Abstract

Since the mid-nineteenth century, many philosophers in the "continental" tradition have maintained that philosophy stands in a special relation to its history. Philosophy, they argue, is an inherently historical discipline, and it is impossible to do philosophy well without studying its past. Charles Taylor calls this view "the historical thesis about philosophy." But while the historical thesis is often taken for granted in recent European philosophy, it is notoriously difficult to pin down exactly what it means, or why one might think it is true. This unreflective attitude towards history could be called a crisis, in Edmund Husserl's sense: a certain view of the history of philosophy has been handed down through the continental tradition, but without being adequately argued for, or even understood. ;This dissertation is a diagnosis and critique of the crisis. Its goals are to explain why continental thinking about the history of philosophy has become mired in confusion, and to determine what the tradition must do to come to terms with the crisis. My thesis is that since Hegel, continental thought has understood its relation to the past according to a single model---the model that Hegel himself proposed. But this model is flawed, because it is based on implausible assumptions about the nature of historical knowledge. To respond to the crisis, I argue, we must recognize the ways in which Hegelian assumptions dominate our understanding of history, and rethink them. And I propose an alternative view of historical inquiry, one that I believe avoids the difficulties raised by Hegel's account. ;The dissertation takes the form of a regressive historical narrative. Chapter One examines the arguments advanced for the historical thesis by three prominent contemporary schools: Derridean deconstruction, Gadamerian hermeneutics, and Levinasian ethical thought. I argue that each of these schools is deeply confused about the relation between philosophy and its past. Chapter Two explains how this confused approach to history first arose in Hegel's work on the history of philosophy. Chapters Three and Four describe how a Hegelian conception of the history of philosophy was unwittingly transmitted to contemporary thought via Heidegger and twentieth century hermeneutics. Finally, Chapter Five sketches an alternative to Hegel's view. Hegel believes that knowledge of history is unphilosophical because it is mimetic---that is, it merely imitates a pre-given past. I argue that Hegel is wrong about this. I claim that historical knowledge is in important respects active and productive, and that recognizing this is the first step towards understanding how truth can be genuinely in history.