But he manages to pack an extraordinary amount of material into 700 pages, and even to include an extremely useful appendix on logic, as well as chapters on areas of philosophy outside the Anglo-American tradition and often excluded from conventional histories – Continental and Indian, Chinese, Arabic-Persian and African philosophy (though, of course, there will be cavils that each is too short). Inevitably there will be nit-pickers who enumerate the philosophers and parts of philosophy that he has neglected in his history, or complain that it predictably begins with the ancient Greek Thales in about 600BC (Grayling happily admits he is telling the “orthodox story”).
The philosopher A C Grayling carries off this unwieldy project with wit and grace, deftly juggling its contradictory problems. Yet they must also be treated as products of their own particular eras if anachronism is to be avoided. Dead philosophers need to be discussed as if they were still talking to us, perennial speakers in an ongoing conversation. A history of philosophy, therefore, is not so much a charting of that discipline’s past as a reliving and rethinking of it. In philosophy, however, ideas now current make little sense without understanding their origins, these being not only the clue to their meaning, but, usually, concepts that must be freshly reinterpreted themselves.
A history of science can discuss past scientific concepts either as mistaken attempts to fill explanatory gaps (phlogiston, caloric, the ether) or as place-markers that have been subsequently given content (genes, heat, electricity) as superseded stages on a journey, or fads that are now abandoned. And whereas what counts as dirt is fairly obvious, what counts as philosophy is itself a philosophical problem. However thorough the cleaner (or author) has been, what will be commented on is the patch of dust they have missed. To write a history of philosophy is as thankless a task as cleaning a house.
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