Journal of the History of Philosophy

Responses and Author's Reply Good and Bad Shadow History of Philosophy Watson ~istinguishes between history of philosophy, the aim of which is to understand past philosophical thoughts as past agents understood them, and shadow histories of philosophy that are created by philosophers in the course of philosophical activity. Shadow histories do not purport to get past philosophers right. Rather, they serve the rhetorical purpose of grounding a philosophical position. If, as Watson argues, shadow history is essential to philosophical activity, it is churlish of historians to criticize philosophers for creating and engaging shadow history merely because it is not a true account of past thoughts. Instead of debunking shadow histories, historians had best try to understand how they function in the history of philosophical activity and why the shadows are often more important in that history than the originals. It seems to me that Watson's thesis is essentially correct, but I would like to restate, in different terms, what I take to be its truth. There is a difference between the philosophical interests philosophers have in the past and the h/s~r/ca/interests of the historian of philosophy. And this distinction is part of a broader distinction it may be helpful to make between narrative and nonnarrative history. Watson's churlish historian of philosophy is a nonnarrative historian. His concern is to frame true hypotheses about how past agents understood their own thoughts. Narrative history however is concerned with the importance or significance of past thoughts as determined by the historian's interests. Narrative concepts such as the Renaissance, the Medieval period, the French Revolution, and World War I link past with later events in a pattern of significance shaped by the historian's interests. Agents who lived through past events under narrative descriptions would not regard these descriptions as part of their own self-understanding. Petrarch did not think he was opening up the Renaissance, and no one in the thirteenth century thought they were living in the Dark Ages. What Watson calls shadow histories are narrative histories determined by the philosophical interests of later philosophers and used to render past thoughts significant. In this sense, the Renaissance, the Thirty Years' War, Empiricism, Russell's Hegel, Ayer's Hume, and Ryle's Ghost in the Machine are all shadow histories. So shadow history is not a peculiarity of the history of philosophy but appears wherever narrative history appears. And where there is narrative history there will always be the debunking work of the nonnarrative historian, insisting that past agents did not and could not have understood themselves under the narrative conceptions that are projected onto them by later generations. Since there will always be narrative history, there will always be a conflict between narrative and nonnarrative conceptions of the past. We can no more get rid of shadow history (narrative conceptions of the past) in philosophy than we can [111] 112 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3~:~ JANUARY ~993 in any other subject. To which I might add that nonnarrative historians are seldom able to free themselves entirely from a narrative understanding of the past events they have chosen to study. It is an intelligible ideal to try to prevent this, but narrative conceptions often steal in unawares. Given the legitimacy of narrative history, we may raise a question which is prompted by Watson's essay but which he does not ask, namely, how to distinguish between good and bad narrative conceptions (or, if one prefers, between good and bad shadow histories). This normative distinction within narratives cannot be determined by an appeal to nonnarrative history. Rather, it must arise from a reflection upon the interests of the activity that generated the narratives in the first place. To answer the question what are good and bad shadow histories in philosophy, we must ask what is philosophical activity, and with what interests may it legitimately engage the past? The examples Watson gives of shadow histories of philosophy are all from the analytic tradition. And the image of philosophy in that tradition is problem-solving. The domain of philosophy is pictured as a field of problems, and philosophical reflection is a beam of light that can...