Justin E. H. Smith

Philosophy, History of

(Published in The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, New York: Scribners’ Sons, 2005).

A respected philosopher keeps a sign on his office door forbidding the discussion therein of any philosophy more than ten years old.  At this late stage in his career the restriction includes a good deal of his own work.  This may well be the limit case of the anti-historical attitude that has prevailed throughout much academic philosophy of the past 100 or so years, motivated by the view that philosophy, as an academic discipline, need have no more connection to its past than does any other positive domain of inquiry.  A physicist, for example, may be interested to know how exactly Newton came upon his discovery of the laws of gravity.  But this interest is, as it were, extracurricular, not a necessary part of the specialized knowledge of a competent physicist.   It will be enough that the physicist learn the relevant laws in a textbook; Newton’s name need not appear at all, much less the details of his distinctly 17th-century concerns. 

Can philosophy be understood in the same way?  At the other end of the spectrum from our anti-historical philosopher, we find  some maintaining that philosophy is entirely constituted by its history, that the study of philosophy can never be anything but the study of the history of philosophy.  Between these two extremes, there is a vast number of intermediate positions concerning the value of philosophy’s history to its present practice.  Among those who accept that it is in some degree valuable, moreover, there are vastly different conceptions of the nature of this value.  Let us review, with the help of some slightly cumbersome “-isms”, some of the possible perspectives on the history of philosophy from within philosophy today, with an eye toward the deeper understanding of the nature of philosophy itself that informs these perspectives. 

Fact

The word “fact” comes from factum, the past participle of the Latin verb facere, “to do.”  The oldest meaning of “fact” in English, accordingly, has it as a near synonym of “deed,” or “thing that has been done.”  This meaning is still retained in legal parlance, as in the phrase “accessory before the fact.” 

Much more commonly, however, in today’s English, “fact” is used to describe not just the relatively small class of things that are done, but also the much broader class of things that simply happen.  Facts, then, are understood to be real occurrences, events, or states of affairs, and are contrasted with whatever has not, and perhaps never will, occur or arise.  Some speak of false facts promulgated by partisans of the opposite side of an ideological battle, but they are misspeaking, for if what is claimed is false, it is eo ipso not a fact. 

Subjectivity

We will do best to start out with a treatment of the idea in question as it occurs in everyday parlance.  Subjectivity is generally seen as something to overcome, something to rise out of.  Objectivity, subjectivity’s opposite, is the proclaimed goal of newspaper editors, jury members, laboratory scientists, and parents wishing to resolve disputes between screeching siblings with inflated senses of entitlement.  The objective, in short, is the way the world actually is, while the subjective is only the way it seems to you, because you have a limited grasp of what is really going on, because your sense organs and memory mislead you, because you have a vested interest in the world’s being a certain way that prevents you from seeing that it is in fact otherwise. 

But what would a truly objective apprehension of the world be like?  This writer has only ever seen the world from various perspectives.  No matter how hard he strives to pay attention to the results of scientific inquiry, to read impartial media, and to compensate for the dimness of his senses by comparing what they tell him with what other more reliable instruments like thermometers and telescopes report, he still brings his particular, inescapable, and often quirky perspective with him to everything he perceives or thinks.  He’s never enjoyed what Thomas Nagel (1937-) has called “the view from nowhere.”  The recognition that there simply is no view from nowhere might easily lead one to conclude that the demand for objectivity is an unreasonable one, since one can never really arrive there.  But philosophy, science, law, journalism, for better or worse, continue to try.