Abstract

A second way of obscuring the true relationship between philosophy and the history of philosophy is to convert all philosophers into contemporaries who are offering competing solutions to perennial problems, either in the characteristically British way of treating the great philosophers of the past as though they were candidates for fellowships at Oxford colleges whose confusions were being laid bare at an interview; or in the characteristically French way of seeing existentialism in the most improbable places, such as the writings of Aquinas or Descartes, and thinking that in so seeing it one is paying a compliment.