Does philosophy have a future?

“Il ne faut pas l’oublier, quelquefois je l’oublis, que tout est une question de voix. Ce qui se passe, ce sont des mots.” [1]

Samuel Beckett

First of all, why the question of whether philosophy has a future? No one is asking whether physics has a future. But string theory might not have a future. And inflationary theory to explain why the incipient universe did not collapse after the initial Big Bang might not have a future if the CERN collider does not discover Higgs bosons. But for all that, no one is saying that physics does not have future even if important special theories in physics turn out not to be valid. The same might be said to be valid for philosophy. We need to do a succinct summary of the history of the relation between philosophy and physics, and all exact sciences for that matter, to justify the initial question. Let’s put it this way. When modern physics emerged, say, with Galileo and Newton, there was a question of how light could propagate in space without some substance to carry it from one material object to another material object. Thus, it was later hypothesized that there was a material substance called the ether which was the means of propagation. But there was no way to show empirically that the ether existed and Einstein proved that light was particulate so that the ether was unnecessary, and physics was the gainer by getting rid of that contrivance. But philosophy seems to work the other way around. When issues that were once thought to be philosophical are stripped away, philosophy does not gain but is diminished.

            It is often said that philosophy, Western philosophy specifically—there is a question whether real philosophy is anything but Western philosophy, but we won’t mess with that hornet’s nest—began when Thales asked the physics question of what constituted matter without the benefit of gods or traditions or any non-physical premise. Yet there is such a thing as Babylonian mathematics, which had nothing to do with the supernatural. Aristotle had a high regard for Thales, but it was he who defined the fields to which philosophy applied, which was practically all of all possible knowledge. Even then, however, there already was a difference between philosophy and mathematics. Aristotle made no significant contribution to the study of mathematics, but Euclid, who was 62 years younger than Aristotle, demonstrated that prime numbers are infinite, so arguably mathematics had become independent of philosophy. [2] Analytical philosophy tried to reverse that more that 2,200 years later, but we will ford that stream when we come to it. Let us, instead, consider the fields that have definitely escaped from the embrace of philosophy. Since Aristotle was a geocentrist, it could be said that the astronomer Ptolemy elaborated on that posit but still might have left space for some philosophical thinking on astronomy. But when Copernicus demonstrated that the Ptolemaic system could be more elegantly replaced by heliocentrism, which eventually led to astrophysics, cosmology became not only irrelevant but impertinent. It must be credited to philosophy that it recognized its own limitations when Descartes made the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa, which in a not insignificant way contributed to the gradual “pauperization” of philosophy. In fostering the birth of sciences from the set of philosophical themes, Descartes undermined philosophy itself, for it was the discrediting of res cogitans that induced Wittgenstein to argue that philosophy was nothing but a sort of explication de texte. Epistemology at least has eluded the grasp of the scientific reduction of philosophy.

            Other philosophical categories have not fared so well. To give some examples: Vesalius and Linnaues scientized biology and zoology; Greek atomism, which was last heard of in Lucretius during the Classical period, remained essentially primitive and unchanged until John Dalton renovated the theory in the context of chemistry, a science that Aristotle had not even envisaged. After Aristotle, Kant was the greatest philosophical systematizer, one of the reasons for his eminence in the history of philosophy, and a quick overview of his work reveals that he strays from ontology, ethics, politics, epistemology, and other properly philosophical issues in his speculations on perception, but that was well within Descartes’ res cogitans. Kant did wander into physics when he made the sense of time and space innate, but as a disjunction, and Einstein disproved this when, as had others before, he realized that they are not disjunctive but co-dependent. For thoroughness it must be mentioned that Kant placed aesthetics within philosophy, but this had been done before, specifically by the minor philosopher Alexander Baumgarten, and this inclusion has not prospered. There was an attempt by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to quantify ethics, but any one can tell that a doctrine that can range from extreme liberalism to extreme conservatism is not very exclusive, which is even more so the case of politics; and philosophy does require at least that to be valid some propositions should necessarily exclude others. This is another argument for the shrinkage of the range of philosophy, not in a quantitative sense, for it is precisely debatable propositions that generate most literature, but in a qualitative sense.

            The attempt to re-insert mathematics into philosophy came about in this way. Res cogitans can be interpreted in a latitudinous manner as nearly equivalent to psychology.  Psychology is about mind, even though Descartes was wary of free-and-loose talk about mind. The mental is the repository of ideas, so that when German philosophers were carrying on in categorical terms about idealism, they were implicitly making a great deal of mind as a subject of philosophical thought. One of the more acceptable results of idealism was that G.W.F. Hegel included history as a legitimate member of the philosophical family. Much more on this later. So much talk of mind made the logician Frege not only distrustful of mind but outright anti-mentalist. Brentano, who was psychologistic, was spared analytical “denunciation” but only because his speculations allowed another logician, Russell, to invent propositional attitudes, which were considered un-philosophical because they could not be made to fit logical canons. [3] Until Frege, it was generally believed that Aristotle had formalized logic for all time. His logical synthesis has become known as propositional logic. Leibniz and Newton invented calculus contemporaneously. As neither proposed alternative formal-logic systems, they presumably used Aristotelian propositional logic. But when Frege tried to derive mathematics from set theory, he found that propositional logic only very laboriously allowed for the formulation of statements about quantities, such as “all”, “some”, and “one and only one”. Set theory is about classes and each class is defined by predication. Russell, who set himself the same goal as Frege, found a predicate that did not define a class and that was a setback for Fregean set theory. Be that as it may, between Frege and Russell mathematics was once again made a theme of philosophy. This reversal from Euclid’s time foundered with Gödel’s theorems, which definitely proved that both Frege and Russell were wild-goose chasing, because, if even number theory is incomplete and inconsistent, what could predicate logic, which is what Russell’s deductive system is called, be proving? Since number theory is inconsistent, then any deductive system used to prove its consistency would itself be inconsistent whether it succeeded or failed. Thus, mathematics exited again from philosophy, and as to formal logic in general, it has become a kind of science of its own, “kind of” because, except for mathematics, it is hard to imagine what it would be useful for or in.

            Having reached this point, where at least the idea of the gradual diminishment of philosophy seems viable,  thus validating the initial question, an inventory behooves, and it is only once we determine what still lies within philosophy that we can then say whether it has a future or not. If we had evidence that philosophy was primarily about physics or about cosmology or about ontology, then obviously it would not have much of a future. Ontology went out of philosophy with modern atomism. What have we retained for philosophy in this brief ramble? How about metaphysics? Metaphysics is a vague concept. The name, as any one who has done a course on the history of philosophy knows, is a purely verbal or sequential designation for the work that in the Aristotelian corpus follows upon his treatises on science or the physical world. Even in this arbitrary sense it is not totally inapt, because Aristotle’s metaphysics is very abstract and it consists of generalizations which apply to all that came before; but these generalizations are mostly about what we now call physics. So we have the real-life paradox that what was quintessentially philosophical happens not to be philosophical at all. The best that can be done to define metaphysics out of the Aristotelian context is its high degree of abstraction, as opposed to, say, the historical or historiographical, which is mainly descriptive. In this sense, however, metaphysics can be applied to any discipline where abstract thought is very important, as in physics, which could lead to an equivalence between science and philosophy. So it is best to leave metaphysics out of a characterization of philosophy in modern terms except as denoting extremely abstract (or obscure?) philosophical thought.

            There is one issue that we have neglected. Descartes, as we saw, laid the philosophical grounds for psychology, and nothing after him can be said to have severed psychology conclusively from philosophy. But this is only partly true. In psychology we have a process not dissimilar to mathematics but more contorted. Whereas mathematics was detached from philosophy early on, re-incorporated later on, and eventually detached again (apparently for keeps), in the case of psychology it was strongly attached to philosophy, then detached, then attached again, but by the time of this re-attachment psychology had become a discipline of its own. Its re-attachment to philosophy has not affected its previous detachment. So it can be said that, unlike mathematics, psychology is both in and out of philosophy. The detachment of psychology began with the experiments of Herman von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt. Behaviorism tried to make it final, but it led to much scepticism, which was also the case of Freudianism. Today, philosophy includes psychology under the label of “philosophy of mind”—to which “analytical” is often prefixed for respectability—but before this happened psychology as such had its own agenda which included elements from psychiatry, neurology, experimentalism, Freud, behaviorism, cognitivism, and some therapeutic postulates of its own. Analytical philosophy of mind is about computation (functionalism) and neurology (“neuro-philosophy”). It has, we think, a more important task, which we shall mention below. But definitely psychology sans phrase is not part of philosophy. So what have we left?

            Utilitarianism did not make ethics any more scientific than it was when Thales lived. Philosophy can get credits from politics only at the expense of its own discredit. Some times something called “philosophy of science” pops up, but science is constantly advancing so fast that “philosophy of science” sounds presumptuous and most scientists would probably agree that philosophers of science don’t know what they are talking about. “Falsification”, the invention of Karl Popper, is weak philosophy, for it can be shown, with many examples, that it is inapplicable to natural history, and this would disqualify geology and paleoanthropology as sciences. “Paradigm”, the invention of Thomas Kuhn, is also weak philosophy, because it implies that all of contemporary science could be based on contestable premises, including relativity and quantum mechanics. Light is a constant of nature, not in itself but its velocity. In some experiments apparently it has been possible to slow down the speed of light. This so far has not produced a scientific revolution. Some scientists apparently believe that if the speed of light is variable, then a door would open to a GUT (grand unified theory). This is very speculative. Reason suggests it is putting the cart before the horse. Pi (π) is another constant of nature. And it appears in some of Einstein’s equations and in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. π is an irrational number. Two Russian Jewish immigrants to New York got it into their heads—perhaps because of Einstein’s belief that God is rational—to try to find a pattern in the infinity of numbers that can be derived by calculating the extension of π, which they carried to God knows how many millions of digits. They were probably kabalists and apparently did not succeed, although they became computational ultra-sophisticates.

            So what then are we left with?  Or is it the case of “Wittgenstein’s ladder” for philosophy to see “beyond” after which you can destroy the ladder? But Everest has been climbed by thousands, ten times more than have climbed K2. So some ambitious mountaineer might consider that he has not accomplished the goal of his life if he conquered Everest but not K2. Analogically, it would have been a mistake to destroy Everest after Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay climbed it. For a metaphor another metaphor! Ethics is still very much in the philosophical agenda. So is epistemology, which could arguably be described as the cornerstone of philosophy, for if you do not know how to philosophize, then how do you philosophize, and epistemology is the study of learning or acquiring knowledge? Knowledge itself is an issue. Experimental psychology is about learning, but it dos not claim that it is specifically about philosophical speculation. The fact itself that we say “speculation” already gives us some insight into what philosophy today is about. Philosophy is speculation about abstract, unresolved “consensual” issues that no science has staked a claim on. We have not forgotten Hegel. There is still the issue of philosophy of history. But this has been discredited with the discredit of thinkers like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee.

            At this time, it would seem like a good maneuver to do some “mega-research”. Check out what is being researched by philosophers during the lapse starting with the second millennium, and that could surely tell you what philosophy really is about today. This method was utilized by the physicist Helge Kragh when he wanted to demonstrate what physicists were doing as discovery piled upon discovery after quanta were postulated by Max Planck. For instance: at the 1900 Paris Conference on physics, electricity and magnetism occupied a relative majority of scientists, somewhat over mechanical and molecular physics. In 1900, Germany had considerably more institutes on physics than any other country. By 1924, Germany had many more publications on relativity than any other country. There could be some national bias here because relativity was considered by some as a “German theory”. But the combined number of publications on relativity in England, France, and the USA was much higher than the total for Germany. It could easily be concluded that relativity was definitely and foreseeably at the heart of physics.

            Our own “mega-research” will be based on the excellent and reliable website http://plato.stanford.edu. Let’s start with a traditional trio: metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology. “Metaphysics” leads us mainly to Aristotle and Kant. But this is history of philosophy. I feel that there is plenty of space for this category as part of philosophy. But if I enter “history of philosophy” I get in return “philosophy of history”, and in the bibliography there are only seven recent publications out of a total of 70+, and of those seven, two are reprints: one of Marx and the other of Giambattista Vico. So much for philosophy of history! Let’s search for “ontology”. Here we get “Logic and Ontology”, which is a combination not unlike what I myself applied on the essay on thought. The bibliographical results are three out of over thirty. We could ask, as an essayist in 1998 did: “Does ontology rest on a mistake?” Epistemology has an entry of its own, although it is not the first on the list of links. Recent works on the subject are abundant, so whatever the contents of the publications (most of which I have not read), the subject does still a have a major place in philosophy. On ethics there is also an abundance to choose from, but there is no entry for “ethics” per se, and many of the links are again to the history of philosophy. Ethics it appears has become highly specialized, which means that no one is searching for a general theory such as utilitarianism. Since this is more or less what happened in psychology, then ethics has become a specialized practice rather than a properly philosophical activity. A search for “justice” results, as expected, in links to entries about John Rawls, whose Theory of justice was published in 1971. “Philosophy of mind” yields “cognitivism” in first place but there are also the foreseeable links to “functionalism”, “identity theory”, and so on. Also there is the “philosophy of neuroscience”, which I think gets its priorities right. It is like saying the “philosophy of physics”, which is nonsense. Let us look for peripherals, such as “axiology”, “politics”, and “deontology”. “Axiology” and “deontology” are not issues. “Politics” once again is about history of philosophy. Logic, which I most inconsiderately dismissed before, seems to have become as specialized as “ethics”, not in a practical sense but in the sense that, since “predicate logic” does not merit its own entry, apparently basic propositional logic seems to be spawning more and more deductive sub-systems. Was I right about logic? I guess not. So logic in its many guises does appear to be an important form of philosophical thought. What then has our “mega-research” obtained? Philosophy today is mostly about epistemology, the various sub-types of logic, and analytical philosophy of mind. Since one can legitimately subsume “logic” and “cognitivism” (core “analytical philosophy of mind”) under epistemology, then philosophy today is about epistemology. I heartily agree. In fact, I would like to go somewhat further and say that philosophy, and especially philosophy of mind, should exercise its epistemological credentials to keep “functionalism” and especially the “philosophy of neuroscience” under a stringent logical constraint. [4]

            There is one large omission, which is the exclusion of history of philosophy from philosophy. This merits consideration in extenso. History of philosophy and philosophy of history are prima facie two distinct categories. The only systemic attempt to have the history of thought inform a philosophy of history was Comtean positivism. It is considered of minor philosophical importance. A philosophy of history can, but need not, take into account the history of philosophy. Hegel argued that the process of history was the becoming of spirit. Spirit is both the guiding principle of history and the object of history. Beyond the principle itself, spirit is an extra-historical entity with a “will” of its own. In so far as it is consciousness, history is the gradual realization of spirit. Hegel's philosophy of history was built upon a set of related metaphysical concepts which encompasses the events of world history. Whereas in Comte it was a theory of mental evolution—analogous to the history of events—that served as basis for a philosophy of history, Hegelian metaphysics as such does not single out the history of philosophy but comprise all of history. In Comte, the history of thought, hence in a very wide sense the history of philosophy, served as a model for the philosophy of history. In Hegel the metaphysics provides the means for the interpretation of history. With neither Comte nor Hegel can we really argue for a very close relation between the history of philosophy and philosophy of history. Despite their self-evident differences both categories share common terms, which can be inverted meaningfully. This is not the case of such terms as philosophy and science or history and science. Though not unheard of, it is not usual to say the science of philosophy or of history, although it is not uncommon to say the philosophy or the history of science. Philosophy and history are related in a special way. We shall consider history of philosophy and philosophy of history singly in succession in order to get a clearer focus on each one. Afterwards, we can try some kind of summary on their possible relations and points of contact, if any.

            What is the history of philosophy? What does it reveal? How can we characterize it? Is the history of philosophy one huge historical cycle of thought? This is hardly the case, for we have no evidence that philosophy is an activity with a beginning, some sort of culmination, and an end. As part of history, it cannot be described as a finite process. A simple description would be that it is a structure, even a narrative structure, exhibiting changing agendas which determine broad and far from discrete stages or cycles. The history of philosophy is a specialized branch of historiography. It is built on a combination of facts, probabilities, and interpretations. The epistemic problems and the "solutions" pertinent to history of philosophy are the same as in the rest of historiography. Propositions on the interpretation of the history of philosophy refer (1) to its categorization into historical periods and (2) to the way philosophical doctrines originate, evolve, and relate. Although this distinction can be justified in diverse ways, its results are not reciprocally exclusive. The categorization of the history of philosophy depends on the nature of philosophical ideas but the latter are in turn influenced by the historical periods or cycles of philosophy. It is possible to study Kant's arguments in themselves. Hence, we could speak of a "Kantian watershed" or some such concept whereby Kant himself constitutes a reference for historical categorization. But to fully understand Kant, it is also necessary to consider the history of philosophical ideas before him, and especially the ideas that explicitly or implicitly influenced or even oriented his thought. It is a legitimate question to ask how much or how little Kant's thought is indebted to those ideas. Hence, the categorization of the history of philosophy to some extent can influence the interpretation of individual philosophies and their precise historical positioning.

            If we consider philosophy as an historical entity, then the history of philosophy can be thought of as the only reasonable, consensual definition of philosophy. Philosophy itself would then be the continuing stream of speculation on the agendas in the history of philosophy, including the present. Since the definition of philosophy is a legitimate philosophical issue, history of philosophy is a philosophical discipline in the same or equivalent sense as other philosophical disciplines or branches. Furthermore, since the definition of philosophy encompasses philosophy of history, the history of philosophy could serve as the bridge between the two disciplines that we have found, on a first approach, difficult to relate to each other. There are other reasons to consider the history of philosophy not only as a branch of historiography but also as a part of philosophy proper. To do the history of philosophy means to do philosophy, second-hand if you will, but philosophy nevertheless, with the same methods, the same premises, the same fundamental concerns. This means that the historian of philosophy is to be considered in the same category as the epistemologist or the logician or the ethicist. It could even be argued that, given its multidisciplinary approach, history of philosophy has a greater general claim on being philosophical than any specialized branch of philosophy, although obviously this would not apply during the gestation of philosophy.  

            The fact remains that the historian of philosophy mostly, at best, reduplicates work done before on philosophical issues by other philosophers. Even on the question of the definition of philosophy, it is usually assumed that philosophy has been defined by others and what the historian of philosophy does is remit previous thought on definitions, formalizations, or specifications of philosophy. The specific historico-philosophical issues we have mentioned—historical categorization and the re-enactment of thought— are ancillary to core philosophical concerns at any point in history. Issues such as why a group of philosophers constitute a historical "movement", how some body of thought derives from another and leads to still another, when and why leapfrogging and cross-referencing across historical periods occur, and so on, have no direct bearing on the core issues in any philosophical agenda. [5] We would not, for instance, consider Kant's refutation of Hume as the fulcrum of his philosophy, even though it is central to any history of philosophy. The question then comes up: even if doubtlessly a form of philosophizing, does history of philosophy contribute to philosophical debate? Can it "advance" philosophical thought in any way? Has it ever initiated a new cycle of debate or closed a previous one? History of philosophy appears to be philosophy only in a very limited sense: it partakes of philosophical methods and concerns but it is, formally, a division of historiography. Does it ever go beyond this towards “original” philosophy?

            There are different ways to approach the history of philosophy. There are "standard" histories with conventional periodization, often derived from general historiography, such as Ancient Classical Civilization, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and so on. [6] There is considerable degree of consensus in this approach. Philosophy is contextual. All philosophers and philosophical movements or tendencies reflect historical situations. Historical periods and philosophical thought can be said to be reciprocally dependent, although it is never the case that philosophy initiates important historical changes. Roman civilization did not have a philosophical origin, although there was Roman philosophy. Ancient Greek philosophy, for all its importance to history of philosophy, had nothing to do with the birth of the polis or of classical Greek art. Histories of philosophy then reflect historical periods. They are as close to historiography as they are to philosophy, whose methods and concerns they assume. But the history of philosophy, however strong its affiliation to historiography, is still fundamentally philosophical in nature and as such it legitimizes an area of philosophical debate.

            Another way to approach the history of philosophy as closer to philosophy than to historiography, a historico-philosophical approach, can be seen when the "historian" is a philosopher interpreting the history of philosophy. In such cases, conventional historiographical categories are disregarded. Interpretations are more important than the establishment of facts, which really has very little part to play. Frequently in this approach certain philosophers, or even one philosopher, are used as reference for interpretation and periodization. These general interpretations of the history of philosophy are specifically philosophical in themselves. But are they different from derivative, histortiography-based histories of philosophy? History of philosophy is necessarily re-enactment of philosophical arguments and themes. There is no history of philosophy which is not philosophical at the very least as doing philosophy at a second remove from direct philosophizing. Historico-philosophical thought places itself in a terrain which lies between philosophy and historiography. But even within derivative history of philosophy, positions emerge and philosophical debate arises. Philosophical interpretations of the history of philosophy are part of the legitimate philosophical debate embodied in wider and more conventional histories of philosophy. They are historiographical and as such belong in the general category of history of philosophy. But in the philosophical appraisals of history of philosophy, because of its less derivative approach to the history of philosophy, there is a tendency to drive this discipline further in the direction of philosophy proper. Let us consider three examples of philosophers as historians of philosophy: Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo, and Edward Craig.

            In Philosophy and the mirror of nature (1979), Rorty argues that the agenda of analyticity is similar to that of Kant, but only in form (presumably, not in their motivation or their objectives). The philosophical project of investigating the foundation of all knowledge can only subsist as apologetics, if it subsists at all. Previous authoritative philosophical constructions can be understood in terms of images. Rorty says that Heidegger discovered the source of Cartesian images in Ancient Greek philosophy. He himself claims that in Descartes and Kant the image of mind is the mirror. What Rorty finds in philosophy now is the substitution of a pragmatic view of knowledge for the concept of knowledge as representation. And in lieu of apologetics, he sees history as the arbiter of validation in philosophy. Finally, he posits a contrast between "systematic" and "edifying" views of the role of philosophy. The upshot is that Rorty's interpretation of the history of philosophy places Kant at a cusp between the past eminence of philosophy and its relativized role afterwards.

            In The end of modernity: Nihilism and hermeneutics in post-modern culture (1989), Vattimo's argument is as follows. Philosophy attempts to grasp being through history. Behind this proposition is the assumption of progress, or, in other terms, that history is the concretion of validity. In Western philosophy, Nietzsche and Heidegger deny that role to history. Nietzsche's philosophy is a tacit and not so tacit debunking of all overt and implicit premises of all previous “mainstream philosophy”. Among those premises are the meaningfulness of history, some kind of cosmic order, a hierarchy of moral values, well-meaning society, and so on. Brian Rotman has this to say on Vattimo’s book: "Nihilism's project is one of unmasking. What it has to show is how the whole apparatus of reason built on logic is nothing but a vast system of persuasion: logic is rhetoric, truth an illusion produced by argument; and all differences such as essence/appearance, rational/irrational, true/false and so on, lacking any grounding in an absolute outside themselves, have no more authority than the language and the culture producing them." What Nietzsche and Heidegger claim is that technology results in non-historical immobility. Technology implies that progress consists in the total "secularization" of knowledge. But the thesis of technological progress is equivalent to immobility, hence to the denial of progress as consisting in goals other than the progress of technology itself, which is like going nowhere. There is, therefore, an opposition between secularization and a goal-oriented historical process. Secularization constitutes a denial of philosophy of history, which posits a unitary process of events, that is, a coherent world-historical process.

            Assuming technological immobility, contemporary historiography consists in "many histories", which is a denial of the essence of philosophy of history. Vattimo himself does not agree with this reduction of the scope of historiography and the denial of philosophy of history. The position of Nietzsche and Heidegger is, in a sense, the denial of ontology. But Vattimo interprets this denial as the opening up of possibility. This possibility consists in the search for truth in aesthetics. Rotman adds: "For Vattimo modernity is that stretch of Western thought from Descartes to the  late 19th century ruled by the metaphysical system of God-guaranteed absolutes such `truth', `reason', `history'; and post-modernity becomes the era inaugurated by Nietzsche's notorious proclamation of the death of God and the consequent secularization of all human affairs. Nihilism's project can understand itself only through the language of that which it seeks to dissolve (‘pensiero debole’)." Post-modernism is a search for a weak version of history, truth, reason, and being. God was the sanction for morality and social absolutes up to the 19th century. Nietzsche argued against this assumption. Vattimo sees this démarche as leading to nihilism and the denial of truth, such as logic as rhetoric. Post-modernism would then be the search for a weak version of the equivalence between history and being. But this version is strong enough to constitute a denial of total nihilism.

            Edward Craig’ analysis, in The Mind of God and the Works of Man (1987), is that there are two Weltbilds. Weltbild one is superseded by Weltbild two. The prevalence of Weltbild one means that the image of God is dominant and that man is a quasi-divine spectator of nature. Weltbild two is the "agency theory", according to which man is a "being that actively creates, or shapes, its own world". John Cottingham explains: "In the second half of the book Craig charts the gradual recession of the Image of God doctrine and its replacement by a still dominant world-picture [Weltbild] which he calls the `Agency Theory' or the `Practice Ideal'. No longer a quasi-divine spectator of reality, man becomes `a being that actively creates, or shapes, its own world'.” The philosophical character of this interpretation can be clearly seen in the following argument. The question of the existence of a real world outside of mind was of fundamental concern to philosophers from Descartes to Kant. It is not an issue that has bothered philosophical thought much after Kant, or approximately in the last two centuries. Dummett's anti-realism, for instance, is not about the existence of things but about the validity of propositions about things. This change can be explained from Craig's perspective. A world-picture dominated by the presence or the concept of God can accommodate scepticism about the world. But that man makes the world—or that such is the idea that men have—as to some extent has been true since the heyday of the coal-and-iron industrial revolution, means that there is no way that man himself can doubt the existence of the world. In other words: if man makes the world, how can its existence be doubted? RaymondAron considers that all history of philosophy is of this sort, or so it would seem from this quote: "La constitution d'une histoire de la philosophie exige une philosophie qui à son tour se constitute historiquement." [7]

            There are two caveats to be entered in all this. One is that histories of philosophy in the conventional history-based sense are engaged in a specialized but marginal debate and unless they participate in current philosophical debate their philosophical nature tends to remain derivative. They can be part of current debate when a philosopher seeks to defend a position by marshalling philosophico-historical support or background, but in such cases specific interpretations of the history of philosophy are secondary to the main thrust of philosophical positions. In this sense, history of philosophy and specifically philosophical interpretation of history of philosophy are of secondary importance to the current philosophical debate itself. The second caveat concerns the greater philosophical pretensions of general interpretations of the history of philosophy such as those we have summarized above. The problem is that there does not seem to exist an agenda proper to the philosophical interpretation of the history of philosophy and without this it is difficult to sustain the claim that such interpretations belong to a well-delimited or precisely defined field of philosophical thought. Conventional histories of philosophy raise issues about the interpretations of specific philosophers, of philosophical works, or of trends, movements, and schools within the history of philosophy. To this sort of interpretations also belong the idiographical or opuscular literature devoted to specific issues within history of philosophy. But general philosophical interpretations of the history of philosophy are akin to interpretations of world history and in these as in those there is no general agreement or consensus on what the debate is about. They are philosophical in that they break with the conventional historiography of philosophy, but they do not transcend to an area of recognized or identifiable philosophical debate. Such works are constrained by the historiographical limits they seek to break through, which means they keep falling back into the category of conventional history of philosophy. Their contribution to philosophical thought is diminished because they cannot escape from a philosophical category which is ancillary to any current philosophical debate. Vattimo was a strong participant on the issue of “post-modernity”, which is largely passé now. But Rorty and Craig are well within the categories of conventional history of philosophy.

            There exist historico-philosophical attempts to enter the “mainstream” of philosophical thought. This approach is present in J.J.E. Gracia and in Dummett for almost identical purposes. They have tried to find "bridges" between opposite tendencies in contemporary philosophy by going back to the sources of those tendencies. Specifically, they address the oppositions between analytical philosophy and philosophical thought in the phenomenological or existentialist tradition, sometimes also circumscribed to or described as continental European philosophy. Gracia believes that by going back to the sources of divergences between these traditions it may be possible to find common grounds for a dialogue. Dummett is more specific: he has tried to discover the ab origine similarities and affinities between Husserl and Frege. Are these efforts philosophical in the manner in which general philosophical re-interpretations of the history of philosophy constitute an attempt at original philosophical thought? Dummett considers himself to be in the analytical traditions and his historical concern does not affect his fundamental stance on issues. It cannot be said that this specific foray into the history of philosophical ideas impinges on his philosophy as such. Dummett himself disclaims that he is doing history. His interest in historical sources is to clarify parts of his analytical convictions. Gracia represents another proposition altogether.

            Gracia's argument, in Philosophy and history (1992), is as follows. Post-Kant there are two fundamental attitudes towards philosophy: the poetical attitude and the denial that philosophy leads to the knowledge of reality. Philosophy as poetry is expository, mystical, and literary. The thesis that philosophy cannot reveal being in itself leads to positivism. Positivism/scientism in turn flows into logical positivism, the Vienna Circle, and analyticity. The shared fundamental epistemological attitude in this current of thought is empiricist. From the analytical point of view, ethics is descriptive rather than prescriptive. Philosophy attempts to encompass reality through logic and language. It does not bother with being in itself. There is a basic contrast between the analytical concern with language and the concern of continental philosophy with consciousness. But the history of philosophy reveals affinities between analyticity and continental philosophy consisting in common themes, methods, and objectives. In other words, analyticity and continental philosophy are not mutually exclusive and the history of philosophy can reveal their common grounds. Gracia appears to believe in the progress of philosophy towards “truth”. He claims an important role within philosophy for philosophical history, but even he admits that what he is proposing is more in the way of a program rather than the actual philosophical resolutions of issues. The contribution of his work is potential rather than actual. There is no concrete contribution to current debate in his thought. It could even be said that his ambitions are larger than that because what he attempts is to create a debate where there is none. His work is formally or methodologically philosophical. It could lead to philosophical stances, to dialogue, to conciliations, and so forth, but only if the parties which he would like to gather around a discussion table were willing to sit down.

            So far in this survey we have found cause to consider history of philosophy in a wide sense as a specialized if derivative field of philosophical debate. This claim is bolstered by philosophers who philosophize about the history of philosophy outside the conventional bounds of history-based periodization. It is also sustained by attempts to participate in current debate through an appeal to history of philosophy. Withal, history of philosophy cannot de-link itself from historiography. It may be possible to relate historiography directly to philosophy through epistemology. There are concepts pertaining specifically to the epistemology of historiography and not just to epistemology in general. One is the distinction itself between history and historiography. History is often used in the same sense as historiography. More commonly, history refers in an unspecific sense to “public, collective events”, assuming that some collective events do not fall within the public ken, as when the “robber-barons” in America gathered in secret to plan the monopolization of the railroad industry. Since we cannot know beforehand which events are historical, it is history itself as it unfolds which reveals them. This is pure historicism and it is a philosophical proposition abstracted from the experience of history. Historicism is an issue in history of philosophy but as well in epistemology and in any branch or aspect of historiography.

            History can also refer to the “totality of awareness” as the cognitive processes that make experience possible. From this perspective it could be argued that history and time are “equivalent”. The least that can be said in relation to the concepts of history and time is that they are as tightly related as are philosophy and history. Everything happens in time, which is also true, in a less “comprehensive sense”, of history. History categorizes events in time and open doors to the exploration of the concept of time. Even if history cannot be said to be identical with time, history is the discipline of thought that comes closest to the “being of time”. All physical processes also involve time and are measured in divisions of time. The theory of relativity is significantly about time, not about time by itself but, for instance, about the effects of gravity on time. History is about nothing else but time, and space of course insofar as events occur is space, but unlike physics we can think of history as implicitly encompassing space. We know time as the life of individual lives and by extension as the "lives" of states and cultures, and this is precisely what history is about. History has time itself as its object and as such it can be said to embrace all other disciplines, including the history of physics. Historiography is the awareness of history as a discipline of thought. It would then seem as if it is historiography rather than the less unambiguous concept of history that determines the “place” of historical events. But since historiography itself is part of history, it is history ultimately that determines the historiographical “validation” of historical events. History and historical events exist independently of historiography. The difference between history and historiography can be compared to that between nature and science. The awareness of nature is like the awareness of history: science emerges from the first as historiography does from the second.

            Assuming now that the distinction between history and historiography is philosophical in a general sense, can we go further and say the concept of historiography by itself involves philosophical issues? The writing of history raises the fundamental epistemological distinctions between factual, probabilistic, and interpretative propositions. It does not necessarily do so, but it would normally do so if it were approached from a philosophical perspective. But any form of knowledge does the same thing and there is nothing in this respect specifically philosophical about historiography. There is the possibility raised by the often heard expression of the "logic of history". But everything is logical. Historiography like all else is logical. Reason consists in the application of logic to experience. General and specific rational principles, such as cause-and-effect and scientific laws, are derived from the application of logic to experience, but they are not logical principles. There is no logical principle which states that all events must have causes. Experience provides the premises from which logic derives rational principles. To say that history is logical is a truism. But it is not redundant to say that history is rational. And the patterns and relations to be found in history are rational, as are the logical deductions that can be made from their use and application. But this again is true of any area of experience in general and of any discipline of thought in particular.

            History of philosophy has solid philosophical credentials, but historiography, one of the categories of thought which defines history of philosophy, appears to raise only the most general of epistemic issues, hence to which it has no exclusive claim. But historiography does raise a question with clear philosophical implications which is proper to it and only to it and that is the manner of the specification of historical events themselves, on which the previous considerations—beyond the general reference to historicism as their  rather vague characterization as “public, collective events”—have not shed any light. For this we must recur to the idea of consensus. Historical events are those which history as a historiographical consensus defines as such. It is conceivable that historiography could omit events with a claim on historicity, but we have no measure of the historical other than historiography however fallible and imperfect. The problem at the heart of the qualification of the historical lies in the definition of criteria of knowledge. What exactly is knowledge? In what sense is philosophy knowledge? And what specifically is the knowledge of history? It is likely that history, as Benedetto Croce claims, somehow determines knowledge, but how exactly does it do it? It is to answer at least in part these questions that the concept of vox historiae has to be invoked, a global historical consensus that changes with the passing of time and the accumulation of both facts and interpretations. Consensual propositions have different degrees of probability. Consensus is also applicable to the philosophy of history. Insofar as they share the same means of epistemic validation, historiography and philosophy of history converge, but their fields of interpretation are far from coincident. Interpretations of historical events involve historiography as the rigorous and methodical investigation of history. Philosophy of history does not “interpret” specific historical events. It builds upon what historiography reveals about history. F. Bravo asks: "La question qui se pose ici est la suivante: quelle dimension doit avoir la courbe du devenir historique pour être lisible? Celle d'un événement isolé, comme enseignent les partisans d'une histoire événementielle? Celle d'une nation, comme on le croyait au XIXe siècle? La dimension d'une culture, comme l'affirme O. Spengler, ou celle d'une civilisation, comme a declaré Toynbee? Doit-elle être aussi longue que la cosmogenèse tout entière? Y a-t-il une ou plusieurs histoires?" [8] These questions arise on the assumption of the possibility of philosophy of history, but it is historiography that lays the grounds for the possibility of posing such questions.

            To summarize our argument, we asked whether the history of philosophy as part of historiography can be placed alongside philosophy of history, but we have not found grounds for doing so. History of philosophy (as historiography) and philosophy of history not only appear to be but in effect are two entirely different things, which is not to go back on our previous understanding of the philosophical nature of history of philosophy. Some history-of-philosophy issues pertain strictly to the history of philosophy as historiography. Others refer to historiography in general. Some of these issues in turn are specifically epistemological or epistemologico-historical rather than historical per se. The distinction between epistemologico-historical and historical issues is razor-thin. The first refer to the validation of propositions about history and could as well apply to propositions anywhere else. The other category refers to propositions about historiography alone. The question of the criteria of knowledge is epistemological, as are the basic philosophical definitions that go with it, but they are as applicable to any other branch of knowledge as to the history of philosophy. Although there can be no doubt about the specifically philosophical import of the history of philosophy, this does not bring it any closer to philosophy of history than it was at the beginning of our enquiry.

            There is a category of historical writing which involves historiography but is not historiographical in the strict sense. For the moment, we shall call it speculative history. Unlike the telling of history, one of its concerns is with the prediction not so much of specific events as of the general course of future events. The closest analogy to speculative history in historiography is to be found in the attempts to write world history, which deal in “world-entities” such as civilizations and long-term historical periods, involving a great deal of interpretation as well as the anticipation of events from claims about vast or epochal or cyclical movements or trends. But world histories are only tendentially, not invariably, predictive, so we can speak at best of an analogy with speculative history. Historiography, or all the different manners of telling the events of the past, does not aspire to more than explanatory efficacy. Speculative history aspires to something akin to "natural laws": propositions involving not just explanation but also inevitability and predictability. Speculative history assumes the existence of regularities in history from which can be inferred the operation of “laws”.

            Traditional Aristotelian philosophy is metaphysical in its concern with the most fundamental and comprehensive concepts. The term is sometimes used to mean very abstract thought, that which does not rely primarily on historical experience. Speculative history is not independent from historiography, but it does try to elicit from it basic concepts and principles, as in taking civilization as the unit of historical reference; or measuring the process of history in terms of centuries or millennia rather than years or decades; or assuming the psychological unity of mankind, over the force of specific cultural influences. By way of contrast, historiography comprises mostly national or international histories within relatively restricted time frames and identifiable cultural contexts. Historiography comes in all sizes and formats, not excluding world history, but it is unequivocally immersed in historical experience. In sum, there is a distinction to be made between conventional historiography, however inclusive, and speculative history. The latter addresses itself to wider issues, it relies mainly on probabilistic premises, and it proposes law-like statements about history. If philosophy is the attempt to elicit basic concepts from the vast variety of the categories of reality, then speculative history can be consistently identified as philosophy of history and the themes involved in speculative history as those proper to a philosophical enquiry into history.

            We have true statements and we have explanations about the past. Causes are explanations. When explanations are true statements, we should theoretically have the full knowledge of historical causes. True statements in history are usually about artifacts and sources in general but these are not causes. Explanations in history are possible, but they are not fully causal and true statements are not necessarily laws. What then are “historical norms or laws”? The latter question can be answered not as “oughtness”, as in society, or predictability, as in science, but in a middle ground between where we can say “this is the way things ought to be” and “this is the way things will eventually be”. This concept of law entails universality and long-duration. It has value not in itself but as a ground for analysis, in the approximate sense in which it was necessary in the West to expand immeasurably the breadth of time from its restricted Biblical constraints before geology could make any headway in understanding the history of the earth and subsequently physics in relation to the universe. The explanation for the common usage of the concept of law in society, science, and history is that it alludes to a dividing line between order and chaos. Historical causes, the only possible ground for historical laws, are accumulative, gradual, and ultimately "indiscernible". History is rational. This means all effects have causes. There may be general historical laws but the question is moot as to whether we shall ever find them. In history, all we can hope for are causal explanations. The best explanation is a statement that is factually true. History can be told. To tell history we have to follow a methodology. We have to apply certain epistemic criteria to propositions about past events. But in telling the past we are also assuming the future. We cannot absolutely predict that the world will go on, but there is a high probability that it will do so. Historiography not only bridges from the "present" to the past but it also crosses from the past to the future. These continuities make anticipation inevitable.

            Historical “laws” are like patterns that have occurred in the past and that, for justifiable reasons, could reappear in the future. Now, the fact that historical causes are not causes in the scientific sense does not mean that they are not valid for the anticipation of the future. History can never be science. It cannot make scientific predictions. But this does not mean that historical propositions cannot involve anticipation. Therefore, we can order concepts in this way: (a) in science, causes produce effects and this relation can be expressed in terms of propositions involving predictability; (b) in history, patterns justify anticipations on the basis of the interpretation and explanation of past events. We can have philosophy of history in the sense of the interpretation of historical movement, but not in the sense of laws or predictability. There exists the interpretation or the hermeneutics of history and there is historiography. Does the interpretation of history justify positing “historical laws”? The interpretation of history is analogous to the interpretation of a text, assuming of course historical facts, and it is in itself controversial, hence a possible source of further controversy. From the interpretation of history it is possible to derive anticipations, but these are not necessary deductions and would therefore hardly qualify as the sort of prediction implicit in natural laws. Nevertheless, every historical interpretation is conducive to anticipation. It is possible to say: "Thus far history and this is what it reveals. If this is what it reveals, then it is to be expected that this or that should happen in history.” No greater precision is possible in the matter of anticipation. But there is nothing in this argument to justify any sort of prediction and if prediction is discarded then anticipation can only consist in expectations, general tendencies, possible even probable convergences.

            In the impossibility of laws, philosophy of history cannot pretend to be predictive. But it can be anticipatory. In fact, historiography itself is, on various counts, anticipatory. Philosophy of history deals in long durations and its anticipations are coarse-grained, as inevitably is its reading of the past. History does not repeat itself in a precise sense. But in another less restrictive sense it does repeat itself. Certain political and economic patterns do repeat themselves. In fact, the problem here is defining in which specific sense history does not repeat itself. The anticipation of history we have in mind is best illustrated or explained metaphorically as the mainstream of history, which, like any river, cannot be dammed indefinitely. If we factor in vox historiae as a basic epistemological principle, then the ultimate philosophical synthesis might be an anticipatory history of the world that includes the history of philosophy and the history of science (the quid of mainstream).