Abstract

This scholarly book addresses itself to what Levi believes to be a dual crisis in writing and teaching about the history of philosophy. One element in the crisis is neglect. Recent philosophical work deriving from Wittgenstein, Austin, et al., has given rise to "philosophic indifference and unconcern". Contemporary philosophizing has given to the discipline "an a-historicity hardly matched throughout its long development". The other ingredient in the crisis is the sort of studies which contemporary philosophers undertake when they study historical figures, for example Cartesian studies of the sort in Doney’s anthology or Kenney’s book. In such studies, Descartes "ceases to be a man, living in a specific period, and becomes a text from whose complicated internal structure arguments may be isolated and lifted for philosophic purposes having little to do with those of Descartes himself".