usually typed his work for publication, since he himself never used a computer. It is this typed version of Frede’s lectures that we still have, for when he moved to Oxford in 1991, Frede threw away the manuscript, but at least kept safe, in a folder with a hard black cover, the only copy of the typed version of his lectures. In 2005, he brought this folder to Athens, along with the rest of his papers and books; unfortunately, he never found the time to read through this typescript and make the necessary corrections before his death in 2007. Although in general the secretary in Princeton did a careful job, there is no doubt that it would have been better to have Frede’s own manu- script. For the secretary left gaps at some places in the text and added a number of question marks, where she could not decipher his handwrit- ing or could not understand the German terms he used. Moreover, she seems to have skipped parts of Frede’s sentences, which often are delib- erately repetitive. Indeed, while copying the typed version of the lectures onto my computer in Word format, I was at times reminded of just how tricky the copyist’s job is. For I had to be particularly vigilant not to leave * I would like to thank Charles Brittain, Benjamin Morison, and Wolfgang Mann for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this preface. viii PrefaCe out whole sections of Frede’s text, in which the same words and phrases occur again and again. On the other hand, his repetitive style proved of great help to me in deciding how to fill in some of the gaps the secretary had left. Although I sometimes needed to modify the typed version of the Nellie Wallace Lectures, such changes were kept to a bare minimum, in order to preserve Frede’s rather idiosyncratic style. For he famously wrote the way he talked, so that anyone who reads these lectures and who had the chance to meet him in person will easily be able to hear his voice. Thus, I decided to retain the long sentences and distinctive syn- tax, but to introduce changes in the punctuation and separation of para- graphs in order to make the text more readable. To facilitate such decisions, I also sought the advice of Frede’s students and colleagues. In a two- day workshop at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi in June 2017, James Allen, Chloe Balla, Charles Brittain, Damian Caluori, John Cooper, Paul Kalligas, Vaso Kindi, Richard McKirahan, Benjamin Morison, Spyros Rangos, and Voula Tsouna met to discuss the difficul- ties in editing The Historiography of Philosophy. I would like to thank them all from my heart for their constructive suggestions. I would like also to thank Wolfgang Mann and Stephen Menn, who kindly sent me constructive comments on Frede’s text. Finally, thanks are due to François Nolle, who compiled the notes with a view to providing biblio- graphical references for those readers who may be interested in explor- ing more thoroughly the issues that Frede raises. The notes refer, in addition, to a set of lectures Frede had given at the University of California, Riverside in January 1986, which differ on sev- eral points from the Nellie Wallace Lectures, but mostly overlap with them. On account of this overlap, I decided not to publish the earlier lectures. On the other hand, Frede’s three published articles on the his- tori og raphy of philosophy are included in this volume for the sake of those who want to study and understand the development of Frede’s views: ‘The Study of Ancient Philosophy’ dates from 1987 and its scope, as the title indicates, is restricted, whereas the scope of the Nellie Wallace Lectures is broader. ‘The History of Philosophy as a Discipline’, from 1988, can be read as a summary or epitome of the salient claims of the Nellie Wallace Lectures. ‘Doxographical, Philosophical, and Historical PrefaCe ix Forms of the History of Philosophy’, from 1992, is a postlude, which, in certain parts, supplements the Nellie Wallace Lectures. (For complete- ness, I should also note Frede’s short review of J. J. E. Gracia’s book, Philosophy and Its History: Issues in Philosophical Historiography in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994), 233–6; it touches upon similar issues, but not in sufficient detail to justify its inclusion in this volume.) Given that we have Frede’s published articles on the historiography of philosophy, one could argue that I should have let the Nellie Wallace Lectures fall into oblivion. In addition, there can be absolutely no doubt that he himself would not have published them in their present form. In fact, he would have rewritten them again and again from beginning to end, as he always did with his work, also taking into consideration the discussions that followed his lectures. But the Nellie Wallace Lectures contain Frede’s most detailed and most systematic thoughts on the topic of the historiography of philosophy, a topic that was dear to him and occupied him for a long time. It would, therefore, have been a pity not to make them available to anyone interested in them. It is, of course, true that many relevant articles and books have been published since the time of the lectures and perhaps some of Frede’s central notions and assumptions have, by now, been superseded. To my mind, however, the Nellie Wallace Lectures have not lost their explanatory power and Frede’s proposal for a historical history of philosophy retains its value; it should thus be easily accessible, carefully studied, and critically assessed. 2. The Historical History of Philosophy Right from the beginning, Frede distinguishes the history of philosophy (i.e. the account of what philosophers have done) from the his tori og- raphy of philosophy (i.e. the account of what historians of philosophy do); and he makes clear that what he is interested in is to study how his- tor ians of philosophy ‘proceed the way they do’ and to make sense ‘of the actual practice of historiography in terms of the principles, presup- positions, assumptions which would justify it’ (p. 4). The aim of his lec- tures, he asserts, is normative: ‘what I am interested in here is not the x PrefaCe factual question why historians of philosophy do what they do, but the theoretical question, the question how we ought to conceive of and explain what they are doing’ (p. 4). For he believes that: (i) ‘reflections on the history of philosophy and its study may throw considerable light on history in general and its study’; (ii) ‘It may also benefit one’s understanding of what philosophy is, of how one should think about philosophical problems, whether and in what sense they are real problems’; and (iii) ‘this kind of reflection might help one to get clearer about the relation between philosophical activity, for instance, what phil- oso phers do nowadays, on the one hand, and the history of phil- oso phy and its study, on the other’ (p. 5). According to Frede, there are three systematic approaches to the history of philosophy, of which the first two are philosophical and the third his tor- ic al. They all fall under the same heading, ‘history of philosophy’, and deal with the same material, but they are distinct enterprises. In presenting these three approaches, Frede also outlines their historical development: I. Philosophical doxography: ‘a very old philosophical enterprise of looking towards the history of philosophy for views and positions of continued philosophical interest’ (p. 14). The doxographer dis- regards the fact that the philosophical views of the past are of the past and treats them ‘as if they were contemporary, perhaps even as views which might be defended nowadays’ (p. 26). Hence, the dox- ographer does not attempt to trace the development of phil oso phy from its beginnings and does not follow a chronological order. The prime example of a doxographer in antiquity is Diogenes Laertius, but among other ancient writers who share the same approach with him are Ps. Plutarch, Nicolaus of Damascus, and Arius Didymus; next, around the middle of the fourteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, we have a renewed tradition of philosophical doxography in the works of Walter Burleigh, Thomas Stanley, Georg Horn, and Jacob Brucker; and finally, in the first
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