In studying the history of philosophy we are often tempted to project our current concerns with problems and methods backwards. One reason we may do this is that we cannot read any text intelligently without having some interpretative approach of our own, however inchoate it may be. In contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, both learning and teaching have been largely ahistorical. In looking at earlier texts, consequently, the framework we use to try to understand them naturally tends to be the one we use in our daily philosophical work. It is likely to seem obviously appropriate, and perhaps we do not have another one available.

There are particular drawbacks to this approach in studying the history of ethics. It is widely held that modern philosophy begins with Descartes and is essentially defined by its epistemological concerns. These in turn are seen as motivated by the new science and the cognitive challenge it contained for religious doctrine. Of course it is recognized that morality was involved in religion. But Bacon and Descartes and Locke did not make ethical issues central to their philosophy, and it seems to be Christianity as a theory of the world, rather than as a way of life, that is ultimately at issue in their writings. So when we teach a course called ‘the history of modern philosophy’, we usually teach the history of epistemology and metaphysics, and we do not ordinarily offer a comparable course, held to be of equal importance, on the history of modern ethics.