Abstract
Contemporary philosophy has had a difficult relationship with its own history. One
extreme view conceives of the task of philosophy purely in terms of solving certain
given problems, and considers the history of philosophy to have no more relevance to
this project than the history of physics has to physics itself. Certainly the history of
philosophy is an important intellectual discipline, they argue, but just as physicists do
not need to read Newton’s Principia in order to make progress, philosophers do not
need to read Aristotle or Kant. At the other extreme are the sceptics who believe that
creative philosophy is, for some reason or another it is no longer possible, and that all
that can be done is to provide ‘readings’ of the great thinkers of the past. As the late
Burton Dreben is supposed to have remarked: ‘junk is junk, but the history of junk is
scholarship’.