This essay—a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on contextualism—is concerned with the gradual rise (in Europe and then more generally in the West) of awareness of the existence of modes of thought or systems of belief that are different from those that are dominant in one's own culture. The awareness can be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (for example, in John Locke, Bernard de Fontenelle, and Giambattista Vico) but was developed further in the early to mid-twentieth century. (...) Its main consequence has been to encourage individuals to distance themselves from their own system—to criticize and change it. (shrink)

O objetivo deste artigo é dar relevo à presença da argumentação histórica e antropológica nas obras publicadas por John Locke entre 1689 e 1695. Essa orientação defende a existência de uma diversidade de povos e costumes ao redor do mundo, tomando como base as comunidades longínquas descritas nos relatos de viagens. Entre os tipos de povos considerados por Locke, existem sociedades ateias, idólatras, de moral filosófica e, poder-se-ia dizer, culmina com a defesa do cristianismo como a religião mais apropriada para (...) educar os trabalhadores das sociedades de apropriação ampliada. (shrink)

Historians of philosophy are increasingly likely to emphasize the extent to which their work offers a pay‐off for philosophers of un‐historical or anti‐historical inclinations; but this defence is less familiar, and often seems less than self‐evident, to intellectual historians. This article examines this tendency, arguing that such arguments for the instrumental value of historical scholarship in philosophy are often more problematic than they at first appear. Using the relatively familiar case study of René Descartes' reading of his scholastic and Aristotelian (...) contemporaries, the article attempts to problematize this notion of pay‐off from an historian's perspective. (shrink)