ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the historical nature of reason by initially recovering the excluded historicist thesis of reason in history, initially given voice by Richard Sylvan in diagnosis of the wretched state of Australian philosophy in a neo–colonial culture. Historicism has the negative connotations of the counter–Enlightenment, and it is unconsciously linked to hermeneutics, anti-naturalism, German idealism and the romantic reaction to the Enlightenment. The analytic tradition historically exhibits a modernist flight from culture, social interest and society, as it is generally understands to involve cutting reason away from historical particularity, and abstracting a universal reason from social practices. In assuming that philosophy is like mathematics or science, Robert Brown overlooks the missing term of literature. One objection that is sometimes levels at Sylvan's historicist narrative of analytic philosophy in Australia is that the grandstanding is a mere sociology of the philosophy institution, and so does not deal with the autonomy of philosophy.
