Classification of Research Interests

Thursday, May 14, 2009

I notice that Philosophy has become one of the tidiest subjects on Academia.edu, nicely organised into genera and species. But I'm a bit unhappy with the fact that some user has decided to move "Ancient Philosophy" and "Medieval Philosophy" from being species under the genus Philosophy, to being species under the genus "History of Philosophy". Why am I bothered by that? Well it seems to me that doing research in the history of modern philosophy is really quite different from doing research in ancient philosophy, or indeed in Medieval philosophy, and we wouldn't always think of ourselves as historians. The task has more affinity with the study of another kind of philosophy (like, say, Continental philosophy) than with doing the history of the modern phenomenon. So I'd vote for having ancient philosophy as a branch of philosophy, not as a branch of the history of philosophy (just as the study of ancient literature is a branch of classics, not a branch of the history of literature).