Grasping the philosophical relevance of past philosophies
pp. 439-451
in: Jenny Pelletier, Magali Roques (eds), The language of thought in late medieval philosophy, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
This chapter examines what is needed in principle for a historian of philosophy to bring out the relevance of certain past theoretical texts for today's philosophical discussions. Three conditions are thus spelled out: (1) the historian should be able to identify the referents of (some of) the non-theoretical concrete terms of the relevant texts; (2) the historian should master the inferences that are acceptable within the past doctrines in question; (3) he or she should make it clear on that basis how these doctrines dealt with phenomena that are still taken to be philosophically problematic, especially logico-linguistic phenomena such as predication, ambiguities, modalities, indexicality, self-reference and so on. How all of this in turn requires a special sort of historical contextualization is illustrated with the case of Anselm of Canterbury's De grammatico.