Problems of the History of Philosophy

Not a symposium, not a set of institute papers, not a committee product with a general editor's name on the spine: a single sustained argument of some 120,000 words by one man.

Theodor Oizerman's subject is not the history of philosophy in the ordinary sense - there is no march through the schools here - but the theory of that history. What philosophy is. Why philosophers disagree. Whether the disagreement can ever end. He treats this as a discipline with its own problems, and whatever one concludes about his answers, the questions are real and he asks them at length.

He writes as a man who has read the books he discusses, in the languages they were written in, and who is interested in them. His chapter on the nature of philosophical problems opens on the observation that philosophy differs from the specialised sciences precisely by staying close to what everyone already knows, and illustrates it with a page of ancient answers to ordinary questions that is genuinely delightful - Thales on magnetism, Heraclitus on why a drunk cannot walk straight, Lucretius explaining that the sea is salty because it sweats. A man writing to a formula does not stop to enjoy Lucretius.

The engagement with living Western philosophy is by name, at length, and from the primary texts in the original. The long section on Heidegger works through his lecture on what philosophy is, in German, and gives the case a fair run before rejecting it. Piaget, Reichenbach and the analytic tradition get the same treatment.

The working literature stops in 1968, so read it as a book of the late sixties.

Translated by Robert Daglish. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.