Introduction
Sandra Lapointe and Christopher Pincock
Over the last twenty years, interest in the study of analytical philosophy’s past has
not only grown: it has also transformed. Philosophical historians today engage with a
broader range of figures and topics than what canonical considerations would have
previously licensed.1 They offer increasingly sharper insight into the complexity of the
context in which the classical themes that are thought to be distinctive of the discipline
evolved: language, logic, cognition, rationality and the foundations of mathematics. One
of the aims of this volume is to present some of the most innovative work in the field, by
some of its most prominent junior scholars. This volume thus offers a conception of the
scope of the discipline that has evolved to be increasingly liberal and inclusive. We set
the chronological, geographical and linguistic boundaries of the study of the history of
analytical philosophy broadly, to include work by philosophers such as Frege, Russell,
Wittgenstein, but also Bolzano, Brentano, Meinong, Mach, Helmholtz, the Polish
logicians of Lvov and Warsaw as well as the American Pragmatists. More importantly,
we recognize the necessity to do justice to a variety of approaches to these figures and
schools. If different investigative concerns require different methods of inquiry, the
history of analytical philosophy implicitly requires a form of pluralism whose underlying
principles ought to be made as clear as possible.
This volume goes some way toward achieving such an elucidation and illustrating
its potential. In this introduction we offer some preliminary consideration of the
methodological questions that underlie philosophical history in general, and the history of
analytical philosophy in particular. We start by discussing three approaches to the history
1
of philosophy that we take to have currency in the discipline – those of Beaney, Rorty
and Soames – and argue that these approaches do not do justice to the richness and
sophistication of philosophical-historical practice. Historians of philosophy now usually
adopt a pluralistic approach that is based on an (often tacit) understanding of the task at
hand. Practice in the history of philosophy is multifaceted and inherently diverse and this
is as it should be. For this reason, one should resist the appeal of any overly simple
framework and emphasize the importance of a variety of tasks that philosophical
historians may set for themselves. This is not a trivial exercise: one has the best chance of
doing justice to the historian’s philosophical contribution by developing some flexible
framework within which this pluralism can be assessed. In Section 2, we identify six such
tasks and formulate general desiderata for a framework to assess these tasks. We
conclude with a brief presentation of the remaining chapters in this volume.
1. Beaney, Soames and Rorty on methodology in the history of philosophy
The most extensive treatment of the history of analytical philosophy and its
underlying method so far can be found in Michael Beaney’s work, most notably in his
recent introduction to the Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy
(Beaney 2013b, 2013c). Beaney defends what he calls “dialectical reconstruction,” an
approach to the history of philosophy broadly construed that is supposed to combine two
tasks: “rational” and “historical” reconstruction. Rational reconstruction, a notion that
Beaney borrows from Rorty (1984), is the process of identifying the presumably coherent
and well-justified system of philosophical commitments that are inherent to a
philosopher’s works. As Beaney understands it, rational reconstruction favors the critical
evaluation of a philosopher’s doctrines and theories over the detailed examination of the
2
contextual causes for that philosopher’s having acquired those beliefs. When one
considers a philosopher’s doctrines and theories, the fact that these commitments were
actually held to be true is not relevant. For the purpose of a rational reconstruction, the
fact that Gilbert Ryle or L. Susan Stebbing’s beliefs were also in part the product their
historical situation or psychological peculiarities is not significant: these factors do not
bear on the internal coherence or philosophical value of their doctrines and theories per
se.
From Beaney’s standpoint the task of rational reconstruction should not however
be undertaken in isolation from “historical reconstruction”. In this respect Beaney and
Rorty are in agreement. Beaney’s second task bears directly on what the first excludes,
namely the broader context and, more precisely, the causal factors that might have
influenced a philosopher’s views. This ranges from what they read and whom they
engaged with to perhaps even the interests that might have motivated them to present
their views as they did. As Beaney understands them, the two tasks of rational
reconstruction and historical reconstruction are “complementary”. Historical
reconstructions in isolation have no genuine philosophical interest. But without historical
reconstruction, rational reconstruction will often fail to accurately ascribe views to actual
historical figures. As Beaney puts it, “historical reconstruction is always required to keep
rational reconstructions honest” (Beaney 2013a, 253). Beaney argues that the
combination of these two tasks is what is required for the historian’s engagement with
past philosophical figures to be fruitful.
Beaney’s model offers a compromise between two equally unattractive
alternatives. MacIntyre labels these options “anachronism” and “antiquarianism”
3
(MacIntyre 1984). According to MacIntyre, rational reconstructions are philosophically
relevant, but since they are not constrained by the concern for historical accuracy, they
are also inherently anachronistic. Historical reconstructions, on the other hand, do
provide one with an insight into the past author’s thought, but only at the price of having
no bearing on contemporary discussion. Because they remain neutral on the value of past
philosophy to contemporary debate, historical reconstructions have a merely antiquarian
interest.
It is no surprise that, until recently, analytical philosophy overwhelmingly sided
with those who favored rational reconstruction. According to this popular approach, there
is no real purpose to philosophical history beyond what it can do to bring past authors
into a dialogue with contemporary philosophers. In this respect, historical reconstructions
are at best tangential to proper philosophical history. As Beaney notes, this austere
picture of historical methodology is what underlies Russell’s methodology in his Critical
Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz (Russell 1900/1992). Russell contrasts an interest
in “philosophical truth and falsehood” with the pursuit of “historical fact” (Russell
1900/1992, xvi). On Russell’s account, only the former systematic engagement with
philosophical truth is required: “without regard to dates or influences, we seek simply to
discover what are the great types of possible philosophies, and guide ourselves in the
search by investigating the systems advocated by the great philosophies of the past”
(Russell 1900/1992, xv-xvi, emphasis added). In more recent times, Scott Soames (2003)
has continued this “systematic” approach. In response to those who have criticized his
lack of historical acumen, Soames offers the following defense: “It is because philosophy
has progressed, and we know more now, that we can separate the essential from the
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inessential in presenting the contributions of a philosopher like Russell. That is the spirit
in which I approach the task” (Soames 2006, 651).2 Soames’ approach to philosophical
history can be fruitfully compared to some early attempts to rethink the history of
analytical philosophy in light of the new logic. Heinrich Scholz also insists that past
philosophical theories can only be presented and assessed efficiently in light of recent
philosophical developments:
what we have gained from the modern logistic treatment of logic has become such
an essential factor for the assessment of the history of logic that the following must
be said at once clearly: the recognition and mastery in principle of these gains is a
necessary condition for the praiseworthy study of the history of logic. (Scholz
1931, v-vi)
According to Soames, the only alternative to rational reconstruction is outright skepticism
about philosophical progress: one who “adopts a value-neutral stance, … takes the
historical enterprise to consist simply in elucidations of all the different strands of past
philosophical thought, and identification of lines of influence” (Soames 2006, 651). For
Soames, reconstructions of this type are without philosophical interest.
Soames’ approach is based on a false dilemma. As Beaney points out (correctly in
our opinion), even someone who agrees with Soames that rational reconstruction alone
can deliver philosophically fruitful assessments of past theories should still devote some
energy to contextualizing the work and understand the intellectual, social and political
elements that might have impacted it. The reason for this is that the justification of our
claims about progress are partly based on historical facts: in order to know, for instance,
whether progress has been made we need to be in a position to justify the attribution of a
5
claim to a given author. At a minimum, then, something like Beaney’s dialectical
reconstruction would be required for a historian to tie her rational reconstruction to actual
historical figures.
What remains unclear however is whether Beaney’s dialectical reconstruction
provides sufficient insight into what makes philosophical history philosophically
relevant, or indeed what makes it philosophically distinctive. Rorty defended a rather
more expansive model of the history of philosophy. Rorty (1984) argues for the need for
a third “genre” to supplement both historical and rational reconstruction. This is what he
calls “Geistesgeschichte”. Rorty uses this term to pick out a narrative whose aim is to
shape and justify a determinate conception of the philosophical canon. He argues that
Geistesgeschichten are indispensable to the history of philosophy as it should be done.3 A
philosophical Geistesgeschichte “wants to justify the historian and his friends in having
the sort of philosophical concerns they have – in taking philosophy to be what they take it
to be – rather than in giving the particular solutions to philosophical problems which they
give” (Rorty 1984, 57). On Rorty’s view, the philosophical historian’s work in this genre
is justified to the extent that it manages to link past philosophy to a certain aspect of its
present. This narrative thus establishes that this way of doing philosophy is legitimate and
worth pursuing. As Rorty might have put it, a completely disengaged historian of
philosophy might get by with Beaney’s dialectical reconstruction. But historians of
philosophy should remain mindful of the normative impact of historical narratives within
philosophical practice. They might even, at times, deliberately use their historical
materials to fashion a new vision of philosophy’s future.
6
In resorting to the notion of Geistesgeschichte Rorty offers a way to avoid the
dilemma of “anachronism” and “antiquarianism”. The key is to emphasize the normative
dimension inherent in certain kinds of narratives. We agree with Rorty that this
dimension can be an important aspect of some philosophical history. But just as with
Beaney’s dialectical reconstruction, what is involved in Rorty’s Geistesgeschichte
remains unclear. It is also unclear why Rorty’s Geistesgeschichte are indispensable. His
views on the way that rational reconstruction, historical reconstruction and
Geistesgeschichte are supposed to be subject to their own ineluctable “dialectic” are
puzzling:
The distinctness of these tasks is important and not to be broken down. It is
precisely the tension between the brisk Whiggery of the rational reconstructors
and the mediated and ironic empathy of the contextualists – between the need to
get on with the task at hand and the need to see everything, including that task, as
one more contingent arrangement – that produces the need for Geistesgeschichte,
for the self-justification which this third genre provides. Each such justification,
however, insures the eventual appearance of a new set of complacent
doxographies, disgust with which will inspire new rational reconstructions, under
the aegis of philosophical problematics which will have arisen in the meantime.
These three genres thus form a nice example of the standard Hegelian dialectical
triad (Rorty 1984, 68).
Among other things, we worry that this understanding of philosophical-historical practice
may go against the sort of pluralism that we defend.
7
In the face of such claims, one may side with Beaney’s rejection of Rorty’s
Geistesgeschichte and the parsimony of his own dialectical reconstruction. However, we
worry that Beaney’s model remains somewhat one-dimensional. The point of dialectical
reconstruction is to arrive at historically accurate, systematic rational reconstructions. But
it is not clear that these systems are waiting to be discovered in philosophers like Frege,
Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein and Carnap. We also agree with Rorty’s suggestion that
some sort of Geistesgeschichte is essential to philosophical historical practice. In
particular, it is hard to deny that whenever a historian of philosophy also considers
herself an analytical philosopher her own self-conception gives her an interest in
legitimating the ongoing practice of analytical philosophy. The significance of such
normative tendencies, and the adjacent hermeneutic difficulties, are not addressed by
Beaney’s dialectical model. Rorty’s Geistesgeschichte try to address the fact that
philosophical historians, as philosophers, build reconstructions and narratives with which
they can identify and endorse. But Rorty’s understanding of the interpretive and cognitive
mechanisms involved in such identifications is unclear. His proposal is rooted in a rather
obsolete predilection for grand narrative and an equally problematic inclination to think
of history as having some agency. As such Rorty’s proposal can serve to indicate what is
missing from other approaches, but not what should be added as a part of a sound
historical methodology.
2. Methodological pluralismA salient instance of the systematic approach to the
history of philosophy is the first chapter of Kuno Fischer’s History of Modern
Philosophy, “The History of Philosophy as Science” (Fischer 1878, Fischer 1887).4
Fischer frames his discussion around the familiar dilemma of reason and cause that we
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have seen already in Russell and Soames: “Truth is a unit: it has no series or succession
of cases, and, therefore, as it seems, no history. And so a history of philosophy, a
succession of different systems … appears as the manifest contradiction of philosophy
itself and the plainest testimony to its impossibility” (Fischer 1887, 2).5 This leaves the
historian of philosophy with an impossible choice:
Either the many so-called systems are accepted as mere historical facts, and the
history of philosophy is resolved into a history of philosophers, -- of their lives,
opinions, and schools, -- which the historian sets forth as well as the sources of
information concerning [them] permit, and as he understands those sources, or
these systems are regarded merely as having failed to reach the unity of true
knowledge, and criticized without reference to their historical character. In such a
consideration of the history of philosophy, history is entirely separated from
philosophy. In the first case, the history of philosophy is a subject merely of a
narration: in the second, it is a subject merely of critical examination. The
narration of the first is as uncritical as the criticism of the second is unhistorical.
From the one-sided historical point of view, there is indeed a history, but no
philosophy: from the one-sided critical point of view, there is indeed a
philosophy, but no history (Fischer 1887, 3).
Fischer resolves this dilemma using a common post-Kantian maneuver. Human activity is
the proper subject of the history of philosophy, and human activity is an essentially
historical process that unfolds over time. As a result, the history of philosophy reveals a
series of systems of philosophical thought, culminating in an accurate account of the role
of the human mind in the constitution of the universe.
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Here we see a genuine instance of Rorty’s history of spirit, and can again
appreciate their inability to legitimate anything like analytic philosophy as it is currently
practiced. The debates about Soames’ history of analytic philosophy suggest that we may
be stuck with the ingredients that generated Fischer’s dilemma, and yet deprived of the
resources that informed Fischer’s grand solution. The common tacit premise of these
models of the history of philosophy is the existence of comprehensive philosophical
systems waiting for the historian of philosophy to uncover and champion. We question
the appropriateness of this premise for analytic philosophy in particular. We maintain that
historians of analytic philosophy should at least be open to the possibility that many of
the canonical analytic philosophers did not aspire to philosophical systems and that this
feature is not incidental to their work as analytic philosophers. With Frege, Russell,
Moore, Wittgenstein and Carnap, for example, there is only one text that even comes
close to a comprehensive philosophical account of the universe and our place in it:
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Even here it is widely supposed that Wittgenstein did not
actually intend to defend a system of statements about the world (TLP 4.112, 6.54). This
does not mean it is impossible to find a system or several systems in the writings of
Wittgenstein or Russell. Our point is only that we cannot take for granted in advance that
a systematic approach will do justice to what is new and special about analytic
philosophy.
What would philosophical history look like if it gave up the assumption that
philosophical commitments are best conceived of as parts of systematic wholes? A viable
approach would allow for an eclectic understanding of the object of philosophical history
10
that does not dictate of the nature of philosophical activity. Normore (1990, 2006, 2016)
and Panaccio (in progress) have both offered minimalist understandings of the material of
philosophical history, while also allowing for a understanding of the methodological
pluralism that obtains in the field. They both agree that the primary objects of a historical
investigation are the texts left to us as products of human activity. Assuredly, the same
text can be the object of a variety other historical inquiries. What is special about the
history of philosophy is the kind of intellectual product it looks for in these texts:
There is, then, a case to be made for a subject which attends to the arguments and
other considerations explicit in texts in the context of considerations which appear
in historically related texts, in the context of considerations about what best
explains why a text is [as] it is given the author(s) is/are aiming at such
philosophical goods as coherence and truth (Normore 2016, 32).
If we follow Normore, the philosophical historian’s task is to draw on the text to explain
the claims that are made by the author, taking for granted that at least part of what drives
the authors of these texts are distinctively “philosophical intentions”. While Normore
suggests “coherence and truth” to be what philosophers aim for, there is reason to
question if these are the only philosophical goods. Nietzsche, for instance, was
undoubtedly a philosopher even though he would have denied that he strove for
systematic coherence, let alone truth.6 In this sense, one might want to understand
philosophical goods more broadly to include the aims of any attempt at a philosophical
argument. As a historian, one seeks to make sense of the historical records. But as a
historian of philosophy, a priority is placed on the philosophical arguments that can be
tracked in the texts that make up the historical record. The fact that philosophical history
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seeks to present what counts as an author’s philosophical intention is what licenses the
kinds of interpretive moves that privilege “facts which illuminate the (broadly speaking)
rational relations among propositions and so provide reasons for holding or rejecting
theses, or thinking or acting in certain ways” (Normore 2016, 42).
Normore’s proposal entails six related theses:
i. The objects of investigation of historians of philosophy are texts.
ii. The specific kinds of text that interest historians of philosophy are those in
which we find philosophical arguments.
iii. We are to conceive of philosophical arguments as linguistic artefacts tied to
certain aims, including (but in our opinion not limited to) coherence and truth.
iv. We are to conceive of the text under study as part of a larger series of “textual
chains”.
v. We are to conceive of the text under study as the product of an author in a
context.
vi. The text under study, even though it is the product of an author in a context,
can have theoretical implications beyond those the author herself drew.
One important feature of Normore’s account is that it understands the nature of the text to
be “artefactual”. A text is a certain kind of product, whose existence is not reducible to
that of its “copies”, i.e. the various iterations of the discrete physical arrangements by
virtue of which it is part of concrete reality. A text is also dependent for its origin on at
least one author, i.e. an agent endowed not only with cognitive intentions, but with
affective and conative intentions as well, the identification of which can come to play a
role in its interpretation. In addition, a text depends for its continued existence on readers
12
and interpreters. These are other agents who contribute intentional states that result in the
relevant interpretations, none of which may converge entirely and who might in turn
become the authors of new texts in which these interpretations are vindicated, criticized
or rejected. Through its author(s), a text is rooted in a broader context that involves a
manifold of preexisting authors and texts that may be more or less loosely causally
related. In the elaboration of certain kinds of narratives, the existence of “textual chains”
can play an important role. For this reason, at least, recourse to contextual information
may play a more or less important role.
History of philosophy primarily focuses on a text as the locus of philosophical
argument. As such, there is nothing methodologically distinctive about any of the
subfields of the history of philosophy, expect perhaps for some variability that results
from the nature of the media involved. The study of different historical periods involves
the manipulation of different kinds of texts. The nature of a given medium and the
cognitive resources its treatment mobilizes belong within the range of factors that affect
the manner in which historians of philosophy are likely to select and interpret – or
altogether overlook – the relevant data.
What, then, should the tasks of historians of philosophy be understood to be? The
answer to this question might benefit from some initial conceptual reconnaissance.
Historians of philosophy produce reconstructions and narratives whose purpose is to
answer a more or less explicit set of questions. The following points – they remain
abstract and will be detailed below – ought to be emphasized:
13

Implicitly or explicitly, historians’ endeavours can always be understood as
attempts to answer a set of questions; broadly speaking, these questions define the
task of the historian.

The historian’s attempt to fulfil her task takes the form of a reconstruction (in a
sense broad enough to include narratives).

There are different kinds of tasks whose fulfilment requires a different procedure,
i.e. each type of reconstruction is based on a distinctive approach. Whether a
specific approach is adequate is a function of its capacity, in principle, to yield a
reconstruction in which the questions that define the historian’s task in this
instance are satisfactorily answered.
The notions of “question”, “task”, “approach” and “reconstruction” are used somewhat
technically and require further comment. For instance, although there is no limit in
principle to the number of questions that may guide reconstructions, the number of
different kinds of tasks such questions circumscribe is finite.
Different tasks require different approaches and the latter are defined by
principles, namely:

Principles for data selection

Principles for data interpretation

Principles for drawing historical connections, philosophical connections or
inferences on the basis of the data selected and interpreted
Consider, for example, historical investigations of a relatively well-circumscribed subject
like “Kant’s views on logic”. The same topic can be approached with a number of
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different concerns in mind and the diversity of concerns is first and foremost epitomized
in the kinds of questions that can be asked. Take for instance:
A. What were Kant’s views on what we call ‘logic’ today? (Task: rational
reconstruction)
B. What did Kant mean by ‘logic’ and ‘formal’ when he claimed that logic is
formal? (Task: contextualization)
C. Were Kant’s views on judgment influential in the 19th century? (Task:
doctrinal history)
D. How did Kant’s views on the scope, method and place of logic impact the
development of the discipline? (Task: disciplinary history)
E. How do Kant’s views on logic compare to that of his immediate predecessors?
(Task: thematic investigation)
F. How did Kant’s views on logic shape those of early analytical philosophers and
was that good or bad for logic? (Task: historical narrative)
Each question illustrates a type of concern and, correlatively, the type of task the
historian who sets outs to answer the question takes on. While (A)-(F) provides a list of
tasks that is neither definitive nor exhaustive, one thing is clear: if we were to ask what
would constitute an adequate approach for each of the tasks provisionally identified, we
would in each case get a different answer. There is not enough space here to identify the
principles that might underlie each approach, but it is at least reasonable to assume that
the exercise would be fruitful as the differences are substantial. An answer to (B), for
instance, cannot be satisfactory if it is not informed by data concerning the history of
publishing and the availability of individual philosophical works (in languages he could
15
read) with which Kant himself might have engaged while he continued to develop his
views on logic throughout his career. Such data needs to be interpreted not only in view
of its philosophical significance, but of its sociological significance as well: an answer to
(B) requires that we draw conclusions as to the way that certain events – whether or not
they involved philosophers – might have caused Kant to acquire beliefs or intentions that
contingently shaped the content of his work or to act in such a way that affected the
subsequent uptake of his own ideas. While a friendship as such does not inform an
argument, it may lead to cognitive situations in which the author of an argument neglects
some relevant information. Or it may give an author access to an argument, e.g. in
correspondence, that no one else had. Such a picture, while it is driven by consideration
of contingent matters, is nonetheless valuable to the extent that it contributes to a better
understanding of the rationality inherent to philosophical practice as well as the norms
and contingencies that underlie the development of disciplines. By contrast, an answer to
(A) not only does not require us to gather and interpret sociological data or draw such
inference. It excludes it altogether.
One might want to ask whether there are any constraints on the kinds of questions
a historian of philosophy might want to ask, beyond their defining a task that pertains to
what genuinely counts as philosophical. One might want to suggest that the questions that
guide a reconstruction should presumably present some epistemic virtue, e.g. they should
be “interesting” or “relevant”. These virtues do seem to be valued by most philosophers,
whether or not they are historians. Here we want to engage with the topic only enough to
say that further treatment should be informed by at least the following three
considerations. First, what counts as interesting and relevant cannot be absolute and is
16
bound to vary across contexts. Why that is is itself a topic for an interesting
metaphilosophical discussion. Second, we typically do not have full control over the
questions we ask. Philosophical problems and questions in most cases just happen to us:
we inherit them, or resist them or overlook them inadvertently. While this remark
concerns the psychology of knowledge, it is part of our intellectual hygiene to recognize
that such a state of affairs contributes to our epistemic and pragmatic limitations in doing
the history of philosophy, since these limitations drive practice as much as they encumber
it. Finally, we rarely, if ever, have full epistemic insights into the questions that guide
historical investigations. The main reason for this is that, even when they are explicit,
questions can be and often are more or less surreptitiously refined and reformulated at
various points of the investigative process. What could be considered to have been an odd
or obtuse or unoriginal initial question may ultimately turn into an interesting and
relevant one. And vice versa.
We have stressed the fact that one’s approach to the history of analytical
philosophy, i.e. the set of principles on the basis of which a given reconstruction
proceeds, is adequate relative to the set of questions that defines the historian’s task in a
particular instance. For this reason, the capacity to recognize the nature of the task at
hand in each case is crucial. We have identified six tasks that seem to be central to –
though presumably not exhaustive of – the practice of historians of philosophy. The
proposal is provisional and should serve as a landmark in a preliminary exploration.
A. Rational Reconstruction. In the history of philosophy, the term ‘rational
reconstruction’ connotes a reconstruction whose purpose is to present and assess the
thought of past philosophers as coherently as is possible from a contemporary standpoint,
17
as if to establish a dialogue relevant to the treatment of current philosophical issues.
Rational reconstruction is usually considered to exclude consideration of the fact that the
sociological, political, cultural and intellectual context of the author under study may
have been widely different.
B. Contextualization. The aim of historical contextualizations consists in
providing an interpretation of philosophical theories and the questions they are supposed
to answer that allows the reader to track the author’s own philosophical intentions, taking
into consideration the relevant aspects of their social, cultural and intellectual
environment. In particular, it seeks to determine the role played by previous writings,
events, or situations in the production of the texts under consideration.
C. Doctrinal History. A doctrine is a principled way of dealing with a problem.
Doctrines develop to the extent that the problem they are concerned with comes under
discussion and, through chains of texts that are not only philosophically but more
importantly causally related, are given solutions which can then be criticised and
modified or improved or combined with other solutions and, most of the time, eventually
abandoned.7 The purpose of doctrinal history is to show how a given philosophical
doctrine has developed over the years in one or several authors. The notion of
development supposes some unity which is here taken to be a function of causal relations
between texts (and authors).
D. Disciplinary History. A discipline is a collection of doctrines and theories,
where theories are the systematic frameworks within which doctrines co-exist. Each
discipline is rooted in the practices of an epistemic community. What makes for the unity
of a discipline is the relative stability of what its scope, method and place is understood to
18
be. How do the members of that community conceive of that discipline’s relationship to
the rest of the knowledge enterprise? The existence of a given discipline does not in
principle depend on the continued existence of any of the particular doctrines it includes,
although it depends on there being some such doctrines at any given time. An analogy
can be made between a discipline and a legal system. The legal system can be amended
but remains authoritative as long as it is believed to define the limits of legal practice in a
given legal community. The history of the philosophical discipline as a whole, assuming
that there is such a thing, would be an attempt to understand what constitutes the
theoretical contours of philosophical practice.
E. Thematic Investigation. A philosophical theme is any aspect of a philosophical
doctrine or theory considered independently of its disciplinary roots. In contrast with
doctrinal history, a thematic investigation’s unity is not a function of the fact that the
texts under consideration are causally related, but of the fact that they express a “common
theme”. This supposes that some philosophical themes can endure or at least reappear
through time. Although a thematic investigation may take the form of a story, the
exercise can be misleading if the principles for data selection, interpretation and
inferential license are not made clear. At the very least, it would be misleading to draw
genealogical conclusions from what is essentially a comparative endeavor.
F. Philosophical Narrative. Philosophical narratives fulfill an important role in the
shaping of one’s identity as a philosopher. Their purpose can be diagnostic or therapeutic;
they can also play a direct or indirect role in canon-formation. As such, the kinds of
questions that guide narratives often serve existential concerns, i.e. concerns about the
meaning, essence or prospects of a discipline or the place of a given concern or endeavor
19
within it. One may want to learn about the significance of current efforts in light of past
developments. Or one may try to explain how a given problem has come to be understood
and handled in some precise way. While philosophical narratives are at the opposite end
of what is considered to be “scientific” reasoning, it is in this kind of “historical”
reasoning that history of philosophy comes to fulfill some metaphilosophical purpose. As
such, these narratives are both remarkably valuable and absolutely central to the
philosophical enterprise.
These approaches suggest that the range of possible tasks for the historian of
philosophy is much richer than is often assumed. The relation between these tasks is not
sequential. Also, it is not our intention to constrain historians to some conservative
prescription. There is no reason to assume that one’s approach, when undertaking a
historical task, needs to correspond exactly to any of the tasks listed above. There may be
other kinds of task or some mixed genres. The tasks we set ourselves are multi-facetted
and far from linear, and they may require us to resort to different approaches that overlap.
Or they may be quite straightforward. Contextualization can be an end in itself, but it
typically informs doctrinal and disciplinary history. Clearly, contextualization might also,
depending on the case, be involved in specific kinds of thematic investigations and
genealogical narratives as well. Conversely, while thematic history may resort to
contextualized interpretations, as when the elements that are being compared are part of
determinate textual chains, it can also be based on rational reconstructions of views of
authors whose works do not enjoy such connections. The point is the following: the
distinction between these tasks is not a classification and what determines the ways in
which these tasks may or may not be combined can hardly be constrained a priori. As in
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everything else, a healthy philosophical pluralism requires clarity more than it requires
regulation.
3. The essays in this volume
The ten remaining essays in this volume appear here for the first time. Each
chapter pursues at least one of the tasks just mentioned, with a tendency to focus on
smaller-scale issues or figures that can be fruitfully discussed in a single essay. Part I
contains two essays that investigate, using very different methods, the question of the
nature of analytical philosophy. Greg Frost-Arnold tackles this perennial question in a
new way in his essay “The rise of ‘analytic philosophy’: When and how did people begin
calling themselves ‘analytic philosophers’?”. The label “analytic philosophy” has proven
quite resilient, and yet has resisted both analysis and adequate definition. When, FrostArnold asks, did philosophers themselves begin using the term “analytic philosophy” in a
way that resembles our current usage? Using textual analysis and newly acquired
historical data, Frost-Arnold argues for a challenging conclusion: the term “analytic
philosophy” has been employed to cover what were in fact several, distinct philosophical
movements. He shows in particular how certain philosophers resisted the label “analytic
philosophy” even though we now take them to be canonical analytic philosophers. There
is thus a conflict between the naïve self-image of analytical philosophy as a unified
movement and this history of debates over the appropriateness of this label.
Catarina Dutilh Novaes and Leon Geerdink investigate one of the fissures within
analytic philosophy in their essay “The dissonant origins of analytic philosophy:
Common sense in philosophical methodology”. They begin with a discussion of a current
debate in philosophical methodology concerning the status of common sense intuitions
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and folk theories. Dutilh Novaes and Geerdink then argue that the transformative and
conservative attitudes towards common sense that are found today can be traced back to a
difference in the practice and conception of analysis in Russell and Moore, respectively.
This split is also said to be present in the exchange between Carnap and Strawson on
explication. Here then is an instance of the divides within analytic philosophy that may
have clouded its conception of itself as a unified movement or school.
Part II contains three essays that consider debates connected to logic and
language. Despite focusing on the same areas of philosophy, these three essays pursue
their historical investigations in three very different ways. Lydia Patton’s “Russell’s
method of analysis and the axioms of mathematics” starts with a puzzle at the heart of
Russell’s logicism: how should one justify one’s belief in the basic logical axioms that
logicism requires? Patton emphasizes Russell’s reliance on what he calls “the regressive
method” of justification. Using this method, a more basic logical axiom is justified
because it permits one to derive more ordinary mathematical truths such as that 2+2=4.
Patton traces this method back to earlier nineteenth century writers, especially Jevons’
1874 Principles of Science. In this way, she illuminates a central feature of Russell by
relating Russell back to a non-canonical figure from what could be called the pre-history
of analytical philosophy.
In contrast to this contextual approach, Colin Johnston’s “Wittgenstein on
representability and possibility” pursues a more resolutely systematic approach. Johnston
focuses on Wittgenstein’s claim in the Tractatus that judgments of nonsense are
impossible. One necessary condition that is imposed on an interpretation of this position
is that the interpretation make sense of why Wittgenstein defended this view. Johnston
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argues that various attempts to provide these explanations fail and that their failure is due
to their assigning either language or ontology some special priority. The upshot for
Johnston is that the most promising interpretation of the Tractatus is one that gives
neither language nor ontology priority. Both elements must be understood together using
the notion of truth.
Daniel Harris’ “The history and prehistory of natural language semantics” offers
this volume’s only instance of what we earlier called a disciplinary history. Harris’ focus
is on the philosophy of language, which arguably was at the center of analytical
philosophy for much of the 1960s and 1970s. He emphasizes the recent communicative
turn in natural language semantics and contrasts this approach with an earlier
preoccupation with truth-conditional semantics. The truth-conditional semantics of
Davidson and Montague is traced to earlier work by philosophers such as Frege, Tarski
and Carnap. The crucial claim of Harris’ disciplinary history is that this earlier work was
guided by some idealizations that were deliberately made for the purpose of
understanding artificial languages appropriate for logic and mathematics. Later writers
did not realize the restrictions imposed by these idealizations, and this blocked a fuller
appreciation of the complexities of natural language. We are thus left with the impression
that much of the work in the philosophy of language up through the 1990s is based on a
kind of philosophical confusion.
Part III of this volume presents three essays on topics tied to mind and ontology.
Uriah Kriegel’s “Brentano’s concept of mind: Underlying nature, reference-fixing, and
the mark of the mental” considers one of the most influential doctrines of Brentano’s
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874). This is that the distinctive mark of
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mental phenomena is their intentionality. Even though Brentano is not a canonical figure
for the history of analytical philosophy, this claim about the mental played a central role
in many debates in analytical philosophy of mind in the twentieth century. Kriegel takes
on a puzzle at the heart of Brentano’s book: what is special about intentionality given that
Brentano also emphasizes other marks of the mental such as inner perception? Kriegel
explains Brentano’s claims about the mental using the Kripkean distinction between what
fixes the referent of a natural kind term and the underlying nature of that natural kind. He
argues that inner perceivability is merely the means that we use to fix the referent of the
natural kind term “mental”. By contrast, Brentano argues that intentionality is the nature
or essence of the mental. As a result, and in line with Normore’s model of the history of
philosophy, we can make sense of Brentano’s text as aiming at internal coherence despite
the puzzles generated by an initial reading.
Alexander Klein’s “Russell on acquaintance with spatial properties: The
significance of James” focuses on the canonical figure of Russell, but relates Russell to
pragmatism in general and William James in particular in a new and fruitful way. Klein’s
main interpretive conclusion is that Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World is
best seen as an attempt to integrate the prima facie conflicting disciplines of psychology
and physics. Russell makes very specific assumptions about the psychological origins of
our representation of space, and here Klein argues that William James’ Principles of
Psychology influenced Russell in decisive ways. Klein goes on to suggest that this link
highlights the need to connect the history of analytical philosophy to the history of
pragmatism. Despite their broader philosophical differences, Russell’s views cannot be
easily understood in isolation from this broader context.
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Kris McDaniel’s “Ontology and philosophical methodology in the early Susanne
Langer” considers some of Langer’s underappreciated philosophical innovations. Langer
is a figure outside the usual canonical figures of analytical philosophy, and yet her work
was widely discussed during the middle of the twentieth century and reflects a sustained
engagement with questions that also troubled Russell, Wittgenstein and others. McDaniel
also shows how Langer anticipated some anti-realist approaches to metaontology that are
now very much at the center of work in ontology. In the context of this volume, it is
especially interesting to see how Langer arrived at her own conception of philosophy as
largely focused on the analysis of meanings. When she argued for this position in her
1930 book The Practice of Philosophy Langer again foreshadowed more well-known
methodological reflections on the nature of analysis that were developed throughout the
1930s and 1940s.
This volume concludes in Part IV with two essays that consider connections
between analytical philosophy and mathematics. Jeremy Heis’ “Russell’s road to
logicism” delves into the complex changes in Russell’s philosophical outlook between
his 1897 Essay on the Foundations of Geometry and the better-known 1903 Principles of
Mathematics. In 1897 Russell defended some kind of post-Kantian idealism about
geometry and logic. However, by 1898 Heis argues that Russell had shifted to a genuine
form of logicism. The core commitments of this early form of logicism are that all
indefinable mathematical concepts are logical concepts and that all mathematical
reasoning proceeds by logical means from essentially logical principles. From this
starting point, Heis then reconstructs how Russell arrived at the more familiar logicism of
the Principles. Crucially, all the components of this form of logicism were present before
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Russell encountered Peano in 1900. The geometrical and logical background of Russell’s
early philosophy, then, helps us to make sense of the origins of one of the distinctive
positions of early analytical philosophy.
Audrey Yap’s “The history of algebra’s impact on the philosophy of
mathematics” carries out a similar sort of excavation, but with a focus on algebra and its
role in various forms of structuralism about mathematics. A structuralist about a
mathematical domain claims that the entire mathematical structure is what is investigated,
and not any position in that structure in isolation. Yap argues that a precondition for the
development of a certain form of structuralism was an innovation in mathematical
practice that occurred only in the first half of the twentieth century. To clarify this
innovation, Yap compares the work of Dedekind and Noether on what is known as ideal
theory. Dedekind defined ideals in terms of pre-existing mathematical entities and
structures, while Noether specified ideals directly as whatever satisfied a list of axioms.
This latter “top-down” approach effectively treats the entire structure as an abstract entity
that should be studied in its own right, independently of its more concrete manifestations.
Yap shows how Noether’s mathematical innovations permitted the structuralist
philosophical innovation that soon followed. This contextualization of debates about
structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics thus illustrates the way that these debates
may arise out of developments in a domain like abstract algebra that is usually considered
to be independent of philosophy.
References
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Beaney, Michael (2013a). “Analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy: The
development of the idea of rational reconstruction.” In E. Reck (ed.), The Historical Turn
in Analytical Philosophy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 231-260.
Beaney, Michael (2013b). “What is analytic philosophy?” In M. Beaney (ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, New York: Oxford, pp. 3-29.
Beaney, Michael (2013c). “The historiography of analytic philosophy.” In M. Beaney
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Endnotes
1
In this introduction we treat “philosophical historian” and “historian of philosophy”
interchangeably. Similarly, we use both “history of philosophy” and “philosophical
history”.
2
See Beaney 2006 and Proops 2006 for two critical reviews.
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3
As Beaney notes, Rorty clearly takes his own Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(1979) to be an attempt at a Geistesgeschichte. Such a “history of spirit” is contrasted
with a mere “doxography”, which is “the attempt to impose a problematic on a canon
drawn up without reference to that problematic, or, conversely, to impose a canon on a
problematic constructed without reference to that canon” (Rorty 1984, 62). A doxography
aspires to the self-justifying narrative of a history of spirit, but fails when it tries to tell
this narrative using some preset list of canonical figures or rigid list of the “genuine”
problems of philosophy. Historians of philosophy are thus discouraged from pursuing
mere doxographies.
4
We draw on a translation of the third edition from 1878. The first edition of Fischer’s
History appeared in 1855.
5
In fact, Russell may have been directly influenced by Fischer’s discussion as he read
Fischer’s account of Leibniz in the History of Modern Philosophy as he prepared for his
own lectures on Leibniz (Russell 1983, 361, Russell 1900, 147).
6
See e.g. Nietzsche (1887/1997), Third essay, section 27 on the “will to truth”. The fact
that Nietzsche was presumably not an analytical philosopher makes the point even more
significant: what we take to be the object of the historian of analytical philosophy should
conceive of philosophy broadly enough to permit philosophy that is not analytical
philosophy.
7
We are thankful to Claude Panaccio for his input on this aspect of our discussion.
29