The Historical Thesis About Philosophy: Clarifying Thesis Evaluating Reasons and Investigating Implications

Some contemporary philosophers put forth a claim which is called “Historical Thesis about the Philosophy”. In the first part of this paper, I clarify and classify the various formulations of this thesis and I show that these formulations can be divided into two classes of process-centered and product-centered formulations. In the second part of the paper, I evaluate the arguments made by the proponents of historical thesis about philosophy. Firstly, I explicate the arguments for the product-centered formulation of historical thesis and show that product-centered formulation consists of two claims. Then I evaluate the arguments for the process-centered formulation of historical thesis. I put forth two moderate and radical versions of process-centered formulation of historical thesis and I continue to argue that moderate version is uncontroversial, but radical version is provocative. I formulate two arguments for the radical version and continue to reconstruct two counterarguments by critics of historical thesis. In the third part of the paper, I discuss the implications of historical thesis. The main question is that even if radical version of process-centered formulation is justified, what epistemic implications we can derive from radical version. In the conclusion, I summarize the findings of this research and I emphasize that it is necessary to study the historicist movement in order to investigate the historical thesis in a more comprehensive and systematic way.