I didn't get far with this. All philosophy is the history of philosophy, in the sense that you're studying the ideas someone had in the past, whether that's th

I didn't get far with this. All philosophy is the history of philosophy, in the sense that you're studying the ideas someone had in the past, whether that's the recent past or the distant past. The only philosophy that isn't history of philosophy is done by a handful of academics, and you can bet they all had a solid grounding in the history of philosophy. I had to do a course on presocratic Greek philosophers. I couldn't understand why we had to study the ideas of these people whose ideas were wrong, wrong, wrong - even barmy. But all the interesting Greek philosophers knew and were influenced by the presocratics; Plato, Aristotle, the sceptics, the stoics. And so-called "modern" philosophers all studied these later Greeks. It's impossible to engage with contemporary philosophy without studying the moderns, and studying the classical Greek philosophers makes it a lot easier to understand the moderns. I'm glad the author mentioned Wittgenstein as a "historical" philosopher to whom attention shouldn't be paid. I don't know how a contemporary philosopher is supposed to approach the philosophy of language and logic without having worked through Wittgenstein and Ayer.