https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020174X.2022.2124542 Skip to Main Content Taylor and Francis Online homepage Taylor and Francis Online homepage Log in | Register Cart 1. Home 2. All Journals 3. Inquiry 4. List of Issues 5. Latest Articles 6. The end of history [ ] Search in: [This Journal] [] Advanced search Publication Cover Inquiry An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy Latest Articles Submit an article Journal homepage Open access 13,789 Views 0 CrossRef citations to date 0 Altmetric Listen Research Article The end of history Hanno SauerUtrecht University, Utrecht, NetherlandsCorrespondence h.c.sauer@uu.nl View further author information Received 04 Jul 2021 Accepted 09 Sep 2022 Published online: 19 Sep 2022 * Download citation * https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2022.2124542 * CrossMark Logo CrossMark In this articleIn this article * ABSTRACT * Introduction * 1. A brief history of anti-historicism * 2. The case for the history of philosophy * 3. Historical authors were probably wrong about almost everything * 4. Historical authors were probably much worse philosophers * 5. How did we get here? * 6. Conclusion * Disclosure statement * Additional information * Footnotes * References Research Article The end of history * Full Article * Figures & data * References * Citations * Metrics * Licensing * Reprints & Permissions * View PDF PDF View EPUB EPUB ABSTRACT ABSTRACT What credence should we assign to philosophical claims that were formed without any knowledge of the current state of the art of the philosophical debate and little or no knowledge of the relevant empirical or scientific data? Very little or none. Yet when we engage with the history of philosophy, this is often exactly what we do. In this paper, I argue that studying the history of philosophy is philosophically unhelpful. The epistemic aims of philosophy, if there are any, are frustrated by engaging with the history of philosophy, because we have little reason to think that the claims made by history's great philosophers would survive closer scrutiny today. First, I review the case for philosophical historiography and show how it falls short. I then present several arguments for skepticism about the philosophical value of engaging with the history of philosophy and offer an explanation for why philosophical historiography would seem to make sense even if it didn't. KEYWORDS: * History of philosophy * metaphilosophy * philosophical methodology * social epistemology * epistemic peerhood What in common language is called old time, ought [...] to be called young or early time. As between individual and individual living at the same time and in the same situation, he who is old, possesses, as such, more experience than he who is young; - as between generation and generation, the reverse of this is true, if, as in ordinary language, a preceding generation be, with reference to a succeeding generation, called old; - the old or preceding generation could not have had so much experience as the succeeding. With respect to such of the materials or sources of wisdom which have come under the cognisance of their own senses, the two are on a par; - with respect to such of those materials and sources of wisdom as are derived from the reports of others, the later of the two possesses an indisputable advantage. In giving the name of old or elder to the earlier generation of the two, the misrepresentation is not less gross, nor the folly of it less incontestable, than if the name of old man or old woman were given to the infant in its cradle. What then is the wisdom of the times called old? Is it the wisdom of gray hairs? No. - It is the wisdom of the cradle. (Jeremy Bentham, The Book of Fallacies, Part I, Chapter II) Introduction Imagine a tiny island somewhere far away. The island only has a few million inhabitants. They have no modern technology, no scientific knowledge of contemporary physics or biology or astronomy or psychology, no real mathematics or logic and, perhaps worst of all, no internet. Many of the people on the island have never talked to each other, and they never will. Indeed, many are unaware of what the world outside of the island is like, or that such a world exists at all. But they do engage in philosophical thinking, and sometimes, they write their thoughts down. Meanwhile, the rest of world outside of the island spends a disproportionate amount of time studying the writings of the islanders, scouring them for hidden insights and important, thus far undiscovered truths which they hope to recover by pondering what the islanders, many of which are notorious for indulging in a rather hermetic style, may have meant. Comparatively speaking, the rest of the world spends a disproportionately small amount of time thinking about the extrainsular world - which contains orders of magnitude more people with all the latest knowledge at their disposal - and what they have to say. When you point this out to them, they become defensive, and insist that what the islanders have to say really is that good - usually much better and more insightful, at any rate, than what anyone from the rest of the world, perhaps with some exceptions, tends to produce. This is an odd situation. Its intertemporal equivalent, I want to suggest, is the situation we are actually in. The tiny island far away is the history of philosophy, and we are paying too much attention to it. In this paper, I argue that studying the history of philosophy is philosophically unhelpful. The epistemic aims of philosophy, if there are any, are largely frustrated by engaging with the history of philosophy. My claim is that we can learn surprisingly little about philosophical problems by studying the works of the 'great' historical philosophers such as Aristotle, Hegel, or Wittgenstein. Examples for philosophical problems are: what is knowledge and how do we acquire it? What constitutes a just society? How does the human mind work? What are natural laws? Where does linguistic meaning come from? Becoming acquainted with the history of philosophy contributes very little to improving our understanding of those problems and their potential solutions, so we would be better off doing much less of it. My paper has five sections. (1) Discusses some anti-historicist forebears. In (2), I show that extant defenses of philosophical historiography have largely fallen short of justifying the historicist approach specifically enough; in many cases, the benefits allegedly produced by studying philosophy could also be provided by studying complicated texts more generally, or studying the history of philosophy, albeit much more rarely and by focusing less on the usual suspects. (3) Argues that we have good reasons for thinking that historical authors were not equipped with the theoretical sophistication nor the empirical knowledge required for their writings to still be relevant to contemporary debates. In (4), I show that we have no reason for thinking that the distribution of philosophical talent and competence should be as skewed in favor of the past as is commonly assumed. (5) Provides a brief sketch of how the history of philosophy became epistemically overrated and why it will likely continue to be. There are various defenses of the history of philosophy in the literature,^1 but I am not aware of any systematic contribution summarizing the case against history.^2 This paper is supposed to fill this gap. 1. A brief history of anti-historicism The anti-historicist thesis I defend has its own history. Rumor has it that a sign on Gilbert Harman's office door at Princeton said: 'History of philosophy? Just say no!', borrowing a slogan first championed by Nancy Reagan in the 'war on drugs'. How many promising young minds, the suggestion seems to be, have succumbed to the devious lure of Nietzsche's aphorisms, only to find themselves unable to stop and, after years of using, tragically ending up as full-blown Leibniz experts? At roughly the same time, the German philosopher Herbert Schnadelbach spoke contemptuously of morbus hermeneuticus, a philosophical affliction - endemic mostly to 'continental' philosophy departments - that led those who suffered from it to pretend that, by engaging in philology and exegesis, they were somehow playing a pivotal role in the very unfolding of world history (Schnadelbach 1987). Some have suspected that the unusually strong focus philosophy has on its own history can at least in part be explained away psychologically: Some history will come in the back door of the problems courses - so be it. But don't be a slave to the fact that most of your faculty know a great deal about the history of philosophy and hence, (a) find it easy to teach, and (b) tend to rationalize its importance. Like the formal logic requirement, this is all-too-often a case of those who went through fraternity initiations (or marine boot camp) needing to justify the hardship - or their own idiosyncratic taste - by generalizing about its necessity. The test of a good major is that s/ he does good philosophy, not good history of philosophy. Few great philosophers are noted for their work in the history of philosophy and many were deficient or disinterested in it. They were into the problems. Let it be at least a matter for investigation whether the history requirements are necessary; they certainly are a barrier. (Scriven 1988, 233) This could explain why philosophy has such a strong historical focus. And this much is true: philosophy is, at least in part, a humanistic discipline, dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of humanity, and sustaining our ability to comprehend a body of difficult texts whose content may fade into oblivion without such stewardship. This is an entirely legitimate endeavor that I won't have anything to object to in this paper. However, philosophy is not only a humanistic discipline, and as far as the part that focuses on the substantive problems is concerned - how to understand time, or virtue, or God - a striking and frequently noticed asymmetry remains: the history of most scientific disciplines, while interesting, plays little or no role in how those disciplines conduct their business today. Physics is not taught or practiced by reading and interpreting Newton's Principia Mathematica Philosophiae Naturalis, Geometry is not done by studying Euclid's Elements, and so on. There may be some sort of fundamental difference between philosophy and physics or chemistry that accounts for this fact. The point is that historicists of philosophy owe us an explanation of what that difference is and why, in philosophy, things should stand so differently. To be perfectly clear: my claim is not that we should not be doing history of philosophy. There are all kinds of reasons why reading and talking about the Critique of Pure Reason or the Republic are worthwhile: studying these seminal texts is an inherently interesting intellectual pursuit; reading them is often tremendously enjoyable; and familiarity with these texts can be very valuable to intellectual historians for the insights into culture, knowledge and morality they may contain. There are thus many excellent reasons to engage with the history of philosophy. Gaining traction on the aforementioned philosophical problems, however, is not one of them. This means that I am not arguing against historians of philosophy and what they do, but against what could be called philosophical historicists, that is, those who seem to think that at least one good method of thinking about knowledge or justice is to study what historical authors have written about knowledge and justice a long time ago. This, I argue, is a mistake. Ultimately, I advocate a version of 'triumphant anachronism' (Williams 2006, 258). If we want to do good philosophy today, knowledge of yesterday's good philosophy is not going to help us very much. A stronger version of this anachronistic thesis would have it that studying the history of philosophy is not just philosophically insignificant but positively harmful. Everything we do has opportunity costs: by deciding to do A, we are, therefore, deciding not to do B, so that every minute I spend reading Spinoza, I could be reading a recent paper with a novel and better argument. This stronger version of anti-historicism is not what I am after here. Moreover, I will limit my argument to the question of how to do philosophical research, leaving the issue of how best to teach philosophy aside. In fact, one could argue that studying authors with obscure, obsolete and difficult to comprehend views is especially useful for sharpening students' hermeneutical skills and training their interpretive abilities. I actually suspect that historical authors should play a smaller role in our philosophical education as well, but I am not taking a stand on this here. Who endorses historicism? It is hard to find this approach defended explicitly in print, largely, I suspect, because people do not see the need to explicitly defend methodological assumptions which aren't felt to require ant defense; people rarely justify what appears obvious to them. But implicit assumptions can be criticized as well, and the practice of dealing with and relying on the history of philosophy that I focus on in this paper will be familiar and recognizable to many readers. We see this implicit assumption at work all the time: Christine Korsgaard develops her arguments for the inescapability of categorical moral demands largely by relying on Kant's work, and the systematic ambitions of Robert Brandom's recent A Spirit of Trust are largely fleshed out in dialogue with Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.^3 The majority of the work appearing in, say, the Journal of the History of Philosophy or the British Journal for the History of Philosophy does not just discuss the views of Spinoza, Aristotle, Nietzsche or Malebranche, but tries to gain an understanding of the systematic issues these historical authors grappled with through engaging with them. Conversely, some skepticism towards the history of philosophy is widespread as well, though it is rarely spelled out systematically what justifies this attitude or what it consists in. Historicists and anti-historicists have thus far mostly avoided to properly articulate the respective controversial metaphilosophical assumptions they feel entitled to take for granted. An explicit debate about these assumptions has yet to be started. To do so is my aim in this paper. My thesis may strike some as epistemically arrogant. It seems that, before one tries to make up one's mind about important questions that have concerned humanity for millennia, one should at least check what others may have said about them. I wholeheartedly agree, but wish to maintain that this duty of epistemic diligence is just as well, or indeed better, discharged by trying to appreciate what other contemporary thinkers have written about a topic. Unless one thinks that the history of philosophy is a completely random walk, it does not seem unreasonable to hope that people have learned at least something from the past, and that philosophy's history is, in some sense, 'contained' within current philosophy, if only because we have learned to avoid the most egregious mishaps of the past. Those who are inclined to reject my thesis straight away often seem to assume, if only implicitly, that there is no progress in philosophy, at least not of the kind we find in the sciences. That may very well be, but I doubt that it is a consequence many historians of philosophy will be eager to accept. One could defend the history of philosophy by arguing that doing philosophical historiography is at least not comparatively worse than doing ahistorical philosophy, since both rest on equally shoddy foundations. Fair enough: but defending the history of philosophy by indicting the whole discipline yields a victory that is hardly distinguishable from defeat. 2. The case for the history of philosophy What about extant defenses of the philosophical significance of the history of philosophy? In this section, my argument will be that, while these defenses give us some reasons in favor of dealing with the history of philosophy, they fail to meet the real challenge, which is to provide a justification that specifically recommends doing history of philosophy in order to produce the benefits which, by their own lights, studying the history of philosophy is supposed to produce. Consider this analogy: I want to become a bodybuilder, but I don't know where to start or how to do that, so I ask my friend for advice. He tells me that I should eat healthy and take a walk every day. One can see right away what is wrong with this advice: while eating healthy and being somewhat physically active probably don't undermine my wish to become a bodybuilder, they also don't specifically contribute to its realization. Which behavior will be most adequate as a means to my end? is what I wanted to know. My friend has told me to do things that only vaguely point into roughly the right direction. His advice is unhelpful, even misleading. Current defenses of philosophical historiography almost always commit the same error. They gesture at some supposed benefit that we have reason to obtain - honing our critical thinking capacities, improving our ability to understand difficult texts, and the like - then aim to show how studying the history of philosophy allegedly produces said benefit. But this is not the advice we seek: what we want to know is whether engaging with the history of philosophy to the extent and in the way that it is done right now is the most adequate means towards realizing the stipulated goal. Defenses of philosophical historiography almost never meet this challenge. Consider, for instance, Rachel Barney's Why Study the History of Philosophy?. She writes: Why should undergraduates be encouraged to read and think about some of the mighty philosophical dead? Really there are almost too many reasons to bother rehearsing. To sharpen their analytical and critical skills; to acquire important new ideas and concepts (new vocabulary, even); to expand their reading and interpretive abilities; to taste the intrinsic fascinations of watching great minds at work; to learn something about big-picture intellectual history and its relation to history of other kinds; to start to learn to think philosophically themselves by studying some important models; and so forth on and on. Moreover, depending on the period and the figures studied, students can either learn important things about where our own society's intellectual framework (such as it is) comes from, or encounter some radically different alternatives it - or, in the case of ancient Greek philosophy, both. In sum, the study of the history of philosophy - at this basic, go-back-to-your-dorm-and-read-the-Meditations level - is mind-sharpening and mind-expanding in all sorts of powerful and uncontroversially worthwhile ways. (Barney 2012, 2f) This argument fails to show that we should engage with the history of philosophy at all. Let's return to the analogy from above for a minute: I want to get into bodybuilding. People tell me that in order to do so, I should start taking walks. I ask them why. They tell me that taking walks is healthy, taking walks is good for your coordination, taking walks burns calories, and that taking walks is good for your digestion. Now, I don't doubt that digestive problems would be most unwelcome for developing a career in bodybuilding. But that doesn't mean that when I want to develop a specific skill, I should start doing things that merely wouldn't hurt in developing it, or merely made a small contribution to it. I need to take the specific and best available means to it. Likewise, none of the reasons for studying the history of philosophy mentioned above specifically recommend philosophical historiography. If we want to 'sharpen our analytical and critical skills', 'acquire new ideas and concepts', 'watch great minds at work', it is surely an open empirical question whether reading historical philosophical authors is the best way of doing so. All of the aforementioned goods can clearly be obtained just as well - or better - by studying contemporary authors, or by studying things entirely outside of philosophy. Next, consider Catarina Dutilh Novaes' (2014) claim that philosophy contributes to our 'conceptual genealogy': the history of philosophy can enlighten is about the origin of our intuitions, so that we do not end up treating beliefs that are historically contingent as eternal, self-evident, a priori truths. Charles Taylor proposes a similar argument: In a given society at a given time, the dominant interpretations and practices may be so linked with a given model that this is, as it were, constantly projected for the members as the way things obviously are. I think this is the case both directly, and via its connection with influential modern understandings of the individual and his freedom and dignity [...]. But if this is so then freeing oneself from the model cannot be done just by showing an alternative. [...] Freeing ourselves from the presumption of uniqueness requires uncovering the origins [of the dominant interpretation]. That is why philosophy is inescapably historical. (Taylor 1984, 21) Let's call this the archeology argument. It contains sound advice in general, but it also fails to specifically recommend that we engage in philosophical historiography. For one thing, there are good reasons for thinking that philosophy hardly relies on intuitions at all (Deutsch 2015) and that, to the extent that it does, we should rely on intuitions much less anyway (Machery 2017). So this argument doesn't do very much for those who already reject intuition mongering as an adequate method of philosophy. But even if philosophers were to legitimately rely on intuitions to some extent, the archeology argument wouldn't show that the history of philosophy is the best, or even a good, way of exploring the contingency of our beliefs. When it comes to exploring the genesis of our intuitions, we would expect philosophers to engage with the history of their discipline much less than they actually do, and instead dive deep into psychology, biology, regular history or cultural history. So here, too, the justification we are offered for the history of philosophy ends up recommending that we do something else. Other justifications of historicism do not fare much better. Perhaps the most commonly cited reason for reading the greats is that only by doing so can we learn from and avoid their mistakes: 'those who are ignorant of the history of philosophy are doomed to recapitulate it (not just reinventing the wheel, but reinventing the square wheel)' (Williams 2000, 492). But as far as I can tell, the opposite seems much more plausible. In order to repeat the mistakes of a famous philosopher, one must first share their beliefs. Now, few people are born with any degree of credence in the far-fetched propositions embraced by many philosophers. In general, these kinds of beliefs have to be acquired; and the only way of acquiring them is to study these authors. It seems that if we wanted to avoid acquiring false beliefs that we would never arrive at except by reading a particular author, the best thing by far we could do is to avoid reading that author. Consider who, out of two random samples of the population, is more likely to repeat Hegel's mistakes. Over here are one hundred people that have never even heard of Hegel and over there are one hundred Hegel scholars that have dedicated most of their professional lives to studying and interpreting Hegel. Presumably, one of the main reasons (though perhaps not the only one) for becoming a Hegel scholar is some basic sympathetic attitude towards the content of Hegel's thought. It may not be unheard of for a philosophical historian to study an author they completely and wholeheartedly disagree with, but it is not the norm. The idea that intense engagement with Hegel's philosophy somehow inoculates against his blunders, rather than biasing us in their favor, is implausible. When scholars of famous philosopher X tell you that you need to study X to avoid their mistakes, it's as if someone with a known vested interest in you believing what the Bible says - say, a priest - tried to convince you to read the Bible because doing so was the only way to avoid repeating its mistakes. I wouldn't believe that person, either. For how do biologists and chemists avoid repeating the mistakes Lamarck or C. E. Stahl made in their respective disciplines? Tellingly, they do not accomplish this by reading Lamarck or C. E. Stahl, but by skipping straight to contemporary biology and chemistry, which originated in no small part by departing from their mistakes. Indeed, the best way of avoiding past philosophical errors seems to be to ignore them and to engage with current philosophy right away. I do not want to overstate this point, however. Physicists do still teach Newton and Newtonian mechanics in textbooks. But this doesn't contradict my thesis: firstly, engagement with historical authors plays a much, much smaller role in other scientific disciplines compared to philosophy and, moreover, exegetical engagement with the primary texts by Darwin or Euclid seems entirely optional in those disciplines, in a way in which it is often not considered optional in philosophy. Wilfrid Sellars once wrote that '[t]he history of philosophy is the lingua franca which makes communication between philosophers, at least of different points of view, possible. Philosophy without the history of philosophy, if not empty or blind, is at least dumb' (Sellars 1968, 1). But this is an empirical conjecture that seems to be plainly false. There is plenty of ahistorical philosophy. Is all of it empty, blind, or dumb? Surely not. Do philosophers who are not familiar with the history of philosophy regularly talk past each other much more severely than historians of philosophy? Do scholars of Locke or Hume really understand each other much better than scholars of neither? No, they do not. Maria Antognazza argues that studying the history of philosophy uniquely equips us to learn how to 'think outside the box' (Antognazza 2015). The history of philosophy can contain a subversive force against unjustified philosophical orthodoxy. But if the goal is to learn how to think outside the box and to avoid the pitfalls of philosophical conformity, then why should we engage with the history of philosophy so much and in the way we currently engage with it? Why not read novels, or study other disciplines? And why should the historiography of philosophy be pursued as it is now, by (mostly) reading and talking about the 'greats'? If her rationale is sound, we should be focusing far more, or perhaps even exclusively, on less well-known figures who played no role in building the philosophical orthodoxy we are, according to this argument, supposed to challenge. The main lesson to draw here is that any defense of historiography as a method of philosophy has to provide reasons that specifically recommend doing history of philosophy, rather than something else, and that recommend doing it in roughly the way it is currently done, rather than completely differently. None of the arguments discussed above establish this. The alleged benefits of philosophical historiography can be obtained at least as well or better by studying contemporary philosophy or other scientific fields. As evidence against the thesis that historical work in philosophy is philosophically unproductive, one may be tempted to point to philosophical breakthroughs that have seemingly been inspired by deep engagement with past philosophy. The revival of republicanism in political philosophy seems to have benefitted greatly from Hobbes and Rousseau; Pittsburgh-style inferentialism in semantics and the philosophy of mind owes a significant debt to Kant, Hegel, and Frege. Modern virtue ethics rediscovered Aristotle's ethics; and so on. All of this may, of course, be true, but it has little bearing on my thesis here. Note that the claim we need to evaluate here is the counterfactual that the discoveries just mentioned would not have occurred without said historical influences, and it is far from obvious that this is so. For one thing, the causal order is often the other way around: a philosopher makes a discovery, and then later finds out that something similar had been already suggested earlier. The connection is then made post hoc. For another thing, we do not know which philosophical breakthroughs would have been made without such engagement with the historical literature. It is far from inconceivable that, even though engagement with its history contributed to whatever modest successes have de facto been accomplished in philosophy, not engaging with its history would have led to far greater successes. Again, a comparison with other scientific disciplines is instructive: suppose that physics were conducted (as it once used to be) primarily by reading and engaging with historical sources. Whatever insights physicists had generated this way would then be at least partly attributable to their engagement with history, which could appear to vindicate its historical approach. But it is immediately clear that this is not so, for the comparatively ahistorical way in which modern physics is actually conducted has led to far greater successes, discoveries and developments than would have been counterfactually possible. The fact that some good things have come from engaging with history does not disconfirm the arguments of this paper. 3. Historical authors were probably wrong about almost everything The case for philosophical historiography is in bad shape. What about the case against history? Perhaps the best argument for studying the great philosophers of the past is that in philosophy, we want to arrive at the truth about various matters, and those great philosophers may just be in possession of (part of) it. Here, the justification for doing history of philosophy would be straightforwardly epistemic. If we ignore philosophy's history, we will miss out on its important insights and clever arguments. This argument, however, incurs an important explanatory burden. We want to arrive at the truth about X. But how did the truth about X get into those past works in the first place? Surely even the greatest of philosophers of all time did not have divine a priori access to the realm of ideas. Even Ockham or Fichte had to rely on something in coming up with their claims. For the most part, any philosopher has to rely on (a) the scientific information available at the time and (b) the work of their peers. Take problem X. Problem X is important and difficult. Now the question becomes a social epistemological one: how much testimonial weight should we assign to the opinion of a person regarding a difficult but important matter about which we know that they did not have the required empirical or scientific knowledge to arrive at a minimally competent and well-informed opinion about X and about which we know that they had no familiarity - none, whatsoever - with the recent scholarly and scientific debate about X? The answer seems clear: no weight at all. An important assumption here is that there are at least some criteria of philosophical quality, whatever they are. Some positions are more thought through, better informed, more consistent, more coherent, or more plausible. These are epistemic criteria, and they are at least not completely arbitrary. But if there are such standards, then the following seems to hold: 1. It is unlikely that historical authors were right about anything because they lacked the scientific and/or empirical information required for it, since so many philosophical claims or theories depend on scientific and/or empirical propositions.^4 2. It is unlikely that historical authors were right about anything because they lacked the theoretical and/or conceptual sophistication required for it, since philosophical competence hinges on at least a basic degree of familiarity with current philosophical debates. Note that we readily apply (1) and (2) to contemporary authors, whose contributions are immediately discounted when and to the extent that they lack basic competence in just this way. Historical authors should not be exempt from this threshold. It may seem as if these epistemic criteria beg the question at issue here. Being acquainted with current theoretical vocabulary and current empirical evidence is a threshold that historical authors, for obvious reasons, couldn't possibly clear. Of course, one may be tempted to reply, if we turn it into a criterion of whose work deserves our attention and whose doesn't that a given author be alive today, then the philosophical irrelevance of historical authors follows trivially. But the appearance that the above criteria are question-begging in any problematic sense of the term is misleading. For one thing, consider that the same charge would apply to the converse epistemic standards as well. Suppose that one were to approach the question of how relevant historical work is to today's philosophy by stating upfront that being familiar with the best currently available conceptual tools and empirical information has no impact on the philosophical quality of someone's work. This, too, could be legitimately seen a stacking the deck in favor of the history of philosophy. Either way, we would be 'begging the question'. The real question is whether the aforementioned epistemic criteria are illicitly biased against historical authors, and whether they fail to display the proper degree of impartiality that is required to fairly adjudicate the question. To see why these standards are not improperly partial in favor of the present, consider the fact that we also apply these criteria to anyone who lives today, and that, as a result of this, the philosophical views and opinions of a staggering number of contemporary people are simply ignored or discounted as well. In fact, we are simply employing a common-sense epistemic criterion - that philosophical competence requires familiarity with the relevant theoretical and empirical state of the art - which then happens to rule out the philosophical views of billions of people, by far the most of which are alive today. As it happens, the great philosophers of the past also turn out be among this diverse group of people, all of whom are fairly evaluated in light of the same criteria. Consider Plato's or Rousseau's evaluation of the virtues and vices of democracy. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of evidence and theories that were unavailable to them at the time: * Historical experiences with developed democracies * Empirical evidence regarding democratic movements in developing countries * Various formal theorems regarding collective decision making and preference aggregation, such as the Condorcet Jury-Theorem, Arrow's Impossibility-Results, the Hong-Page-Theorem, the median voter theorem, the miracle of aggregation, etc. * Existing studies on voter behavior, polarization, deliberation, information * Public choice economics, incl. rational irrationality, democratic realism * The whole subsequent debate on their own arguments * [...] When it comes to people currently alive, we would steeply discount the merits of the contribution of any philosopher whose work were utterly uninformed by the concepts, theories and evidence just mentioned (and whatever other items belong on this list). It is not clear why the great philosophers of the past should not be subjected to the same standard. (Bear in mind that time and attention are severely limited resources. Therefore, every decision we make about whose work to dedicate our time and attention to faces important trade-offs.) The nature/nurture debate in moral psychology illustrates the same point. Philosophers have long discussed whether there is an innate moral faculty, and what its content may consist in. Now consider which theories and evidence were unavailable to historical authors such as Hume or Kant when they developed their views on the topic, and compare this to a recent contribution to the debate (Nichols et al. 2016): * Linguistic corpus data * Evolutionary psychology * Universal moral grammar theory * Sophisticated statistical methods * Bayesian formal modeling * 250 years of the nature/nurture debate * 250 years of subsequent debates on Hume or Kant * [...] Finally, consider Hobbes' justification of political authority in terms of how it allows us to avoid the unpleasantness of the state of nature. Here are some concepts and theories that were not available to him when he devised his arguments: * Utility functions * Nash equilibria * Dominant strategy * Backward induction * Behavioral economics * Experimental game theory * Biological evidence on the adaptivity of cooperation * Empirical evidence regarding life in hunter/gatherer societies * Cross-cultural data regarding life in contemporary tribal societies * [...] Again, when it comes to deciding whose philosophical work to devote our time and attention to, any person that didn't have any knowledge whatsoever of the above items would be a dubious choice. A version of this problem that is somewhat more specific to moral philosophy is that in ethics, it is often important not to assign disproportionate testimonial weight to people of which we have good reasons to suspect that they harbored deeply objectionable attitudes or publicly expressed moral beliefs we have reason to deem unjustified and/or morally odious. Personally, I have made a habit of not heeding the ethical advice of Adolf Eichmann, Ted Bundy, and various of my family members. But upon looking at the moral views held by many of the most prominent authors in the history of philosophy, one often cannot help but shudder: Plato advocated abolishing the family, violently if need be; Aristotle defended (a version of) slavery as natural; Locke advocated religious toleration, only to exclude atheists from the social contract; Kant argued that masturbation is one of the gravest moral transgressions there is; Hegel claimed that it is an a priori truth that the death penalty is morally obligatory, and indeed a form of respect towards the executed; the list of historical philosophers who held sexist, racist and other discriminatory views would be too long to recount here. Does the fact that a historical philosopher endorsed some extremely despicable moral views entail that we should discount their views entirely? One may think that in order for the latter, stronger, claim to follow, one would have to show that said philosopher's entire body of work is somehow deeply and thoroughly infected by those despicable views.^5 But note how this invokes precisely the kind of double standard I aim to criticize here: I sincerely doubt whether we could cut any contemporary author the same slack, and continue to take seriously their contributions to moral philosophy despite their defense of the claim that indigenous people are savages and women male property. Because who knows? Maybe the philosopher has some other good ideas? In general, if we find out that a person holds monstrous moral beliefs like that, we tend not to listen to them at all, much less treat them as experts on what's good or bad. If we found out that a person was unable to grasp basic moral truths and didn't understand why, for instance, cooperation is supposed to be good or why pain is supposed to be bad, we would assign no testimonial weight to that person's moral beliefs. Why should moral beliefs that we would treat as disqualifying for someone alive today not be treated as similarly disqualifying for someone who happens not to be alive anymore? Contemporary philosophers today also have insufficient information and are thus also likely to be wrong about everything. And surely current work isn't satisfactory in light of the improved standards of empirical corroboration and theoretical sophistication that future science and philosophy will usher in. Do my arguments show, then, that even contemporary philosophy is not worth paying attention to? First, let me emphasize that this objection concedes my central point: that we can't learn very much from engaging with philosophy that isn't up to the best available standards of argument and evidence, and that we should thus largely ignore historical work. The question is whether this argument overgeneralizes to current philosophy as well. And I don't think it does, since the recommendation to stick to the best currently available state of the art remains defensible, if only because said improved future work in philosophy would never come into existence in the first place if we didn't do philosophy now. That our current level of philosophical sophistication will one day be outdated, too, is not an argument against doing philosophy at that current level, since no other level is actually available. It is an argument, however, against doing philosophy at any level that is, at this very current moment, already known to be outdated. Either way, the objection just sketched would not amount to a defense of the history of philosophy as much as a rejection of all philosophy, historically oriented or not. And for the record: I am quite happy to entertain the possibility that philosophy in general is epistemically flimsy. But whether this is so is not my concern here. 4. Historical authors were probably much worse philosophers Another way of framing the issue at hand is to ask who should be considered an epistemic peer. A commonly held view in the epistemological literature on peer disagreement is that two individuals, S[1] and S[2], are epistemic peers with regard to a given proposition p iff, and to the extent that, they possess the same evidence and are equally good at processing it (Klenk 2018; Gelfert 2011). It seems fairly clear that the further past one goes, the status of peerhood becomes increasingly fragile, simply in virtue of the fact that past philosophers did not possess the same evidence (because it was unavailable at the time) and were not equally good at processing whatever evidence they had (in large part because they were unable to draw on a comparably richly developed state of the art of their discipline which would contain the required conceptual resources to do so). It seems unlikely that past philosophers would have possessed enough philosophical competence for it to be worthwhile to study them in great detail. Yet when one looks at which philosophers command the most scholarly attention, one finds that the distribution of airtime is drastically skewed in the direction of the past (and indeed the distant past).^6 Here are the results of a recent poll concerning the most 'important' philosophers of all time: 1. Plato (428-348 BCE) 2. Aristotle (384-322 BCE) 3. Kant (1724-1804) 4. Hume (1711-1776) 5. Descartes (1596-1650) 6. Socrates (469-399 BCE) 7. Wittgenstein (1889-1951) 8. Locke (1632-1704) 9. Frege (1848-1925) 10. Aquinas (1225-1274) Everyone on this list has been dead for at least several decades, and most have died centuries or millennia ago. Most of the philosophers which are considered 'great' and thus worth studying lived a very long time ago. But most people live today. How is this possible? Why should the distribution of philosophical importance be so heavily lopsided in favor of the past? One possible explanation for this historical bias is that great philosophers are philosophers that come up with great ideas, that great ideas are few and far between, so that most of them - the low-hanging fruit, as it were - have already been taken. The great philosophers are great because they were first. Note, however, that this reply concedes my point about philosophical competence, for it is not immediately clear why, in deciding whose work to study, we should focus on those who had it easiest, that is, those who could afford to compromise on philosophical sophistication. Moreover, why not keep plucking those low-hanging fruits ourselves, and then quickly move on to the harder-to-reach morsels only we have finally gained access to? Here, too, I am assuming that there are at least some criteria of philosophical quality. If this is correct, then there are at least some differences in philosophical competence, i. e. the ability to meet those standards of philosophical quality. Some philosophers are better informed, more intelligent, more industrious and diligent, cleverer, more experienced, or all of the above. And if that is so, then there are differences in philosophical ability between philosophers. And if that is so, then it is extremely unlikely that the distribution of great and/or important philosophers should be so heavily skewed towards the past. A second assumption I am making here is that, other things being equal, we should engage more heavily with, i. e. devote more time and attention to, philosophers who are more rather than less competent (so understood). As far as assumptions are concerned, this one seems relatively uncontroversial: better philosophers epistemically deserve more attention. A third assumption is that philosophical competence, or the building blocks needed to develop and sustain it, are either innate or acquired (or a mix of the two). (Please note that I am not suggesting that there is a distinct faculty to do philosophy, which may be innate or acquired, merely that being able to develop philosophical competence hinges on more basic capacities - general intelligence, linguistic prowess, creative thinking etc. - that contribute to philosophical ability.) If we combine these three assumptions, the historical bias of philosophical greatness comes out as extremely surprising. Suppose, first, that philosophical competence is innate. In that case, we would assume that it is distributed more or less randomly, perhaps according to a natural lottery. If this were so, then the overwhelming majority of competent philosophers should be alive today. Statistically speaking, there should be ten individuals in present day Kaliningrad that are equally competent philosophers as Kant was. Let me emphasize that this is indeed what my argument entails. Likewise, Princeton or Zurich University now employ numerous physicists that are as good or better than Einstein was. This is not to say, of course, that Kant and Einstein weren't philosophical or scientific geniuses of the highest rank that are only found very rarely in a generation, but merely that the state of the art of their disciplines, in no small part thanks to their own work, has undergone drastic improvements since their respective times. Now suppose that philosophical ability is acquired through training. If philosophical competence is learned, then the historically biased distribution is even more mysterious. Nowadays there are many, many more philosophers than 200 or 2000 years ago, and those philosophers encounter much, much better environments in which to hone their philosophical abilities. Here is a non-exhaustive list of how the conditions for developing philosophical competence today are better than they used to be: 1. No matter how gifted, it is hard to become a great philosopher if you die in childhood. We don't know for sure the infant mortality in ancient Greece, but it is almost certainly at least an order of magnitude greater than the present day. 2. Even if one doesn't die, one can become stunted or cognitively impaired due to insults in childhood or early life. Again, we don't know how prevalent this was, but it certainly it is much less now than then. 3. Although there remain lamentable barriers to people who aren't rich white men entering philosophy in the present day, these were even worse in the past: compare ones prospects as a woman in modern Greece versus ancient Athens, or as someone from a lower socioeconomic group versus a slave. 4. As the world is now richer and safer, budding philosophers have a much greater chance of being able to devote their time to philosophical training and understanding, instead of being trapped in subsistence farming or political intrigue. 5. Insofar as philosophy is a constructive endeavour on prior work, we have the benefit of 2000 years of subsequent philosophy that Plato could never access. 6. Insofar as philosophical understanding can be informed by other fields (e.g. natural science, linguistics), the much greater development of these now are also advantages. 7. Technology allows us to have much wider and easier access to our peers and philosophical work (Lewis 2016) What philosophical historicists are ultimately committed to is the idea that extremely small and underdeveloped societies with highly exclusive privileges of access to the relevant resources have produced much better philosophers than extremely large, globally interconnected and much more inclusive societies. This seems highly improbable. But if I am right, and the distribution of philosophical quality should, statistically speaking, be much more even-handed, then where are all the philosophical geniuses hiding? Where are the present day Ibn Rushds, the current Plotins and Feuerbachs, the contemporary Anselms, Brentanos and Schellings, the living, breathing Moores and Montaignes? There aren't any, and this is probably a good thing. The existence of towering geniuses is almost always a sign that a discipline is still in the early stages of development and hasn't reached a stage of maturity yet. Mature disciplines are characterized by a state of the art in their debates that simply cannot be overseen or dominated by any single mind. The absence of philosophical prodigies, rather than being evidence of decline, actually means that we've made it. A discipline that frequently produces singular geniuses hasn't left its earlier phase of relative inchoateness yet. Serendipity may occasionally wrestle another Gauss or Einstein from the claws of non-existence. But in general, modern scientific disciplines are so far developed to be beyond individual mastery. The list containing the most influential philosophers could be a simple statement of fact: Plato was de facto much more influential than any living person ever had the chance of becoming, since he had much more ample time to acquire such influence. This is indisputably true, but it doesn't amount to a defense of philosophical historiography. If anything, it shows the opposite, namely that the attention historical authors receive today is unlikely to be due to epistemically relevant considerations, and rather due to the grace of an earlier birth. Perhaps the above list need not reflect unwarranted historicist prejudices as much as survivorship bias. Now, the planes that returned from battle need not be better planes. They are simply the ones that happened to make it back to the shore. But in the case of philosophy, the surprising density of philosophical quality in the past may be an illusion created by the fact that only the highest quality tends to be preserved and passed down. Bad philosophers have always existed, but we don't know about them anymore because they were so bad. This surely plays a role in explaining the historically skewed pattern, but it doesn't address the central question: the same mechanisms of survival bias are at play in any scientific discipline, but philosophy remains unique in combining epistemic pretenses with a deeply historical approach. Many people will think that comparing philosophy to other, non-philosophical disciplines such as physics or mathematics is misguided. But note that similar asymmetries can be found intramurally as well: most philosophical historicists implicitly concede that older philosophical contributions are likely to be less epistemically valuable, since historians of philosophy spend very little time studying old work in the history of philosophy . People generally engage much more intensively with recent scholarly literature on, say, the philosophy of Kant or Hegel, rather than historical secondary literature. In fact, few people even know about the works of Jakob Friedrich Fries, Johann Friedrich Herbart, Herrmann Cohen, Karl Rosenkranz, Kuno Fischer, Julius Ebbinghaus, Hans Vaihinger, or others. It is not clear why the epistemic value of the secondary philosophical literature should deteriorate so much more quickly than the epistemic value of the primary philosophical literature. The fact that it does suggests that much of philosophical historiography is just philosophical hagiography. 5. How did we get here? Historical philosophers get far too much credit. But why? Let me offer some possible explanations here. I believe that each of these has a good deal of plausibility, though I am not confident that they are the correct ones. Much of what I have to say in this section will remain fairly speculative. One possible explanation for the undue epistemic credit received by the great philosophers of the past has to do with how our minds evolved. Current evolutionary psychology stresses the importance of social learning for cultural evolution. In order to build up a cumulative reservoir of complex practices, skills, traditions and information, human beings must be able to transmit information horizontally. Individuals must be able to learn from each other. But how to we decide whom to learn from? In many cases, acquiring information from older individuals will be an extremely useful heuristic: Once we became a sufficiently cultural species, capable of selectively focusing on and learning from certain models, older individuals often emerged as important information resources. By opening the informational floodgates between generations, cultural transmission changes the relationship between younger and older individuals. By contrast, in noncultural species, not only is the information accumulated by older individuals limited to what they can acquire through their own experience, but it's also of little consequence to others since they usually lack the psychological abilities to obtain it. Thus, in species with cultural learning, while ageing individuals may be physically declining, they still possess transmittable know-how that makes them increasingly valuable to younger generations. This accumulated knowledge may explain why the elderly are prestigious in most, if not all, traditional societies. (Henrich 2017, 131) The disproportionate testimonial weight given to past philosophers could be a case where an otherwise justified psychological mechanism misfires. Our evolved prestige psychology simply isn't equipped to deal with an environment of culturally archived immortality. It makes sense to learn from older people because they tend possess a great deal of useful knowledge. But when our heuristics of social learning are placed in an environment populated by individuals whose opinions have been embalmed by cultural techniques such as writing and printing, they start to lead us astray. As a result, we think we are opening a precious message in a bottle, but end up drinking the kool aid. A second possible explanation comes down to publication bias (Huemer 2020). Regardless of how much of what we find in the great philosophical works makes sense, it seems clear that the significant philosophers of the past also said an enormous amount of blatantly false and risible things. So why do they continue to attract so much attention? One possibility is that we study great philosophical works not despite, but because they contain so many preposterous claims. Great philosophers are the most influential philosophers, and the most influential philosophers are the ones that are most talked about. But only the most outrageous theories get talked about a lot, because of publication bias: 'sexy' research results with grand claims that defy common sense - such as esse est percipi, there is no self, no one knows anything, and so on - attract attention, while common sense truths such as, say, 'it is often difficult to control one's behavior' generate much less buzz. Thirdly, historically influential philosophers remain influential because people are averse to sunk costs (Buekens and Boudry 2015). Once a group of people has invested time and energy into studying something, they acquire an incentive to rationalize its importance. Soon it becomes psychologically increasingly prohibitive to recognize one's hermeneutical investments as a waste of time. This entrenches a recalcitrant equilibrium that, since people teach what they know, perpetuates itself from one philosophical generation to the next. 6. Conclusion We have good reasons for thinking that historical authors were deeply wrong about almost everything, we have statistical reasons for thinking that the best philosophers live now rather than in the past, and we judge historical authors by much too lenient standards. Given that we could be studying contemporary philosophers who are much less likely to be wrong about much fewer things, that we must rationally assume that more of these philosophers live today than in the past, and that we judge currently working philosophers much more harshly than historical authors, I suggest that, when it comes to satisfying the epistemic aims of philosophy, we ought to spend much less time studying the history of philosophy. The deliberate historical ignorance I recommend seems to assume that philosophy has a 'vindicatory' history (Queloz 2017): we are only entitled to move past historically significant authors if the history of philosophy is a success story. Firstly, however, it would be extremely implausible to suggest that there are no philosophical successes whatsoever, that is, that over the course of the history of philosophy, no one has ever learned anything at all. Moreover, if philosophy were in no way a success story, there would be hardly any reason for studying it in the first place except, perhaps, as a literary phenomenon. Then again, my argument seems to rely on a particular picture of what it means to do philosophy. According to this picture, there is a certain set of philosophical problems that remain largely the same. Over time, we get better and better at developing solutions to these problems, such that it makes sense to focus on whatever the most recent solutions are. But, as Rorty and others have pointed out, what we see as a philosophical problem, and which problems belong on this list, are themselves questions with a historical origin, and in order to understand that origin, we must understand the genesis of those problems. And there is surely some truth to this line of thought: many philosophical problems on the agenda today only make sense in a particular historical context; many others not on the agenda have simply been forgotten about, often for reasons that are difficult to understand. But we also shouldn't exaggerate this point. There is a large number of philosophical topics, such as the existence of God or free will, the possibility of knowledge or moral responsibility, the relationship between the physical and the mental or the individual and society, that are not as discontinuous as the 'Rortyan' picture suggests. At the very least, my argument would apply to philosophical endeavors concerning those perennial problems. The claim that historical philosophers have little of value to contribute to contemporary philosophy may seem disrespectful or even ungrateful to some. But I think the opposite is the case. That the historiography of philosophy - its historia rerum gestarum - is especially philosophically significant amounts to the thesis that the history of philosophy - its res gestae - was philosophically in significant. To say that the great philosophers of the past remain relevant today is tantamount to saying that they have accomplished nothing of lasting value; that, in effect, there are no giants on whose shoulders we can stand. Physicists do not keep studying Newton's Principia precisely because of what he has accomplished. The best way of respecting Newton is to ignore him - or, more precisely, to ignore his own writings in favor of the lasting results he produced, the substance of which can be paraphrased and taught - because the progress engendered by his work allows us to. The cure I am recommending is a healthy dose of historical amnesia to counterbalance the burden imposed by the weight of history. This cure was famously prescribed a long time ago by Nietzsche, one of history's greatest philosophers, in his 1874 Untimely Meditations - which is ironic. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Additional information Funding This work was supported by Horizon 2020 [grant number 851043]. Notes 1 Antognazza (2015), Barney (2012), Mash (1987), Nichols (2006), Queloz (2017), Pasnau (2011), Scriven (1988), Taylor (1984), Williams (2000). 2 However, there is some discussion of this issue on various philosophy blogs. 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