No History Without a Method: Anticipation and Other Bad Contexts

Abstract

This paper argues for the centrality of methodological awareness in writing the history of philosophy. It does this by analysing and comparing different interpretive proposals presented by those engaged with past philosophical texts. Taking the literature on Thomas Hobbes from past and present century as an example, it shows the merits of conscious contextualisation in its variety. This claim is also substantiated the other way round: by looking at the contextualisational deficits exhibited in some canonical readings of Hobbes. The analysis' salient takeaway is simple: sensibility towards the extratextual embeddedness of the author correlates with a high methodological consciousness as such. This correlation manifests itself in a three‐fold manner. First, pursuing extratextual contexts on the side of the author enhances the effort to explicitly mark the contexts the interpreter is seeking after. Second, the interpreter is thereby more prone to actually work with what has been sought, that is, to examine the sources that correspond to the contexts concerned. Third, it results in a considerable reduction of what can be called an uncontrolled break‐in of contexts that are centred around the reader herself: a break‐in that typically shows itself by the disjunction between the context and the source that is supposed to attest to it, or by the lack of a source altogether.