A rule: historians are interested in things that change, insofar as they change. Philosophers are interested in things that do not change, insofar as they do not change.
Philosophers may examine change itself and the things that change, but their interest in change and changing things lies in those aspects that do not change.
It is in the nature of such a rule that, if true, no historian could ever accept it.
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A question: What does that make a historian of philosophy? Is he a historian insofar as he is studying the changes in philosophy? Is he a philosopher insofar as he is studying philosophers?
ReplyDeleteAnother question: What if philosophers, while studying the things that do not change continuously and across generations, themselves changed during those generations, if only insofar as they changed "the place from which they started" their philosophical inquiries? Do philosophers differ in the place from which they begin their studies only as a result of their particular methodologies? Or: By virtue of being men and thus alive in different places and times, do not different philosophers experience differing places from which they start their inquiries of a like subject? Does that make "the history of philosophy" a history of beginnings or origins?
According to my rule, "philosophers are interested in things that do not change." Philosophers do not always (or perhaps usually) grasp the things that do not change. Thus philosophers sometimes disagree and the history of philosophy is the history of the changes in the opinions of the philosophers.
ReplyDeleteIn so far as philosophers are people, they are bound by time, place and matter. That is they change. To strive after the things that change does not mean to arrive at them. Perhaps, as Maimonides has said, the unchanging truth is grasped as flashes of lightening. Those who cannot see the lightening all the time must live as it were in the darkness of the changing world.