In the the opening sentence of the review, which confronts the reader with an essential question: “What is the history of philosophy?” Munk claims that in order to answer this question, it is first necessary to define the object of the history of philosophy: philosophy itself. Munk admits that it is not so much an objective answer he is looking for, but rather a clear definition that may give an exact idea of the philosophical science to those who, as yet, have none. Yet precisely herein lies the difficulty; for the day such a definition can be given, the human spirit will have, if not completed its work, then at least found a solid base on which to build its oeuvre and to achieve an aim it believes to have grasped today, but which will elude it tomorrow; and philosophy will have attained a rank among the exact sciences which, at present, it is permissible to contest.7
According to Munk, it is precisely because no clear definition of philosophy exists that the task of deciding what pertains to the domain of philosophy falls to the historian of philosophy. Although Ritter did claim philosophy was a science, he stopped short of offering a clear definition of that science, outlining it only vaguely – in what Munk called a “negative way” – by distinguishing it from various heterogeneous elements, such as religion or poetry.
Munk found that Ritter’s work, although apparently impartial and critical, actually reflected a Hegelian model in which the history of philosophy is understood as a progress of philosophical systems toward a final goal – the Hegelian system itself. In approaching the history of philosophy in this way, Ritter superimposed – as Hegel had – models constructed a priori on the critical study of history, at the cost of distorting the facts. The danger, Munk warned, is that the author of a system “is only too often led to believe that he has found the definitive solution to the metaphysical problems” and, convinced that his results are the natural conclusion of the previous systems, mistakenly equates “the operations performed by his individual reason [with] those of the universal reason of humanity.” He writes:
L’auteur d’un système n’est que trop souvent porté à croire qu’il a trouvé la solution définitive des problèmes methaphysiques: il mesure sur son propre système la valeur de ceux qui l’ont précédé; il les considère tous comme aboutissant nécessairment là où il est arrivé, et il lui semble que les opérations de sa raison individuelle sont celles de la raison universelle de l’humanité. 8
The second part of Munk’s review deals with Ritter’s reconstruction of the genesis of Western thought, from a discussion of the first philosophers’ search for the principle of all that exists in the first volume of the work, to the second and third volumes, which examine what Ritter defined as ‘Socratic philosophy’ – the efforts of Socrates and his followers to elevate moral consciousness to the level of scientific certitude. According to Ritter, every philosophical school of the Socratic period based its ideas on the Socratic conceptions of knowledge and scientific method: he considers Plato and Aristotle followers and disciples of Socrates, Aristotle having “merely” given a more systematic form to Socratic ideas. Munk underscores the centrality of the idea of a progress of philosophical systems in Ritter’s reconstruction, while at the same time denying the existence of a linear process in philosophy:
Les disciples de Platon se contentèrent de présenter les doctrines de leur maîtres sous une forme plus systématique et il n’y à la aucun progrès à signaler. La réalisation de l’idéal socratique sera continuéè par la plus digne disciple de Platon, Aristote. 9
In his review, Munk discusses Ritter’s work, treating in particular the period up to and including Aristotelian philosophy. Yet the essence of Munk’s criticism, which he would systematically formulate only twenty years later in the introduction to an 1855 essay, “Des principaux philosophes arabes et de leurs doctrines,”10 pertained to Ritter’s reconstruction and evaluation of the role of medieval Islamic and Jewish thought. In this later essay, Munk takes issue with the fact that Ritter, in his volumes on medieval philosophy, hardly even mentions the medieval Jewish scholars and philosophers, including Maimonides, who had been of such importance to Christian thought, and hence to European thought in general. Having failed to recognize the existence of even a single original Jewish philosopher, Ritter had omitted Jewish philosophy from his history altogether.
Munk’s criticism extended to Ritter’s treatment of medieval Arabic philosophy as well. According to Munk, Ritter, who lacked access to the original works of the medieval Arab philosophers and Aristotelians, had based his analysis of their doctrines essentially on available Latin translations of their works and on modern scholarship. In addition, he had overlooked the valuable insights available to him in the works of the medieval Christian theologians, and as a result had failed to appreciate the subtle distinctions between the doctrines of the Arab philosophers. Munk underscores his point by noting that, in his discussion of the doctrine of the Kalam, Ritter would have done better to quote Maimonides’s Guide rather than a modern scholar like Schmölders – who, after having read two or three relatively recent studies, had claimed “to know more about the Arab philosophical schools than a twelfth-century philosopher immersed in a wealth of contemporary sources pertaining to the philosophical currents of his day.”11
Despite these critique, Munk recognized the value of Ritter’s efforts, describing his book as a work of rigor and originality testifying to its author’s thorough knowledge of Islamic and Arabic philosophy. Munk particularly appreciated Ritter’s rigorous re-examination of the sources provided in Jacob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae of 1742 – a milestone in the development of modern philosophical historiography which had made documents essential for the reconstruction of the history of philosophy available to scholars for the first time, paving the way for much subsequent research.12 In Munk’s view, Ritter was the first scholar to have conducted a thorough re-examination of Brucker’s sources, in an effort to discover new facts potentially valuable for the history of philosophy. By the time he composed the Mélanges, Munk had already examined a variety of Judeo-Arabic texts (including works of Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, Al-Kindi, Avicenna and Averroes), published several articles in the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques and devoted much time to the study of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed – thereby acquiring greater knowledge of the reciprocal influences between Jewish medieval philosophers than any other scholar, German or French, of his time. With this authority, Munk once again challenged Ritter to rethink his dismissive attitude toward Jewish philosophy, in light of the fact that he had unknowingly “singled out a Jew as the most original thinker of the Arab period, one who shows us a side of Aristotelian teachings which emerges nowhere else with such clarity” – the thinker in question being, of course, the “enigmatic Avicebron,” or Salomon Ibn Gabirol.13
Although Ritter, who felt his insufficient knowledge of Arabic was compensated by his genuine interest in Arabic and Islamic philosophy,14 could admit this and other blunders in his interpretation of Avicenna, Ibn Bajja and Averroes, he was not yet prepared to recognize the importance and originality of Jewish medieval philosophy. Munk drew Ritter’s attention to the fact that Maimonides, and perhaps other Jewish philosophers as well, had been an essential source for Christian scholars in their study of medieval Aristotelian Arabic philosophical texts. Commenting on Ritter’s lack of regard for Maimonides, Munk noted that “one might well expect more from such a thorough and conscientious researcher. It appears to us that at least Maimonides,