The Historian of Philosophy and His Experience: Within and Beyond the Realm of Philosophy

The article analyzes the intellectual experience of a historian of philosophy. This experience is formed by the ideological and the political factors that lays beyond the realm of the philosophy. The author demonstrates how nonphilosophical factors influence both philosophy itself and the activity of the historian of philosophy. If, since the Greek ancient epoch, the basis of the philosophy is the faith in the universal laws of the nature and their intelligible character, then the historian of philosophy relies on the faith into the intelligible laws of the development of the thought, derived from the historicism, which is a part of the ideological corpus of the Western Enlightenment. The history of philosophy in the modern state is a space where the activity of the historian of philosophy, emulating epistemological anarchism, in reality covers its bias by the political paradigm of Western civilization. As a result, the history of philosophy turns out to be a sphere of unfolding specific political and ideological programs, and the experience of the historian of philosophy is not only professional but also political work. This personal experience by its nature is decisive for the formation of the image of philosophy and the picture of its historical development. The author suggests to qualify the history of philosophy as a register of knowledge in which the central concepts and definitions should be constantly renewed. In the conclusion, the author proposes to acknowledge that the historian of philosophy, working with the corpus of philosophical texts and ideas, has far greater degree of creative freedom than it is traditionally assumed.

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