This is philosophy Bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy Bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
Philosophy Bytes is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
Our current philosophical knowledge includes all the ideas of the past.
Philosophers have embraced the good ideas from the great thinkers and binned the bad ones.
It follows that it would be a waste of time to study past philosophers as silly as if an astronomer decided to study the theories of a pre Copernican.
Not so, says Oxford professor Adrian Moore.
Adrian Moore, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thank you very much, Nigel.
The topic we're focusing on here is philosophy and its history.
Let's begin by just getting clear what we mean by the history of philosophy.
I think it's very useful to draw a contrast, which is due to Bernard Williams, between what he calls the history of philosophy and the history of ideas.
He says that the history of ideas is, in the first instance, history.
The history of philosophy is, in the first instance, philosophy.
There is such a thing as the history of ideas.
There is the historical exercise of looking back at how ideas were formed.
And how they influenced each other and how they arose in particular historical milieu.
And when you're engaged in that sort of an exercise, you are fundamentally doing history.
It's like any other historical exercise.