History is essential to philosophy, as everyone in the field now agrees. But the adequate study of the history of philosophy involves an understanding of its many dead ends, false starts, and withered research programs. This means among other things that we have to take seriously many topics that scientists can safely ignore, such as alchemy, astrology, and physiognomy, since at some point or other these have played crucial roles in the explanation, respectively, of the nature of material bodies, of the causes of motion, and of the relationship between mind and body.
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Here I cannot help but recall an incident in graduate school, when I was obliged to trek over to the earth sciences library at my university to find Friedrich Lange’s Geschichte des Materialismus und Kritik seiner Bedeutung in der Gegenwart (History of Materialism and Critique of Its Present Importance), a great 19th-century philosophical study of the concept of matter from Thales through Hegel. I wondered as I walked: Who could have put it in the earth sciences library? Presumably this was not going to be the library of some Borgesian alternative universe, but just a regular geology library. The book could only have been placed there by someone who thought that materialism had to do with matter, and that the earth, in turn, was a prime example of such stuff. In other words, it was put there by someone who, rather late in the game, continued to see the disciplines through the lens of natural philosophy.
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To this day, doctoral students in, say, geology, continue to earn Ph.D.’s, but the ‘Ph.’, which abbreviates the Latin genitive of ‘philosophy’, is vestigial, and few geologists wonder what it is doing there. Yet as in evolutionary biology, we would do well to not dismiss a trace of the past as merely vestigial too quickly. Could it be that there is in fact something philosophical about studying, say, the sediments of riverbeds? We can perhaps understand why the sedimentologists would wish to answer this question in the negative. They’ve got work to do: dirty, muddy work, and no time to worry about the history of the concept of matter.
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There were still branches of philosophy that could not branch off into science departments, such as the core areas of logic, metaphysics, and epistemology. They could not branch off, arguably, because there was no possible positive science into which they might be turned. Logic is useful for thinking about things, yet as Wittgenstein reminds us, logic itself tells us nothing. Metaphysics has been in the philosophical doghouse for most of the past few centuries, because (on one common definition) it pretends to treat of entities that are by definition beyond the bounds of experience, which many agree is impossible.
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It is the crime of looking into what goes on in the heavens and below the earth that marked Socrates, rightly or wrongly, as what was, for a long period between him and us, known as a ‘natural philosopher’. In the comedy of Aristophanes, it is as a natural philosopher that Socrates discovers that thunderbolts and flatulence are fundamentally similar processes, are investigable as interrelated phenomena within the same natural order. Looking into the heavens and beneath the earth was a crime because it threatened to expose the levers and riggings that traditional thought preferred to attribute to the active agency of supernatural forces. Such looking was also, by the same token, one of the most basic things, along with meditation upon the self and on the divine, dialectical exploration of arguments, and investigation of the limits of knowledge that philosophy conceived itself as doing. Natural philosophy was philosophy, and philosophers, to the extent that they practiced natural philosophy, were curious, and so also potentially dangerous.
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