Manny’s Reviews > The Philosopher: A History in Six Types > Status Update

A historian does not read, say, Descartes, as a non-historian might read him, with the straightforward question "Is this true?" in mind. He aspires rather to live up to the assertion, misattributed to Aristotle yet profound nonetheless, that a learned mind should consider the thoughts of others without an interest in either accepting or rejecting them. And yet we are often told that historians are "not philosophers".

Wittgenstein did for a short time express some interest in E.E. Evans-Pritchard's work on magic among the Azande people of Sudan, and Quine's thought-experiment about the native informant who says 'gavagai' (to which, surprisingly, no one has yet taken exception as a crude caricature concocted by the colonial imagination) is obviously derivative of the actual problems ethnologists have faced in the field.

Philosophy is perhaps the only discipline that is able to canonize the figures, or at least some of the figures, who have sought in their lifetimes to break it down or to reject it. Antiphilosophy, like philosophy, is the business of the philosopher, as Steven Shapin said.

As the philosopher Zhuangzi says to his friend Huizi, who has disputed his claim to be able to know the happiness of a fish on the grounds that he, Zhuangzi, is not a fish: 'You are not I, so whence do you know that I don't know the happiness of a fish?'

It may at first be doubted that the Chinese recognise spiritual substances. But after having thought about this much, I judge that, yes, they do: although perhaps they do not recognise these substances as separate, and entirely beyond matter. There would be no harm here as concerns created substances, for I myself tend to suppose that angels have bodies, as did many of the ancient Church Fathers.

- Leibnitz, 1714

Many of the pre-Socratic philosophers, notably the Miletians, for example, do not worry about how they can know the claims they make are true. They just go ahead and make them, The expectation that philosophy must involve epistemology is very recent and makes demands on the term in question that few believed must be satisfied until at least the middle of the eighteenth century.

ARISTOTLE AND ALEXANDER THE GREAT'S WIFE IN BDSM ORGY SHOCK

Read all about it guv. There's pictures and everyfing. Phwoar!

While professional philosophers in the developed world today might not wish to acknowledge that, when they speak of "doing philosophy", they are speaking of a particular professional activity akin to practising law or doing the hospital rounds as a physician, it is unlikely that many of them would admit that philosophy is something that can be "done" in Tibetan monasteries or the winter encampments of the Inuit.