Question In reading various relatively contemporary secondary literature on several different philosophers, I've noticed that many of them seem to intimate (or sometimes outright state) that the philosopher in question has been badly misunderstood, at least from a time shortly after their death, until relatively recently. Has the standards of scholarship really drastically improved in the last 20 or so years, or is this sort of claim perennial to the secondary literature on philosophy?

Accepted:
April 5, 2007

Comments

I think the standards of scholarship have improved over the last twenty years (or maybe the last forty or so -- it's been a gradual development). At least in the better work that is being done in the history of philosophy nowadays, there is a far higher level of rigour than one used to find. This has probably been a consequence of the expansion in the professional field during that period. With so many more academics working on these things than there used to be, all in (friendly) competition with one another, the somewhat woolly and slapdash approach that one can find in older works on the history of philosophy will nowadays lose out in the battle for publication. And the field has definitely benefitted as a result of this new rigour.

But that's not necessarily to say that we understand historical philosophers better than they used to be understood. In the academic profession, there's a lot of pressure to come up with some new insight or original interpretation, to validate the publication of yet another work on a philosopher who's already had thousands of other books and articles written about them. And then, when someone does come up with a new idea, it's just human nature for them to think it's right, and to wish to promote it as strongly as they can, so they might dress it up in such a way as to suggest that all of the other interpretations are wrong. That certainly is a perennial feature of the secondary literature. And, if the author can provide lots of textual evidence for this novel interpretation, then it will certainly be worthy of serious consideration. But, if they go to the extreme of suggesting that the historical figure in question was universally misunderstood in his or her own time, and that it's only now that we're finally cottoning on to what they were really going on about, I think one does have to treat that kind of suggestion with a certain degree of caution.

Here and there, one probably can find a handful of historical philosophers who were misunderstood by their contemporaries. I think George Berkeley was probably an example: comparing what he wrote with what was written about him in his own time, there is such a stark contrast that it's hard not to suspect that his contemporaries simply didn't get it. But such cases are few and far between. More generally, one needs to be on one's guard about making claims like these. A philosopher's work can only be properly understood in the way that philosopher actually intended it when one approaches it via the conceptual scheme and the cluster of presuppositions, methodological principles, motivations and goals that were informing the work (not to mention having a proper grip on the connotations of the terms the author was using, whether in an archaic version of English or, even worse, an obsolete form of a language that is already foreign anyway). What we need to do, if we want to do serious work in the history of philosophy, is to get a grip on the wider context of the period: and this is not impossible, but it does require quite a bit of effort. By contrast, those who were discussing these figures in, or even merely nearer to, their own time were already, to a greater or lesser degree, embedded within that very context. It was second nature to them, whereas we are forever playing catch-up. So, on the whole, if I want to know about, say, the philosophy of Descartes, although I would be inclined to place more trust in a recent analysis than one from a hundred years ago (because, as I say, the standards of scholarship have improved), I suspect that decent seventeenth century authors (the Objectors to the Meditations, for instance) would be likely to have understood it better still. The trouble is, of course, that understanding those seventeenth century commentators is likely to throw up all of the same problems as understanding Descartes himself. But, then, no one ever said these things were easy!