The Historical Discourse of Philosophy

Abstract

What is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?

Michel Foucault

It may be that we can learn nothing from history but the fact that we have a history… but there is simply no other way of gaining sensitivity to a future than through insight into the uniqueness and irretrievability of what is past.

Hans Blumenberg