Überlegungen zur Sprache und Geschichte der Philosophie

Abstract

This paper challenges a view often held by analytic philosophers according to which philosophy is independent from the history of philosophy, by setting out to undermine the analogy between philosophy and science on which the view in question is plausibly understood to depend. Philosophy is neither a scientific theory nor is it based on a pre-existing subject-matter. Rather, philosophical problems and topics are fundamentally constituted by language. This distinctive feature makes it necessary for philosophers to engage with the problems of the history of philosophy, since the linguistic universal of historicity is part and parcel of both language in general and philosophical language in particular. Moreover, the language of philosophy is not only essentially historical but also necessarily determined by the pragmatic feature of alterity. Such a feature implies that philosophers can properly understand and reasonably adopt a position on a given philosophical issue only if they reflect upon their own and others’ perspectives. Therefore, it is impossible to do philosophy without including other positions previously held in the history of philosophy.