Rorty

The essentialism and ahistoricism this project embraces is coupled with both a Whiggish pride in ‘our’ formulation of ‘the problem’ and a Great Man theory of the history of philosophy. But most of the Great Philosophers included here were not so great. They were simply compilers of ideas that were in the air at the time, and their ‘greatness’ consists mainly in being lucky enough to fi nd their way into doxographic

histories of philosophy compiled by nineteenth-century Kantians – the kind that begin with Thales. These histories managed to entrench Kant’s externalization of the intellectual scene of the eighteenth century by persuading subsequent generations that there are perennial and specifi - cally philosophical problems requiring a distinct academic discipline to service them. Thus persuaded, an institutional niche arose in which unimaginative professors could bore each other with the minutiae of problems with no relevance to wider culture. Within that niche today, it would be unthinkable to exclude Descartes from a volume of this kind, though Petrus Ramus was his more original source. But the niche is not as immune to history as it likes to think itself, because it would once have been unthinkable to exclude Malebranche, and he did not get an entry. This lack of immunity is demonstrated most clearly by the absurd decision, inspired by our multicultural times, to include non-Western thinkers and call them ‘philosophers’. But the cultural milieu which led ancient Indian and Chinese writers to say the funny-sounding things they said is unfathomable to us. You can force their words to relate to ‘our problem’, of course; as Wittgenstein said, if you use enough wrapping paper, you can make things whatever shape you like. But the result will be as artifi cial as it is unedifying. Philosophy is a Western tradition; it must be, because Kant invented it.