Why Engage with the Past? Philosophy and Its History
In philosophy, you quite immediately notice a striking difference between content taught and philosophical research, for example, when looking at how philosophy departments are structured in European universities. There are courses and research projects that deal with current topics usually associated with the chairs of theoretical philosophy (philosophy of nature, metaphysics) and practical philosophy (ethics, feminist philosophy, political philosophy), respectively. And there are those that deal with philosophical theories of philosophers who lived long ago, that is, content that belongs to the field of the history of philosophy, often associated with chairs of history of philosophy. While the former research and teaching content addresses current issues and topics, such as climate change or polyamory, the latter deals with questions and problems that may seem somewhat outdated at first glance. These include, for example, Descartes’s mechanistic view of nature, which includes (outdated) mechanistic descriptions of the human body, and Kant’s philosophical argument for why space is necessarily Euclidean (which has been proven false). Of course, there are still contemporary philosophical concepts of nature that can be …


