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| Vatican fresco The School of Athens, 1509-1511, by Raphael Photo: Getty Images |
In philosophy, however, ideas now current make little sense without understanding their origins, these being not only the clue to their meaning, but, usually, concepts that must be freshly reinterpreted themselves. A history of philosophy, therefore, is not so much a charting of that discipline’s past as a reliving and rethinking of it. Dead philosophers need to be discussed as if they were still talking to us, perennial speakers in an ongoing conversation. Yet they must also be treated as products of their own particular eras if anachronism is to be avoided.
The philosopher A C Grayling carries off this unwieldy project with wit and grace, deftly juggling its contradictory problems. Inevitably there will be nit-pickers who enumerate the philosophers and parts of philosophy that he has neglected in his history, or complain that it predictably begins with the ancient Greek Thales in about 600BC (Grayling happily admits he is telling the “orthodox story”)...
From Descartes in the 17th century, distinguishing the mind from anything that occupies space, we glide easily to what that distinction, and its accruing problems, later became – the tantalising mind-body problem – and the ways in which subsequent philosophers have tackled it. We see Hobbes as a Royalist who fled the republican aftermath of the English Civil War, and who defended absolute monarchy by declaring “self-contradictory” those citizens who rebelled against protective tyranny when they had deliberately sacrificed certain freedoms so as to gain it...
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Recommended Reading
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| The History of Philosophy |
