Hi there!

I can only speak intelligently regarding history of philosophy, so that is what I will focus on in my answer. I’ll also flag that I am a dyed in the wool Analytic. So I’ll have nothing informative to say about what our friends/opponents in Continental philosophy have to say about any of this (in fairness, they tend to not really know what we analytics say either… which is perhaps a problem but that is a seperate post altogether!).

So, first off, your basic insight is a good one: History of philosophy does tend more towards “great man” style work than other comparable fields (and unfortunately the gendered language here is still more appropriate than it ought to be; more on that later). I’ll illustrate this by a few examples of really good work in the history of philosophy. Two works that I’d consider absolutely seminal are Three Philosophers by Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach and Learning from Six Philosophers by Jonathan Bennett. I select these particular classics because the titles themselves give away that their project is looking at the history of philosophy via looking at some of its most important and insightful figures (Aristotle, St. Thomas, and Frege in the case of Three Philosophers; Descartes, Spinoza, Liebniz, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume in the case of Six Philosophers). And while the titles of these works make this point especially vivid, it is by no means atypical. Works focusing on periods within the history of philosophy, such as Richard McKirahan’s uniformly excellent Philosophy before Socrates, also take this approach. A quick glance at the table of contents often makes this readily apparent. In the case of McKirahan’s book, all but four chapters of twenty focus on a single figure (from Thales down to Philolaus of Croton).

This focus on single “great” figures also filters down to the way philosophical history is taught at the undergraduate level. A New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny has as good a claim to being the “standard” introduction to the subject as any work. Kenny presents the material in two ways, first via a chronological narrative and then via a chronological accounting of how various philosophical issues (God, knowledge, ethics, etc) were explored and developed during each period. In both cases, however, what we get is a narrative in terms of “great” figures. Selecting a chapter at random, the Medieval chapter on God is divided into subsections like: The God of Augustine, Boethius on Divine Foreknowledge, Negative Theology in Eriugena, Anselm’s Proof of God, Aquinas on God’s Eternal Knowledge and Power… you get the idea.

Ok, this motivates the descriptive claim that history of philosophy does tend to center itself on the contribution of “great” figures. But your question wasn’t actually descriptive; it was normative. I take it the basic idea was: Is this focus in history of philosophy less objectionable than it would be in other fields within history? Let’s consider some reasons we might give on both sides, starting with some positives.

So, the most basic defense you might give of focusing on the contributions of the great philosophers is that there is simply more to be gained philosophically by doing so. The history of philosophy is peculiar in this respect: It is entirely legitimate to approach the subject with a principle aim other than an attempt to understand the past. Now, I’ve put this more provocatively than I really needed to - The idea is just that the overarching reason to read a canonical philosopher can be to understand better the philosophical themes that philosopher discusses. So, for example, if you read Plato’s Republic without trying to get a handle on what justice truly is, then in an important sense you’ve missed the entire point of why reading Republic is worthwhile. Reading Republic is worthwhile because Plato has interesting and important things to say and teach us about his philosophical subject. It is important, of course, that one do good history to do so, else your not engaging with Plato but rather your mischaracterization of him (and that mischaracterization probably doesn’t have as interesting things to say!). So one reason to focus on the great philosophers is because we are interested in treating them as interlocutors who can help us get at the truth. And, obviously, this project only really makes sense if we focus on figures who have something insightful/important to say.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the historian of philosophy goes around trying to make everything our distinguished predecessors said come out true. Often, the importance comes from seeing that the historical philosopher failed, but in a subtle, interesting, illuminating way. For a great example of this, a sustained argument that St. Anselm’s famous Ontological Argument fails in just such an illuminating way, see “Anselm and Actuality” by the late David Lewis, who is himself arguably already among the pantheon of “great” philosophers.

Of course, we might approach the history of philosophy in a more purely historical way. But even here, it is natural to focus on the “great” figures. First, on a pragmatic level, you just can’t read everything. So, you tend to focus, especially early on, on the canonical figures, and only later (if ever) start to read the lesser works surrounding these figures to provide context. A good example of what this looks like in practice is Dennis Des Chene’s Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought. This work, as you might expect from the title, is grounded ultimately in the thought of Descartes, but one of its major contributions is providing a ton of context regarding philosophy around the time of Descartes, which lets us get a fuller picture of Descartes’s thought and importance. Which leads us to a second key point: It is not a baffling coincidence that guys like Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Hume get so much attention. Their work just is important and influential to such an extent that they demand a central focus. For those more familiar with science, you can think, very roughly, of the importance of Einstein as being in the same ballpark. Imagine writing a history of physics in the 20th century that doesn’t devote swaths of pages to Einstein! Writing on modern philosophy without a comparable swath of pages devoted to Descartes would be just as bizarre.

Ok, so what are the negatives. Well, first is the issue of context, though here the idea is often that we need to the context to better understand the central figure (the aforecited Physiologia is once again illustrative). More important is the issue of who got into the canon and why.

First, who decides what work gets to count as philosophical? This isn’t a trivial question. Recently, Newton’s works (especially stuff like De Gravitatione) has started getting taught in courses on early modern philosophy. Cambridge University Press recently put out a volume of Newton’s “Philosophical Writings” with selections of relevance to historians of philosophy. It also wasn’t that long ago that you had extremely prominent Anglo-American analytic philosophers arguing, in deadly earnest, that the writings of Nietzsche and Hegel were, quite literally, nonsense, meaningless babble, valuable (if at all) merely as literature. Or consider religious works. St. Thomas and St. Anselm are always taught nowadays, but this wasn’t always so.

Indeed, the religious angle gets to perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the philosophical canon: The exclusion of women. One way women’s voices wound up excluded was by characterizing their works as “religious” in character rather than philosophical. A good example of this sort of thing is the thought of St. Teresa of Avila, who contemporary historians of philosophy are only now starting to take seriously once again. But more broadly the philosophical canon as we know it today was established by sexist people in incredibly sexist times, a reality that is reflected in the total absence of women from that canon. Indeed, I’d say that the first female who is near-ubiquitous in the contemporary analytic curriculum is Elizabeth Anscombe, former student of Wittgenstein and analytic Thomist par excellence. But she is, of course, a 20th century figure, which is entirely absurd, especially with clear and obvious cases of earlier women doing highly original and insightful philosophical work (St. Teresa of Avila and Emilie du Chatelet being two blindingly obvious cases). The sexist language of the “Great Man Theory” remains indefensibly apt in the history of philosophy. Accordingly, there is an ongoing project in the history of philosophy to correct this clear deficiency. For an overview of the problem and a sketch of how it came about, see Eileen O’Neill’s “Disappearing Ink”.

Anyway, I could drone on forever, but perhaps here is a good place to stop.

Sources

Anscombe, G.E.M. and Geach, Peter (1973). Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Frege. Blackwell.

Bennett, Jonathan (2001/2003). Learning from Six Philosophers. 2 vols. Oxford University Press.

Des Chene, Dennis (1996). Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought. Cornell University Press.

Kenny, Anthony (2007). A New History of Western Philosophy: In Four Parts. Oxford University Press.

Lewis, David (1970). “Anselm and Actuality.” Nous, 4.2: 175-188.

McKirahan, Richard (2010). Philosophy Before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary. Second Edition. Hackett.

O’Neill, Eileen (1998). “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History.” In Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions. Princeton University Press.

From the perspective of Art History, the Great Man Theory of History has been an aspect of contention. My field of study concerns the postwar period (1945-present), so I can speak to this era. In the 1960s, many artists were concerned with art’s “objecthood” (a term closely associated with the critic Michael Fried), and sought to break down or expand art into the environment (Land Art, Systems), language (conceptual art), and promote collaborative or activist forms of art where the artist was no longer the only “author” of the work (feminist, activist groups and spaces like the Art Workers Coalition or Womanhouse). With the publication of Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author,” published in the art magazine “Aspen,” we find a direct link to intellectual engagement with defeating the model of a single genius. Another famous essay to tackle the problems of the Great Man issue is Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” from 1971.

By way of contrast, museums and galleries continue to put on exhibitions of singular artists, which contributes to the Great Man myth, despite its general rejection within art and academic circles.