In an interesting article called “History of Philosophy Today; and the Case of Sensible Qualities,” Margaret Wilson agrees with Jonathan Rée in finding unconvincing “the case … for the categorical importance of historical consciousness to philosophers.” Like Wilson, I agree with Rée that “the actual opinions [of great dead philosophers] might well be philosophically impoverished compared with the imagined ones.” I also agree with Wilson that certain views which Jonathan Bennett incorrectly ascribes to Locke provide a nice illustration of Rée's point. More generally, I agree with both Rée and Wilson diat much philosophical work is best done with only the sort of cavalier attention to historical context found in what Richard Watson has called “shadow histories of philosophy” – dramatic narratives of how egregious past errors were overcome.

The kind of philosophy best done in this way is what I call, echoing Kuhn, “normal” philosophy. Watson is right, I think, in suggesting that the practice of this sort of philosophy usually requires general acceptance of a particular “shadow history” (the sort offered in, for example, the second book of Aristode's Metaphysics and in Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic). As he goes on to say, the claim of such history to “display the important logical or conceptual guts of history” is a “strong self-fulfilling assumption.” The normal philosopher, the one who has no doubt that many problems currendy under discussion are real problems, uses such a shadow history to assure herself that she need not question the terms in which these problems are posed.