ABSTRACT
Such scepticism about the very existence of philosophy often lies behind the hostility of historians to the critical examination of texts from a philosophical point of view. It is also, of course, consonant with the long fashionable philosophical theory, which has taken a variety of forms in the present century, that philosophy in the traditional sense is as dead as alchemy. I do not share that scepticism, but I have considerable sympathy with the view that philosophical commentary on philosophical texts has commonly distorted their meaning. Philosophers have indeed proved very liable to import their own interests and preconceptions into their readings of the great, and to create a mythological past, golden or dark, in justification of present ways of doing things. They have done so, in one way or another, for a very long time, and custom has bestowed a spurious respectability on the practice. Some even see it as a necessary task for each generation to rewrite the history of philosophy according to its own philosophical lights. Yet we have the same duty here as elsewhere in historiography to try to cut through the barriers set up by the immediate context of our own thinking and to reconstruct and judge the past as it was. No doubt our reconstruction will be less than perfect. We shall never be
able to see things exactly as they might have been seen by this or that seventeenth-century intellectual. No doubt, too, we must start, in our very first readings, from where we are, bringing our own philosophical intuitions or grasp of the philosophical possibilities to the interpretation of the text. Yet we should remain open to the likelihood that our first impressions of its meaning will prove wrong, even wildly wrong.
