Doxographical or Philosophical History of Philosophy: On Michael Frede's Precepts for Writing the History of Philosophy

Summary

In a series of articles from the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Frede analysed the history of histories of philosophy written over the last three hundred years. According to Frede, modern scholars have degenerated into what he calls a ‘doxographical’ mode of writing the history of philosophy. Instead, he argued, these scholars should write what he called ‘philosophical’ history of philosophy, first established in the last decades of the seventeenth century but since abandoned. In the present article it is argued that Frede's reconstruction of the history of histories of philosophy is historically problematic.