31 December 2016 (Peter Adamson)

Rules for History of Philosophy

A while ago I had the idea to suggest some guidelines encapsulating what I see
as good practice in studying the history of philosophy. With any luck, these
rules are exemplified, not routinely violated, by the podcast itself. These are
not really rules of course, only suggestions of best practice based on my
own limited experience. I would love to hear other ideas and have further
discussion here on the website.

The rules were posted on an extremely irregular basis over a couple of

years, and I eventually got up to 20. So that people dont have to comb back
through the blog, here is the entire list in one place.

Rule 1: It's possible for the same idea to appear independently more than
once

It strikes me that a common error in history of philosophy is to see that two

figures/traditions have put forward the same idea, and immediately infer a
historical connection. For instance: atomism or monism emerging in both
ancient Greek and classical Indian philosophy. Or: al-Ghazali's and Hume's
discussions of causation. Yes, the similarities are striking, and there might be a
historical connection, but the similarity does nothing in and of itself to show
that there is such a connection. Rather it only raises the question of whether
there was influence one way or the other. Often, the simplest explanation is
just that people thinking about a certain topic will naturally tend towards a
certain, limited range of positions (like, either bodies can be infinitely divided,
or not - and in the latter case one is an atomist).

Rule 2: Respect the text

This is my version of what is sometimes called the "principle of charity." A

minimal version of this rule is that we should assume, in the absence of fairly
strong reasons for doubt, that the philosophical texts we are reading make
sense. This holds not only for outstanding famous thinkers but also for lesser
lights: even if they were not earth-shattering innovators, they usually didn't
just write rubbish. Here it's also worth bearing in mind that until very recently
(the last century) any text that has survived to get into your hands has already
been through a process of selection by earlier readers. So they are likely to be
reasonably good. But even without this observation, it still seems obvious (to

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me at least) that useful history of philosophy doesn't involve looking for
inconsistencies and mistakes, but rather trying one's best to get a coherent
and interesting line of argument out of the text. This is, of course, not to say
that historical figures never contradicted themselves, made errors, and the
like, but our interpretations should seek to avoid imputing such slips to them
unless we have tried hard and failed to find a way of resolving the apparent
slip.

Rule 3: Suspect the text

As I've frequently emphasized on the podcast, texts often have a long and
complicated history of transmission. A work by, say, Aristotle was first written
down well over two millenia ago; it's not unlikely that even the very first
copy/copies had mistakes, given that it would presumably have been dictated
to a scribe. To reach us, it then had to be copied by hand many many times,
with the earliest surviving copies being copies of copies of copies... and those
earliest surviving copies come from the Byzantine period, many centuries after
Aristotle. Of course things aren't quite so daunting with more recent works
but certainly anything produced before the invention of printing involves
copying by hand, and there are philological issues to contend with even in the
case of early printed works. This means that, if you are really getting into the
nitty gritty of a pre-modern philosophical text, you need to beware of the
existence of many variants in the text, which could radically alter the meaning.
Scribes made mistakes, incorporated glosses into the main text, and made
their own emendations to fix problems they found in their copies (these
scribes were not stupid by the way: their emendations may well be right!).
And that isn't even taking into account the possibility of outright tampering.
The podcast fell afoul of this when I emphasized the salacious story about
Avicenna's unrestrained sexual appetite while dying of colic. I subsequently
became aware of a recent article showing persuasively that this was a later,
hostile addition to the biography of Avicenna written by one of his students.
(See the comments on the relevant episode.) The upshot is that historians of
philosophy need to be philologists too, insofar as they can manage it, and to
take seriously the work of scholars working on textual transmission or even
collaborate with them.

Rule 4: Respect the context

Podcast listeners will know that I put a lot of emphasis on the wider historical
context within which philosophy was produced. To some extent it should be

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obvious how necessary this is: how can we understand, say, Plato and
Aristotle's political philosophy without knowing something about the political
situation of Athens in their day, or understand Hobbes without knowing about
English history? But historical context can be relevant in more surprising ways;
my favorite example of this is the parallel between early Islamic debates over
the eternity of the universe and the contemporary debate over the eternity or
createdness of the Koran. (Actually, though I've drawn this comparison in
many places including the podcast, I don't know that anyone agrees with me
about it, but I still think it's right.)

There are at least two worries we might have here. First, that history of
philosophy is turned into something that is more history than philosophy.
Sometimes people speak dismissively of the "history of ideas," in which
philosophical theories are nothing but reflections of other historical events.
But I strongly feel that history of philosophy is both a kind of history and a kind
of philosophy. Understanding the historical context will help us understand
philosophical arguments, but going through and evaluating those arguments is
still a philosophical enterprise.

Second, that this rule makes it nearly impossible to do the history of

philosophy. Are we really supposed to become experts, not only on all these
philosophers, but also on the whole context they lived in, taking into account
everything from political events to social circumstances, economic factors,
etc? My answer would be, basically, yes. There is no point at which you can
say, "ok, I've learned enough about the historical context, nothing I learn
further will help or be relevant." In principle, it is always worth looking at the
context more carefully, no matter how well you understand it. The limits are
imposed by what we can manage in terms of time and expertise. Like some of
the other rules I'm proposing, this rule is intended as an open-ended
encouragement to strive for an ideal which is not practically reachable.

Rule 5: Take "minor" figures seriously

I suppose no one is going to be surprised by this one, given the "without any
gaps" slogan. One of the main points I'm trying to make with this podcast is
that, if you want to understand the history of philosophy, you can't just hop
from one great thinker to another, leaving out everything that happened in
between. Of course the famous names are those who drew us all into the
subject in the first place: I am not alone in having caught the philosophy bug
by being exposed to Plato. But even if all you want to do is understand the

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famous figures, you have to remember that they are responding to less
famous figures who came right before them or who were their
contemporaries. We've seen plenty of examples in the podcast so far.
Furthermore, as we've also seen, the so-called "minor" figures have made
significant contributions themselves.

Previously ignored authors are routinely "discovered" in scholarship and

pushed into the front rank. In the series on medieval philosophy, for instance,
we look at John Buridan who was previously relatively obscure but has gotten
a lot of attention in recent secondary literature. Another point to consider
here is that all the figures who leap to mind when you think of "great
philosophers" have been men. So ignoring the "minor" figures means leaving
out the contributions made by women authors throughout the history of
philosophy. Historically, attitudes towards women have almost guaranteed
that they would be evaluated as less important than their male counterparts.
While some, for instance Wollstonecraft, are now taken seriously as major
thinkers, we have a long way to go in terms of rescuing women thinkers from
undeserved obscurity.

None of this is to say that it is illegitimate for a historian to spend much of

their time reading, say, Plato, or Descartes. These are complex, deep and
rewarding thinkers who seem to be almost inexhaustible in rewarding our
attention. But as a discipline, the history of philosophy would benefit if more
effort being devoted to the B team.

Rule 6: Learn some dates

This one may seem obvious, but I mention it because it does really come in
handy. As I've had occasion to mention on the podcast I don't have a very
good head for dates, so I try to remember some specific ones as landmarks --
like the death dates of significant philosophers, and then you can at least get a
vague idea when another philosopher is by knowing whether they are earlier
or later than that philosopher. (A good one to memorize is Socrates' death
date of 399 BC, because you can work backward to know when the
Presocratics were and forward for Plato and Aristotle.) It's also a good idea to
learn some other non-philosophical dates, to help with knowing what the
context of the philosophers' work was (see rule 4).

While I'm on this subject, don't forget the timelines here on the website (in
the menu above) which give you the dates for all the philosophers I've

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mentioned on the podcasts thus far, with links to the episodes where they are
covered.

Rule 7: Ask yourself why they care

This and the next couple of rules are going to be about avoiding anachronism.
That seems obvious enough, but anachronism is surprisingly hard to avoid in
the history of philosophy, so I thought I would break the issue down into
several aspects. This first one is, I think, often overlooked. Instead of assuming
that the historical figures we study are motivated by the same philosophical
worries that worry us, we need to understand why they care about each issue
they raise. Often it will be because of something in the historical context
(again, see rule 4), a view held by a predecessor, or something else in their
own philosophical system. Seeing what led them to a particular argument or
discussion will help us understand that argument or discussion.

My favorite example here is the medieval debates over the eternity of the
world. We might even be tempted to dismiss the whole debate as
uninteresting, since modern physics has rendered the debate obsolete. But if
we dig into the motivation for the debate (as I tried to do in, for instance,
episodes 144, 161, and 252) we see that the eternity debate was not only
about eternity. It was about God's relationship to the world, and more
abstractly, about how to understand the concepts of necessity and causation.

Rule 8: Read the whole text

I shouldn't even have to say this! But I do, because in fact it's very common to
take individual passages or arguments or claims out of their textual context.
Perhaps the best example of all is something I mention in podcast episode
205, on Anselm's ontological argument: the argument fits onto a page or two
and is nearly always read by itself without going through the rest of the work
in which it appears (his Proslogion). In fact that argument is only the first step
in a lengthy attempt to grasp God, and it's impossible to understand correctly
what Anselm is up to unless you read the whole book. That's an extreme
example, but it's not atypical, I think.

Of course, there may be more or less free-standing bits of text that don't need
to be read along with the rest of the work in which they appear - some
philosophers write aphoristically, for instance. But even in that sort of case,
we shouldn't just assume that (say) a collection of aphorisms and short texts

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by Nietzsche has been put together with no thought regarding structure or
thematic arc. At the other end of the spectrum, it amazes me that people
often read bits of Platonic dialogues as if they could be understood in isolation
- even though it's patently obvious that Plato put immense effort into the
unity and structure of each dialogue. (In fact he even talks about the organic
unity of a good speech in the Phaedrus.)

Of course, it's not always easy or even possible to read works as a whole.
There are texts that are preserved only as fragments, like with the Presocratics
and early Stoics; similar problems arise with, say, anonymous glosses or notes
in medieval manuscripts, where we can't be sure what (if any) other material
was written by the same annotator. Then there are massive works where
reading the whole thing is a major commitment; I wouldn't tell someone it is
worthless to read one book of the Republic unless they are also going to be
reading the other nine in the near future. As with the other rules, this is
therefore more an ideal to shoot for. Whenever possible consider textual
evidence in light of the rest of the work, for instance by considering what the
author may have been trying to do in the work as a whole, and what function
this particular part of the text plays in that whole.

This is incidentally another way to avoid anachronism. By being more attentive

to the goals and project of the whole work, we are less likely to jump to
conclusions about one isolated passage and to import anachronistic
philosophical concerns into that passage.

Rule 9: Learn the terminology

Another obvious one, perhaps, but also worth mentioning. Not all
philosophers develop their own technical or semi-technical vocabulary, but
many do. (Sometimes even those who officially make a big deal out of not
worrying about terminology, like Plato.) When reading any philosopher, you
need to know which words have a technical meaning and what they mean
this obviously requires knowing at least enough of the primary language to
track the terms in question. (I actually considered having a more general rule
to the effect of learn the primary language, but I worry that this could be
discouraging: please do read Plato, even if you cant read Greek! Still, it really
does go without saying that there is a significant sense in which you cant in
fact read Plato if you cant read Greek.)

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This is another rule that has to do with avoiding anachronism. The more we
know about a philosophers language, including not only the way terms were
generally used at his or her time but also the way that this philosopher in
particular uses terms, the less likely we are to import our own assumptions
about what these terms must mean. There are many examples where scholars
have pointed out that interpreters have mistakenly been taking a given word
to mean what we now today would mean by it, whereas actually it meant
something different one that comes to mind is cause in Aristotle. The best
way to guard against such mistakes is to track the use of a word across the
philosophers works, using context (both in these works and in other works of
the time) to get a better grip on exactly what the word means.

Rule 10: Silence is not louder than words

One of the most tempting things to do when you are reading a philosophical
text is to assume that, if the philosopher you're reading hasn't mentioned
something you would expect to be mentioned, then they have omitted it on
purpose. Allusions to predecessors, suppressed premises, allusions to
historical/religious context, etc all may cause what seem to be loud silences
when they are absent. And definitely, being alive to the possibility that a
philosopher is purposefully not saying something should be in every
historian's toolkit. But it's a tool to be used with great caution. What we might
expect a philosopher to say is going to depend to a great extent on what our
own interests and philosophical worldview looks like, so breaking this rule can
be another souce of anachronism. The same goes for our (inevitably very
partial) understanding of the philosopher's intellectual and historical context.
How, we might think, can a philosopher not mention such-and-such a
historical event that we think of as really crucial... they must be avoiding
mention of it on purpose! At its worst, this sort of reading allows us to project
our own concerns onto the text with wild abandon.

It's an interesting question what exactly you need to have as evidence before
arguing from silences in this way; one kind of license might be a philosopher
who actually tells you that some points are deliberately being suppressed (as
Maimonides does in his famous preface to the Guide). But generally, I think
one should always err on the side of working out the philosopher's priorities
and ideas from what they do say rather than what they don't.

Rule 11: Think critically

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With all these worries about avoiding anachronism, you may have gotten the
impression that I am only worried about "getting the text right," and in fact I
do think that is a first step in dealing with any historical source material.
However, just as I said in an earlier post that history of philosophy is a kind of
history, it is also a kind of philosophy! Philosophy comes in not only when you
are reconstructing the position (because you need to make sense of the ideas
in the text "from the inside" which is a philosophical task) but also in assessing
the arguments you've read and, hopefully, now understood in all their
complexity, historical context, etc.

Here I like something that we used to emphasize a lot when I taught in

England (it's much less emphasized in Germany, I find): that from the very
beginning of their education in philosophy, students should not just
summarize and present a text in their essays or discussion in class, but also say
what they think about it, consider possible counter-arguments, etc. Of course
this often meant that students were being asked critically to assess arguments
and ideas they weren't yet in a position to understand fully, but it's
nonetheless a good approach because it trains students to think critically
about what they are reading.

The most obvious reason to do this is that we are probably in the end
interested in whether any of these philosophical views are true! But even if
your motivation is strictly historical, you will often need to think hard about a
given philosopher's ideas critically to understand why later philosophers (or
even the same philosopher, after re-thinking) rejected, or carried forward,
those ideas in certain ways.

Rule 12: Think about the audience

All good writers, teachers and speakers know to bear in mind the audience
they are writing for; think about what will interest them, what their concerns
may be, what they already know and what they want to learn. Obviously not
all philosophers have been good writers, teachers and speakers, and some
philosophical texts seem to have been written with no particular audience in
mind (or even with an audience be damned! attitude). But usually, texts are
written with at least some conception of the readership. This can be an
important guide to interpretation. It is vital to know, for instance, what a
philosopher could take for granted in terms of background knowledge in their
intended audience, or which other texts the audience will be likely to know.
Just to give a specific example, it is almost impossible to overestimate the

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presence in an ancient Greeks mind of Homer and Hesiod, or the Bible in a
medieval readers mind these texts could be brought to mind even with
single words or vague allusions, much as we can bring to mind tv shows or
movies with a single word or phrase. Likewise it may be useful to bear in mind,
say, that an audience member is likely to have primarily theological concerns
in mind, or primarily political ones, in thinking about how the author has
framed arguments aimed at that audience: what does such-and-such an
argument indirectly imply about the Trinity, or about the legitimacy of
monarchy?

The result is that the historian of philosophy needs to know as much as

possible about who the audience for a text was likely to be, and as much as
possible about what that audience would have read, known, and thought. This
is obviously related to knowing about the historical context more generally,
but it is a more specific and to some extent more challenging task, one even
impossible to carry out fully, since for most periods we have little hope of
stepping entirely into the shoes of the audience members. Again, its more of
an ideal to shoot for.

Rule 13: Take metaphors seriously

The history of philosophy is full of metaphors, analogies and similes - from

Plato's cave to Neoplatonic "emanation" to Rawls' "veil of ignorance". In
general, I am a big supporter of taking seriously the "literary" features of
philosophical texts, like structure or characterization and dramatic setting.
Metaphors are a particularly interesting case, though, because one needs to
decide how exactly to apply the metaphor. Obviously many philosophical
metaphors have been parsed and analyzed in great detail - no one would say
that Plato's cave has received insufficient attention. Nonetheless I think there
are a lot of such metaphors that bear further thought. For instance I recently
wrote a paper on the widespread ancient tendency to compare the following
things to one another: the individual (or the soul); the household; the city; and
the cosmos. It turns out to be useful to dwell on exactly how such metaphors
are cashed out, and what effect they have on philosophers' ways of thinking.
That comparison between a city or other society and the cosmos tends to
push them in the direction of arguing for monarchy, because the cosmos is
likewise for them ruled by a single divine principle. (Or was it the other way
around, that they draw the analogy in the first place as a way of justifying their
political preconceptions?) And then there is the issue of what, if any,
argumentative weight a metaphor has - should we be more persuaded by a
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philosophical view just because it is illuminated by a rhetorically powerful
metaphor? Again, think of Plato's cave and how much less resonance it would
have if he had just said something like, "I think people in everyday life are
paying attention to images of reality, instead of true reality," without giving
the metaphor. Yet that resonance itself doesn't make the philosophical
position more convincing... or does it? Again, it's just one example of what
could be a more general rule, which is to pay heed to literary features of texts;
it would be interesting to hear what other examples you all might have.

Rule 14: Take religion seriously

Ok, this one might be controversial. But it has been much on my mind recently
since I have been writing episodes on medieval philosophy, where religion is
woven into pretty much every text I am looking through. As I write the scripts I
am thinking a lot about how to present the material in a way that will be
interesting and seem relevant to listeners who don't care much about religion,
without misrepresenting the material or for that matter letting down listeners
who do have an interest in the religious side of things. At any rate, it seems to
me important to remember that the vast majority of figures available for us to
study in the history of philosophy have been religious believers. This goes not
only for the obvious cases like the medieval Latin Christians but also for pagan
thinkers of antiquity. We can assume that nearly all of the people I covered in
episodes 1-100 (i.e. before arriving at ancient Christianity) were practicing
pagans, and that includes household names like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
They may have had culturally unusual interpretations of the religion of their
day but they were in some sense themselves religious (by which I mean that
they believed in divine entities and presumably engaged in cultic practices)
and more importantly for us, they felt the need to engage with religion in their
works. So religious issues are (to differing degrees, but almost always to some
degree) woven into the very fabric of the philosophical works we are reading
from antiquity, and this also goes of course for the medieval period in various
cultures, and for early modernity. As weve seen in the series on Indian
philosophy, religious issues also played an important role there. Nowadays
most professional philosophers in Europe and the US seem to be atheists, as
far as I can tell, but that is a very recent development, even if one can point to
occasional atheists in earlier periods (Hume is a favorite example).

What does this mean for the historian? In the first place that we need to learn
about religious context just like the other aspects of historical context. No
surprise there. But it also means something more challenging, which is that
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one needs to take an objective and open-minded attitude towards the
philosophers' religious beliefs. Insofar as we are historians of philosophy, our
goal should not be to take inspiration for our own religious faith if we have it,
or to find the mistakes made by great religious authorities for the sake of
reinforcing our own lack of faith if we don't have it. Rather it should be to
understand how the religious views interacted with and influenced the
philosophical views for instance, how Augustinian ideas about grace
affected views on free will. Actually I would go further and say that we
shouldn't even worry which aspects of a thinker's worldview are "religious" as
opposed to "philosophical." Much of the time this dividing line is going to be
blurry or even non-existent, and there is no reason to get anxious about it. I
know from comments I've seen here on the website that some listeners think
that philosophy is antithetical to religion; whatever merit that may have as a
philosophical position nowadays, it is not a good place to start from in doing
history of philosophy.

This is not to say, of course, that one's own beliefs remain irrelevant. If you
are an atheist you had better be ready to say what is wrong with Anselm's
ontological argument for the existence of God, once you have done your best
to understand it! It's just that, as I've argued before in this series of rules, the
first and very challenging step is to understand the texts you are reading, and
taking religion seriously is part of that.

Rule 15: Be broadminded about what counts as philosophy

This is in a way a generalization of the previous rule to take religion seriously.

The point I want to make with this rule has as its obvious starting point the
frequent observation that, until very recently (like, only the last couple of
centuries) the word "philosophy" included much more than we would include
today. Still during the Enlightenment people we would call "scientists" would
have referred to themselves as "natural philosophers." Of course that by itself
might just mean that the word has changed meaning. But we need to
remember that historical figures would have seen topics of inquiry that for us
are no longer "philosophical" as being part and parcel of "philosophy"; they
didn't recognize the same disciplinary boundaries that we do, so they moved
very freely from topics like epistemology and metaphysics to topics like
astronomy, mathematics or medicine. This is why I have devoted so much
attention to "scientific" and even "pseudo-scientific" subjects in the podcast,
covering things like medicine, astronomy, and astrology.

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But it's not just science: historically the boundaries between philosophy on the
one hand, and theology or mysticism on the other, have been quite blurry or
just non-existent. I won't go into the theology point again, except to refer back
to the Islamic world episodes and all the philosophy we saw being done by
representatives of "kalam" (systematic theology). We also saw some
philosophically interesting material in Sufis and Kabbalists, with mutual
influence and re-purposing of ideas about negative theology, the soul, and so
on, from philosophy to mysticism or vice-versa. Even a topic like Islamic
jurisprudence turned out to have important implications in ethics and
epistemology.

The moral of this story, then, is that historicans shouldn't restrict their
attention to texts, figures and movements that seem "philosophical" in our
sense. Philosophical material is not philosophical because of where it appears,
but because (to make a long story short) it is philosophically interesting.

Rule 16: Respect texts about texts

A whole genre of philosophical writing that traditionally suffers from neglect is

the commentary. Actually there is a whole range of texts about other
philosophical texts, which would include commentaries but also glosses,
paraphrases, epitomes, and the like I am referring to all this sort of thing,
but to simplify Ill mostly just talk about commentaries. A good example,
and also an example where prejudice has largely been overcome now, is the
massive body of philosophical commentaries on Plato, Aristotle and other
philosophical works that was produced in late antiquity. Thanks to Richard
Sorabjis Ancient Commentators Project (which I worked with in London for
some years) these commentaries are now mostly available in English and have
been pretty well integrated into history of philosophy. There are also many
commentaries in Latin medieval philosophy and in the Islamic tradition. In
fact, one reason for the widespread myth that philosophy in the Islamic world
ended after the 12th century or so is that thereafter, philosophy was often
written in the form of glosses and commentaries, which are always in danger
of not being taken seriously. (I interviewed Robert Wisnovsky about this here
on the podcast.)

There are at least three reasons why we should take such texts seriously, and
include them in the history of philosophy. First, they can still fulfill their
original purpose of illuminating the text commented upon. Alexander of
Aphrodisias was not only a superb philosopher in his own right, but also had a

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thorough and intimate knowledge of Aristotles works (plus he was a native
speaker of ancient Greek!). He is thus a very useful guide to textual and
philosophical problems in the source text that doesnt mean hes always
right in his interpretations of course, but he is pretty well always worth
consulting. Admittedly not all commentators reach his standard; maybe
only Averroescan compete with him as an insightful and interesting
commentator on Aristotle. But the mere fact that a commentary has survived
down to the present day is usually a sign that many generations of readers
found it useful.

Second, commentators are themselves philosophers and say interesting and

original things in the context of commentating sometimes this happens as a
kind of digression from the commentary, but you can also find fascinating
material in the midst of commenting on a passage. Its often precisely when
the commentator has trouble with the source text that he or she is going to be
innovative a Platonist commenting on Aristotle, for instance and the
innovation may show itself in very subtle ways, for instance slightly but
significantly different word choice as a source text is paraphrased.

Third, there is something philosophical about the commentary activity itself.

Of what these older commentators were doing is much like what we are doing
when we read historical philosophical texts today: trying to make sense of
them and find what is true in them. The methods and presuppositions a
commentator brings to a text can be illuminating for our own practice. For
instance, do they use a principle of charity, trying to offer readings that will
make the source text come out true or at least coherent or plausible, and if so
how do they do so? As youll know by now Im firmly convinced that doing
history of philosophy is itself a philosophical enterprise, and we may have no
texts that illustrate this point better than texts about texts from earlier time
periods.

Rule 17: Focus on the primary text, not secondary literature

I often tell my students, "I would always rather you read the primary text one
more time than go read a piece of secondary literature." The point of this is to
encourage students to form their own impressions and analysis of a historical
source, rather than just reproducing what scholars have already written about
that source. This is not to say that secondary literature is useless. It would be
pretty hypocritical for me to say that, given that I produce it myself! But one
needs to think carefully about how to use it, and about the balance between

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reading the primary source and using scholarly literature. I think that it is a
good rule of thumb for everyone - from beginning student to professional
historian of philosophy - to focus on the primary text, and to have a clear idea
what one is trying to get out of secondary literature when one does turn to it.
Some uses are pretty much unproblematic, for instance:

It may help provide historical context for the primary source, e.g. what other
texts the author is responding to; often you just won't be able to get that out
of the primary text (editorial notes indicating sources or parallels in other
works are, of course, themselves a "secondary" intervention and not part of
the primary text).
If you want to produce new research about the primary text you obviously
need to know what has already been said, so that you aren't just reinventing
the wheel.
General secondary works (like this podcast and the books based on it!) can
give you a broad sense of what primary texts are out there, and which you
may want to study more closely. To employ a metaphor I've used before,
something like the podcast is akin to a travel guide, which tells you which
cities and landmarks you may want to visit; but you shouldn't only read the
guide book, you should go visit yourself.

The tricky part comes when secondary literature tries to help you understand
the primary text, by making distinctions or observations you may not have
seen yourself. Of course this is useful too; indeed it is usually the point of
reading published scholarship on history of philosophy. But it is more
treacherous, because having read this scholarship you run the risk of coming
to the primary text without "fresh eyes" and only seeing the problems or
solutions others have already found in it. Hence the point of my advice to
students: when in doubt, make up your own mind first and then check to see
how your understanding of the text compares to what others have said.

Rule 18 for history of philosophy: don't essentialize

In reading about Indian philosophy for the podcast I have been struck that,
especially in older secondary literature, you'll come across claims like "an
interest in the self is fundamental to the Indian worldview" or "non-violence is
deeply rooted within the humanism of Indian culture." Such claims, made by
both Indian and non-Indian scholars, are usually meant as compliments. But to
my mind they are reductive and, to be frank, silly. In one case, which actually
inspired me to devise this new rule, an author said that non-violence

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(ahimsa) was fundamental to the Indian worldview, so that the spectacular
and tragic violence of mid-20th-century Indian history must have been
somehow a violation or abberation of Indians' true nature! That looks
suspiciously like a theory that is immune to counterevidence. One sees this
with other cultures too. I've often seen - and not only in older literature -
remarks that Islam is, or isn't, a "religion of peace," is "intolerant" or
"tolerant," etc.

The truth is that cultures, including religious cultures, are complex and marked
by internal disagreement, and they develop over time. So we should see them
as historical phenomena, not as having some sort of essential character that is
acquired by all the adherents of a given religion or members of a given
culture.

Probably it is easier to make this point about cultures or geographical regions

than religions. It seems just evidently ridiculous to suppose that the
population of India has, in general, had a commitment or even tendency to
any particular philosophical view or ethical maxim from the time of the
Upanisads down to the current day. Lurking below the surface here is our urge
to stereotype - just as Italians are emotional and germans love discipline, so
Indians are supposedly fascinated by the self and committed to non-violence.

With religion, things are trickier. I think I would have to admit that someone
who is actually a Muslim might have a stake in what Islam "really is committed
to," e.g. on the basis that there are correct and incorrect interpretations of the
Koran and hadith. But I see no reason for a non-Muslim, or even a Muslim
historian of philosophiy who is writing in his or her capacity as a historian, to
think in these terms. Rather the question should be, "what have actual
Muslims in such-and-such a period believed about their religion?" Anyone
who's dipped into the Islamic world episodes of the podcast knows that the
answer to that is as varied as the thinkers that I covered, to say nothing of
those I didn't.

This matters for the history of philosophy in particular because of the

widespread tendency to expect that certain (especially so-called "non-
western") philosophical traditions will have a distinctive, essential character -
more "spiritual", more "determinist," or whatever. This is a bad approach. We
are much more likely to discover tensions and disagreements within a
tradition of any significant historical scope, than we are to discover some kind
of enduring character that marks all thought from within that tradition. And

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supposing that frequently recurring ideas within a culture somehow derive
from the "innate character" of that culture is lazy, and a way of avoiding the
more interesting question: what historical or intellectual reasons underlie the
prevalence of such ideas?

Rule 19 for history of philosophy: beware of jargon

This is, I think, good advice for all kinds of writing in the humanities but it's
especially relevant for philosophers and historians of philosophy.
Contemporary philosophy, both analytic and continental (to use some
terminology that in itself is questionable), bristles with off-putting jargon and
also technical tools like logical notation to abbreviations and numbered
propositions. There's certainly a place for this: philosophy is, among other
things, about precision and rigor, and formal languages and jargon can be very
precise. But analytic philosophers often make things unnecessarily hard on
their readers by using technical symbols when normal language could say the
same thing quite easily, or expecting the reader to bear in mind what lots of
numbered theses stand for. (I recently read a book for the podcast that had so
many numbered propositions in it that it needed a several page long appendix
to list them all, forcing the reader constantly to flip back and forth between
the main text and the appendix.) As for "continental" philosophy, the scandals
of parody articles being accepted for peer review speak for themselves. Every
time you introduce a new piece of terminology, abbreviation, or tag (like
referring back to some philosophical claim as P, or 4*) you make it harder for
the reader to stay with you, and an accumulation of these devices will make
your text almost impossible to read. Of course their use is often justified, and
what is incomprehensible for a general audience is often straightforward for a
specialized audience. But the rule should be: dont formalize, or use jargon,
unless the gain in clarity, rigor etc is worth the burden youre placing on the
reader by doing so.

There are two reasons that this point is especially relevant to history of
philosophy. One is that the use of contemporary technical tools and jargon
brings with it the risk of anachronism (and by now you know how I feel about
anachronism). My favorite example is the use of the backwards E or
existential quantifier (), for instance x which would be read there is an x.
You can readily find examples of this symbol being used in work on ancient
philosophy. Of course such notation was not used then, but that isnt the
problem. The problem is that one can have a long debate about whether

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ancient thinkers had a notion of existence that would correspond to the use of
this quantifier, where anything can be put in for x. I would argue that they
did not. Just imagine what Aquinas would say if you insisted that God, a
created substance, or a created accident must all exist or be in the same
sense, because they can all be substituted for x in x. Similarly, using bits of
jargon from contemporary philosophy can cover up the interesting fact that
earlier thinkers lacked precisely the concepts or presuppositions behind that
jargon. Again, Im not saying it is never warranted, and I myself am willing to
apply a term like compatibilist or physicalist to, say, the Stoics. But you
have to be very clear in your own mind what these terms mean and whether
they truly apply.

The second reason is that historical texts have their own jargon (see rule 9:
learn the terminology). Of course using these terms is not anachronistic,
unless you apply a term from one period of history to another period. But
again, it is a barrier to understanding for the reader. I hate it when people
write about Aristotle and use untranslated Greek, or about Avicenna with
untranslated Arabic. This is like putting a note at the top of the piece that says
if you cant read these languages, I dont want to talk to you. And same with
unexplained bits of technical language (say, using supposit in a discussion of
medieval philosophy without explaining it). Here too of course, the rule is not
absolute. You might be writing a detailed discussion of the original
terminology, which inevitably presupposes that the reader knows the original
language. Or you may intend to write only for other specialists in medieval
thought, who are just going to be annoyed and bored if you tell them things
they already know. My suggested rule of thumb though is to avoid erecting
unnecessary barriers to understanding.

Rule 20 for history of philosophy: things are always more complicated than
you think

For this final rule I considered several options, like learn some geography
which is definitely a good idea (compare to rule 6 about learning some dates),
or exhorting people to explore philosophy from more than one culture or
more than one branch of philosophy (not just ethics, but also epistemology,
etc). But eventually I decided the best piece of advice to close with is this:
things are always more complicated than you think. In a way this sums up
the core message of my so-called rules. Like plain old history, history of
philosophy is very complicated and there is no real limit to the things you

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might want, or need, to know if you really want to understand how and why
ideas developed. Hence my earlier pieces of advice to explore the context of
historical texts, the role of lesser-known authors, and so on.

But I also suggest this last piece of advice with a view to the core activity of
the historian of philosophy, which is reading philosophical texts. One thing I
have learned from participating in many philosophy reading groups over the
years (and not least from MM McCabe, who was for many years a colleague of
mine at Kings College London) is that a good philosophical text will keep
yielding insights the longer and more closely you read it. Of course you cant,
for practical reasons, just keep reading and re-reading the same page forever,
even if that page was written by Plato or Kant. But one should also resist the
thought ok, I basically get the point of this text, or I already know what this
author thinks about this topic, and swiftly move on. Slow reading, and
repeated reading, is crucial. Towards this end, it is useful to remind yourself
that the text youre looking at is more complicated than you think. Just
assume you havent yet figured it out fully. Of course not every text rewards
this kind of scrutiny; perhaps there are even some bits of Plato that arent this
rich (if so I havent found them). But with any given text, as for the history of
philosophy as a whole, it doesnt hurt to assume that there is always more to
discover.

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