ДА ЛИ АРИСТОТЕЛА МОЖЕМО СМАТРАТИ ПРВИМ ИСТОРИЧАРЕМ ФИЛОЗОФИЈЕ?
CAN ARISTOTLE BE CONSIDERED THE FIRST HISTORIAN OF PHILOSOPHY?

Summary/Abstract: History as an essential idea of human orientation and selfdetermination has its path of creation. From the beginning, it was not a way of self-understanding man and his world. As an idea, history begins with the ancient polis and with the emergence of philosophy. Philosophy critically deconstructed and broke the mythical consciousness of the polis, freeing the ancient man for social life and history, because the static polis corresponds to the myth with its cyclical understanding of past and present time, as its eternal circulation. In this way, the human world was closed in the cyclical order of the polis, whose model is physis – nature. Looking from that side, it could be said that designing the history of philosophy in the ancient period was not even possible. In this particular instance, the remarks of all those who denied Aristotle as a historian of philosophy would be appropriate. However, their remarks primarily related to his, in their opinion, misinterpretation of his predecessor's philosophy, as well as to inserting his school of thought into their teachings. But regardless of the fact that the philosophy of history could not exist in the ancient world, something much greater did exist, and that is what Aristotle himself showed: that the entire history of philosophical teachings preceding him has an internal unity in the historical course of philosophy. This is why Hegel emphasized the role of Aristotle as the first one who managed to show this. Namely, Hegel considered that it is not easy for an ordinary observer to understand this significance, because the history of philosophy appears on the surface as a multitude of various ideas, teachings, systems, directions, and aspirations, in which there is no essential inner unity. In the beginning, historians of philosophy depicted the historical movements of philosophy only in that way. It was, in fact, only a chronicle of the historical movements of philosophy, which mostly described and understood little. Such a chronological and anecdotal description of the history of philosophy was first decisively criticized by Hegel, who showed that the superficiality of such an attitude towards the history of philosophy is concealed by ostensible scholarship. That is why Hegel emphasized that the philosophical and scientific treatment of the history of philosophy is not at all a matter of scholarship but of intellectual cognition of the fact that, beneath the surface of the apparent chaos of the system, nevertheless, some essential order is hidden, and that the main problem is to discover that order. Aristotle's interpretation is certainly not a mere interpretation of the inherited text, because philosophical texts are essentially ambiguous, and cannot be interpreted unquestionably, that is, in some absolutely “objective” way. What certainly cannot be objected to, with regard to Aristotle, and what has been pointed out on several occasions in this work, is the fact that he knew the teachings and works of his predecessors much better than all the critics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, because he, in comparison to modern critics, also had the advantage of observing his compatriots from a much greater, not only temporal but also spiritual proximity and certainly evaluating them with fuller records than contemporary authors. Thus, in his works, Aristotle searched for the guiding thread of the entire previous school of thought, which he both criticized and also preserved in a higher synthesis. By reason of all of the above, Aristotle and his works rightly represent one of the most complete and profound sources when considering the philosophical teachings that preceded him, and because of this, we can rightly qualify Aristotle as the first historian of philosophy.

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