Some hints on intellectual temporality

Abstract

The article begins by refuting the popular topos of “eternal philosophical problems” and then establishes several oppositions, explicit or implicit, in contemporary intellectual history and, more narrowly, in the history of philosophy. Is philosophy merely a succession of philosophers, or some unifed enterprise? For philosophical temporality, the crucial conceptualization was Hegel’s establishment of the unity of the logical and the historical. Hegelian (or other) progressivism is opposed by preformism. In historical-philosophical scholarship, the distinction between the history of philosophy proper and the history of reception, which should ideally complement each other, plays an important role. The study of the success or failure of a certain doctrine can be very relevant. Another important opposition: dialogue, or direct communication with a thinker of the past against the thematisation of distance. Finally, an opposition between two research orientations is introduced: evolutionarycumulative and revolutionary-catastrophic. The author concludes by examining the temporal implication of three recent Russian historical-philosophical studies on Stefan George Circle, Scholasticism and Heidegger respectively.