Mystery and Intelligibility

Book excerpt: Philosophy is born in its history as pursuit of the wisdom we are never able fully to know. Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom both argues for that method and presents the results it can achieve. Editor Jeffrey Dirk Wilson has gathered essays from six philosophical luminaries. In “History, Philosophy, and the History of Philosophy,” Timothy B. Noone provides the volume’s discourse on method in which he distinguishes three tiers of history. History of philosophy as method occupies the third and highest tier. John Rist reckons with contemporary corruption of the method in “A Guide for the Perplexed or How to Present or Pervert the History of Philosophy.” Wilson’s own essay, “Wonder and the Discovery of Being: From Homeric Myth to the Natural Genera of Early Greek Philosophy,” shows the loss of wonder, so evident in mythology, by early Greek thinkers and its recovery by Plato and Aristotle. In “Metaphysics and the Origin of Culture,” Donald Phillip Verene demonstrates the wide cultural implications of philosophical discoveries even when the discovery is the boundary of what humans can know. William Desmond offers an essay, “Flux-Gibberish: For and Against Heraclitus,” that owes as much to the humor of James Joyce as to the philosophical insights of philosophers, ancient, medieval, and modern. Eric D. Perl’s essay turns to the apophatic character of pursuing wisdom, perhaps especially when asking what may be the most fundamental metaphysical question: “Into the Dark: How (Not) to Ask, ‘Why is There Anything at All.’” Philipp W. Rosemann concludes the volume with the question best asked at the end of this literary seminar, “What is Philosophy?” Although there are philosophers within the analytic and continental schools who are committed to the history of philosophy, Mystery and Intelligibility demonstrates that history of philosophy as a third and distinct philosophical method is revelatory of the nature and structure of reality.