History of Philosophy and Methodology: My Approach
What you are about to read may sound presumptuous for an academic philosopher of relatively little time in the field to write. This is because I have simply documented my own thoughts, in a kind of journal entry, about the way I want to do history of philosophy. Nothing I say below is definitive. It is simply an open and honest reflection upon my own research process.
Historians of philosophy face a nearly insurmountable problem. We study the ideas of the past, and to say anything about what someone was thinking in the past you must ascribe to them a belief (or set of beliefs). Unfortunately, human beings are not very good at ascribing beliefs to other human beings. Psychologist Alvin Goldman has described this process, which he calls mindreading, as follows:
“[We] ascribe mental states to others by pretending or imagining [our]selves to be in the other’s shoes, constructing or generating the (further) state that they would be in, and ascribing that state to the other. In short, we simulate the situation of others and interpret them accordingly” (“Interpretation Psychologized,” 1989 p.169).
Think about this process. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is hard enough when you are trying to determine why your roommate is angry with you. In these cases, we have speech acts and gestures to help us figure out what someone is really thinking, and even still, we sometimes can’t figure out if they are mad because we forgot to take out the garbage or if it’s just because they had a bad day. The reason I think this is so hard is because in simulating the situation of another person you always, inevitably, simulate it in your own way. That is to say that you simulate it infused with some aspect of your own perspective on the world. And this can lead us to, sometimes, draw the wrong conclusion about what someone else is thinking.
When we apply this to the ideas of the past, the problem gets even more difficult because we lack any of the usual cues that we have when we interpret people in the moment. Not to mention, the philosophers that we interpret are separated from us by hundreds or thousands of years of context. That means the texts that they wrote depend on educational backgrounds, intellectual (and theological) debates, and cultural standards completely foreign to us. We know that these things affect philosophizing because, on reflection, we can see how they impact our own work. But we do not often consider how remote this gap in context renders the ideas of past philosophers.
There are two schools of thought in the history of philosophy about how to philosophize across this historical gap. Contextualists think that, to study the ideas of the past, we must immerse ourselves in that past, learning as much as we can about the educational backgrounds, biographies, and primary sources (among other materials) of the time we are studying. A reconstructionist thinks, instead, that the best way to study the ideas of the past is to focus on what is common between past philosophers and us: the ideas themselves. Here the focus is on thinking through “timeless” philosophical problems alongside the philosophers of the past, “reconstructing” their views using contemporary analytic methods to figure out what they were really trying to say about a persistent philosophical problem (usually one that we still care about today). Without a doubt, the contextualist approach is the more popular approach to the history of philosophy today.
And indeed, I myself am quite squarely in the contextualist camp. Because I acknowledge how much one’s intellectual backdrop implicitly informs their philosophical thinking, I think it essential that we study this backdrop if we aim to understand a thinker’s ideas. However, I worry about several persistent challenges for the contextualist method not frequently discussed in scholarship.
First, contextualists sometimes speak as though historical context can determine our interpretation of a text. These are statements like: “Descartes was reading x, so he must have been trying to criticize y and z” or “Descartes never read x, so there is no way that he could have been engaging with y or z.” These scholars seem to have forgotten that the history of philosophy is not a science, nor is our understanding of a text simply a function of who has read the most historical context. Historical context is very useful for understanding what may have been on a figures mind when they wrote something, but it still requires that we interpret how it applies to a particular text. We are still putting ourselves in the shoes of an author and ascribing to them some thought process or set of beliefs, and this ascription is itself liable to influence from our own personal biases. Simply studying the historical context by itself is not enough to interpret the history of philosophy. We need to do some philosophical work to make use of this historical context, and this work is not as simple as going from A to B.
Second, over-reliance on historical context runs into trouble when we become interested in figures who are not equal parts of the historical record. Recently there has been an increased initiative to support research on underrepresented philosophers. These are people such as women, colonized peoples, and slaves, who certainly did philosophy in one way or another, but for prejudicial reasons were cut out of past historical narratives of who philosophy included. We now recognize that past historians held biases about who the “real” philosophers were (usually white European men), and these historians shaped our view of the history of philosophy for the worse by ignoring or misrepresenting the contributions of certain people. We now are much more interested in recovering the contributions of all these philosophers and incorporating them into our history of philosophy. But we should not forget that the historical context concerning these figures that remains available is severely limited. A woman in the early modern period may well have been trying to philosophize about something which, due to neglect by past historians, is not part of the available record of historical material. If we want to spot cases like this where a philosopher from an underrepresented group is trying to “think outside” their historical context we cannot constrain or determine our interpretations entirely by the record of material evidence.
One may wonder, at this point, whether I think any legitimate progress is possible towards understanding the ideas of the past. What I’ve suggested so far amounts to a kind of skepticism about our capacity to interpret the thoughts of others, especially across large gaps in time. And I clearly don’t think that material historical evidence is sufficient by itself to explain how we should understand a philosopher’s ideas. But history of philosophy possesses standards of interpretation that are widely accepted, even if they are not so widely discussed. A great example of this occurs in translation. When we translate a past philosophical text from Latin or Greek to English, the translator almost always makes some decisions about passages of the original language that, for one reason or another, are now semantically ambiguous. Good translators clearly denote in their translation, using either a parenthetical citation or footnote, the choices they make, articulating their rationale for any controversial decisions. The translator does not do this thinking that their choice will by itself determine the meaning of the text going forward. They do this so that other people familiar with the original language can scrutinize their work and offer different interpretations if they desire.
If we accept that interpretation is a tricky business, and that our knowledge of the relevant historical context is not itself sufficient to determine our interpretations, I think we should be inclined to consider more imaginative methods for understanding the history of philosophy. This includes techniques commonly associated with “reconstructionist” approaches to the history of philosophy. We need to free ourselves up to put ideas in the heads of historical figures that they may never have had. However, we need to do this in a context-informed manner, and, like a translator, we need to flag for our readers the places where our own biases and assumptions creep in to our work. This is lacking from current scholarship on the history of philosophy, and it prevents scholars from well and truly engaging with each other’s ideas. How many times have you sat at a conference or in a classroom and watched two people try to understand each other’s view, when simply clarifying the background assumptions that they each brought to their reading of the text would have cleared up their difference of opinion? We must perform this activity upfront and in print, allowing ourselves to be more vulnerable to criticism for the sake of giving our interpretations a legitimate chance to move the conversation forward.
These thoughts on methodology have directly informed my work on early modern Stoicism. I approach the question of Stoicism in the 17th century as something that cannot be clarified or understood solely through the historical record. In the case of Stoic moral philosophy this is especially true because 17th century philosophers were all motivated to distance themselves from Pagan thinkers, especially Pagans such as the Stoics who articulated a very impious form of materialism. I don’t allow the historical record of citations to Stoic texts to determine who is and is not a “Stoic” philosopher in the period. But as well, I don’t adopt the sort of conceptual analysis where “Stoicism” picks out all and only those views that current scholars of ancient philosophy give to the label. If we take our contemporary reconstructions of the ancient school and go looking for these views in the 17th century, we aren’t likely to find meaningful and informative connections because we are ignoring a thousand-year gap in the historical context that affected the recovery of Stoicism at this time. Instead, I focus on authors engaged in the project of recovering Stoicism in the 16th and 17th centuries. I take their descriptions of Stoic philosophy and compare them with what we know about the ancient school of thought today. I then arrive at a kind of reconstructive framework that describes what Stoicism ought to look like in the 17th century, and I allow this framework to inform how I interpret the historical context that I find in my research.
The result of this approach is that I am willing to discuss the presence of “Stoicisms” in places that may not initially seem very intuitive, for example in Malebranche’s account of Cartesian moral philosophy. A positive result of taking this sort of approach is that certain discussions, which initially seem to be solely about theology or other non-philosophical subjects, can be identified as representing a form of “Stoicism” according to my framework. Because of this I am willing to identify and discuss moral philosophy happening in places which have commonly been ignored by past historians, expanding the breadth of early modern moral philosophy by way of investigating early modern Stoicism. While I do subject myself to critique and may mistake who I ascribe this set of moral views to, I leave behind a very clear record of the assumptions and background ideas that informed my thinking. Hopefully this approach to history of philosophy can allow other scholars to make use of my failures in ways that deepen and expand the conversation beyond what I myself can imagine.