Hi David

You had me scrambling to see what I had said earlier! 

You quote my recent comment that:

Generally I think  we need to guard against the danger of philosophy becoming too "in house" - i.e. too strongly wedded to established currents of thought. That way lies ossification...

and you say:

That is too extreme a switch on the position I was putting, which was more in-keeping with your related post of 20091229 in which you said:

On the one hand, there is simply the need for historical awareness. Without knowledge of the historical context in which earlier philosophers wrote, there is a real danger they will be misunderstood - ie that we will ascribe ideas to them that they never held. The danger gets bigger of course the further back we go in time.

These are two separate issues, as you no doubt recognize. My point in the second comment is that if we are dealing with earlier philosophers we should be aware of how they are using terms/concepts and should not assume they are using them in the same way we might be. That is not the point in my recent post (first above), which is that we should not allow ourselves to become hedged in by whatever approaches to philosophical problems happen to dominate the discourse - past or present.

An example that might interest you - since I think it's one of your areas of interest - is the continued domination of the philosophy of art by the post-Kantian (really post-Enlightenment) categories of beauty, aesthetic pleasure etc. In one way or another, both analytic and continental aesthetics still live in the shadow of this and (with minor exceptions) seem unable to talk about art in any other terms. I reject it entirely. I think it is a huge mistake - an understandable one for historical reasons, but a mistake nonetheless, and one that acts like a ball and chain on our understanding of art.*

Now I may be right or I may be wrong, but it is vitally important, in my view, that we be prepared to question everything, including strongly entrenched traditions like this. That's what I mean by the danger of becoming hedged in and too strongly wedded to established currents of thought.

DA

* PS One of the things that annoyed me about the questionnaire by the way was its apparent assumption that this tradition represented the only way to think about art. As I've said before the questionnaire was an inherently conservative instrument.