Rules for Writing 4: The primary text is primary

This overlaps with a point I made in the previous series of “20 rules for doing history of philosophy,” but I’m going to say something similar here because it is so important. When you are doing history of philosophy, you want to be closely engaged with the historical texts (or other material you’re working on, but it will usually be a text). This means that you should spend more time reading (and re-reading) that text than engaging with secondary literature; it’s amazing how a work may yield up further insights on repeated readings. Of course, secondary literature is helpful, but you don’t want to slip into the trap of writing “tertiary literature” where you are writing far more about recent historians of philosophy than about the primary text. Even if your aim is to respond to a piece of secondary literature, you should always make clear that this is part of an effort to understand the primary text, which needs to stay firmly in view.

One issue that arises here, for students but even professional academics, is how to signal to the reader that you have “done your homework” and read all the secondary literature (unfortunately referees for journals love to complain about items missing from bibliographies… especially items they wrote themselves!). There’s an old-fashioned European habit of producing a “literature review” where all the previous scholarship on a topic is surveyed. As you can imagine given what I’ve said in the first three rules, I dislike this policy since it gets in the way of diving into a question and getting the reader to feel gripped by it. The literature review can be a good exercise to write for yourself, but it shouldn’t be included in a piece of philosophical work, in my opinion. (Sometimes the lit review is positively required as part of a PhD, but even then it should not appear in the published version. I’m always amazed to find actual published monographs that start with these glorified homework exercises.) 

And this is the wrong way to think about secondary literature anyway: “here is what others have said; ok, now let’s move on to what I want to say.” Instead, you should work on weaving the interpretive ideas of other scholars into your own writing, in an organic and productive way. Think of points from secondary literature as planks in the structure you’re building, which help to give the whole thing shape and stability, or to change the metaphor, as little pushes that move the argument forward. If you merely want to signal to the reader that you are aware of relevant work, simply put it in the footnotes: “on this topic see also Smith 2020.” 

When you do engage with secondary literature more actively, I recommend doing this in a mostly positive way: giving credit to others and building on their insights, rather than focusing on where they have gone wrong. I really dislike it when philosophers seem like they are nitpicking, or going out of their way to be critical of other scholars. After all, we are all engaged in a collective effort to understand the texts, and everyone is presumably just doing their best. Of course sometimes you do need to register disagreement, but that can be done politely and affirmatively: “Smith 2020 makes a good point by observing that X, but might also have noted that…” If you think poor old Smith 2020 hasn’t done anything useful to advance the debate, then better not even to mention them.

One caveat to the above is that once you’re doing proper research, so perhaps at PhD or even MA level, you are under some pressure to show that what you are saying is new. This does mean you have to get across that you’ve read the rest of the scholarship and identified something you can add to it. But even here the better way to do this is not with a literature review, but rather mentioning the more relevant or similar studies along the way and engage with those studies organically; this will convey to the reader that you’re familiar with the terrain and have a sense of where your own work fits in.

There is also an art to using the primary text elegantly and effectively, but I’ll get into that in the next rule.