Does Philosophy Have a Vindicatory History? Bernard Williams on the History of Philosophy

This paper develops Bernard Williams’ suggestion that for philosophy to ignore its history is for it to assume that its history is vindicatory. The paper aims to offer a fruitful line of inquiry into the question whether philosophy has a vindicatory history by providing a map of possible answers to it. It first distinguishes three types of history: the history of discovery, the history of progress, and the history of change, and offers reasons to think that much of philosophy, including in part the philosophy of mind and  metaphysics, lacks a vindicatory history. The paper then reconstructs Williams’ conception of what it means for philosophy to engage with its own history. The paper concludes that it is a mistake to think that a vindicatory history is what we would really like to have, and that in fact, the resulting picture gives philosophy several reasons to engage with its own history.