My take on the “cancel Aristotle debate”: what people are really demanding is a way of teaching the history of philosophy in a way that takes the sociology of philosophy seriously. I.e., we really need social histories of philosophy! (/1) https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/opinion/should-we-cancel-aristotle.html

But since philosophers are in general allergic to thinking seriously about the social context of philosophy and the “extra-philosophical” determinants of philosophy, we instead get a pointless moralizing debate about whether things should be “on the syllabus”. (/2)

Basically we need materialist histories of philosophy that identify the extra-philosophical determinants of philosophical texts/traditions/ebbs and flows in “influence”, etc. (obviously not all sociologies of philosophy are Marxist....but they should be lol)

With respect to the issue of abstraction from historical/social context, I think that abstracting successfully presupposes that you actually know what you are abstracting from! So even then historians of philosphy will have to study social history.

You simply can’t understand what Aristotle said about slavery without understanding the social structure of the place where he lived and taught (Athens was one of the few genuine “slave societies” that existed in human history....)

The point is that a sociological approach would be illuminating in general! Even in relation to illuminating philosophical debates that don’t seem to be political per se, e.g., @MartinKusch work on the psychologism debates, & @arichardson_phi on American philos of science.

Also see George Reisch’ “How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science” (& responses to it), and McCumber’s “Time in the Ditch” (but I don’t think that “continental philo” is as emancipative as he thinks)...

and see John McClendon’s critique of it for leaving out Af-Am philos https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/download/191570/188681/

None of the aforementioned approaches are Marxist in any explicit sense (except for McClendon), but for Marxist approaches why not actually read some Soviet historiography of philosophy?! My first reccomendation would be Boris Hessen on Newton technically history of science but..

But Soviet historians of philosophy tended to take seriously the idea that you can’t write the history of philosophy w/out history of science (especially for early modern philos). For a general Soviet history of philosophy, see...

“Principles of the Theory of the Historical Process in Philosophy” by Theodore Oizerman & A.S Bogmolov (Their take on Hegel is really interesting). Btw, one interesting thing about Soviet philosophers was their interest in non-Western philosophers....

You could say that this interest was politically motivated. True. But so is the neglect of non-Western philosophy in most Western philosophy departments....

I conclude by pointing to a really interesting Weberian take on the sociology of philosophy: Joseph M. Bryant’s “Moral Codes and Social Structures in Ancient Greece”...obviously this is not a complete list, but more of a sampling of diff. approaches to the sociology of philos.