About the conference

The Historiography of Philosophy, 1800-1950

International Conference in Copenhagen, September 27-28, 2018

Organised by Leo Catana and Mogens Lærke

Philosophy’s history stretches back more than 2600 years. However, the discipline narrating philosophy’s past, the historiography of philosophy, emerged relatively late, namely in Germany in the Eighteenth century. Over the last three centuries, the historiography of philosophy has had its own history, where it has developed its methodological concepts and periodizations, and where it has expanded (and sometimes reduced) the number and range of past philosophers included in its surveys. On an educational level, teaching the history of philosophy has been an integral part of most university curriculae in philosophy from the nineteenth century onwards. This implies that most if not all professionally trained philosophers have some notion of the historical trajectory of the problems that they worked on.

In some cases, this historical consciousness has predominantly been shaped by accounts of other, earlier historians of philosophy, by adopting, rejecting or modifying their perspectives, preferences, selections and categorisations of the exposed historical material. In most cases, however, it is not only previous historians of philosophy, but also and sometimes more importantly contemporary philosophers and philosophical movements that have influenced the way in which the history of philosophy is presented. In each epoch, the work of contemporary philosophers is significantly informed by the way in which they understand and use the texts of their predecessors. In these respects, awareness about the way that historical accounts of philosophy have developed is not only of historical interest, but crucial for understanding how philosophers have approached and continue to approach their problems. The planned workshop focuses on precisely these issues.

The historiography of philosophy as a discipline can be defined in various ways. In this context, we distinguish the history of philosophy from the historiography of philosophy. The history of philosophy is the past philosophers themselves and their writings. In addition, history of philosophy refers to accounts of past philosophy. We understand the discipline historiography of philosophy as accounts of past philosophy (thus overlapping with the second meaning of ‘history of philosophy’), and as methodological reflections on the way in which past philosophy is researched, analysed and presented in accounts of past philosophy. These accounts of past philosophy may cover individual thinkers or topics, e.g. a monograph on Leibniz’s philosophy. Alternatively, they may cover a period in the history of philosophy, e.g. ancient philosophy, or the entire history of philosophy from the earliest times up to the present, so-called general histories of philosophy.

If we are right in our claim that philosophers or philosophical movements may affect the way in which history of philosophy is narrated, and vice versa, then one can, in meaningful ways, speak of a Hegelian historiography, a neo-Kantian historiography, an early analytic historiography, or a structuralist historiography of philosophy. Thus understood, it is clear that the history of the historiography of philosophy is inseparable from, without being identical to, the history of philosophy proper. Each philosophical paradigm has developed its own ways of using and instrumentalizing the history of philosophy and has developed ways of writing the history of philosophy that allowed them to making use of past philosophers in the ways that proved most effective for their own purposes. One important aim of the workshop and the planned publication that will result from it is to draw attention to this connection, and show how, in different times of history, the historiography of philosophy has acquired philosophical purpose.

The conference is organized in collaboration between the Division of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, the Institut d’histoire de representations et des idées dans les modernités (IHRIM, UMR 5317) at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS de Lyon), and the British Society for the History of Philosophy (BSHP). The conference has been funded by these three institutions and three additional institutions: CEMES, University of Copenhagen; IHRIM, UMR 5317, CNRS, ENS de Lyon; and Labex Comod, Université de Lyon.

Contact:

Leo Catana: catana@hum.ku.dk

Mogens Lærke: mogens.laerke@ens-lyon.fr