Where’s Lucian? Failure and Historical Compromise in the History of Philosophy

There is an unresolved tension in Stephen Gaukroger’s Failures of Philosophy between the imperatives of philosophy and historicity. The result is a modified present-centered genealogy. The absence of Lucian and Lucianic philosophical satire from histories of philosophy illustrate the point. Their inclusion would complicate specifications of philosophical context. Three factors may help explain the Lucianic absence: insufficient propositional certainty in his writings, the exclusion of satire from the philosophic domain, and the disciplinary structure of the modern university in which the curriculum helps shape a sense of the past.