历史的终结

The End of History

如果对当前最前沿的哲学争论完全不了解,对相关经验数据或科学数据所知甚少,甚或一无所知,如此形成的哲学主张应该获得多少可信度呢?极少或完全没有。然而,当我们研究哲学史时,我们却给予这些历史性的哲学主张很高的可信度。哲学史的研究无益于哲学。如果哲学有认知目标,那么从事哲学史研究会使其受挫。因为我们极少有理由认为,历史上的伟大哲学家提出的主张,能够经受今天的严格审查。

What credence should we assign to philosophical claims that were formed without any knowledgeof the current state of the art of the philosophical debate and little or no knowledge of the relevant empirical orscientific data?Very little or none.Yet when we engage with the history of philosophy,this is often exactly whatwe do.In this paper,I argue that studying the history of philosophy is philosophically unhelpful.The epistemicaims of philosophy,if there are any,are frustrated by engaging with the history of philosophy,because we havelittle reason to think that the claims made by history’s great philosophers would survive closer scrutiny today.First,I review the case for philosophical historiography and show how it falls short.I then present severalarguments for skepticism about the philosophical value of engaging with the history of philosophy and offer anexplanation for why philosophical historiography would seem to make sense even if it didn’t.