ABSTRACT
After several decades of what might be termed formalist critical commentary – commentary principally concerned with entailment relations and the warrant for assertions in Anglo-American historiography of philosophy, there has been a revival of substantival commentary on past philosophers. Substantival, as opposed to formal, commentary and criticism is, of course, nothing new. Authoritarian moralists and political thinkers have always found inspiration from the past philosophers. And the history of philosophy has often been treated and not only by popularizers as though it were a repository of hard-won eternal truths on the human condition to be brooded upon and internalized. Worries about the methodological grounding of engaged modes of criticism have accompanied it for a long time. The asymmetry that licenses substantival criticism can emerge only when historical commentary is taken as acceptable method for instructing others what to think or merely signalling moral and political views, as offering a way albeit a roundabout way to talk about politics and ethics.
