A Defense of Anachronistic History of Philosophy
David Weberman (CEU)
As part of a larger project on interpretation, this paper deals with the nature of interpreting the history of philosophy. Past philosophical texts often involve questions, assumptions, motivations, strategies, vocabularies, and styles different from those of the present. The question is what we should say or do about this sometimes large chasm between the past and the present. Should we understand older texts in their terms (antiquarianism, also called historical reconstruction) or in ours (presentism, also called rational reconstruction)? Can we choose between the two and must we? I argue against Quentin Skinner’s meta-interpretive antiquarianism, which says that antiquarianism is the only proper way to interpret texts. The point of this argument is to show that texts admit multiple, non-convergent interpretations.