Stefan Heßbrüggen-Walter

The term ‘doxography’ is a neologism coined by Hermann Diels for an ancient tradition of reports on philosophical tenets. Within contemporary history of philosophy, it is mostly used pejoratively for scholarship that contents itself with reproducing the theses and arguments of a philosophical work without providing additional insights into its structure, argumentative value, or historical relevance. In this context, it is often accompanied by the epitheton 'mere’. To be called a doxographer comes close to an insult (a point nicely made by Dennis Des Chene in his New APPS piece “Philologist! Doxographer!”).

Assessments of the ancient tradition the term was originally applied to vary: John Dillon holds that “doxography […] remains a pretty low form of literature, but it certainly does have its interest and its importance, […]” (in this review on a volume on ancient doxography). Jaap Mansfeld, in the conclusion of his contribution on ancient doxography for the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, points out that texts in this tradition were used as “tools, […] a type of secondary literature” (and, so it may be surmised, should and can be used as such tools even today).

In present-day scholarship within the history of philosophy, doxographies are - somewhat paradoxically - ubiquitous and absent at the same time. With some notable exceptions, e. g. the German-language volumes of the new 'Überweg’, they are no relevant part of published scholarly discourse. But informally, they are a constitutive part of the workflow in the history of philosophy: How else should we approach a previously unknown text, unless we produce excerpts, notes, indexes in order to understand and structure its content?

Most of these 'informal work results’ will be produced electronically. After they have served their purpose, they might continue to linger on the hard drive or in some other medium. But they only become relevant again, if we return to the original text they are describing. Most readers may believe that they have no additional value beyond their own work

This assumption, however, may be wrong: Reuse of doxographical texts by others may make it easier to cope with the huge mass of information that by now is available online. If we find a way to connect them, new insights may be possible that could not be achieved by customary scholarly research strategies ('read, think, write, publish’).

But the format of such 'small resources’ (I owe this term as well as the inspiration for this blog post to Stewart Duncan) may vary greatly, comprising e. g. bullet lists, diagrams, verbatim excerpts, or summaries. Some may be available online, e. g. as blog posts, others may be comprehensible only to their authors, so they are stored only locally.

Here, technical progress and innovations in the field of scientific publishing may come to the rescue. The next blog post will discuss how to provide a common model for such informal results of scholarly work in the humanities and connect them in a meaningful way.