ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the opposition of most historians of philosophy to Hegel's, Comte's and Cousin's systems, for being a priori and unsupported by empirical evidence, and for undermining the uniqueness and originality of individual philosophical works. The conception of the history of philosophy that Bergson put forward in Bologna differed from that which he had proposed in his Evolution cratrice only a few years earlier. Bergson argued that if one analyses the originality of philosophy for what it explicitly says, there is very little that is new, apart perhaps from his theory of vision. An important part of the historians of philosophy's work was to preserve a philosophical tradition, precisely because they believed in its continued relevance. The Socit franaise de philosophie was an extremely important place of debate for philosophers in the broadest sense in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century.
