Renaissance Antecedents to the Historiography of Philosophy

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By the time Thomas Stanley published the first volume of his work entitled The History of Philosophy in London in 1655, European culture was ready to welcome a work which thus defined itself. Stanley, who was a poet, philologist, and man of letters, took his title from the Latin expression historia philosophica, which was already in use in learned circles among scholars and historians. He had before him a quantity of works belonging to a type of enquiry the aim of which was to investigate the particular events and historical details of philosophical activity. In the same year in which the History of Philosophy appeared, the historian Georg Horn, Professor at the University of Leiden, published a work of his own entitled Historia philosophica. This work, despite its somewhat schematic, panoramic nature, and despite a number of precipitate conclusions and interpretations, was demonstrably the fruit of a tradition of research which had been established during the course of the sixteenth century. It was not mere chance that Stanley and Horn should have published two comprehensive works on the historia philosophica in the same year. It would seem that the moment had arrived to move on from detailed investigations or historical sketches to the all-embracing work, the comprehensive treatment, the thorough and definitive study. These two ‘histories of philosophy’ were rooted in the previous century and had taken over their convictions and methods from the philological and philosophical scholarship which flourished at that time. They found solid and well-motivated working methods in the Renaissance period and in the laborious work of the rediscovery of classical antiquity, while at the same time drawing fresh inspiration from the new projects which had begun to take shape under the influence of Bacon and other novatores.