These are not accidental tags. Philosophy has "earned" these epithets. They point toward defining characteristics and tendencies of the philosophical style.
This is a fundamental presupposition of this course, and I would argue of the history of philosophy. In the absence of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary (indeed, under rules of evidence that would disqualify almost all evidence to the contrary) every idea is presumed to have made its first appearance at some point in history (whether that point is traceable or not.) The strongest possible evidence is demanded for claims of the timelessness or universality of any concept or idea.
It is hardly possible to pick up a newspaper or listen to NPR today without realizing that cosmology and cosmogony are one again topics of everyday discussion. Physicists are practicing philosophy, in a reversal of the pattern of specialization of disciplines that has dominated the academic world since the Enlightenment. Philosophy is once again front page news.
Because philosophy is essentially reflective, its history (and its historiography) are essential components of philosophy itself. Plato devoted substantial attention to reviewing and criticizing the views of his predecessors, and Aristotle made the history of philosophy the starting point of many philosophical discussions. In this activity they were inventing and defining philosophical historiography. For the history of ideas consists, primarily, in reconstructing the logical structure of thought of our predecesors and, secondarily, in criticizing that structured thought. Philosophical historiography risks two characteristic failures: either the historian fails even to imagine that different issues might have dominated various pasts, or the historian prematurely criticizes historical figures for not addressing the issues that compel or obsess her/him in her/his day. This forms the central issue of "hermaneutics". The history of philosophy sets its own, high ethical standards. The historian's first obligation is to make the author (s)he is studying speak sense. Criticism (in the sense of challenging and revising an author's opinions) may legitimately be leveled only at authors who, in the opinion of the critic, have in the main got their analyses right. We all ought to think twice before we denounce anyone as "dead wrong". Too often in the history of the history-of-philosophy facile critics have excoriated long dead thinkers for their supposed failure to address or solve the burning issues of some later age (usually the age in which the critic regrets to find him/herself.) Such criticism is, in the view of your instructor, bad logic, bad history, and bad philosophy. Aristotle, the first systematic historian of the history-of-philosophy, knew better, and he set a higher standard for all of us. Anachronism can take make forms. Even the estimable Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago agreed to testify as an "expert witness" in a Colorado Gay Rights case (Romer v. Evans, 1993) and allowed herself to get caught up in a pointless argument about the correct translation of certain terms in ancient Greek. She allowed plaintiff's counsel to convince her to rely on an unreliable 19c Greek-English lexicon, then ventured further out on the metaphorical limb by suggesting that homosexuality was uncontroversial in ancient Greek, which, if true, would make nonsense of a good deal of Aristophanes, not to mention Plato's Symposium.
revised September 14, 1996
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