Why study history of philosophy? | Leiter Reports

Just spent the past hour and a half or so reading through this blog post, the attached letter and the debate in the comments. Really interesting, encouraging from the point of view of the sort of stuff I am generally interested in going into, and just shows how much I have to learn!

Here’s a nice thought from, I believe, based on writing style, my tutor David Wallace:

As a general rule, I think, when an area of philosophy gets its methodology to the stage where it’s pretty unproblematic, we stop calling it philosophy (which is my usual answer to colleagues in other subjects who ask why philosophy doesn’t progress). It happened to maths long ago, and to physics around the time of Newton; it’s largely happened to formal logic; I’m optimistic it’s happening to the bits of philosophy of language and mind that overlap with cognitive science/psychology/linguistics/AI.

I came across this months ago but very glad that I’ve gotten round to reading it all through.