I have been recently reading a few reflections on how the history of philosophy is, or ought to be done.  I will engage with these issues on a specific basis in the near future, but in general they come across as somewhat jaded–– no doubt the wisdom of a realist, in the eyes of these authors.  It so happened that Ancient Philosophy was particularly in view, but the ideas broadly apply to any scholarship in the history of philosophy, or really any scholarship dealing with the interpretation of texts.  I, like many others, have, and have had for a long time, thoughts about what it is to “do” ancient philosophy in an academic setting.  This performance of ancient philosophy scholarship, if I may call it that, has always been in my mind grounded on what ancient philosophers actually believed, even if, as it turns out, e.g., Aristotle was wrong about women having less teeth than men.  Thus, to turn this into an absurd example, no one could write a journal article on the premise that  Aristotle was a proto-feminist because he argued for dental egalitarianism, not because the former claim is laughable and false, although it is, but because the latter claim is baldly untrue.  On this view, history of philosophy, right or wrong, good or bad, must ultimately be dependent on the gold or dross, whatever they be by hap, which we find in the ancient philosophers.

On the other hand, there is a view, perhaps even earnestly practiced–– there need be no suspect design–– that skeptically approaches not a dialogue with the philosophers, but a series of encounters with “texts.”  There is not necessarily a correct view of Plato, only what one can, with adequate footnotes (of course!), persuasively put forth as emanating from the given Platonic texts one has chosen to invoke.  On this view, scholars are free to cobble together a great variety of creative interpretations, not liable to constraint by what the philosophers said, but by what they can be made to say by ingenuity and literary resilience.

One way this division between those who think that the history of philosophy is discovered or created, for this is what I think it amounts to, is to ask this question, “Would you write a paper or book that could be brilliantly sustained (though wrongly, in your honest opinion) by given textual readings?”  This option would be especially tempting if the reading was novel in the good sense, a truly insightful and counter-conventional interpretation of a text.  Yet should one still produce a work advancing a view of a philosopher, even if, by your philosophical compass, you believe it false?   What I worry about is not that too many today think that the history of philosophy is created, as opposed to discovered; rather it is the fear that many have never reflected on the possibility that they are anything but the same.