The Historiography of Philosophy by Michael Frede (review)

Reviewed by: The Historiography of Philosophy by Michael Frede Claude Panaccio Michael Frede. The Historiography of Philosophy. Edited by Katerina Ierodiakonou, with a postface by Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 256. Hardback, 80. 00. From the 1970s until his tragic death in 2007, Michael Frede was one of the most prominent scholars in ancient Greek philosophy, with landmark contributions to the study of Aristotle and of Hellenistic thought in particular. This volume contains his theoretical reflections on the work of historians of philosophy. The main part of the book reproduces with minor corrections the previously unpublished text of the Nellie Wallace Lectures that Frede gave in 1989–90 in Oxford (1–135). Then come three papers that he published on pretty much the same topic between 1987 and 1992 (137–88). Jonathan Barnes's postface, finally, launches an exciting discussion of Frede's proposals by raising a number of questions and critical remarks about them (189–230). Frede's main claim throughout the book is that there is, and should be, a distinctively historical approach to the history of philosophy that has not yet been sufficiently recognized as such in the academic world. This is not to say that he considers more philosophical approaches to be illegitimate. His point is that we have to be clear about the distinction and what it involves in terms of requirements and methods. What Frede calls the "historical history of philosophy" is thus contrasted by him with two varieties of philosophical approaches. One of them he identifies as the "philosophical history of philosophy. " It consists in retrospectively studying the past of philosophy as a kind of maturation toward some more recent doctrinal stage, as Aristotle or Hegel saliently did with their respective predecessors. Frede takes this to be "a perfectly intelligible and legitimate, though perhaps not particularly interesting or fruitful, enterprise" (41). Most of the time, he thinks, it would be led by its own philosophical presuppositions to be too selective and to provide a badly distorted picture of past philosophy. Frede is much more sympathetic to the other philosophical approach to the history of philosophy he acknowledges, the one he calls "doxography. " This is the study of past philosophers with the aim of finding something of interest in them for ongoing philosophical discussions—a familiar practice, indeed, in the philosophical discipline as we know it. There is an inevitable amount of anachronism in such endeavors, according to Frede, insofar as the commentators will have to reformulate the old views in contemporary terms to a certain extent and to look at them in connection with the questions that are currently debated in the field. But Frede deems this kind of anachronism acceptable as long as sufficient care is taken to correctly identify the views of the past we are interested in and to report them in the best available way. He strongly insists, however, that there are inherent risks of distortion in this approach. This might not be a problem if we are prepared to deal, as philosophers, with views that were not exactly those of the past; but we then run the risk of leaving out something of great philosophical interest, even to us, since "as a rule the philosopher subjected to doxographical treatment was a much better philosopher than the doxographer" (34). If we turn to the past for philosophical inspiration, we should also do it seriously, and this presupposes a historical study of past authors that is pursued for its own sake. End Page 317 The latter is what Frede is really interested in, and he wants this historical approach to be "as independent as possible from philosophy and not just an ancilla to philosophy" (60). Its practitioners must have a strong philosophical training, of course, in order to understand the views they study and the arguments that were adduced in support of them, but Frede insists that they nevertheless are historians first and foremost: they strive to provide a correct account of "the actual, historical evolution of these views and positions" (14) and of how new doctrines actually grew out of previous ones given the historical context. Insofar as this is what they are doing, historians of. . .