"No philosopher understands his predecessors until he has re-thought their thought in his own contemporary terms"
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Strawson is picking a fight with the museum model of philosophy: the idea that understanding past thinkers is a matter of careful preservation, like dusting off Aristotle and placing him back on the shelf. His line insists that comprehension is not passive reception but active reconstruction. You only "get" a predecessor when you can make their problems live again inside your own intellectual weather system.
The intent is methodological and quietly polemical. Strawson, a leading figure in ordinary language philosophy and a major interpreter of Kant, is defending the practice of rational reconstruction: translating older arguments into the conceptual tools, assumptions, and live disputes of the present. That move has obvious risks (anachronism, distortion), but Strawson is arguing that the alternative is worse: reverent paraphrase that mistakes fidelity for understanding. If you cannot restate a predecessor in terms that could plausibly be argued over today, you have not yet located the engine of their thought.
The subtext also carries an institutional message. Philosophy, unlike some historical disciplines, advances by re-using and re-testing its inheritance. Strawson is licensing a kind of intellectual appropriation: treat predecessors less as authorities to cite than as interlocutors to pressure. There is a British understatement to the provocation, too. "Until" implies most philosophers stop short, settling for scholarship as a substitute for philosophical grasp.
Context matters: mid-20th-century analytic philosophy often framed itself as a break from the past, suspicious of "history of philosophy" as antiquarianism. Strawson is carving out a third position: not nostalgia, not rupture, but renewal through translation.
The intent is methodological and quietly polemical. Strawson, a leading figure in ordinary language philosophy and a major interpreter of Kant, is defending the practice of rational reconstruction: translating older arguments into the conceptual tools, assumptions, and live disputes of the present. That move has obvious risks (anachronism, distortion), but Strawson is arguing that the alternative is worse: reverent paraphrase that mistakes fidelity for understanding. If you cannot restate a predecessor in terms that could plausibly be argued over today, you have not yet located the engine of their thought.
The subtext also carries an institutional message. Philosophy, unlike some historical disciplines, advances by re-using and re-testing its inheritance. Strawson is licensing a kind of intellectual appropriation: treat predecessors less as authorities to cite than as interlocutors to pressure. There is a British understatement to the provocation, too. "Until" implies most philosophers stop short, settling for scholarship as a substitute for philosophical grasp.
Context matters: mid-20th-century analytic philosophy often framed itself as a break from the past, suspicious of "history of philosophy" as antiquarianism. Strawson is carving out a third position: not nostalgia, not rupture, but renewal through translation.
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| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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