1 Edwin Curley, ‘Dialogues With the Dead,’ in The Role of History in and for Philosophy, Joseph C. Pitt, ed. (Synthese 67, 1 [April 1986]) 33-49

2 I owe this term and helpful discussion of this issue to James Hankinson.

3 For a spirited introduction to the work of Bourbaki, see J. Fang, Bourbaki: Toward a Philosophy of Modern Mathematics (Hauppauge, NY: Paideia Press 1970).

4 Duluth: University of Minnesota Press 1987, ix-xxvii. This paper has also benefitted enormously from unpublished work of Prof. Frede based on lectures given at the University of California, Riverside in January of 1986.

5 Among the most interesting experiments in this direction I might mention Tobias Dantzig, Number (London: MacMillan 1930) and subsequent editions, and Nicolas Bourbaki, Elements d'histoire des mathematiques (Paris: Masson 1984).

6 I don't mean here the standards and methods actually used by professional historians; historians too can be corrupted. But it is the standards and methods appropriate to history rather than those of another discipline which are relevant.

7 What I shall call doxology is closely related to what Michael Frede (in lectures presented at U.C. Riverside in January of 1986) calls doxography. There are some differences, however, and so I shall use ‘doxology.’

8 Here, of course, I take a stand in an area which has been hotly contested by historiographers and students of narrative during the past few decades. I hope to return to this debate elsewhere.

9 For the early history of the history of mediaeval philosophy, see E. Gilson, ‘Notes bibliographique pour servir a l'histoire de la notion ds philosophie chretienne,’ in L'Esprit de la philosophie medievale’ 2nd ed. (Paris: J. Vrin 1932), 413-40. These notes have been, unfortunately, omitted from English translations of the work.

10 Michael Frede traces out this story in the Riverside lectures mentioned above.

11 There is, of course, a tradition of esoteric and exoteric teaching among philosophers and a tradition of attributing such a distinction. The task of determining when such a distinction should be drawn is, I think, a properly historical one, which perhaps explains why it is so often done so badly by philosophers.

12 Prof. Bracken's interpretation of Berkeley as an Irish Cartesian is worked out in Harry M. Bracken, Berkeley (London: Macmillan 1974).

13 Introduction à la Philosophie Neo-Scholastique; in English as An Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy, trans. P. Coffey (New York: Dover 1956), 46

14 P. Coffey, ‘Philosophy and the Sciences at Louvain,’ first published in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record (May and June 1905) and reprinted ‘with some minor alterations and omissions’ as an Appendix to his translation of De Wulf cited above. The quotation is at 277.

15 Perhaps the definitive statement of Gilson's position can be found in E. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House 1955) and frequent later editions.

16 Cf. K. Michalski, Les courants critiques et sceptiques dans la philosophie du XIV siècle (Cracow: 1927) and Le problème de la volonte à Oxford et à Paris au XIVe siècle (Cracovie: 1927).

17 Noteworthy in this connection is the work of Philotheus Boehner. See his Collected Articles on Ockham, E.M. Buytaert, ed. (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Francisan Institute 1958).

18 This emphasis is evident, for example, in H. Obermann, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1963), and in the collection H. Oberman, ed., The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (Leiden: Brill 1974).

19 A very good recent example of this rethinking is Katharine Tachau's Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham (Leiden: Brill 1988).

20 The concept of ideology at work here is discussed below.

21 Cf. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979).

22 Rorty, 47

23 Cf. R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory: Habennas and the Frankfurt School (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1981).

24 My characterization of Prof. Brown's view was based on an unpublished manuscript ‘Bolingbroke us. Henry Ford.’ I read the much more articulated and sophisticated presentation of his view in The Rational and the Social (London: Routledge 1989) too late to discuss it properly here and hope to do so elsewhere. In chapter 6 of The Rational and the Social, Prof. Brown proposes that scientific rationality is captured by the methodology which makes the history of science out to be as rational as it can be, given our best sociological theories of how scientists, scientific institutions and other relevant factors work. This proposal (which Brown describes as ‘anthropological’ and ‘to approach science as we would any exotic culture’ [133]) is related to the ‘third alternative,’ which I call ‘diachronic cultural anthropology’ and discuss later in this paper. We differ, however, in that Brown's anthropologist seeks a single account of scientific rationality which is to make the whole past of science seem as rational as possible given the constraints of sociology. My third alternative for philosophy does not require this, but suggests instead an effort to understand each epoch in the history of philosophy by its own account of rationality. This whole issue deserves further study and I hope to return to it elsewhere.

25 B.C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980) 39-40

26 Cf. J. Murdoch, ed., The Cultural Context of Medieval Learning (Boston: Reidel 1975).

27 An earlier version of this paper was read at a Tri-University conference on ‘What the History of Philosophy has to Do With Philosophy’ sponsored by the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University and the University of Victoria in 1987. I would like to thank the organizers of that conference and to thank the participants for useful comments. The completion of this paper was aided by Erindale College and the Gluck Memorial Library at Ohio State and much retarded by the circulation policies of the Robarts Library at the University of Toronto.