Abstract

Alasdair MacIntyre noted that we appear to face a dilemma when engaging with the history of philosophy. Either we interpret great works “so as to make them relevant to our contemporary problems” or we read them “in their own terms, carefully preserving their idiosyncratic and specific character.” The former involves reshaping great thinkers into “what they would have been” had they been our philosophical contemporaries, and risks overlooking, downplaying, or distorting those features of their work that resist such efforts. The latter approach, by contrast, threatens to resign the texts to a state such that “they cannot emerge into the present except as a set of museum pieces” (“The Relationship of Philosophy...