DEAD PHILOSOPHERS: A Volokh throws down the gauntlet: We don’t spend too much time reading ancient, medieval, or even pre-20th-century economists, mathematicians, political scientists, or natural scientists. Why then do we read Plato, Anselm, and the like?

Well. First of all, I submit that philosophy reaches its nifty tendrils into all kinds of disciplines (biologists, of course, are practicioners of natural philosophy), and some of those disciplines are more likely to attain more-or-less-final answers than others. Does rotting meat spontaneously generate maggots? Nope. Does ethics require metaphysics? Well, Richard Rorty will fight you if you think that one’s been decisively answered in a way that convinces more-or-less-everyone, the way the rotting-meat question has.

There are ancient philosophers who do get neglected; we’re not really concerned about whether the world is basically made of fire, or water, or whatever. The long-dead philosophers you’ll read in halfway decent philosophy courses still get read because the questions they raise have persisted. And no, often those questions have not been put better by others; as in literature so in philosophy, there is true genius. (Not that literature and philosophy are entirely distinct either. There’s no hygienic separation between disciplines.) Because later critiques generally assumed familiarity with the philosophy being criticized, it’s also very difficult to read later philosophy without earlier. The Old Oligarch was just complaining the other month about attempts to understand Descartes without any knowledge of the religious and philosophical context to which he was responding; it’s easy to misunderstand his claims and either accept or dismiss what you think he’s saying, thus missing the point of his critiques. It’s like trying to read Endgame without having ever read Shakespeare.

I’d also note that there’s great value to be gained from raw confrontation with an ancient, alien, yet great and compelling mindset. More on that here.

As for whether you should care about a philosopher’s biography–although there are obvious dangers (prurience; dismissing a great philosopher’s work because you find his life repugnant), in general, I think the answer is yes. Ideas have consequences, at least sometimes; just as we’d want to know how countries who tried to implement socialism have fared, so we might want to look at people who tried to live their lives in accordance with their philosophies. Moreover, having specific examples can lead us to feel the pressure of political or philosophical questions that we might otherwise ignore or gloss over–Mark Lilla’s excellent “The Lure of Syracuse” (link requires subscription) gives us the political contexts in which Plato, Heidegger, and other thinkers made their claims; I think that context helps us to remember how important their stances were, how much courage or blindness or pride their positions required, and what their words meant in context. (Think of the recent “Jihad at Harvard” flap–context matters a lot.)

Some of the first great works of philosophy–Plato’s dialogues–were also biographies, of course. I think that’s in large part because there is no sharp distinction between the life of the mind and “real life.” People often change their lives because of a philosophical conclusion they reached; it seems to me both appropriate and enlightening to look at how they changed and what the results were. If rhetoric is acceptable in philosophy, life should be too; for in many ways, living one’s life as an exemplar of one’s philosophy is an act of rhetoric.