Philosophy has long been animated by the aspiration to articulate universal, timeless truths. From classical metaphysics to modern analytic philosophy, the dominant image of philosophical inquiry has been one of ahistorical abstraction: the search for stable structures, formal systems, and general principles that transcend the contingencies of history. Yet this aspiration has increasingly come under pressure. In a world marked by rapid political transformation, technological disruption, and shifting forms of social life, the adequacy of an ahistorical conception of philosophy has become deeply questionable. What is at stake is not merely a methodological dispute, but a more fundamental question: can philosophy make sense of human life without taking its historical situatedness seriously?
This conversation with Hans Sluga engages precisely this question. Sluga’s work has consistently challenged the assumption that philosophy must operate in abstraction from history. At the center of his philosophical orientation lies a simple but demanding idea: that human life, thought, and practice are irreducibly embedded in time, and that philosophical reflection must therefore attend to their historical character rather than abstract away from it.
The interview unfolds in two parts. The first addresses the problem of historical experience and the difficulty philosophy faces in accounting for temporality. Sluga argues that mainstream analytic philosophy, with its focus on logical structure and internal coherence, has tended to ignore the historical conditions under which thought emerges. This neglect is not accidental but reflects a deeper commitment to a structuralist conception of philosophy—one that privileges timeless systems over historically situated practices.
The second part turns to political thought, where the tension between historical sensitivity and abstract theorizing becomes particularly visible. Through a contrast between Machiavelli and Hobbes, Sluga highlights two fundamentally different ways of understanding politics: one grounded in the study of historical experience, the other in the construction of rational models. This contrast reveals what is at stake in adopting what he terms “historicist” perspective—not simply a change in method, but a shift in what counts as understanding political life.
The end of the interview brings these reflections into the present. Sluga examines the anti-historical tendencies of contemporary analytic philosophy and situates them within a broader historical trajectory, tracing their roots to early twentieth-century logical positivism. At the same time, he suggests that philosophy cannot ultimately escape its historical entanglements: even its most abstract ambitions are themselves products of specific intellectual and cultural conditions.
Taken together, the conversation invites a reconsideration of philosophy’s self-understanding. Rather than viewing philosophy as the construction of timeless systems, Sluga proposes that it be understood as a reflective engagement with our historical situation—an effort to grasp where we stand, how we arrived here, and what possibilities lie ahead. In this sense, historicism is not opposed to realism, but may constitute its most adequate form: a way of thinking that takes both the contingency and the concreteness of human life seriously.
Part I — Philosophy and the Problem of Historical Experience
TY: Your writing emphasizes the historical character of philosophy and, specifically, of political philosophy. Could we begin by exploring what it means to say that human life and experience are historically situated? In what ways does this situatedness shape our awareness and experience?
HS: You are right in highlighting the historical or, rather, “historicist” orientation of my writing. But “historicism” is a widely abused term. I need to say something first about the way I came to it.
I have, to begin with, never called myself a historian. I have far too much respect for their profession. Historians know how to digest stacks of documents, extract lots of bits of information from them, and integrate those finally into a comprehensive narrative. We philosophers are notoriously slow readers, by contrast, fixated on a few ideas we take to be fundamental, and forever on the hunt for inconsistencies. History and philosophy are, in many respects, antagonistic professions.
Historicists seek to walk on the edge that separates the two disciplines, to be both philosophically minded and historically minded at the same time – which is obviously not easy to do. You either slip back into the role of the philosopher and treat history as a mere illustration for your philosophical argument or you become a historian for whom philosophy is just one topic of historical interest.
“Historicism” is for me the name of a philosophical view concerning history. Historicists look at the world as a historical phenomenon and strive to interpret the supposedly universal, timeless, or eternal in that light. The kind of historicism I am after sees the universe not as an entity but as a stream of events that reaches from galactic formations through biological evolution to human history.
Our philosophers find it difficult to take such a stand. They think that you need to assume some kind of changeless order (of logic or mathematics or of the laws of nature) to understand change; otherwise, they fear, you will be forced into a self-undermining relativism. Neither the universalism nor the relativism appeals to me. A historicist form of realism seems to me the only viable option.
Note that I am not saying that historicism is what is most important in philosophy. I would never call myself a historicist, full stop. What matters is that we try to understand where we find ourselves and what to do in our situation. Being realistic about that is what counts. But it may turn out that this requires us to take a historicist view of things.
TY: How then did you come to that view?
HS: I certainly didn’t get to it by reading Hegel or any of the other historicist thinkers after him.
My earliest inclination was to be a systematic philosopher – like Descartes, I said to myself – and history did not figure much in that project. The break came with my book on Gottlob Frege of 1980. Paul Grice, my teacher, colleague, and friend, reminded me later on that I had really written two books: one that got me tenure at Berkeley but that I then destroyed and another one that I subsequently published. The first book had aimed at a systematic exposition and assessment of Frege’s work. The second took a historicist turn which I indicated by giving the book a motto from Heidegger that said: “To ask historically means this: to release the happening resting and bound in the question and to set it in motion.”
I thought it illuminating to look at Frege’s work as marking a point in a historical process – an ongoing dispute about human knowledge that pitted followers of Kant against radical empiricists like Mill and Helmholtz. The motto was aimed at the analytic philosophers with their disdain for Heidegger as well as for history. It was aimed, in particular, at Michael Dummett who had told me that it was illegitimate to think about Frege in historical terms, that the history of philosophy had come to an end with Frege, and that there was now only systematic work to be done in the spirit of Frege.
My goal was also to critique Frege’s philosophical outlook. “If everything were in continual flux, and nothing maintained itself fixed for all time,” Frege had written in his Foundations of Arithmetic, “there would be no longer the possibility of getting to know anything about the world and everything would be plunged into confusion.” He appended a line from Horace to this which said: “There is an order to things; there are definite boundaries.” In drafting the first version of my book, I had tried to map that timeless order as Frege had seen it. But while I was working on the book, I was also reading the later Wittgenstein and becoming increasingly skeptical about the very notion of structure as something sharply distinct from its empirical embodiment. The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus had assumed the existence of a logical structure of language and the world, but he had concluded later on that language is a practice rather than a formal system, that meaning manifests itself in use, that practice and use are inherently temporal, and that language is used for a variety of purposes, not simply as an instrument for mapping the structure of reality.
TY: So, it was Wittgenstein who made you lose faith in Frege’s timeless order.
HS: Wittgenstein, the Dutch mathematician L.E. J. Brouwer, and, I should add, Michael Dummett. Wittgenstein had received a boost for his anti-structuralist views when Brouwer lectured in Vienna in 1929. I learned about Brouwer and his mathematical intuitionism from Dummett’s seminars at Oxford. For Brouwer mathematics deals with constructions in time, not with a rigidly immobile universe. Dummett was using the same sort of reasoning in his seminar to critique the Fregean idea of the timelessness of truth.
None of those three was, of course, a historicist thinker of the kind I was turning into. I call them “temporalists” in that they recognized the temporal dimension of linguistic use, mathematical construction, and the process of verification. But I meant to go further by asking who was using the language and in what circumstances, who was doing the mathematical construction and under what conditions, and who was engaged in the verifying, where and at what time. Historicism seemed to me the natural next step beyond Wittgenstein’s, Brouwer’s, and Dummett’s temporalism.
I need to add to those three, finally, the names of Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, who became my colleagues in London and who helped me to think about the natural sciences in a historically oriented manner. I mention all these names in order to make clear that a properly historicist account of logic, mathematics, and natural science is needed, if historicism as a philosophical outlook is to be compelling. That’s where a lot of the historicist tradition has failed.
TY: You’ve pointed out that philosophy—especially in its mainstream analytic form—has difficulty grappling with historical reality. Why is it so resistant to thinking historically? Is this resistance rooted in the very form or aims of its inquiry?
HS: I have been intrigued for a long time by an entry in Wittgenstein’s notebook from the First World War which says: “What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world.” The thought had, no doubt, a deeply personal meaning for him. How can history be anything to you when you are crouching in a hole in the ground expecting to die that very day? But the sentence also denies a historical perspective to philosophy. The notions of time and history are, in fact, entirely marginal to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. And that attitude is still characteristic of a great deal of analytic philosophy.
The reason for that is that the analytic philosophers remain preoccupied with logical structures in the way Wittgenstein had been in the Tractatus, or, rather, with a specific way of looking at such structures. They look at those structures, I want to say, entirely from inside. They are interested only in determining their internal, structural properties. They forego the possibility of looking at those structures from outside in order to see how they are located in the landscape. They are like structural engineers who study the relations of the elements of a structure to the structure of the whole, but they don’t ask what purpose it serves and how it has come about.
What is known as analytic philosophy is, in essence, a structuralism of this particular kind. The term “structuralism” is used today for a movement in French thought, but it also fits analytic philosophy. The two movements have, in fact, much in common.
The idea that analytic philosophy is exclusively or predominantly concerned with analysis is, in fact, pure fantasy. A lot of analytic philosophizing consists in the production of structural theories. The one “analytic” philosopher who really understood that was Rudolf Carnap. He called his first book The Logical Construction of the World (Der logische Aufbau der Welt), not “The Logical Analysis of the World.” And he wrote that the aim of the book was a “construction theory” meant to lead to “construction system” that provides a completely structural account of the world. “Science deals only with the description of structural properties of objects,” he wrote. There was, of course, nothing historical or historicist in that project. Its goal was rather to give a structural account of “cultural objects” which, in turn, were to be constructed as “psychological objects.”
But where are those structures that the philosophers talk about? What we have, in fact, are the words and symbols actually used by them and then we have, in addition, their assertions that those markings can be extended to form complete, self-sustaining systems of signs which, in turn, represent complete, self-sustaining structural systems of concepts, numbers, etc. What we actually have, in other words, are figments of the philosophical imagination.
What about the use that logical and mathematical structures have in the interpretation of the natural world? We must pay attention here to two different meanings we give to the word structure. We use it to speak of imagined systems of ideal objects, but we use it also to speak about features of the natural world. When we talk about structures in the natural world, we imagine that there are invariants in nature that constitutes the frame in which contingent reality unfolds. (That is surely what Frege and Horace were talking about.) But there is, in reality, nothing absolutely invariant in the natural world. What we take to be so are things that change more slowly than things that looks variable to us. There is no sharp distinction between structures in nature and what happens in them. But we can use the formal structures that our scholars have devised to represent symbolically those loose, variable structures of the natural environment. The formal structures are convenient, though not completely adequate, devices for mapping a piece of our reality.
TY: Speaking of regularities, many philosophical traditions aim to produce timeless truths, abstract models, and formal systems. Do you see this aspiration as being in tension with human history and concrete political experience? What, in your view, gets lost when philosophy seeks unhistorical universality?
HS: Formal models have proved extremely effective in some areas and that is something that itself calls for historical analysis. There is nothing wrong with the work of the logicians and mathematicians. But there are lots of questions to be asked about what exactly they are doing. How did we come to be creatures capable of constructing such models? Why are we so drawn to them? That we are is not a necessary feature of the world. We can ask, for instance, why and how did the new symbolic logic of Frege, Russell, and their successors come about. And when we look closely enough, we discover that there were specific contingent conditions that brought this development about.
TY: To continue with that line of development. You mentioned that analytic philosophy itself is historical. Can you elaborate on that?
HS: We now realize that analytic philosophy has a quite contingent history. There is even a recognized subfield called the history of analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophers have come to understand that they are no longer thinking like Frege, Russell, the early Wittgenstein, or the members of the Vienna Circle. From being initially a European (and even mostly a Continental European) enterprise, analytic philosophy has become a predominantly Anglo-phone and American undertaking. Modal concepts have gained an importance in analytic philosophy that they didn’t have for the early practitioners. That development is connected with a revived interest in metaphysical speculation among analytic philosophers. Immanuel Kant, who was once considered as outside the analytic tradition, has come to be re-assessed as a proto- or quasi-analytic thinker. Analytic philosophers have expanded the reach of topics they deal with and also their approaches to them. The members of the Vienna Circle could once agree on a manifesto. No such manifesto would be possible today. Over roughly a hundred years, the analytic philosophy has been exposed to political events, scientific developments, personal destinies, and cultural transformations. Today, it looks like other schools and movements in the history of philosophy that have come and gone.
Part II — Politics
TY: Your early writings are almost all about Frege and then you started to publish on Wittgenstein. Why did you eventually turn to politics?
HS: I grew up in Bonn when it was the capital of the West German Federal Republic and many of my school friends were children of high government officials. It was the time after the Second World War when the memory of the Nazi regime was still very vivid. We wanted to know what had happened and what was needed to prevent such a disaster from occurring again. We were naturally drawn to political discussion. That doesn’t mean that I had an early interest in political philosophy. Politics was one thing for me and philosophy something else. What made me reconsider that separation was, precisely, the later, historicist turn in my thinking.
TY: Do you think there is a disciplinary bias within political philosophy against historically grounded ways of thinking? If so, what might explain that preference?
HS: Politics, political philosophy, and history have a complex relation to each other.
When you are politically engaged, you are concerned with the present for it’s only in the present that you can act. But that present isn’t an extensionless point. Action requires time. But the present in which you act doesn’t just have a temporal dimension, it has also a historical dimension. It has come about in a particular way and along a particular path. History bears on the present in two ways. The present has a history and political agents, in turn, have views about that history which will determine their actions.
To be politically engaged means to face the particularity of the situation in which you find yourself. The particular moment, the particular place, particular circumstances, particular events, particular individuals. There is, of course, nothing else. The universe consists of nothing but particulars and each of those has its history.
Some political thinkers understand that. Machiavelli certainly did. But philosophers generally lack a sense for the particularity of the world. They see all kinds of similarities and conclude that there must be underlying universal identities. The philosophers concern themselves, as a result, with universal concepts and universal laws. Their whole mode of thinking leads them to bracket out particulars and their history.
TY: In your reading of Machiavelli and Hobbes, you highlight two fundamentally different ways of engaging with politics. You describe Machiavelli as deeply historical in his approach, whereas Hobbes begins with a rational, abstract construct—the so-called “state of nature.” Could you elaborate on this contrast, and what’s at stake in it?
HS: The contrast between a historical mode of thinking and a non-historical mode of thinking manifests itself even in political philosophy. That is a bit surprising, because in politics we are always dealing with historical realities. But that hasn’t stopped the philosophers from taking a highly abstract, and thoroughly unhistorical view. Plato’s Republic illustrates that, but so does Hobbes.
Machiavelli and Hobbes both wanted to understand politics in human terms, not in terms of a metaphysical or divine order. They both drew on the concept of human nature for that purpose. But they had a very different understanding of that notion. . Machiavelli read history and, in particular, Livy’s History of Rome. On the first pages of that book, he encountered Livy saying: “In history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience… You can find for yourself and for your country both examples and warnings, fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.” Machiavelli took this idea up in his Discourses where we read: “Whoever considers the past and the present will readily observe that all cities and all peoples are and ever have been animated by the same desires and passions.” He doesn’t mean that human behavior never changes. But it varies only within a limited range of possibilities. Humans are sometimes virtuous and sometimes corrupt. Lawmakers have reason to assume the worst and treat humans as bad. But human beings are hardly ever completely good or completely bad. To understand that, one must study history. It gives us a complete catalogue of human behavior.
In The Prince, Machiavelli writes that there is nothing more important for a ruler than to prepare for warfare. “A prince should have no other aim or thought, nor take up any other thing for his study, but war and its organization and discipline.” And for that he needs to engage in hunting as a training in warfare. “But as to exercise for the mind, the prince ought to read history.” Not philosophy, and certainly not theology. Machiavelli’s Discourses mention Aristotle only once and in passing. He is, in practice, an unphilosophical political thinker with no patience for philosophical utopias or abstract speculation on how human beings ought to act. He believes, instead, in the possibility of learning from history.
If you want to talk about human nature, that is, about what human beings are capable of, you can’t just look at how they are acting right now. From where then can you take an adequate account of human nature? Machiavelli says: from history; and that is surely a good first answer. Its weakness is that it gives us no pointers when we are faced with an entirely new reality. We live today under technological conditions that have never existed before. History cannot tell us how human beings will react to that new situation. But that objection does not devalue Machiavelli’s historical outlook. We still have to ask how the technological age has come about, what its dynamics is, in order to see where it may be going.
TY: Didn’t Hobbes also have a historically based view of human nature which he derived from Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War? Didn’t he translate that book early in his career?
HS: Yes, that’s where he started. But when he became familiar with Galileo and Descartes and their new science, he abandoned the historically oriented way of thinking and turned to the project of creating a civil or political science. Descartes had tried to show how from the minimalist assumption of a thinking self you can construct an account of the whole physical world. Following that approach, Hobbes set out to show how from the equally minimalist assumption of a power-pursuing subject you can derive the blueprint of a peaceful commonwealth.
We must begin, Hobbes thought, with looking into ourselves for only in this way can we “learn truly to read one another” according to the Introduction to his Leviathan: “He that is to govern a whole nation, must read in himself, not this or that particular man; but mankind.” That is admittedly difficult to do, but by looking into ourselves, we can see that humans have the same passions, though the objects of their passions may vary widely. What Hobbes discovers in this way are, in fact, only the ruling passions of the people with whom he lives: aristocrats engaged in a constant political struggle for more power. It’s on this slim base that the whole deductive structure of his theory rests.
Moral and political philosophers like to operate with the notion of human nature. It seems to provide a concrete, non-transcendental foundation for practical reasoning. But from where do we derive that notion? Aristotle says that humans are political by nature, but he never explains why he takes this to be so. He also says that we are naturally rational. For Hobbes we naturally strive to get more and more power. All of this is ungrounded. I think that Machiavelli is doing a better job, by looking for a historically grounded account. But even that turns out to be problematic. Do we need to look at biology and the study of primate behavior for a more adequate story? Or is the whole notion misconceived?
TY: Would you say Hobbes is unhistorical and represents a shift toward formalism in political thought? Machiavelli, for all his subtlety, is often treated as “less philosophical,” do you think his historical orientation has contributed to this perception?
HS: People say that Machiavelli wasn’t really a philosopher, in contrast to Hobbes. That assumes a view of philosophy as systematic theorizing. I find it difficult to share that view. There are too many counter-examples to it in the history of philosophy. There’s a great deal of philosophical thinking in Machiavelli, but it is, of course, always backed up by examples. That is his way of understanding politics while Hobbes strives to be a systematic writer.
TY: Do you think philosophy can ever truly escape its historical entanglements?
HS: I take it that you mean to ask whether analytic philosophy can ever overcome its initial anti-historical bias. The answer is that I don’t know. Philosophical movements can have a very long life and can become rigid, scholastic enterprises, but they can also over time take surprising turns.
It was Russell who injected the hostility to Hegel into analytic philosophy. He had started his philosophical influenced by F. H. Bradley. But around 1900, he and G. E. Moore turned against the monistic idealism they had taken from of Bradley and adopted a metaphysical pluralism they thought of as antithetical to Hegel. When you read Russell’s writings from that point onward, you will see that Hegel comes back again and again as his permanent antagonist. But today there are analytic philosophers who are quite unapologetic about reading Hegel.
But all that is a marginal issue. The real question is how well are we dealing with the really pressing issues that confront us.
We are living in a period of extraordinary change. We need to figure out where we are and where we are going. Our main concern has to be with the present. But what is the present? It is certainly not a static moment in time. It has an extension. But how far does it reach? It has also a dynamic that we must try to understand. How has the present come about? We know of no laws to explain that to us. We need to study the history of the present, to use Foucault’s suggestive phrase.
TY: If philosophy is to remain relevant to the texture of human life and experience, must it find a way to think historically? What would a truly historical philosophy look like—not just as a subject matter, but as a method or orientation?
HS: Gilbert Ryle used to say that it is useless to ask what philosophy is or what it should be. The only thing is to do it as well as one can.
