The HBS hosts argue for the merits of studying the history of philosophy.
In a recent essay, Hanno Sauer argued against the importance, for philosophy, of the history of philosophy. In summary, he presented a positivistic, scientistic model of philosophy, namely, that like physics, biology, and chemistry, philosophy has actually “made progress” on many of the issues that philosophy struggled with from Thales until relatively recently. Because of this progress, Sauer’s argument goes, we do not need to study the history of philosophy. The model of the sciences shows why this is the case: in biology courses, no one is struggling with Aristotle, Linnaeus, or Mendel. In chemistry, no one pays attention to the history of alchemy, the theory of phlogiston, or the ether. In physics, no student learns Aristotle’s theory of why bodies “fall,” or the medieval notion of “impetus.” Is Sauer right that philosophy has similarly progressed? Should philosophy leave its history to the historians? Then, beyond Sauer, we can add that the history of philosophy is a history of both dead white guys and the history of the victors. If the history of philosophy is ethno-centric, and therefore racist, if it is phallo-centric and therefore patriarchal, why should philosophy continue to engage it?
Or is there something philosophically relevant about the history of philosophy?
In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:
- Nicolaus of Cusa
- Thales of Miletus
- Hanno Sauer, “The End of History” (Inquiry, 2022)
- Discussion of Sauer’s “The End of History” at Daily Nous
- Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (1936)
- Idit Dobbs-Weinstein
- Joshua Glasgow and Jonathan Woodward, “Basic Race Realism” (Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2015)
- Hotel Bar Sessions, Episode 9: The Philosophical Canon
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
- Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)
- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
- G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1910)
- Christia Mercer
- Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
- Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637)
- Our interview with Caleb Cain in Episode 68: YouTube’s Alt-Right Rabbit Hole
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