This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at www

philosophy bites.com.

Philosophy bites is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.

Our current philosophical knowledge includes all the ideas of the past.

philosophers have embraced the good ideas from the great thinkers and binged the bad ones.

It follows that it would be a waste of time to study past philosophers.

As silly as if an astronomer decided to study the theories of a pre-Kepernican. Not so, says Oxford Professor Adrian Moore.

Adrian Moore, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much, Nigel.

The topic we're focusing on here is philosophy and its history.

Let's begin by just getting clear what we mean by the history of philosophy.

I think it's very useful to draw a contrast which is due to Bernard

Williams between what he calls the history of philosophy and the history of ideas. He says that the history of ideas is in the first instance

history. The history of philosophy is in the first instance philosophy.

There is such a thing as the history of ideas.

There is the historical exercise of looking back

at how ideas were formed and how they influenced each other

and how they arose in particular historical milieu.

And when you're engaged in that sort of an exercise,

you are fundamentally doing history.

It's like any other historical exercise.

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