In a typical philosophy curriculum, there are some history courses, and some courses that are not history courses. A course on Plato’s metaphysics is a history course; a course on recent work on causation is not. Some courses have a history component. When I teach scepticism at upper levels (or graduate levels), I start with Descartes and Hume. I’m teaching history at that point; I’m not doing so when I go over the recent debate between Jim Pryor and Crispin Wright.

In that sense of ‘history’, which parts of the curriculum do you think count as part of history of philosophy? That is, when are you teaching history, and when are you not? To focus attention, consider which of the following works you would count as part of a history course, or part of the historical part of a course:

* Mill’s _On Liberty_;
* Russell’s “On Denoting”;
* Moore’s “Principia Ethica”;
* Wittgenstein’s _Tractatus_;
* Ayer’s _Language, Truth and Logic_;
* Ryle’s _The Concept of Mind_;
* Austin’s _Sense and Sensibilia_;
* Quine’s _Word and Object_;
* Gettier’s “Is Knowledge Justified True Belief?”
* Davidson’s “Actions, Reasons and Causes”;
* Grice’s William James lectures (as published in _Studies in the Way of Words_);
* Davidson’s “Truth and Meaning”;
* Anscombe’s _Intention_;
* Rawls’s _A Theory of Justice_;
* Kripke’s _Naming and Necessity_;
* Lewis’s _Counterfactuals_?
* Putnam’s “The Meaning of Meaning”;
* Thomson’s “In Defence of Abortion”;
* Block’s “Troubles with Functionalism”;
* Perry’s “The Essential Indexical”;
* Kripke’s _Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language_;
* Lewis’s “New Work for a Theory of Universals”;
* Lewis’s _On the Plurality of Worlds_.

That’s probably enough to give you the spirit of the enterprise. My answer is in the comments.