Professor Michael Rosen: Why Does Philosophy Have a History?

It’s 100 years since the first Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures were held in 1925. To mark the centenary, the 2025/6 London Lecture Series focuses on the theme Philosophy in Retrospect and in Prospect. Distinguished philosophers have been invited to reflect on where their area of the discipline has got to over the last hundred years, and/or where it might go – or should go – over the next hundred.

All lectures include a post-lecture "in conversation" session with our Academic Director Edward Harcourt, followed by audience Q&A.

Like every other significant human activity, philosophy has a history. But its history is a challenge for philosophy for the following reason. If philosophy is a rational discipline, we might expect its history to resemble other rational disciplines: knowledge accumulates, problems are by common consent resolved and research becomes more focused and precise. But that is not at all the picture that we find in philosophy. Certain philosophical problems remain with us from the Greeks, while the nature of philosophy – its boundaries and its methods – has been contested and drastically re-configured many times over the centuries. So is philosophy, as Marx thought, more like religion than science – an expression of social processes whose real dynamic lies outside it? Or might philosophy be rational in its own distinctive way? If so, what kind of a relationship to history does that involve?

Michael Rosen is Senator Joseph S. Clark Professor of Ethics in Politics and Government at Harvard University. He has wide interests in philosophy and politics, but is particularly well-known for his work on German philosophy and social theory. His most recent book is The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel and the Passage from Heaven to History (2022).

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