ABSTRACT
Studying science is not the same as studying the history of science, and one may be a competent scientist, and even an extraordinary one, without knowing or caring about the history of the field; conversely, it might be doubted whether a person who studies only the history of science can truly be called a scientist at all.The same can be said, with only slightly less justification, for the study of literature or the study of history itself. The study of philosophy, on the other hand, is hardly separable, if at all, from the study of the history of philosophy.The basic questions of philosophy, being questions basic to life itself, show a remarkable continuity from antiquity to our own day,1 and not for nothing did Alfred North Whitehead describe the European philosophical tradition as “a series of footnotes to Plato”:2 much has changed since Plato, and in many areas progress has been made, but to a large extent the questions that philosophy deals with are still the questions that Plato raised and others that arose out of the effort to answer Plato’s questions.This means, on the one hand, that students of ancient philosophy will find that other philosophers know much more about their field than, for example, professors of modern literature know about ancient literature; on the other hand, it
literature is for the student of Homer.
