In our latest instalment of our interview series, I talked to Peter Adamson about his research on ancient and medieval philosophy and the history of science.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is your academic background?
Peter Adamson: I am Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy at the LMU Munich.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the topic of your research and how did you become interested in this?
Peter Adamson: I work on ancient and medieval philosophy, especially late ancient (roughly, the period of Neoplatonism, so from the 3–6th centuries) and philosophy in the Islamic world (9th–13th century, for the most part). I also have a side interest in Latin medieval philosophy and occasionally have written on this. Actually, that was my original intended focus: I was interested in medieval literature when I was an undergraduate student and when I went to graduate school at the University of Notre Dame, intended to complement this by exploring medieval philosophy in Europe. But along the way I discovered Greek Neoplatonism which led me also to the Arabic reception of Neoplatonic works; that was the subject of my doctoral dissertation.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your working theories and methods?
Peter Adamson: I would describe myself as a historian of philosophy whose work emphasizes the close reading and analysis of texts. I tend to focus on conceptual problems rather than, say, issues of textual transmission or historical context, though those issues do certainly come up in my work too. I tend to feel like an analytic philosopher when I’m talking to other historians and like a historian when talking to analytic philosophers. As I’ve broadened my historical scope I’ve increasingly been working with understudied texts, including texts that are preserved only in manuscripts: this is especially true of the texts we tackled in a recent project called the Heirs of Avicenna, a series of sourcebooks on the reception of Avicenna’s philosophy in the Islamic East (available open access from Brill, by the way). But I also still work on better researched authors like Avicenna himself and various Greek philosophers. I often think about the differences between these two situations: research that presents relatively unknown material, as opposed to research that tries to find new insights regarding relatively well-studied texts.
Ole Birk Laursen: How is your research situated within the field of the history of science?
Peter Adamson: Though I would, as I say, consider myself a historian of philosophy and not a historian of science, issues in the latter field have often arisen in my work. This is especially true of medicine. For some years I worked on a figure named Abū Bakr al-Rāzī (known in medieval Latin as Rhazes) whose main vocation was that of a doctor, but had a kind of side interest in philosophy. So that led me to look at philosophical issues connected to his medical output and also in his sources, especially Galen. Another scientific field I’ve dealt with is astrology: I’ve written a few pieces on how philosophers sought to explain the (apparent) efficacy of astrological predictions.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the state of the history of science today?
Peter Adamson: Not nearly as healthy as the history of philosophy, or at least this is my impression as an outsider. The main issue here is just that there are so few academic positions for self-described historians of science; thus, it is a field that often needs to shelter under the protective wings of more well-established fields. I think this is a real shame, not just because it is an important topic (see my next answer) but also because one really needs to understand the history of science for doing work in other fields: my own of course, but also for instance history of economics, art history, and so on. Having said all that, I’m always very impressed by the work of colleagues who are managing to make a go of it as historians of science: I think it is a philologically well-informed and methodologically self-aware field, which is not something one can always say about the history of philosophy. So, in that sense one might say it is in a healthy state after all.
Ole Birk Laursen: Why do we need to study the history of science?
Peter Adamson: It’s common to note that science and philosophy differ in that philosophers teach the history of their own discipline, whereas scientists (mostly) don’t. The assumption is presumably that older science has been abandoned for good reason, whereas older philosophy might still have something to say for it. That might describe the motivations involved but if so, I think it is a rather naïve way to understand the situation. For each historical philosophical idea that might strike today’s philosophers as plausible or worth reviving, there are ten that would strike them as bizarre and unattractive, the philosophical equivalent of geocentrism or phlogiston. This is a risky thing to admit since it could encourage philosophers to abandon the historical part of their discipline, as scientists mostly do (and some want to do that as it is). I do think that the history of philosophy offers many ideas worth exploring and perhaps reviving, but this is not the only reason to do it. Rather, there is an intrinsic value to understanding how people in different places and times throughout history have engaged with philosophy: it gives us perspective on our own parochial time and place, as well as teaching us where the current ideas came from. And the same goes for science. To which one might add the familiar point that it’s very recent to distinguish philosophy sharply from science: until early modernity, these disciplines were totally intertwined. So, anyone who thinks that the history of philosophy is worthwhile should also be committed to the value of the history of science.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the value and impact of your research today? How does it connect with contemporary debates in broader society?
Peter Adamson: I don’t usually present my work as being directly applicable to contemporary concerns, in part because as I say, I think the value of the history of philosophy lies to some extent in its capacity to let us step outside contemporary concerns. But there are exceptions: for instance I wrote a book called Don’t Think for Yourself: Authority and Belief in Medieval Philosophy, which argues that medieval texts offer useful explorations of a problem that is now very current, namely the question of how to base one’s belief on expert authority (think for instance of deciding what to believe about climate change as someone who hasn’t studied climatology). Of course, there is also a broader relevance to the study of philosophy in the Islamic world, and work on it has the potential to challenge assumptions about that culture: for instance, by refuting the false idea that philosophy and science in the Islamic world declined after the medieval period.
Ole Birk Laursen: Are there any unusual stories you have come across in your research? Anything that changed your perception of dominant historical narratives?
Peter Adamson: For more than fifteen years now I’ve been working on a public-outreach project called The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps; this is both a podcast and a book series. And I have learned a great deal and many fantastic stories by doing this, it has challenged pretty much all my prior assumptions about the history and even the nature of philosophy. There is much more to say about this than I can here, but perhaps the three biggest issues are the following. First, the extent and depth of the non-European philosophical traditions. Of course, I knew about philosophy in the Islamic world, but looking at Africana, Indian, and Chinese philosophy has shown me that European philosophy is actually a much smaller part of the story than most people understand. India and China in particular offer philosophical traditions that are comparable to Europe’s in their extent, longevity, and nuance. A second point is about the nature of philosophy itself: working on Africana philosophy has led me to be more open about what sorts of material could be of interest to the historian of philosophy (or science, for that matter), e.g. oral traditions, traditional myths, and perhaps even the details of given languages. Third, I have gotten very interested over the years in philosophy by women: this is a point that applies to science too. If one explores these histories “without any gaps,” looking beyond the most famous names to lesser-known figures, one finds a lot of female authors who can be integrated into our histories.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your plans for future research?
Peter Adamson: At the moment I’m running a project funded by the DFG that is looking at a group of Christian philosophers who wrote in Arabic and worked in the 10th century, called the Baghdad School. We’re producing a collection of translations of their works and a second book giving a thematic overview of their thought. In my podcast series I’m in the midst of classical Chinese philosophy with my co-author Karyn Lai, and am now planning to move on to later Chinese philosophy, so everything past the Han Dynasty, together with a new co-author, Justin Tiwald. In parallel I’m also putting out episodes on early modern philosophy, i.e. the 17–18th centuries: that will keep me busy for some time to come!
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the future of the history of science?
Peter Adamson: Hard to say of course! But if I had to guess I would say that there will be an increasing use of methods from digital humanities. Despite being a podcaster, this is not really my strength, but it’s clear that digital methods will allow us to access and understand vast amounts of textual and material evidence in a way that could never be done by the patient work of individual readers. Still, I hope that the traditional methods don’t go out of fashion: there’s no substitute for having a well-trained human (not a machine) read a text carefully and think deeply about it!
Ole Birk Laursen: Thank you so much for answering these questions!