Journal article
Does philosophy need to know its history?
- Abstract:
- In this essay, I address the question whether philosophy needs to know its history, by comparing and contrasting philosophy with other areas of enquiry. In particular, I emphasize a feature of philosophy that distinguishes it from every other area of enquiry, namely that its history can be a significant contribution to it. That already points towards a positive answer to the question, although the answer takes some teasing out and towards the end of the essay I distinguish between what follows from this answer concerning philosophy as a discipline and what follows from it concerning the practice of individual philosophers. In between, I explore two factors that give philosophy this distinctive relation to its history: what I call Self-Consciousness and what I call Appropriation. By Self-Consciousness, I mean the fact that the nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical issue; by Appropriation, I mean the fact that, with respect to any great philosophical idea of the past that is no longer viable, there always remains a question about what we can do with it.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 459.5KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1007/s12115-025-01075-y
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer
- Journal:
- Society More from this journal
- Volume:
- 62
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 314-319
- Publication date:
- 2025-03-04
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-02-21
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1936-4725
- ISSN:
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0147-2011
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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2097070
- Local pid:
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pubs:2097070
- Deposit date:
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2025-03-25
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- A. W. Moore
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- Copyright © 2025, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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