Parallel, Additional, or Alternative Histories of Philosophy? Questions on the Theory and Methodology of the History of Philosophy — (original) (raw)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy (BJHP), forthcoming. This is a DRAFT. The DOI of the published paper will be: 10.1080/09608788.2018.1458281. Once the article has published online, it will be available at the following permanent link: https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2018.1458281 Methodologies and theories for writing histories of philosophy are particularly relevant today due to the abounding challenges to the discipline that have emerged: e.g., the problem concerning the precise mode of the inclusion of non-Western philosophies in the history of philosophy, the response to postcolonial considerations at large, the transformative impact of new media, and the question whether the history of philosophy is primarily a philosophical, rather than merely historical, enterprise. À propos the relative scarcity that is to be witnessed in explicit articulations of methodologies and theories for writing histories of philosophy, in this note I focus on certain spontaneous, rather than theoretically planned, responses that have emerged to the above challenges — in particular Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy without any gaps — and in conclusion, as an example of methodological development, I touch on some of the problems we encounter in the case of the inclusion of Byzantine philosophy in the history of philosophy.