by Michael Frede (Author), Katerina Ierodiakonou (Editor)
The Historiography of Philosophy is the
text, virtually unchanged, of the Nellie Wallace lectures, which Michael
Frede gave in Oxford in 1989-90. In these lectures, Frede is largely
concerned with how the history of philosophy has been studied and how it
should be studied, that is, how we ought to conceive of and explain
what historians of philosophy have been doing and should be doing. He
distinguishes three systematical approaches to the history of
philosophy, which run under the same heading 'history of philosophy' and
deal with the same material, but they are distinct enterprises:
Philosophical Doxography, Philosophical History of Philosophy, and
Historical History of Philosophy. All three enterprises are considered
by him as perfectly legitimate, but he clearly gives priority to the
historical history of philosophy, since the other two ultimately have to
rely on its findings; for it is only a historical discipline that can
determine which position a philosopher of the past, as a matter of
historical fact, took and for which reasons he did, in fact, take it.
Frede starts his lectures by showing how the historical history of
philosophy differs from the two philosophical studies of the history of
philosophy; he then examines the historical discipline in more detail,
and finally looks into the consequences of its practice. This volume
also contains three previously published articles by Frede on the same
topic, a preface by Katerina Ierodiakonou that places Frede's lectures
in context, and a postface by Jonathan Barnes that discusses and
criticizes Frede's views.
