The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon) / quote 11 of 18
Tiedemann's history of philosophy starts with the Greeks
The idea that philosophy has a uniquely Greek source and that everything prior to the Greeks is simply not philosophy finds its most powerful modern expression in Dietrich Tiedemann’s six-volume Geist der spekulativen Philosophie (The Spirit of Speculative Philosophy, 1791–7). This is a work that deeply influenced much subsequent writing of the history of philosophy and John Passmore describes it as ‘the first history of philosophy in the modern manner’. Tiedemann makes crystal clear in his Preface that he is not going to deal with ‘Chaldeans, Persians and Indians’, and he judges these traditions to be either poetic or religious, but not philosophical in the strict sense. What also happens in Tiedemann’s approach is that the doxographical elements in the history of philosophy are minimized and emphasis is placed, as his title suggests, on the speculative spirit of philosophy that can be expressed systematically, rather than the individual flesh and bones of a philosopher’s life.