Philosophy Between the Minds

AbstractAcknowledging the vast quantity of scholarship that Professor Melzer has put into renewing the esoteric-writing hypothesis and that the level of evidence guarantees there's some sort of phenomenon here that merits study, this essay nevertheless takes issue with two underlying points. The first of these is Melzer's somewhat tendentious use of “historicism,” which at least needs to be elaborated and worked through. There are many philosophers who might be called “historicist,” but few who would be happy with the name; I use Nietzsche to demonstrate that a historicist outlook need not exhibit all the features Melzer ascribes to it. Melzer's hypothesis, furthermore, apparently rests on what seems to me to be an un-Greek account of the sovereignty of individual conscious thought, ignoring concepts like “tradition” or “practice.” In the end, I suggest that if the main objective is to study the possibility of and strategies for a liberation of thought, then historicism in some guises is more a useful cow...