Philosophy and Its History Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy

This volume collects contributions from leading scholars of early modern philosophy from a wide variety of philosophical and geographic backgrounds. The distinguished contributors offer very different, competing approaches to the history of philosophy. Many chapters articulate new, detailed methods of doing history of philosophy. These present conflicting visions of the history of philosophy as an autonomous sub-discipline of professional philosophy. Several other chapters offer new approaches to integrating history into one's philosophy. These do so by re-telling the history of recent philosophy. A number of chapters explore the relationship between history of philosophy and history of science. Among the topics discussed and debated in the volume are: the status of the principle of charity; the nature of reading texts; the role of historiography within the history of philosophy; the nature of establishing proper context.

Introduction; Mogens L?rke, Justin E.H. Smith, and Eric Schliesser; Chapter 1 : The Anthropological Analogy and the Constitution of Historical Perspectivism; Mogens L?rke; Chapter 2 : The History of Philosophy as Past and as Process; Justin E. H. Smith; Chapter 3 : Philosophy and Genealogy. Ways of writing history of philosophy.; Koen Vermeir; Chapter 4 : Understanding the Argument Through Then-Current Public Debates or My Detective Method of History of Philosophy; Ursula Goldenbaum; Chapter 5: The Contingency of Philosophical Problems; Joanne Waugh and Roger Ariew; Chapter 6 : Philosophical Problems in the History of Philosophy: What are They?; Leo Catana; Chapter 7: Philosophizing Historically/Historicizing Philosophy: Some Spinozistic Reflections; Julie R. Klein; Chapter 8 : Is the History of Philosophy a Family Affair? The Examples of Malebranche and Locke in the Cousinian School; Delphine Kolesnik-Antoine; Chapter 9 : The Taming of Philosophy; Michael Della Rocca; Chapter 10 : Philosophic Prophecy; Eric Schliesser; Chapter 11 : Philosophical Systems and their History; Alan Nelson; Chapter 12 : Charitable Interpretations and the Political Domestication of Spinoza,; or, Benedict in the Land of the Secular Imagination; Yitzhak Melamed; Chapter 13 : Mediating between Past and Present:; Descartes, Newton, and Contemporary Structural Realism; Mary Domski; Chapter 14 : What Has History of Science to Do with History of Philosophy?; Tad M. Schmaltz; Bibliography

Mogens Lærke is Senior Research Fellow at the École Normale Supérieure, Lyon and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Justin E. H. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University. Eric Schliesser is Bijzonder Onderzoeks Fond Research Professor and Associated Professor of philosophy and moral science at Ghent University.