Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry [antikvár]

PREFACEThis is a study in the history of philosophy rather than in the history of ideas. I use those labels to mark the distinction that the history of ideas is history before it is philosophy, while with the history of philosophy it is the other way round. In any worthwhile work of either sort, both concerns are likely to be represented, but there is a genuine distinction.For the history of ideas, the question about a work what does ii mean? is centrally the question what did it mean?, and the pursuit of that question moves horizontally in time from the work, as well as backwards, to establish the expectations, conventions, familiarities, in terms of which the author could have succeeded in conveying a meaning. This enterprise itself cannot be uncorrupted by hindsight. This is not just because the understanding we bring to the explanations is a later one, though that is true and important, much as playing seventeenth-century scores on seventeenth-century instruments according to seven-teenth-century practice, admirable enterprise though it may be otherwise, does not produce seventeenth-century music, since we have necessarily twentieth-century ears. Beyond that, it is also true that our selection of the works that we take to reward this enquiry is governed by their subsequent history and-our present situation; and within the works themselves, what utterances strike us and strike our historical curiosity is, again, governed in that way.^ Yet what we are moved to, as historians of ideas, is an historical enquiry, and the genre of the resulting work is unequivocally history.The history of philosophy of course has to constitute its object, the work, in genuinely historical terms, yet there is a cutoff point, where authenticity is replaced as the objective by the aim of articulating philosophical ideas. The 'horizontal' search1. For this point, and for other helpful considerations, see John Dunn, The Identity of the History of Ideas', Philosophy XLl 11 (1968), 85-104.