Richard Rorty proposed to interpret philosophy as cultural politics, understanding it as the shift of philosophy vocabularies to the moral and political context, and considering philosophy primarily as a program of action, a social and linguistic practice. In the context of discussing the autonomy of the history of philosophy as a discipline, we believe that it can also function as a cultural policy, which allows in this aspect to talk about the new contemporary mode of existence of the history of philosophy. The paper discusses two cases that illustrate this understanding of the history of philosophy, namely when the specialists in ancient philosophy (M. Nussbaum and B. Cassin) used the cultural patterns of the past to create contemporary, relevant humanistic and social projects.