Michael Frede and the history of philosophy

Abstract

In the last half of the twentieth century, some of the most prominent historians of Philosophy turned their attention to the historiography of the subject. Arguably the most important and most influential of these was Michael Frede and thanks to Katerina Ierodiakonou and those who assisted her in the production of this volume most of his most important writing on the subject is now available, much of it for the first time. Central questions these writings address are what is the History of Philosophy and to whom (and why) does it matter? One crucial distinction which I think we owe in good measure to Frede is that between a discipline and its subject matter – a distinction often blurred in language. I attempt to capture this distinction by capitalizing the term for discipline and not that for the subject matter. Thus Geology studies geology, the structure and formation of the planet Earth. Both Geology and geology have a past; the past of geology extends roughly 4.5 billion years; the past of Geology a few centuries. Sometimes the past of something is termed its history but, as Frede usually did, I reserve the word ‘history’ (with a small ‘h’) for descriptions of the past and History (with a capital ‘H’) for the subject which studies such descriptions. By a philosophy, I understand a collection of (typically propositional) items ordered by reasons and bearing on a philosophical issue – where what is to be counted as a philosophical issue is itself a philosophical issue. Philosophy, the discipline, studies such philosophies, attempting to understand the items they contain and the connections among them. By a history, I understand a description of a temporally ordered sequence of causally connected items. The History of philosophy would study histories of philosophies, i.e. descriptions of how philosophies themselves evolve (if they do) while the History of Philosophy studies histories of Philosophy, where a history of Philosophy is a description of a temporally ordered sequence of events involving the adoption or rejection of philosophies. In “The Study of Ancient Philosophy”, his 1987 introductory essay to the volume of his papers titled Essays in Ancient Philosophy and reprinted in this volume, Frede took pains to distinguish the past of Philosophy from its study.