ABSTRACT
The point of reading the history of philosophy – and the history of modern philosophy in particular – is not that it tells us what people who are now dead used to think, but that it helps us to understand what those who are now living currently believe. The attitudes and beliefs which inform and structure the lives we currently lead were not invented by us, but were inherited from our tradition: they are built into the language, conventions and institutions that we inhabit. Philosophers are the voices of that tradition: successful ones (which by definition any that we read today must be) have succeeded in articulating ideas which people have a use for, and which play some part in the evolutionary struggle between rival ways of thinking and living that has produced our current orthodoxies. By reading the philosophy of the past, therefore, we see something of how we came to be what we are; and more importantly, by understanding the views of the past, and comparing and contrasting them with what we take for granted, we come to understand our own positions the better, and therefore give ourselves the possibility of changing them.
