There area a fun set of conversations going on in anglophone philosophy of history (esp early modern phil of hist) right now about the relationship between, more or less, historical understanding and philosophical understanding.  The Daily Nous has the story.

But I have to say that this AM I read the underlying text--Christia Mercer's "The Contextualist Revolution in Early Modern Philosophy"--and found it equally stimulating and frustrating. Stimulating, because despite the air of Whiggish self-congratulation it exudes ("we've finally got this right"), it points to a lot of good work. Basically I'm on her side on this one. But I found the essay also frustrating, not just because of the Whiggish self-congratulation, but also because it seems to be representing the recent past as an abyss of Stygian darkness where everybody was a radical presentist. 

This is curiously bad history for someone who presents themselves as a contextualist historian. There was certainly a period where anglophone philosophy was rigid, procrustean, and blinkered, and I allow you can make the argument that it still is today, in many respects; but the idea that Philippa Foot, or John McDowell, or Bernard Williams never cared for history or language is over-strong. (And I went and checked the review of the Williams Book by Catherine Wilson, which she points to as something of an example of a contextualist scholar resisting a presentist scholar, and in fact Wilson is quite positive about Williams's understanding of Descartes and acquaintance with Descartes's corpus.) 

Anyway, maybe I just chose to read the more contextualist of the anglophone philosophers, but it seems to me that this is too simplistic.

Also there's this sentence (p. 544): "But unlike our appropriationist predecessors who approached historical materials through the lens of contemporary philosophy and in that sense took contemporary philosophy to historical texts, current early modernists like me hope to take insights gleaned from our newly discovered historical materials and apply them to contemporary philosophy." Two things: (a) this is a formal restatement of the central thesis of Bernard Williams's SHAME AND NECESSITY (so was he or was he not an appopriationist?) and also pretty visible in the line of work running from Elizabeth Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" through MacIntyre's AFTER VIRTUE; and (b) I suspect that anyone who can set up this either/or needs to immediately follow it up with a footnote to hermeneutics. Presumably she's read Gadamer: it's a circle, not one or the other.

That said, clearly I found the essay sharp and stimulating and I basically agree. Despite my harumphings.