ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most profound and difficult question in philosophy concerns the nature of philosophy itself. One way of raising it is to ask why the history of philosophy matters so much to philosophers. Almost everywhere its study is recognized as an integral, even essential part of a philosophical education, and it is normal for it to be pursued in the same university departments and by many of the same people as engage directly in the criticism and production of current philosophical theory. It is only necessary to compare philosophy in this respect with chemistry or biology or mathematics to see that the relationship between the historiography and the practice of philosophy is a peculiar one. What kind of subject can it be that has been so bound up with its own history, ever since it was old enough to have a history? Not that an explicit conception of 'the history of philosophy' is nearly as old as philosophy itself. Yet philosophers have for a very long time felt it appropriate to draw on the past, to align themselves with or against long-standing traditions, to revive what has previously been discarded, to engage in dialogue, sympathetic or hostile, with the long dead. Why?
