Q: What about after you’ve destroyed philosophy, though? What about once trolling has destroyed everything but trolling itself…. leaving nothing but a desolate wasteland haunted by the howling winds and the ghosts of extinct disciplines. Is that what you really want?
— J. Elson
A: Yes, but you forgot the lamentations of their women.
(Note: These days the wreaker of havoc obviously must also be willing to accept male lamentations, but analytic philosophy is notoriously dominated by married feminist dudes.)
With the collapse of the world economy and Western Civilization generally, my vendetta against academic economics is now less likely to be ascribed to eccentricity, mental illness, or a grudge, but for most, my vendetta against philosophy is still suspect.Why should something as “quixotic”, “mostly harmless”, and null as academic philosophy rouse any strong feelings whatsoever?
Because of the opportunity cost. Harmless-and-null philosophy is crowding out something better, and has been doing so since 1950 or so. Philosophy did not have to be what it is today; it was made what it is by purposeful, destructive action. The social institution of philosophy (the biz, the forms of production) has distorted philosophy itself. The job has destroyed the work. Philosophy could be a resource for the educated, thoughtful adult, but it isn’t.
Brian Leiter is indeed a crap philosopher of no real intellectual interest, but my struggle is not with him personally. His institutional importance dwarfs his person and his work. He is the Second Assistant Secretary Philosophy Commissar, and despite his lowly philosophical status, he’s in command because he controls the Philosophy Gourmet Report. This system of rankings provides the default standard according to which the philosophical nomenklatura decide hiring, firing, and promotion. By reading this report, philosophers and would-be philosophers at every level down to high school can find out who’s who and what’s what, what’s hot and what’s not. The Leiter Report displays and produces the interlocking, mutually reinforcing hierarchies by which students choose schools, schools choose students, and schools hire and promote.
NOTE: Since my crusade began I’ve repeatedly had to deal with two standard retorts: first, that I don’t enough about contemporary analytic philosophy to criticize it, and second, that the stuff I’m looking for is really out there, but that I just haven’t found it. My recent good-faith efforts to understand analytic philosophy better have been entirely in response to these two criticisms. I’ve never promised to change my ideas about what philosophy can and should be; I’ve just committed myself to verifying that the stuff I’m looking for really isn’t there.
So what’s wrong with contemporary academic philosophy, and what do I think that it should be instead?
1. Philosophers today (like most other scholars) systematically narrow the scope of their questioning in order to get more precise and more certain results. This is analyticity, or a version of it anyway. The process of narrowing iterates repeatedly, until finally you’re discussing sub-sub-sub-questions of original questions which have been long forgotten. Beyond that, often enough the analytic method is further ornamented with fanciful counterfactual hypotheticals which themselves can become independent objects of study. The outcome of all this is a perfect Potemkin village of conditionally rigorous conclusions which are irrelevant to anything actual or actually imaginable.
To systematically broaden the scope of questioning in order to bring in additional factors and produce more realistic descriptions of reality, while keeping as much rigor as possible (but not the maximum rigor) would be an equally valid philosophical strategy — the contextual, constructive or exploratory strategy — but professional philosophers at every level (above all during their Pavlovian early years) are strongly discouraged from doing this.
2. This general philosophy would be readable and usable for thoughtful, educated adults whose training is in non-philosophical fields; in various ways it would help them understand the world better. Philosophy would regain its adjacency to history, literature, maxims, wisdom literature, aphorisms, reflections, meditations, pamphleteering, social criticism, utopias, etc. and would quit pretending to be a expert specialized science (which Aaron Preston has shown it has never been). This philosophy would not privilege proof and science over persuasion, and could be constitutive of persons and peoples.
Historically, some philosophers have been read for pleasure and others not. (It is not a question merely of difficulty). In general, philosophy today models itself on the less readable philosophers: Aristotle, the scholastics, Kant and the Kantians, and the more barbarous writings of the early moderns. Many authors once read as philosophers are now classified by philosophers as mere literature, and others (e.g. William James) are read purely historically with respect to specific contributions relevant to the institutional philosophy of today. (According to Wiki, the philosophy pros blame Russell for giving too much attention to early philosophy in his History of Western Philosophy; I find this highly amusing).
3. The usability of philosophy to which I refer is usability in practice. People go through their lives living mostly routinely, but very frequently they can find themselves facing an unknown, unpredictable future which is to some degree capable of being formed by human initiatives; such cases range from the trivial and purely personal on up to the historically decisive and weighty. At these times they can only rely on the “philosophy” (in the popular sense) which they’ve developed in the course of their lives on the basis of their experience and knowledge. In my opinion, being a resource of for someone forming a personal philosophy is one of philosophy’s primary tasks, but contemporary philosophy minimizes this aspect when it doesn’t aggressively reject it.
4. I do not know how original this next thought is, but in my opinion the situation just described in #3 is the source of ethics and normativity. When facing an open future the questions “What should I do?”, “What should we do?”, “Who am I?”, “Who are we?”, in one form or another, are unavoidable. The practical is the ethical, the ethical is the practical, and both are inextricable from and constitutive of personal being, belonging, and social being. This orientation toward an unknown and open future should be the anchor and reference point for all thinking on normativity, but for most contemporary philosophy it is not. By and large Anglo-American philosophy during the last half-century or more has avoided these questions, or has apodictically declared them to be undiscussable and nonsensical, or has muddied them up with fake precision to the extent that they are difficult or impossible to do anything with.
5. The situation in #3, facing an open, contingent future partly formable by human actions and human choices, renders some traditional goals of philosophy and science obsolete or even potentially harmful. If the turning points are real turning points, and if there really are two or more importantly different possible outcomes at many different points in time, of which only one can be realized, and if the actual outcome is contingent and systematically unpredictable, and if there are diverging paths from every moment of decision through new moments of decision onward into the future, then there are important kinds of Truth which are in practice impossible to attain or even state (i.e., possible only in the sense that a million monkeys might eventually type the works of Shakespeare). Tomorrow becomes a single particular partnered with one or more other ghost particulars which never came into being and never will, and the understanding of tomorrow’s outcome reality becomes simply a recognition that it’s there, rather than its explanation in terms of Truth. (Davidson talked about events as particulars two decades or so ago, but no one seems to have gone anywhere with it.)
6. The kind of question described in #5 is much discussed in many disciplines, but I think that there’s often an attempt to minimize or deny its impact, for example by convergence theories, fluctuation theories, or many-world theories, which all allow you to preserve Truth while making change, indeterminacy, real multiple possibility, and human choice insignificant. Be that as it may, questions of the type “What should I do?”, “What should we do?”, “Who am I?”, “Who are we?” are not truth-functional, and do presuppose an open future of real uncertainty. And since the future is by definition as yet undecided, even simple practical statements like “I’m going to build a shed in the back yard” cannot be true, since they are about an act that hasn’t happened and might not, and a thing that doesn’t exist and might never. Projects and proposals can’t be truths, but life consists above all of projects and proposals, and if philosophy is to be usable in the way that I’ve proposed that it should be, the insistence on Truth is a fatal impediment. Personal identities, group identities, and individual affiliations with groups are all projects and proposals, and group-formation is a multi-dimensional, multi-player process of persuasion involving much more than Truth. (Whether this has anything to do with Wittgenstein’s assertion that there cannot be a propositional ethics I don’t know; I think that it does.)
7. Philosophy should be a philosophy of wholes. Holism is distinguishable from generalism, though similar to it, but it’s above all contrastive to universalism. By and large universalism consists of rigorous truths which are everywhere and always true, and truths of this kind (for example in mathematics and logic) are found by narrowing the topic and making the definitions more abstract until finally rigorous Truth is achieved. Generalism uses the opposite method: it expands and contexts the topic, and makes the language more concrete until a realistic (but less certain) description of a broader reality is achieved.
8. The whole is more than just the general, however; in fact, a whole can be a part. A philosophical whole is an attempted description of everything about a topic — in the most general sense, everything about everything, but most often just everything about some specific question, particular or situation.
Holistic statements are always false. You always leave something out or get something wrong, and in any case, the world’s always changing, so that even if an ambitious holistic statement happened to be true today, it wouldn’t be tomorrow. Any holistic statement — above all any generalist holistic statement — immediately elicits opposition, and this is of necessity. Some will find the proffered holism suggestive, or usable with adaptations; others will find it thoroughly objectionable — and the debate will continue. Nobody should ever take holistic statements at face value.
9. So why do we want wholes at all? For practical reasons; we have no choice. We live our lives in accordance with our own holistic schemes. When we make decisions, we make on them on the basis of the whole we have constructed to model our own world, and a new holism presented by someone else might help us to improve the one we already have. No matter what, holism is a a gamble; it accepts responsibility for everything about a topic, including aspects not yet understood, and does the best it can. If we fail or screw up, we cannot (or should not) say things like “How was I to know that? Nobody told me about that” unless the unknown factor was something which was in actual fact unknowable. Holism deals with realities as they present themselves.
Or to belabor the obvious, all actual things and situations are holistic wholes, and the more interesting and important they are, they less likely it is that they can be modeled adequately.
10. “Personal philosophy” is holistic, and public philosophy is also holistic, and holistic philosophies developed within the university could conceivably be resources for either of them. But they seldom are. One present-day impediment is the liberal dogma that individuals are all strangers to one another, so that personal philosophies are subjective and purely private, which makes it an intrusion on privacy and a violation of freedom for anyone to try to influence someone else at any very deep level. (People today are exceedingly scrupulous about “not telling others how to live their lives”.) A second major impediment is the scientistic dogma that every statement that’s not a statement of fact is meaningless hand-waving nonsense, and you still do find many traces of this in academic philosophy and social science. But the most destructive impediment at all to the development of a usable philosophy in the universities is the enforced principle that only truth is important, and that all truths are specialist truths.
11. Holistic thinking is managerial thinking. Specialist thinking is subaltern thinking — specialists are docile bodies and attendant lords. (See Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds.) Even in philosophy, which I think should be the broadest and most independent field of study, the university trains philosophers to do their jobs according to apodictic rules (paradigms) which are not to be questioned or even to be discussed much, but are only to be obeyed. The university does not teach freedom or free citizenship, and for good reason: free minds make managements’ job more difficult, and nowadays everything is managed. The university is managed by university managers, politics is managed by PhD politicos, and government is nothing but management by experts. This is the golden age of management, and for the nomenklatura it’s really terribly unfortunate that Western Civilization is collapsing right at the point when they were ready to achieve total world domination.
12. What do the managers — the real men — study? Well, they’re all practical, high-testosterone men, some of them (e.g. Karl Rove) with very little formal education indeed. Managers are as smart and hard-working as academics, and they resent academic arrogance and take pleasure in making academics look bad (not that it’s hard). Their educations seem mostly to be in engineering, economics, finance, law, and mushy quasi-fields like international relations, public relations, and management. Graduates of Bible colleges are probably as common as humanities graduates.
And without much help from philosophy or any of the liberal arts, they’ve all patched together their own holistic personal philosophies, and based on what we know, these personal philosophies are horrible indeed. And they rule the world, and we obey them.
13. So the world fares on, its docile, jellified citizens obediently performing their assigned tasks and intermittently emitting subjective, purely-private grumbles about the management they always obey. High above them, the real decisions are being made by real men, and down at street level unemployed humanities majors scuffle for scraps and remember the far-off days when anyone gave a shit what they did.
FAQ
QUESTION ONE.
What would you do with actually-existing philosophy if you were to replace Leiter as Philosophy Commissar and were empowered to take drastic measures?
Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, and Logic would be reassigned to psychology, linguistics, mathematics, AI, and Computer Science, as appropriate. A few liaison functionaries would be left behind. Philosophy of Science and Political Philosophy would be sent to reeducation camps, and those few capable of reeducation would be retained. Ethicists working in hospitals, etc. would be left there. The other Ethicists together with the Metaphysicians and Epistemologists would be sent to Happy Puppy Farm, where incontinent old dogs are sent when the family gets tired of cleaning up after them, and there they would live out their days frisking and sporting in the happy meadows.
QUESTION TWO
What kind of philosopher are you?
I have very limited involvement in “Continental” philosophy (Foucault, Nietzsche, some Marxism). This can get a bit sticky, because Continental Philosophy is the Hamilton Burger / Washington Generals / Workers and Peasants Party fall guy in today’s cartelized philosophical world, and non-analytic philosophers are usually assumed to be Continentals.
My own interests are pragmatism, “practical philosophy”, left social criticism, Chinese Philosophy, and process philosophy (and the theory of historicity). All of these tendencies are marginal in today’s philosophy biz, and process philosophy approaches extinction.
In reality I’m not a philosopher at all, of course, but a pamphleteer, polemicist, satirist, and guttersnipe. That ship has sailed.
QUESTION THREE
Do you claim that every present-day Anglo-American philosopher fails on every point of your denunciation?
Too goddamn many of them fail on too goddamn counts. Many fail in every single one. Charles Taylor passes my tests, with a B- on readability. Toulmin is out of philosophy now. Rorty is dead. Putnam is moving in the right direction, but he’s a hundred years old and still seems too meta.
QUESTION FOUR
Is there anything that you’d like to say to your critics?
When making your criticism, please specify whether you think that what I’m saying a.) not right, b.) partly right but exaggerated, c.) in many respects right, but these things aren’t bad things, d.) right, but please shut up because there’s nothing we can do about it and it’s too depressing, or e.) not proven.
If e.), shut up and get out of here, because of course it’s not proven.
QUESTION FIVE
Do you ever use hyperbole?
No.
f
March 22, 2009 at 5:58 pm
the source of ethics and normativity
You forget that authentic Philosophy doesn’t exist to simply enforce some given do-gooder morality–xtian, liberal, or otherwise: it asks, WTF is “normativity”? What does the word refer to?
Like with Hume’s classic dissection of rational “ethics” via the fact/value distinction, which you have yet to understand. Whatever “values” are, they are not objects/phenomena/events, are they. What are values given Darwinism, for that matter….
Normativity also relates to the freedom/determinism issue. Wm James realized that. You read James as some liberal-pragmatist when in reality his views far closer to that fiendish Quine.
March 22, 2009 at 6:12 pm
You’re going in circles, repeating yourself, and not reading carefully, P.
Values not being phenomena, events, truths or facts is pretty much my starting point. Hume and Quine didn’t go far beyond that to my knowledge.
March 22, 2009 at 7:04 pm
You’re repeating yourself (wasn’t this essay on Idio–.com in various forms)? Let’s put it this way: what are you trying to accomplish? Politics? Ethics? Psychology? Phil of Science? All of the above? You can’t do everything.
You suggest a pragmatist or holistic system (of some sort) and yet also claim truth is meaningless. OK, so then, the code of Allah might be holistically acceptable to some; JHVH to others; Wotan or Marxism, Darwin to others. Having abandoned truth, you’re by implication a type of relativist, however glaringly obvious that seem–relativist in terms of ethics, or metaphysics (and apparently science too). Ergo, anything goes in EmersonLand.
That was a problem for your hero Dewey as well. Dewey pushed for some kinder, gentler, general holistic pedagogy without the hard edges of logic or mathematics (at least traditional sort), but he can’t really argue for anything given his own criteria–why say teach history, when it’s all about nasty business like Stalinism, nazis, etc. So historical truth doesn’t matter to a Deweyan, either. Anyway the Deweyan programme didn’t quite pan out–. Dewey’s now like filed in the “useless bureaucratic holism” file, by both the analytical/scientific people, and by the leftist-marxist-freaks.
I agree with some of your anti-academic perspective, but I don’t think you approach it correctly. Instead of grand generalizations, one might address specific projects,nepotism, or academic fads, mis-applications, high-powered but futile research in sciences, or social sciences, etc. The global warming biz, for one, receives millions but there are good reasons for doubts about the Gore/IPCC claims. Not saying AGW is entirely bogus, but many questions (say whether C02 is the culprit or not), and there’s a definite political aspect (grant money, etc). Feyerabend one starting point, though I don’t always agree to his constructivist ideas.
March 22, 2009 at 7:18 pm
My piece was written for a specific purpose and is not really relevant to your concerns. This responds much of your post.
As for pragmatism, pragmatists say that Truth doesn’t do any work, and I agree. It would be nice if it did, but in practice the real work is always done by adapters and kludges slapped on ad hoc at the last minute, as in econ.
A further criticism of the standard of Truth is that it tends toward defeatist perfectionism, whereby the resolution of a question is postponed indefinitely until all the principals are dead, like one of those legendary multi-generation lawsuits. To my knowledge AP hasn’t come up with any interesting Truths about anything I’m interested in. Just an enormous mass of argument.
UPDATE: One of the positivist dreams has always been to come up with answers to ethical and political questions as which are as certain as the answers to mathematical and scientific questions, and to second, reorganize society on rational scientific principles. Even Plato tried something like this. The first enterprise was, for a lot of reasons, mostly a failure. The second was somewhat successful and probably did more good than harm.
March 22, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Where’s the “right, but why is this important again?” option?
OK, let me go back through your analysis. I think that putting in Leiter is a weakness. Wiki informs me that his Gourmet Report started in 1989, and you’re talking about something that you say started in the 50s, so he can only be a symptom or a late stage. I take the point of your “specialist thought is subaltern thought”, but that is general to the entire time period, not merely something occurring in philosophy. If Leiter didn’t exist — if analytic philosophy didn’t exist — they would have had to have been invented.
Is there much hope for springing philosophy from a syndrome that has all of society in its grip? No.
But why do we want to again? Because of opportunity costs, yes. But opportunity for what? I have to say that allowing philosophers to be a great influence on personal worldviews has last happened when, antiquity? And I know that you like the Chinese ones, but the Greeks were many really fairly nasty sorts. Isn’t this generalist worldview-building, value-building stuff now pretty much done by political and religious leaders? Why should we want it back in academia? The values of academia do not seem to me to be the values that really lead to a successful life anywhere else.
My loyalties are more to science, and science isn’t doing too badly. You still see generalist pop-science books that people actually want to buy that try to explain big chunks of the universe to them. So we’re already seeing the lamentations of the philosophers, as their pretension towards being the center of everything is revealed as a hollow sham. Why bother trying to patch them up?
March 22, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Of course science and technology does well, very well. A Feyerabend (or the marxist sorts) criticizes the American scientific establishment precisely because of its dedication to functionality, and because of the scientific establishment’s dependence on corporate sponsorship (as with the new guru Dr. Chu, who did work for BP for some time). That shouldn’t be mistaken for anti-rationalism, or Ludditeism (tho’ some Postmods did not lack Luddite aspects), but about applications and misplaced priorities. The shuttle program sucks up billions while teachers are being laid off by thousands. What’s the pay off for AGW? Defense contracts? Or the Hubble? ? We don’t have to indulge in the usual marxist jargon, or quote Heidegger’s QCT to realize that many high-powered science projects do not pay off. There is a political dimension to academic science–even at say the undergraduate level, when the engineers and physics/chem people go one way, and social scientists/humanities go another– which Emerson hints at (but does not really flesh out).
March 22, 2009 at 8:06 pm
“Symptom or late stage”
Apotheosis, maturity, present state of the system.
“Isn’t this generalist worldview-building, value-building stuff now pretty much done by political and religious leaders?”
Mostly by TV personalities. Religious leaders too, alas. Christopher Hitchins, Andy Sullivan, P.J O’Rourke, and Maureen Dowd. Etc. It’s pretty crappily done. I knew someone not long ago who lived her life according to the wisdom of Jimmy Buffett. Fact.
“Why bother trying to patch them up?”
Academia sucks in a lot of smart people and then degrades them. It also is a functional part of the indoctrination process for our swipple elite; chatting with New Class people you have all kinds of academic cliches presented to you as deep wisdom or self-evident truth.
“You still see generalist pop-science books that people actually want to buy that try to explain big chunks of the universe to them.”
I like pop science and read a lot of it, but it doesn’t ask many of the questions I’m most interested in. I’m grateful for what they do when they’re good at it, but it’s just pure good luck that any of that stuff gets done at all.
Think of university departments as real estate standing empty, or as some other kind of idle resource. With the investment being put in now, much better stuff could be produced.
March 22, 2009 at 8:11 pm
I highly, highly recommend Istvan Hargittai’s “The Martians of Science” on the politics of science. “Science doesn’t cause war, but war causes science”. Lots of interesting info, and a multi-dimensional, carefully-done book. His lovely daughter Eszter is at Crooked Timber but should not be blamed for that.
March 22, 2009 at 9:56 pm
“Think of university departments as real estate standing empty, or as some other kind of idle resource. ”
But if they weren’t standing empty, they wouldn’t be allowed to stand at all, right? My basic problem with your analysis is that you seem to be taking a result of the overall social system and treating it as if it can be changed piecemeal. If we could break it one piece at a time, then I see targets of much greater apparent value. On the other hand, I guess that it might be easier for philosophy just because there isn’t as much riding on it.
That’s why I’ve said, over the years, that you should really be going for the punk rockification of philosophy. Rather than try to get into the official channels for the official rewards, do it for the hell of it and encourage others to do likewise. That liberates the energies of people not tied into the current system. You’ll inevitably get co-opted eventually, but this co-optation is the primary method of change for entrenched cultural products anyways.
There aren’t many people doing it, yes; maybe it wouldn’t take off. But the chances still seem better than with a frontal assault on the academy.
March 22, 2009 at 10:20 pm
My basic problem with your analysis is that you seem to be taking a result of the overall social system and treating it as if it can be changed piecemeal.
I more or less think that. I.E., there are various specific places where something might be done. I don’t actually think that when I gain control of philosophy I will be on the way to world domination, but I don’t think that that would be nothing either. A lot of it has to do with the way habits of servility are inculcated in the liberationist schools, and the way academics and other New Class persons actively accept their own submission. (Everyone read Jeff Schmidt.)
I’m doing the punkrock philosophy shit as it is, but I have between 100-600 daily readers, which isn’t really enough to smash the state.
March 22, 2009 at 10:49 pm
It’s time for some charismatic philosophy punking then. Hmm, I’ll brainstorm:
* your own link list / short statement of what “we’re” doing. Think of Silliman and his tyrannical dominion over poetry if you don’t know what I mean. It should be called, hmm — the philosophical gourmet report. Then everyone could googlebomb it so it would turn up as the first Web hit maybe for that phrase, or at least high on the list. That’s the kind of annoying thing that punks do. Maybe Leiter would bite and denounce you, which would be great.
* Youtube videos. Like those ones that PZ Myers-&-co do for people explaining why they don’t believe. Have people expound on their philosophical points.
* The anxiv. Named sort of like the arxiv. this would be a Web repository not for links to people’s sites, but for specific philosophy papers that people didn’t want to try to publish through the academic system.
Naturally you want the work on these to be done mainly by your minions. So step 1: get some minions. I’m not volunteering, because my primary interest in philosophy is mostly for its amusement value within fanfic, but I can be a free source of wonderful great ideas like the above.
March 22, 2009 at 10:54 pm
Minions? Rich has given you your marching orders.
In truth, philosophy is such a company-town biz that no minions will appear. You get a job through the nomenklatura, or you leave the biz. One of the reasons why I’m crazy is that I kept paying attention to that shit in full awareness that there was never going to be any money in it for me.
I’ve got Leiter’s goat already, though.
March 22, 2009 at 11:28 pm
Well, they have to be people who have similarly given up on the biz. Aren’t there any disgruntled ABD grad students out there? People who got Ph.D.s a decade ago and have worked in food service or computer programming since then? The archetypal cab driver who still writes philosophy. You can’t be the only person who is still doing it without hope of reward. Once you get a subculture — even one of, let’s say, ten people — people will be falling over themselves to investigate your subculture, because that’s how coolness goes.
Let’s see if any of those 100-600 readers appear on this thread. Who knows? Although for some unexplainable to me reason most people who read blogs never comment.
March 22, 2009 at 11:40 pm
My attacking Leiter personally presumably reduced my commentatorship to the hardened trolls (no offense intended). I’m pretty sure that there are people in the biz with considerable sympathy to what I’m doing, but for some reason they shun my kiss of death.
March 22, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Your first mistake may be Viewing Leiter as a representative of the Philosophy biz as a whole. Leiter’s not in the analytical camp (he does Nietzsche for MBA students, or somethin’). And it’s debatable whether philosophy–analytical, continental or otherwise–possesses the power or influence you think it has. The power-departments are in sciences, engineering, business, law, etc. Even some leftist guru like Zizek hardly matches up with like an Alan Dershowitz.
Your ire and rage seems rather misplaced. Who bothers reading even Kant anymore? Kant’s critique may be a bit schwer for most ‘Mericans, but was in principle himself somewhat anti-dogmatic (and had a bust of Rousseau in his study), yet also opposed to reductionism, ‘vulgar empiricism,” etc. You might not care for his system, but you could point out what you disagree wit’…..
March 22, 2009 at 11:58 pm
I don’t write about philosophy all the time, but right now that’s what I’m doing. I’m not claiming that philosophers control the world, or that they are the most critical contributors to the stupefaction of the American people. In the same way, if I were to write about the exploitation of slaughterhouse workers, it wouldn’t be because I thought that they were an important demographic.
Regarding Leiter, based on his book with the word “Nietzsche” in the title, which I read, what he’s doing is expanding AP slightly in order to be able to claim breadth and inclusiveness. It’s just crap though, he garbles Nietzsche in a thoroughly opportunistic way. Philosophy is just a type case. (In the same way, orthodox economics, once it had crushed its opposition and held total power, started appropriating customized tag ends of the various economic movements it had crushed.)
The liberal arts and the humanities are among the vehicles bringing a flunky ideology to many people who might otherwise have had a bit of independence and initiative. Jef Schmidt, People!
March 23, 2009 at 1:28 am
Taking your numbered points in order, and with the requested letter-responses:
1: b: This complaint has some strong similarities to Iris Murdoch’s complaints about contemporary philosophy in pieces like “Vision and Choice in Morality” and “The Idea of Perfection”. Murdoch was highly influential for Cora Diamond, who’s still alive, not Putnam-level old, and a major figure in both ethics and Wittgenstein. Cavell also says things like this in “The Claim of Reason” and elsewhere. So does Bernard William, at least in his stuff about “thick” and “thin” moral concepts.
You certainly are pointing out a real problem in a lot of philosophy here, but it’s not something philosophers are ignorant of, or have avoided trying to correct. I know you liked the Rorty/Soames debate from a few years back; philosophy is not all Soameses. Outside of ethics, I’d recommend you look at Davidson again. Don’t read the early stuff (which I recall being what you did); skip to “On The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”, and “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”. Rorty liked all three of these. “Three Varieties of Knowledge” is what Davidson recommended as an introduction to his later thought (from the mid-80s onward), and it is at least not guilty of being narrow.
2: a: I don’t know why you want people in philosophy departments to also be gurus. I think that there’s already a lot of work on philosophy and literature being done; Martha Nussbaum gets all excited about it, and all of the ethics guys I mentioned in the last point do, too. James Conant has a long article on Rorty and 1984 in “Rorty and His Critics” that you might like. As for philosophers being read for pleasure, I’m not sure what to say. Certainly there’s a lot of bad writing in philosophy. (Not Cavell or Murdoch, though.) Not everyone can be Dewey; Dewey couldn’t always be Dewey.
3: a: I don’t think that the sorts of habits people rely on in “moments of crisis” are usefully thought of as “philosophy”, at least if philosophy is supposed to be the sort of thing that Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein etc. did. Murdoch & Diamond do care about this sort of thing, though.
4: aaaa: This seems to me to be an egregiously narrow conception of ethics, of just the sort Murdoch & Diamond complain. FWIW, “death and chance” are two of Murdoch’s major themes in “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts”.
5: a: I don’t know quite where you’re going with this one. It’s worth noting that Davidson’s characterization of “events” (spatiotemporal particulars) is the standard one in philosophy of action, which is the main place events get talked about. They’re unrepeatable happenings. I don’t see why you think this should lead to fluffy ruminations about how you can’t put the toothpaste back into the tube once it’s out.
6: a: I am expanding the above Davidson recommendations to include “The Structure and Content of Truth”. It’s available as the first half of his book “Truth and Predication”. (Actually, I have all of these articles in PDF. I should just send them to you, on the off-chance that minimizing effort will maximize the chance that you look at Davidson again.)
7: c: Holism is important. Davidson talks about it a lot.
8: a: wait, I retract that last one. I don’t know where you’re going with this.
9: this sounds like Weltanschauung twaddle. You think that our contemporary producers of this sort of dreck are bad at it (Maureen Dowd etc.); why do you want to replace them? Why not abandon the whole fetid genre?
10: c: Iris Murdoch said all of this fifty years ago in “Vision and Choice in Morality”.
11: a: I don’t know where you get the idea that philosophical paradigms are not questioned or discussed much. People broadly agree that they’re correct, which is why they hang around as paradigms, but they are constantly being attacked from all corners. Philosophy is intrinsically patricidal. (I’m leaving the management-stuff out of this, since I don’t see what it has to do with analytic philosophy. Incidentally, George Reisch’s work on the Cold War and philosophy would probably let you justify a lot of your geneological claims without resorting to books that are written by non-analytic figures. Which seems like it would be helpful for your self-presentation, unless you enjoy being a Cassandra figure.)
12, 13: c’mon, no one ever gave a shit about what humanities majors did. The majors didn’t exist until they were irrelevant. (That a few luminaries were also humanities scholars does not mean that the major was ever non-worthless.)
trollblog is funblog
March 23, 2009 at 1:52 am
Ooo, the expert’s arrived, at least the theology expert (and one who still considers Quine a xtian), and he’s attending Uni. Of Chi–allegedly–home to Leiter hisself (not to say Austrian economics, of like the Greenspan variety). You got yr GRE’s handy, Doc S-Dan?
Davidson was probably even to the right of Quine and generally supportive of reductionism (which is to say, yes Emerson, you are looking for a Weltanschauung. Yr not likely to find it among Anglo-Americans, even your beloved pragmatists). Anyway, the Quine/Davidson type of holism didn’t translate to the sort of generalist, vaguely Deweyan pedagogy you are considering. It means something like checking a theory or claim with the Big Unis of the world.
.
March 23, 2009 at 1:53 am
[…] BlogRabbit created an interesting post today on Why Analytic Philosophy Should Rankle Your Ass TooHere’s a short outlineAnd since the future is by definition as yet undecided, even simple … much help from philosophy or any of the liberal arts, they’ve all patched […]
March 23, 2009 at 1:57 am
Quine was an agnostic, Leiter is at the law school here (not where I’m at, and not where philosophy courses are taught), Austrian economics is not a major player here (“Chicago school” economics is its own thing, and many Austrians hate it), Davidson always explicitly rejected reductionism, your GREs first Tossy, and Davidsonian holism uber alles.
funblog is trollblog
March 23, 2009 at 2:37 am
[…] Why Analytic Philosophy Should Rankle Your Ass Too « Trollblog […]
March 23, 2009 at 2:41 am
I don’t know why you want people in philosophy departments to also be gurus.
Caricature. Not what I said.
I don’t think that the sorts of habits people rely on in “moments of crisis” are usefully thought of as “philosophy”, at least if philosophy is supposed to be the sort of thing that Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein etc. did.
Moments of initiative, decision or choice, not necessarily crisis. Just any time when you’re not walking through scripted routines. And all three of the philosophers you named were better than almost anyone today on this point, though I only read Wittgenstein any more and have never read much Kant. Wittgenstein was a strange, nearly psycho case, but he didn’t have the bland flatness of most AP.
fluffy ruminations
Caricature again. Irreversibility and historicity are topics that philosophers seem to want to avoid or minimize. A big neglected issue. For example, a mutation is contingent, an event, a particular, and a novelty, but in specific cases it becomes lawlike, as the non-compliant genes disappear. Davidson’s teacher Whitehead worked a lot of this out, but Davidson had no respect for Whitehead and probably didn’t understand him on this point.
Why not abandon the whole fetid genre?
Because of the effects and the necessity. Because these things are constitutive of personality and society. Because good ones are better than horrible ones. Of necessity, people always have what you call weltanshauungs, and they put them together from whatever resources they have. Historically philosophy has often had a strong and favorable weltanshauung content, but philosophers today seem to take a tremendous pride in refusing to play. (The professional philosopher’s own weltanschauung is normally a horrible stew of careerism, conventionality, professionalism, conceit, and scientism, or something very like scientism. In this they are only slightly different than generic humans). This particular point of disagreement is the most important one here. I have an extraordinary hatred for what I understand to be the characteristic professional attitude on this question.
Read Preston on paradigms. By the time a philosopher gets to the point when he’s allowed to discuss or question paradigms, he’s docile. People who object to the paradigms early on are sweated out. I know many such. AP people might talk about paradigms within AP limits, paradigms chosen from the menu of approved options, but at a certain point (long before I could possibly enter the conversation) questioning is cut off.
The management-stuff and its relationship to AP is my main point, of course. AP disables smart people for doing anything other than AP. Philosophy is just a type case; other disciplines are as bad. Someone with a sound professional training tends to be worthless in the world of actuality, either as a leader or as a citizen, because his training forbids him to think in certain ways. Schmidt is essential here.
I’ve read Reisch and various other historical critics (Mirowski in econ, and McCumber, and Wilshire, and others more historically grounded. James and Veblen too, as far as that goes. And Rorty and Putnam.)
Dewey was able to be Dewey because he wanted to be Dewey, and because he was not forbidden to be Dewey. It’s not as though he had an amazing God-given talent; he actually wasn’t that good a writer.
Iris Murdoch is read in lit departments nowadays. I’m not condemning every philosopher who there ever was, just the dominant AP trend over the last few decades. Plucking out a few individuals who I might like, some of them from half a century ago, doesn’t do much. I’m talking about the contemporary and recent profession generally, above all the way it distorts and processes incoming human raw material, starting at the undergrad level.
I think that at some formal level I might like Davidson, but with regard to the other points I’ve made he’s as bad as bad could be.
March 23, 2009 at 2:42 am
Davidson views language as wholly truth-conditional based on bi-conditionals (while called semantics, it’s still close to a verification theory ala Carnap). I don’t pretend to have mastered DD’s corpus, but truth-conditional semantics does not a Weltanschauung make, as say “historical materialism” or “pragmatism” or “Zombie Calvinism” does.
March 23, 2009 at 2:45 am
Perezoso, the less sarcasm and the fewer insults, the longer you stay. I like many of your comments and they’re welcome here. But I’m two eyes for an eye if things go bad.
March 23, 2009 at 3:20 am
Why don’t you apply your ethics consistently, for once. You kowtow to the believers, regularly, including conservative believers.
March 23, 2009 at 3:21 am
“Iris Murdoch is read in lit departments nowadays.”
I just finished up a course on Murdoch, Cavell, and Diamond. “20th Century Moral Philosophy” it was called. Diamond cites Murdoch a lot, and a lot of people dialogue with Diamond.
“Docile” seems like name-calling.
Tossy: Davidson thinks that a speaker who had a true theory of truth for a given language (in the form of being able to construct T-sentences for arbitrary sentences of the language) would thereby be well-equipped to understand that language. Language itself is not made of biconditionals, it’s made of words of whatever sort there are. Carnap has nothing like this.
It is true that truth-theoretical semantics is not much of a weltanschauung.
I am not much enamored of the weltanschauung-obsessed weltanschauung. It just does not seem to me to have the import that some find in it. People think things. Okay? So? Where’s the payoff?
blogblog is funtroll
March 23, 2009 at 3:24 am
“Why don’t you apply your ethics consistently, for once.”
I want to go on the record and say that “Leiter is teaching Nietzche to MBAs now” was pretty fucking funny. Even though the MBA program isn’t the law program.
Just sayin’.
March 23, 2009 at 3:32 am
oh, I forgot something: Murdoch might be read in Lit departments because she was an accomplished novelist in addition to writing some mighty fine philosophy essays. I suspect that “The Sovereignty of Good” is not what the Lit folk are looking to when they look at Murdoch.
March 23, 2009 at 3:45 am
It’s Truth-conditional, as in dependent on some object (observation, event, fact, etc) being plugged into the metalanguage. Yes, you could say, paraphrasing Revelation, “A Woman rides the Beast” iff a woman indeed rides the beast, and that would be formally correct I guess, but lacking anyway to prove that assertion, it’s not meaningful. (doesn’t that mean the Good Book’s fallible? seems so)
So it has some relation to verification, evidence, or observation (I believe Quine said that as well). I’m not saying that sort of thing is not important or useful, but not a Weltanschauung. In E-Land we go for the grand vista.
March 23, 2009 at 3:56 am
Perezoso, can the huffiness and the insults.
I am not much enamored of the weltanschauung-obsessed weltanschauung
No, but you seem obsessed with it, in the sense of bringing it up when no one else has mentioned it. Likewise gurus. This is the same sort of thing that various other APs have said on the same topic, a knee-jerk response that I presume has been implanted by the Pavlovian methods. Just consider that my opinion on these topics is far different than yours, and that your caricatures are not helping you to figure out what my actual opinion is.
“Docile” is from Foucault’s “docile bodies” and makes sense in the context of the Schmidt book you won’t read. “Attendant lords” is from Shakespeare, I think, via Eliot.
Cavell is on my list of APs who might be all right. I’ve recently been disappointed and saddened by Bernard Williams, though; I have a very strong feeling that he would have been a very interesting writer if he’d been in a less tight-assed discipline.
March 23, 2009 at 4:08 am
Tossy: “So it has some relation to verification, evidence, or observation (I believe Quine said that as well).”
Truth and verification certainly have some kind of relationship. The verification principle is not mandatory, nor is the verification theory of meaning; there are other ways one can handle the topics. Ways which work better than Carnap’s. Davidson’s “Meaning, Truth, and Evidence” is a wonderful late piece on Quine and the three titular topics. You can read it, it is quite clear. Nice companion piece to the dog-eared Quine you keep in your rucksack.
Emerson: Being disappointed and saddened by Williams seems to be the general response. He satisfied absolutely no one.
“This is the same sort of thing that various other APs have said on the same topic, a knee-jerk response that I presume has been implanted by the Pavlovian methods.”
This is fair; I am being a bit of a dick. I don’t think I could have picked up my reactions from analytical training, though; I found the “personal philosophy” stuff uninteresting as a theology undergrad, too, when I’d never heard of analytic philosophy.
March 23, 2009 at 4:22 am
I guess I’d just say that people with zero interest in gurus and weltanschaungen tend to be conventional people with given weltanschaungen that they have no problems with. And people like that are often very happy and successful, but to me they seem unphilosophical and (in the liberal context) conventional. I suppose that that’s a nasty thing to say, but that’s where we’re at.
March 23, 2009 at 4:28 am
I am fine with being called “unphilosophical and conventional”; no need to apologize for nastiness. Happiness and success will hopefully come along in due time.
I do not like Iris Murdoch; she wants philosophy to do things and be important and shit. Which is why I recommended her: I thought you might like some things in there.
March 23, 2009 at 12:45 pm
Truth and verification certainly have some kind of relationship. The verification principle is not mandatory, nor is the verification theory of meaning; there are other ways one can handle the topics.
In some contexts verification and evidentiary reasoning (and induction, really) may be mandatory: like, say, evidence gathering in a trial, or investigative journalism, natural/social sciences, etc. We don’t have to go as far as Carnap, or even WVOQ–there are meaningful/significant sentences that are not verifiable–like, say, the old Tales from the Crypt AKA the Book of Revelation, or Schackaspeare for that matter–but induction and evidentialism (including probability issues) plays a part in the Weltanschauung. Even Karlo Marx agreed to that. Better evidentialism of some form than dogma.
March 23, 2009 at 6:02 pm
My personal belief is that Perezoso is the Troll of Sorrow over at Unfogged and elsewhere. I’ve seen plenty of stylistic similarities, especially when he starts to lose his temper. However, he can be sharp and funny so should be kept around so long as he is.
Philosophy of Science and Political Philosophy would be sent to reeducation camps, and those few capable of reeducation would be retained. Ethicists working in hospitals, etc. would be left there.
I don’t understand this. Political philosophy sure, we can all agree there. But “professional ethicists” of any sort are surely noxious (isn’t ethics an inherent part of practice not to be farmed out to separate “experts” trained on bizarre hypotheticals?). And I would defend philosophy of science as pretty nuts-and-bolts important and having made significant progress. The universal theory-dependence of facts is lesson #1 for anyone who wants to understand and question ideology, and philosophers of science have done much to establish it.
March 23, 2009 at 6:30 pm
Perezoso is welcome here as long as he stays cool.
Some ethicists work in medicine and actually have concrete, real-world knowledge of things. ttaM at Unfogged may be one such.
Actually, I think that some political philosophers are redeemable, along with some philosophers of science. But they need a firm hand to encourage them to improve themselves.
March 24, 2009 at 2:10 am
“One of the positivist dreams has always been to … reorganize society on rational scientific principles… this… was somewhat successful and probably did more good than harm.”
Do you really mean “did more good than harm” and not the other way around?
(I feel liberated to make creative use of ellipses with regard to your quotations by your use of ellipses on my quote.)
March 24, 2009 at 2:57 am
More good than harm, but plenty of harm. I don’t reject the Enlightenment, progressivism, leftism, etc. Even though a lot of the metaphysical and scientific ideological supports for the enlightenment, absolutism, progressivism were bogus, a lot of the rationalization was concretely a good thing.
Foucault has argued that the intellectual rationalism was subsequent to and caused by the social rationalizations of the absolutist states, especially the military under Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus — Descartes was a military engineer who served under Maurice.
I think that contemporary administrative technocracy is terribly problematic, but I don’t plan to go backward through history denouncing its antecedents.
March 24, 2009 at 2:43 pm
You seem more interested in pathopsychology, than analytical philosophy, JE, and your criticism of Quine & Co then even farther off the mark. Quine follows the positivists–and Wm James–in terms of clarifying language, adapting logic to experimental science, etc. The analytical precision was quite suited to clinical settings. Pathologists don’t all come from Paris (or Vienna for that matter).
The Chomsky-Skinner spat remains at least slightly relevant to that issue. Academia and the population at large may now view BFK/behaviorism as outdated, trivial, cold, clinical, etc. but Chomsky’s vague Rousseauian pleas for freedom and so forth seem rather optimistic if not sentimental; the Noamster, while impressive in ways (at least with his linguistics) has been advancing leftist-populism for years–really his ideas on innateness relate to his politics. For NC (and Rousseau) humans have innate knowledge, and innate worth, even “goodness”. Alas, some of us reject that assumption, however noble it seems. Herr Trollblog himself seems a bit of the Rousseauian leftist.
March 24, 2009 at 3:41 pm
It’s not exactly a discovery that I’m a leftist, H. In some sense I suppose I could be “Rousseauian”, but that’s a pretty mushy word by now. The things I like about James are mostly, but not exclusively, the things the analyic philosophers didn’t accept.
I’m more interested in AP as an impediment and energy sink than in its own terms. To my knowledge, very little useful for my purposes has appeared in AP since about 1960, and a lot of useless, silly discourse has been produced in its place.
It’s so bad that whenever I do get interested in an APer, he’s downgraded, expelled, or leaves on his own power: Gellner, Toulmin, Rorty, Putnam, R. Williams, and to a degree (posthumously) Wittgenstein, Austen, and Ryle.
March 24, 2009 at 5:11 pm
The Ordinary language school rates as even more conservative and traditional than the earlier AP strain via Russell, Carnap, Popper, etc. Paraphrasing BR on the OrdLang crew, who cares about the silly things silly people say? Politically St. Ludwig himself quite to the right of Russell (and Carnap), regardless of what some PoMos claim.
The Tractatus has some force (though whether LW substantially updates Frege and BR a matter of debate), along with the Carrollian weirdness, but Phil. Investigations about a page or two of semi-interesting conceptual rhetoric.
Popper himself considered St. Ludwig a charlatan, if not psychotic. Popper was the one who attempted an analytical Weltanschauung of sorts, though more empirical and inductive than logical (though his later views were closer to idealism of some sort). The Open Society itself still relevant, especially in terms of the criticism of historicism, Hegel, Marx–not merely because of politics, but the philosophical aspects of the ideology as well. Even a smart PoMo might read it, to understand the wrong side of Hegelian absolutism–
March 24, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Horatio, my spamscreen sometimes stops you, as it earlier did political football. I approve when I see it.
In all cases I adapt what I’m interested in, and never swallow something whole. Few or no APers have anything interesting to say about politics and the like.
*REVISED*
Russell’s “Who cares about the silly things silly people say?” is the exact opposite of my opinion, and strikes me as a fair summary of the opinion of the APers I dislike most — an aggressive form of deliberate, anti-human, know-nothingism.
What a bunch of stupid, arrogant, escapist shits — too pure to dirty their hands with anything that doesn’t seem scientific or mathematical, and too lazy and dumb to go into an actual scientific field. The dregs of the dregs.
March 24, 2009 at 7:06 pm
That sounds like a conservative, anti-rationalist critique. Had Emerson read and understood Russell’s Principles of Mathematics–or even Principia–instead of his later journalistic stuff, JE might think differently. Russell was a Cambridge Wrangler, and analyst, before he entered the Phil. biz, and mathematical logic is a bit of an advance on Aristotle. He tutored Keynes on probability. Early AP was about logic, and foundations of mathematics, as well as language, and Phil. of Science. You don’t seem to quite understand what they were doing (then, you yourself admit you’ve not even bothered to read Kant).
Anyway, Russell WAS a philosopher, as well as competent in modern mathematics, and fairly well read in physics as well (he handled integrals and partial derivatives probably as well as Einstein did).
The point concerned the Ordinary Language school itself, not humanity at large. Russell apparently considered later Witt. and Austen’s concern with mere conversation a bit trivial.
March 24, 2009 at 7:30 pm
I’m not denying that Russell did what he did, or that he’s a smart guy, or that what he did was important. What I’m saying is that when AP started imposing its narrow paradigm, which was partly derived from Russell’s work, it crippled philosophy for the kind of stuff I’m interested in.
Besides Russell’s cocksure, well-intended, fluffy journalistic writings, I’ve also read his much more ambitious book “Power”, which he intended to begin a new phase of his career. As far as I could tell the lessons of his early philosophy contributed nothing whatsoever to this work. It wasn’t a bad book at all and I recommend it to people, but it was more like Gibbon or Voltaire than anything in contemprary philosophy. (Russell was very aware of the problems with statism. Gellner in certain respects was continuing Russell’s work, though I’m not sure he knew that.)
That book by Russell, a lot of Popper’s stuff, and Gellner’s stuff is interesting to me, though I don’t agree with it.But that kind of stuff is not allowed in AP anymore — Gellner was essentially expelled (over Russell’s protests), and Popper was ignored. A common outcome in revolutions — the ultraleft kills the less radical founders.
March 24, 2009 at 7:58 pm
It wasn’t a bad book at all and I recommend it to people, but it was more like Gibbon or Voltaire than anything in contemprary philosophy.
Yes, Russell’s writing may be slightly “belle-lettrist” at times, but he had the logical–and scientific–chops as well, unlike say the Hitchens sort. “Power” was for a popular audience, however, or at least not an academic audience.
Compared to usual academic hack (from the sciences, or philosophy, humanities), including the leftist papasans, Russell is a Voltaire.
Listen to some of Zizeks bizarre rants on violence, or mideast politics: is SZ f-n serious? He sounds mad at times, as in crazy. It’s not even marxist jargon, but a strange Lacanian psychoanalysis meets Hegel rhetoric. You object to Russell, and the older logicians, try Lacan and the rest (including Foocault, who wrote one coherent paragraph for every 10 incoherent ones). I suspect the Bolsheviks themselves would have considered most PostMods some strange type of metaphysical idealists, and pitched ’em into mineshafts (they might have tossed logicians in as well. There were, however, some Bolshevik positivists/Machians, like Bogdanov). Are Voltaires gulag meat as well? Zizek or Jodi Dean would seem to suggest as much (though much of the AP bashing sort of Brit-bashing. Anything Albionic is suspect to the comrades)
March 24, 2009 at 8:09 pm
“Power” was his most serious book of that type. And if Russell could have applied his technical philosophy to that task, he would have. (People have said the same thing about Hume, who also wrote history and ignored his own philosophy when doing so.)
Lacan and Zizek are irrelevant. I don’t read either. I’ve looked at Zizek a little, and it was mildly interesting.
March 24, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Try reading some Kant, Emmy.
March 24, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Why?
I’m out of here for a few hours. Later. The spam screen may get you, or it may not.
March 25, 2009 at 1:07 am
Some ethicists work in medicine and actually have concrete, real-world knowledge of things.
doesn’t matter. Defining ethics as an expertise totally separate from practice severs work life from political decisionmaking in just the way Schmidt criticizes. If you need some expertise, better to have lawyers in that ethics job, at least they are representing laws established through some democratic procedure instead of analytical philosophy type decontextualized logic-chopping.
Actually, I think that some political philosophers are redeemable, along with some philosophers of science.
philosophy of science is just far, far superior to political philosophy, there’s really no comparison. Philosophers of science really tend to understand how science is done and works, political philosophers by and large have no clue about politics. (Unlike political scientists, who often are pretty informed). We really do need people theorizing about what scientists are doing when they do science; there’s a ton of institutional power there that needs to be understood. You can’t understand e.g. the debate between global warming deniers and climatologists without being at least an amateur philosopher of science.
March 25, 2009 at 1:35 am
The ethicist I met at the hospital seemed pretty real world. I believe that it’s an level two applied specialty designed to make philosophers seem employable and to graduate more ladies. Of course, I could be wrong.
Maybe something happened after the Popper-Kuhn-Lakatos-Feyerabend series. But to me that stuff seemed horribly ideologized, and too involved in the “Is This Really Science?” debate, with Science playing the Holy Grail role except when it was being debunked by Feyerabend.
Historians of science and science-studies people seem much more interesting, but they’re not in Philosophy. I like Mirowski, Redfield, and Shapin.
Unfortunately one of the science studies people, over at CT just now, has hired out as a contrarian and is stinking up the place.
March 25, 2009 at 1:45 am
“You can’t understand e.g. the debate between global warming deniers and climatologists without being at least an amateur philosopher of science.”
Disagree with that. The denialists really have nothing to do with science, and there’s no debate. There’s only propaganda by economic interests vs. science, and again that doesn’t really have anything to do with science per se. If it did, scientists would been better at defending against it.
March 25, 2009 at 4:06 am
Disagree with that.
well, you’re wrong.
The denialists really have nothing to do with science, and there’s no debate.
right, the denialists are criticizing science *externally*, they are pretending to be scientists but they aren’t. But you need philosophy of science to get why that is so.
External critics of science (like creationists) always to try to deconstruct science by explaining how science is an ideology that is never able to fully prove its own truths. And they are correct, too. Philosophy of science at its best is deconstructs science while leaving its value intact.
You can tell philosophy of science is superior to political philosophy because science is actually a renegade branch of philosophy, while the relationship between philosophy and politics has forever been about ideological propaganda and wishful thinking.
March 25, 2009 at 6:28 am
I think in general academic jobs exist for hacks to occupy, but philosophy teachers are relatively insignificant re: potential harm or help they can do. Whereas much of the liberal humanities is actively dedicated to helping the powers that be by sowing confusion about what’s going on and destroying political confidence in various way.
Incidentally, if anyone has succeeded in transcending the limitations of class and profession it has to Russell (in fact only literally a handful of western Intellectuals attempted to expose US atrocities in Vietnam and probably not single other soul in the case of Belgium Congo genocide). Sure, he was an elitist aloof asshole, but less of an asshole than just about anyone else I can think (less than you or I I am sure).
March 25, 2009 at 11:32 am
There’s no doubt that any organized activity serves some socio-economic agenda.
I last read Russel in college, but I also got the impression that he is extraordinary sharp, witty, and clear.
Some of you guys are dramatically overeducated, IMO.
March 25, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Post-1940 Russell had effectively left philosophy, and around 1960 (when Gellner was effectively expelled from the profession) philosophy left him. His non-philosophical activities are irrelevant to my point, only his early contribution to the formation of AP’s dogma is in play. (BTW, I’ve always thought that as popular political / cultural journalists Russell and Margaret Mead embodied “secular liberalism”. Their common advocacy of some degree of sexual liberation pushes them ahead of John Dewey, whom the Christianists also hate.)
Abb1 (and Rich to an extent), the premise of the whole thread is that philosophy is worth bothering with but is presently being done wrong. Your disagreement is noted.
Peter, I’ll go into it some other time, but I think that philosophy in small Phil 101 dose contributes greatly to a culture of unthoughtfulness, quibbling, amorality, “neutrality”, and technical distancing from substantive issues — Daniel Lindquist above, bless his heart, seems to object to the very idea of thoughtfulness, which to him means “gurus” and “weltanschauungen” and other very bad things.
PGD, political philosophy is split, with analytics mostly in Phil depts. and Straussians and the like mostly elsewhere. But I wouldn’t write either of them off.
Contrary to Lindquist and PGD, I think that “gurus”, “weltanschauungen”,”ideology” and “wishful thinking” (under different names without the scare quotes) are necessary parts of life which can be bad, neutral, or good, and that philosophy properly participates in their making.
Truth and science constrain construction but do not determine it. To me, all attempts at constructive thinking which claim to be grounded on truth and science alone are fraudulent, and plugging in a mysterious undiscussible “normative” unit to label the unscientific residue is just a crude hand-wving patch.
March 25, 2009 at 1:45 pm
The denialists really have nothing to do with science
Freeman Dyson, Princeton physicist, has expressed doubts about the “science” of global warming (and doubts regarding the claim that man-made CO2 is the culprit). So have many other scientists. Doubt is not denial. There are questions regarding the reliability of the temp. data. Even granting that temp data is correct, are the slight temp. increases anomalous, and does Al Gore know what margin of error means?
Anyway, perhaps you’d like to link to a lab study proving that slight increases in C02 in atmosphere lead to higher temps. The “forcing” experiments have not been conclusive except with C02 amounts far greater than what are found in atmosphere (see Dr. Hug’s studies, and others, which are online). The Gore/IPCC models were not atmospheric physics anyways, but simulations.
Alex Cockburn’s writings on this were quite good, as were the people he linked to. Granting some warming, even man-made due to other GHG (say, methane), little or no proof of CO2 to warming exists. The time lag issue another problem: C02 increased substantially from like 1930’s to 70’s yet those were some of the coolest years on record. Even the real climate people admit they cannot establish how any supposed “time lag” effect would work.
Phil. of science people should be aware of the ideological aspects of AGW, the Gore hype, and the ad hoc solutions (like the Pelosicrats now throwing millions at the supposed problem); for that matter simulations (ala IPCC) are not chemistry. The CO2-to-warming claim has not been verified, yet is a matter of faith among many, even scientists.
March 25, 2009 at 2:04 pm
I was going to respond, but instead I’ll just ask that we keep global warming out of the rest of this thread. If I ever want to discuss it here I’ll post a global warming thread. CT and other sites have GW threads more or less every week.
March 25, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Truth and science constrain construction but do not determine it. To me, all attempts at constructive thinking which claim to be grounded on truth and science alone are fraudulent,
huh, I agree with this so I’m not sure why you’re putting me in the opposite camp. Your first sentence is one of the major conclusions of the best modern philosophy of science as I understand it (although I may not). The problem with analytic political philosophy is precisely that it’s a mystification which pretends to be based on logic. I’m OK with mystifications that admit they aren’t based on logic, so long as they also aren’t based on authoritarian imposition. I agree with you that such mystifications need to be respected on their own terms, as a legitimate form of thought that can be done well or badly.
March 25, 2009 at 2:39 pm
Fine with AGW, but it does have some bearing on this discussion, and Phil. of Science (I doubt Feyerabend would have clapped his hands at the Al Gore/IPCC eco-rave, sponsored by Chevvy)
In regards to PhilofPol: A Rawls may have bureaucratized did not mystify. His work with the Pareto optimization and so forth was quite technical (Nozick’s writing also quite complex, though I don’t completely agree with Nozick’s libertarianism). Rawls had a Hobbesian sensibility, and like Leviathan, Rawls’ TOJ is not a trivial book, though not exactly a potboiler. Most people either summarily dismiss it as not necessary (then neither were most of Hobbes arguments), or there is a right wing response–collectivism! I doubt even most philosophers (students or profs) have read more than the first few chapters.
I think the original position and difference principles are viable political schemas (and ethical theory), not as utopian as some think, but implementing them would require great efforts, if not revolutionary (some marxistas draw on Rawls at times). Rawls may have downplayed, shall we say, Malthusian issues (say petroleum reserves running out). The original position/Veil of Ignorance, etc can be criticized of course. There’s an element of luck (as some on CT have said)–and the agency issue is not really fleshed out.
Rawls did attempt a political/ethical Weltanschauung, and deserves respect. Rawls was not just parsing sentences, or talking about possible worlds, or the meaning of “blue”: he’s trying to provide a foundation for democracy.
March 25, 2009 at 2:48 pm
It’s possible that you’re more in touch with analytic political philosophy than I am. I don’t keep up any more.
The most interesting stuff I’ve read recently has been by Ernest Gellner and his students / colleagues / collaborators. But Gellner was expelled in 1960 when the APs refused even to review his book, and his people are classified as historians / anthropologists / political scientists.
March 25, 2009 at 2:56 pm
My beef with Rawls and most of those who follow him (and Nozick in a different way, and even Singer) is that he’s just putting argumentative foundations under already-existing beliefs. I think that the world has changed enough that people should be looking for something new (more constructive). And philosophers theoretically could be among those doing it.
In practice, of course, I’m a generic left-liberal-democratic-socialist type, with weakly developed populist, anti-bureaucratic, and communitarian tendencies, and a fairly primary anti-war orientation.
March 25, 2009 at 3:17 pm
It’s workable to some extent, unlike new agey utopianism, or marxism (or Nozick’s crypto-Tory dreams–actually this is NozickVille, for the most part. Las Vegas, Nozick MGM Grand).
Rawls can be read in different ways. The gauchistes read it as liberalism; Objectivist sorts say it’s socialism–the Diff. principle is fairly socialist. You continually shift the goalposts. If you want to discuss politics, and practical reforms, Rawls applies. Some of us still value argumentation; the Gestalt-o-crats failed, mostly (though even Zizek seems to want to bring Gestalt back). Rawls’ limited egalitarianism is an alternative to the marxist-state (which may be arriving sooner than you think), or NozickTown.
March 25, 2009 at 3:38 pm
At the beginning anything new seems crazy, because it is. The English Revolution is less present in our awareness than the French, the American or the Russian, but it was more or less the beginning of it all. In some respects it was moderate in its outcomes, but it was full of crazies (and cold-blooded killers, too).
March 25, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Non sequitur, though Rawlsian politics closer to ideals of American and French revolutions (though not quite sans cullottes) . Perhaps include some of Rawls TOJ, along with Kant.
Ciao
March 25, 2009 at 3:59 pm
I was responding to “It’s workable to some extent, unlike new agey utopianism….
Rawls is workable because there’s nothing much new in it. Anything constructive will have its enormous flaws, and will also attract crazies.
The English Revolution was firmly grounded on misreadings of history and tendentious and credulous misreadings of Bible passages. Not only that, but there was a ton of that.
March 25, 2009 at 6:20 pm
A Rawls may have bureaucratized did not mystify. His work with the Pareto optimization and so forth was quite technical
Pareto optimization is not a mystification? Please. The “quite technical” qualifier is even funnier, and a perfect expression of the analytic attitude.
March 25, 2009 at 7:02 pm
Decision theory is fairly standard fare in Econ. as well. Tell the economists who make use of Pareto’s theories and similar ideas (or, really, utility itself) they are mystifying. It might be obtuse, or complex, even vague in some respects, but not exactly mystification.
Obviously many decisions, whether at individual or societal level, may result in benefits for some, and losses for others (whether in terms of business, or politics). Voting itself might be viewed as a type of decision theory (and Pareto optimization would apply, at least with some work).
March 25, 2009 at 7:14 pm
What’s funnier are the Trollbloggers’ guessing games about analytical phil. Rawls was doing political phil., and ethical theory–not at all what Quine and Carnap did. Anyway, you want to deny that decisions even exist (or justice, equity, utility, etc), you’re fairly close to the Quinean school, if not Darwinism. WWII, just some river monkeys vs. the steppes baboons. Fine.
March 25, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Tell the economists who make use of Pareto’s theories and similar ideas (or, really, utility itself) they are mystifying
PGD is an economist.
March 25, 2009 at 7:39 pm
Rorty pointed out almost 30 years ago that Rawls was not an analytic. He was probably allowed within philosophy because the others realized that they were not capable of saying anything intelligible about the topics he discussed, and were embarrassed to have no political philosophy whatsoever on the menu.
My claim is that AP is a rotten egg crowding out better stuff. I’m not a rotten-egg specialist and am not going to eat the whole egg.
In some formal way and on certain points, I may agree with certain APers, but the way they crowded other stuff out is still unforgivable.
March 25, 2009 at 8:35 pm
What is this “other stuff,” Emerson? You mean psychology? Or is it religion. Why not attack economists or physicists for not addressing psychology.
You’re again positing some obligation –you, Dr. Pangloss, must create Weltanschauungs! Really, modern history has plenty of examples of the Weltanschauung gone wrong–stalinism, and the nazis two examples (one might include the Weltanschauung of monotheism itself). The positivists were reacting against the Weltanschauung school.
March 25, 2009 at 8:52 pm
Horatio, you understand my position pretty clearly, and just disagree with it. But the word Weltanschauung isn’t mine; it’s the smear-word (along with “guru”) of a different APer above, one much like yourself. Your Nazi-Stalin argument-smear isn’t worth a dime. I’ve heard all this BS before; it’s astonishing how incapable of imagining any alternative to their own views APers are.
APers have their own Weltanschauung, which they don’t call that, and so do you, and their refusal even to talk about Weltanschauungen (except to smear all others) is just their way of protecting their own from criticism, by fiat — by pulling up the drawbridge so that there can be only one Weltanschauung in the castle. Aaron Preston covers this, up to a point, though his word is “paradigm”, which has a narrower meaning.
These are institutional, not philosophical arguments we’re having, and you’re begging the question. If I accepted your institutional (normative, paradigmatic) idea of what philosophy should be, I’d agree with you.
March 25, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Tell that to Popper (or Russell), who offered quite a few cogent arguments in favor of the negative impact of the hegelian or marxist Weltanschauung.
As I said, Rawls’ contractualism does offer a political middle road between statism, and the conservative-libertarian minimal Nozickian state, and it’s applicable to economic issues as well (like distribution–oops, that might be sort of normative. Then, even some baboons might decide to cooperate at times). TOJ, however, is a bit too cold and bureaucratic for most hepsters (and most have not bothered to read the cliffsnotes to TOJ).
March 25, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Tell that to Popper (or Russell), who offered quite a few cogent arguments in favor of the negative impact of the hegelian or marxist Weltanschauung.
Did you read what I wrote? That’s a silly response to it. I was talking about AP Weltanschauung.
March 25, 2009 at 9:22 pm
I haven’t read ToJ and am unlikely to. An argumentative grounding of one of the versions of conventionality doesn’t do any work.
March 25, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Au cuntraire: the Gestalty, Deweyan, existentialist, vaguely religious approach didn’t work. Hegelian-Marxism did not work, for the most part (well, it did succeed in terms of liquidation). The US Constitution does sort of work; with some tweaking ala Rawls, it might work better.
That said, I am no liberal optimist (that’s your role), quite aware of Darwinian/materialism, and for that matter, not a worshipper of any philosophers, yet some AP figures did possess a conceptual type of knowledge which is not merely quantitative, or intuitive/aesthetic. Sort of…….analytical. Your tendency to lump together all of AP usually misses that. Russell the old fiend argued for a type of wisdom, beyond just equation-crunching, or the verbal knowledge of belle-lettrists. As in Sophia–not pathos, and not strictly logos.
March 25, 2009 at 10:01 pm
As I understand. and according to some of his own testimony, Russell had to ditch his philosophy in order to say much of anything at all about political and social questions. He was OK, not the worst, not the best.
It becomes annoying when you start heaping up names for me to defend. Marx, Hegel, and Zizek are no more my business than yours.
We seem to have come, not for the first time, to the point when the argument becomes repetitious and fruitless. Let’s try again later.
March 26, 2009 at 8:31 am
@76, what’s with all the nonsense about the things that “work” and “don’t work”? One doesn’t need to read all that crap you’re so proud of having read to know that nothing “works”.
As The Philosopher of philosophers said: all is vanity and chasing after the wind.
March 26, 2009 at 10:16 am
Thanks for playing, Abb1. Horatio and I have both read a lot of crap, though not exactly the same crap. It’s a presumption of the thread that this is a good thing. We’re arguing about what kinds of crap should be favored within philosophy, which we agree is in general a legit enterprise (though we have disagreements about what it should include.)
“Nothing works” is just a two-word attitude and doesn’t go anywhere, the area of “Life Sux”. But if it makes you happy.
March 26, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Typical juvenile nihilistic response from the Abby.
Many things work. Say, modern medicine. Computers. Aircraft carriers. Even predicate logic. Now, prayer: that doesn’t work. Most parisian leftist jargon: that doesn’t work either.
March 26, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Rawls Theory of Justice closer to authentic xtianity (whatever that is), anyway, than either statism or Nozickland (or the phonies of the weblog). Rawls respects Kant’s categorical imperative, and unlike most leftists, he doesn’t think it’s merely theoretical (or ironic).
Monotheism (whether Xtianity, Joodaism, or Islam) doesn’t exactly have a great ethical track record either. Abby, like many believers, probably objects to analytical philosophy because of the AP skeptics like Russell–a whole ‘nother issue pretty much untouched on the TB (who has bothered to read Russell’s criticism of the traditional theological arguments for God, or his discussion of Hume, etc? Hume himself had already greatly undermined any theological claims circa 1750 or so, and his essay contra-miracles offered sound reasons for questioning the supposed inerrancy of scripture. )
March 26, 2009 at 3:06 pm
I’m sorry, it didn’t come out right (too much work these days).
Reading is fine, of course. What I don’t like is these “working” and “not working” labels. There is no superior point of view, only different angles, approaches, models.
Both Euclidean and Lobachevsky models work fine, pick the one you like more.
March 26, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Jesus fuck, Horatio, would you please target a little more carefully? I’m less hostile to Christianity to you but I’m not a theist and haven’t been since 1961 or so. I occasionally quote the Bible to you just to annoy you. I like Kotsko and find him interesting. You are free to disagree. I think that the social Christians from 1880 to the present have been a positive force in American life and greatly regret that they’ve been superseded by Armageddonists.
You need a different tack than “Hume and Quine refuted that”. People who believe that believe that, but it doesn’t clinch every argument the way you wish.
My reading of Nietzsche is that he was pointing out that people of his time tried to ground their social truths on Science the way that Christians had tried to ground them on the Bible, and that it didn’t work either way. That kind of grounding is bogus, whatever grounding is alleged. So this puts you back to zero, with the whole package of social truths right there before you ungrounded by anything. And to me the supposedly Christian truths are no more objectionable than the supposedly Scientific truths.
Science constrains social truths, but without grounding them or proving them. Science is like a means to an end, or a critical corrective.
March 26, 2009 at 3:35 pm
ABB1: some things just plain don’t work. Horatio’s line of attack was completely legit, considering that I’m a pragmatist. There are usually several ways to attain any given goal, but there are also ways that always fail.
In a way that’s what pragmatism is, results-defined validation as opposed to method-defined or Truth-defined practice. The proof is in the pudding.
March 26, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Horatiox:
“[Foucault, Lacan] wrote one coherent paragraph for every 10 incoherent ones”
“Try reading some Kant, Emmy.”
I think Immanuel wrote zero coherent paragraphs, on average, for every 10 incoherent ones. Doesn’t seem quite fair to deride Lacan on the same grounds. We don’t have to forgive the excesses of the Continentals, but let’s not dismiss them on the grounds of mere opacity either.
Some people still use the quaint old term “metaphysics,” which actually still works for me, despite its being declared moribund by Analytics and Contintentals alike.
March 26, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Ah but Hume’s point–a supremely Newtonian point, really–on the uniformity of experience precluding miracles does work, however trite, dull, or obvious it seems to many of us. With Rev. Hagees still in the pulpits (or Phelps, Wrights, or Farrakhans,et al) a Hume still remains viable–so do the Founding Fathers. Jefferson considered the Book of Revelation the work of a madman. The leftist xtians who now think they can work with any religious zealots themselves could use Hume (though he’s considered booj-wah, if not crypt-fascist).
Some Postmods sorts insist Marx was sympathetic to theology: not accurate. He realized that many poor folk were religious mostly because of desperation. Marx never blessed the Church–whether prot., Cat., jewish, muslim, etc–even when their charitable works helped some people out. Religion is bourgeois ideology for orthodox marxism, regardless of the few instances of the Churches supporting liberal reform.
It was an issue for the Bolsheviks as well, but the official policy was economic materialism, and anti-religious, even if in some areas the Bolsheviks allowed the churches to remain in force (including some sharia courts). Trotsky supposedly later regretted the appeasement of religious groups. Stalin helped bring orthodoxy back into power.
March 26, 2009 at 4:23 pm
What people say is that Marx was crypto-prophetic and in that sense religious. His anti-religious views are well-known.
Horatio, akismet support might free you from my spam net. I’ve been routinely approving everything, but it’s possibly that someone else’s block is applying to me.
March 26, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Many things work. Say, modern medicine. Computers. Aircraft carriers. Even predicate logic. Now, prayer: that doesn’t work. Most parisian leftist jargon: that doesn’t work either.
classic — smuggling in scientism so analytic philosophy shares in the reflected glory from antibiotics and airplanes. What bullshit. Predicate logic was invented when, 500 BC? When was the airplane invented?
the Gestalty, Deweyan, existentialist, vaguely religious approach didn’t work. Hegelian-Marxism did not work, for the most part (well, it did succeed in terms of liquidation). The US Constitution does sort of work
wow. I guess the shining example of the U.S. constitution really lets us bring order to all this confusion of different approaches.
March 26, 2009 at 4:38 pm
And I do like the U.S. Constitution, although I would never claim that it “works” in any simple sense. But the U.S. constitution emerged from an Enlightenment philosophical background that is much, much closer to John’s ideal than it is to analytic philosophy. To the degree that the U.S. Constitution is going to be your penicillin analogy for political thought, you should want philosophy to go in a much more humanistic, history-oriented direction. The Federalist papers have nothing to do with Rawls. They’re driven by empirical observations of human nature and historical example, and heavily influenced by enlightenment thought about virtue.
March 26, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Have you read Rawls, PGD? Point out his errors. The decision matrix hardly any different than that used by many economists. For that matter, you operate on Darwinian-naturalist grounds, you have no grounds to complain about anything really: so Kant’s a meme of some sort. (anyway Frege updated Aristotle rather substantially).
Your mystification points apply to economics. Let’s see your empirical evidence of something known as “utility,” or even equilibrium, except as just a description of financial transactions: those are as much constructs as Rawl’s difference principle: indeed, philosophers more or less founded economics: Smith was working with Hume.
Logic’s hardly anymore mystification than classical economics (ie a rational man standard, invisible hand etc.). Less, really. Economic theory is constructed, inductive, probable. Lakatos asserted it was nearly all pseudo-science.
March 26, 2009 at 5:06 pm
Virtue!
The whole point of AP (starting with Hume, if not earlier) was to ask, what do words like Virtue mean? Is it located on periodic table? Nyet. It will take quite a bit of work explaining exactly what it does mean, if it means anything at all. To the positivist, it’s meaningless. Even by suggesting something like “virtue” exists, you seem to involve something like metaphysics (if not universals–a key problem for AP).
Not all APers were anti-history (and Rawls wasn’t. Had some of you read the text, instead of Wiki, you might note Rawls spends several pages discussing the manner in which historical-social conditions will be accounted for in any real-world attempts to implement the orig/position or difference principle).
I’m not defending AP as a whole anyway–I object to some of the “greedy reductionism” of Quine. Yet compared to average 500 paragraphs of postmod-Hegel-Lacanian sludge, a few pages of QuineSpeak are rather eloquent. (Really, one should deal with specific points of AP you disagree with instead of grand generalizations)
March 26, 2009 at 5:19 pm
What PGD said, but I’ll say it again anyway:
prayer – it “doesn’t work” in the most vulgar sense, otherwise it sure works for many, many people; some of them I know personally. Incidentally, in the same sense that “prayer doesn’t work”, the US constitution doesn’t work either; y’know, being just a bunch of words printed on a piece of paper.
Diamat certainly does work, without a doubt; a perfectly valid model, empirically observable.
March 26, 2009 at 5:24 pm
PGD is an economist, but hardly a defendy of neoclassical econ. Just to move the discussion along.
I’m pretty Rawls-neutral, but I don’t see that he goes any work. From hearing people talk about him, he just provides an apologia for one version of contemporary normalcy (a liberal / social democrat meld). Good as far as it goes.
My beef with AP is that the tools of thought developed and taught by AP since 1960 are useless or worse than useless for anyone discussing human society and human history even from a purely theoretical POV, and from an applied-normative POV (how to live, political action) they are even worse. They really make the intelligent discussion of actuality almost impossible; you alwas will get bogged down in the mind-body problem or the foundations of ethics or th ontology of the mind or the ontology or “society” or something.
Rorty pointed out 20 years ago that Rawls doesn’t make use of the AP tools. He’s the dominant american academic political philosopher just as a stopgap. The ruling cabal would have preferred someone who used properly analytic methods, but that’s impossible for anyone to do.
March 26, 2009 at 5:41 pm
Again, you’re begging the question on the status of history as knowledge. What actually occurs when you read, say, something about the French Rev. and Napoleon? You have no direct acquaintance with the facts. There are conflicting reports; there are conservative accounts, liberal accounts, marxist accounts. Yes, it’s probably likely much of what is reported is accurate, but it’s not necessarily true. We have to construct a narrative, and much may be missing. That may be obvious, dull, trite, etc. Regardless, historical knowledge is contingent: new facts are added, new interpretations are added. It’s not mathematics. The verificationists (and Popper) may have gone too far, but one should realize the power of the Weltanschauung of the german idealists and marxists.
The Hegelian dream of some historical science was itself rather dubious: we might see something like a dialectic in some situations, but that’s not predictable whatsoever, except in the broadest sense–Germany attacks Russia; Russia reacts. Hegelian philosophy may have had a certain romantic power (and let’s not forget Hegel worshipped roman emperors, Luther, Machiavelli, etc), but he was no Nostradamus. Again, Popper’s criticism of Hegel and Marx are worth reading, even for the galois-smoking hepcat at Cafe A Gauche.
March 26, 2009 at 5:58 pm
No, I’m not. Early AP proposed, among other things, that if discourse about history and society (both theoretical and practical discourse) were reformed and reorganized along AP lines, we would have a new, far superior discourse.
Nothing like that happened at all. AP has ranged from irrelevant to wrong (the positivism of Milton Friedman and Lionel Robbins has been disastrous). That game is almost a hundred years old, and it’s over.
March 26, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Fuck. Horation, my mouse finger slipped and I deleted that one.
March 26, 2009 at 7:17 pm
“Germany attacks Russia, Russia reacts” has absolutely nothing to do with dialectics; pure cause-and-effect thing.
Much more dialectical and interesting is the story of the British and French fostering and appeasing that ultra-nationalist “Drang nach Osten” movement in Germany, which then turns around and negates the sons of bitches, so that they end up uniting against it with the guys who they were trying to negate in the first place. Pretty fascinating, actually.
March 26, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Really? Here it is again, though I think you’re a bit too attached to the pragmo-marxist-holistic dogma, and so any arguments in favor of AP will not likely phase you.
AS was said earlier on this thread, evidentialism still plays an important part in most types of knowledge: AP was not merely about “discourse” or rhetoric, but induction, evidentiary reasoning, probability, phil. of science, language, logic, truth etc. Not especially exciting, but you’re positing some obligation again–they should have done this or that instead of what they did (I’m tired of repeating the usual names, but Popper and Russell did discuss politics, economics, even “Weltanschauung”–Russell was friendly with Kropotkin, the fabian society, etc. I don’t think you understand the historical context either–like the rebellion against the german idealists).
For that matter, AP was against jargon (another Russellian point)–a point lost on the usual continental or pragmo-marxist wind machine. After reading a few dozen pages of Rorty’s windy conceptual generalizations, Russell’s quaint Queen’s anglo seems like eloquence itself.
Really, I think you’re a marxist (or wannabe) but just won’t cop to it. Analytical philosophers like Russell are guilty because they are from the elite universities, the upper crust, tradition bound, etc and they were not even honest enough to become engineers, doctors, or “real” scientists, etc. Same ol same ol: analytical philosophy as emblematic of bourgeois individualism, family privilege, a certain platonic aspect, etc. So Emerchek doesn’t really even argue against them, but simply classifies them among the class of Oppressors. I think you might start another thread (I have to return to work, comrade. Arbeiten macht fried!)
March 26, 2009 at 7:27 pm
“Germany attacks Russia, Russia reacts” has absolutely nothing to do with dialectics; pure cause-and-effect thing.
Not entirely accurate, since Hegel was a military historian par example, and did often use battles and nationalist struggle as a type of evidence for dialectical movement. The dialectic does have a causal aspect, according to both Hegel and Marx. Not sure where in the Hegelian labyrinthe –Sci. of Logic, perhaps–Hegel discusses that, but he’s no platonist ( Aristotelian, really, and more materialist than many realize). The dialectic enters nature, and history. And for that matter, given Hegelian process, a WWII is just a stage of historical development of Geist itself: GWFH approves of War, more or less. Everything’s Good to the real Hegelian (not the cafe-marxist hegelian).
March 26, 2009 at 8:56 pm
You’re absolutely right that you’re not likely to faze me, of course.
I’ve had a lot of contact with Marxists and have vonsiderable sympathy with them, but when it gets serious we end up in endless arguments like this one.
I had made my peace with a big chunk of pre-1960 AP at a certain point, but found that the stuff I liked (Gellner, Rom Harre, Wittgenstein, Ryle) was being relegated to the back room. Popper and Russell’s politics are the kind of thing which was being excised.
You’ve got a lot of irrelevant stuff floating around. Basically I don’t like AP because it disables philosophy for certain kinds of topics, excludes better philosophers from the biz, is obsessed with certain not very interesting questions, and fails to ask more interesting questions.
March 26, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Of course the WWII is just a stage of historical development – what is controversial about that?
He has an angle, and that’s an interesting, original angle. It doesn’t explain everything, obviously, just like, say, an infrared picture doesn’t reveal everything about the object, but it does capture a slice of reality. What more can we ask for?
March 26, 2009 at 10:30 pm
We have to construct a narrative, and much may be missing. That may be obvious, dull, trite, etc. Regardless, historical knowledge is contingent: new facts are added, new interpretations are added. It’s not mathematics.
Ummm, this is precisely the point. History is not mathematics or engineering but is willing to admit that fact and work from that basis. Other disciplines have physics envy and are not willing to make this admission, and in fact actively work to delegitimate all forms of knowledge that don’t pay the proper homage to scientism and instrumental reasoning.
Horatiox is beginning to sound a little like a Tom Friedman of the seminar room in his patronizing repetition of the accepted centrist truisms, academic version.
March 26, 2009 at 11:13 pm
And Abby sounds like the usual marxist dogmatist, spouting the usual half-baked emotional manipulations. The little labels don’t mean anything: usual ID politics, not even bad marxism. I doubt you’ve ever read a page of real philosophy in your life (like for one, Hume. No obligations to be ethical, or to be leftist. I might like War. Oh well. De gustibus, etc)
March 27, 2009 at 12:17 am
Goddammit, quit waving your Hume fetish. We’ve heard that.
March 27, 2009 at 12:33 am
No, you haven’t. It’s not about “Hume”, or names or characters whatsoever. It’s about the arguments. DH pointed out many of the problems with rationalism (including rational “ethics”, whatever that was)–and empiricism as well. You cannot just magically invoke “normativity”, or innateness, some groovy gestaltist whatever, or implied marxism.
March 27, 2009 at 12:55 am
You can suck on your Hume security blanket if you want. The ethical principles he refuted were the contemporary attempt to put ethics (etc.) on some sort of rational, scientific, indisputable basis.
People have gone on to other ways of doing ethics, but you and a fair number of others in the biz still maintain the old refuted insistence on a rational, scientific, indisputable basic for morals. And Hume’s avatars and proxies is still around to attack that when it’s tried, so we end up with an endless tire-spinning argument.
March 27, 2009 at 1:00 am
Au cuntraire. Refuted? Has Darwinism been refuted? If anything, Hume via Darwinism, naturalism as a whole has been reinforced over last 100+ years or so (except for the rise of religious fundamentalism–which you seem fairly comfy with). You are again invoking, fulminating, barking, but not really arguing. Instead, maybe prove to me WHY Hume is mistaken re fact/value distinction (which Carnap also agreed to, for most part).
March 27, 2009 at 1:29 am
We’re getting pretty close to the end of our travel, Horatio. My opinion is that Hume is right that there can’t be a naturalistic, scientific, or rationalist ethics, and for that reason I don’t look for those. I’m ontologically naturalist in the sense of not being a dualist, an idealist, or a supernaturalist, but not in the sense that I think that ethics and politics can or should be naturalistic, scientific, or rationalist. And that’s pretty much the end of it for me.
You want me to justify ethics (etc.) to you in your terms, but that’s just you. I can’t, won’t, refuse to, don’t care, have moved on, think that it would be impossible to do so, and don’t give a flying fuck.
And therein lies the difference. I renounced the scientistic / rationalistic Holy Grail and went on with my life.
March 27, 2009 at 7:33 am
I, of course, haven’t read a single page of Hume, but from what the internet tells me about his views on ethic, it’s the same as modern evolutionary psychology, Pinker&Co.
So what. These guys have their slice too, like everybody else.
Human nature – fine, sure; but why are these guys so aggressive, as if they felt their little theories are threatened when people state the obvious: a huge part of the big puzzle (including ethics, of course) is environmental, social conditioning.
March 27, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Given DH ‘s maxim of “no ideas without antecedent impressions”–he would probably be in agreement with conditioning, even behaviorism. So much for ethics. AP does have an empirical strain (then so did Marx). The point on the is-ought was to show that the language of morali-tay was itself vague and insubstantial.
Let’s put it this way: those thinkers who want some ethical objectivity or Kantian deontology must deal with the many counterarguments–not just the chestnuts of DH, but Darwin, Nietzsche, evolutionary psychology, etc. yada yada yada. YOu want to try ethics, maybe take a crack at Rawls, who was well aware of all these issues. He’s attempting to get to Kant–and show some type of obligation, contra-DH–but via a contract.
Marxists of course have no need for any ethics: like his master Hegel, Marx was a determinist (or damn near), and wasn’t making normative judgments (except maybe implicitly): capitalism may exploit the working class, but is not injust, in some platonic, religious sense.
There may be some “Compatibilism” to marxist thinking (his points on Feuerbach), but I contend he was primarily an Aristotelian materialist (as did Spinoza)–though probably from Heraclitus, really. Shit happens, mo or less.
March 27, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Seriously. Horatio, I think we’ve finished it. Like a lot of other people* you think that ethical / normative (etc.) thinking is either illicit and delusory (and probably oppressive), or else needs scientific grounding and logical reconstruction in order to be valid. I reject both ideas.
*Structuralists, Freudians, Lacanians, Marxists, liberationists, relativists, nihilists, post-modernists, Social Darwinists, determinists, reductionists, many naturalists, and many or most schools of AP. They mostly are running after the Holy Grail of Science, they all claim an expert specialist superiority over both the average man and the generalist, they all have agendas ranging from mysticism to personal liberation to scientific aggrandizement to administrative authority to a quiet feeling of enormous superiority to the plebs.
Liberation and the Holy Grail are the nightmares from which we are trying to escape.
March 27, 2009 at 3:18 pm
You reject the discussion–not only of ethics, but of freedom and determinism (a bit more involved)–. That doesn’t mean you have disproven anything (or proven anything), and merely suggest some other, mysterious psychological or leftist-pragmatist alternative.
In effect, you have even admitted that DH and Carnap/Quine’s points contra-metaphysics and the language of moralitay hold. So at least in part you agree AP succeeded, though you might object to the psychological implications or something. Cognitivism may advance our knowledge beyond that of analytical philosophy–and show exactly how language, logic, mathematics, higher order thinking functions neurologically— yet many in the cognitive school were influenced by people like Quine. They’re unlikely to discover some Cartesian or platonic ghosts
March 27, 2009 at 3:24 pm
You finally got past the spam screen.
In effect, you have even admitted that DH and Carnap/Quine’s points contra-metaphysics and the language of moralitay hold.
Pretty much explicitly, not just “in effect”, though in a limited way.
I don’t object to the very existence of AP at any time ever anywhere, as though it were an abomination to be rooted out. I object to its present domination of the phil biz. Rorty said something like “AP has done it’s work.” (Though I do have reservations about AP even at best, I hasten to add. )
March 27, 2009 at 3:51 pm
You don’t understand. Marxists do need and have ethics, it’s just that they believe that the ethics don’t exist in a vacuum; they stem from the socio-economic system.
You should’ve phrased it like this: ‘capitalists exploit the working class, and it’s not unjust in the paradigm of capitalism‘. This is correct, and obvious.
Not enough to skim over all that stuff, it helps if you understand the basics.
March 27, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Ah I thought you might have picked up on the Cartesian jass. Really the philosophical battles of AP–and of say, Chomsky vs. the behaviorists–were foreshadowed in the battles between Descartes and Hobbes, but most Joe Varsities don’t realize it (nor do Jill Varsities, like those naive liberal shrews of Unfogged). The continental school follows from Descartes (mostly); the empiricists from Hobbes. The catholics still follow Descartes (tho some more aristotelian), the protestants Hobbes.
I’m not saying Hobbes won hands down, though his points on corporeality are difficult to disagree with, even for those who don’t care for the implications. Hobbes wants to discuss politics and economics: he wants to keep society from falling into riot and ruin. He’s practical. Descartes is anything but practical. He wants to discuss Mind, God, the timeless truths of mathematics, etc.
(hey Abby: I’m quite sure I’ve read as much Marx as you, and ethicist he was not. The German Ideology was supremely empirical–so is Capital. Yes people are conditioned by social-economic factors. That in itself runs against the idea of an objective rational ethics)
March 27, 2009 at 4:08 pm
There are a million kinds of Marxists, and many of them are flatly anti-ethical. Ethics under sapitalism is false consciousness, ethics under Communism will be unnecessary.
I don’t spend a lot of time trying to keep up, obviously. The first thing to do with Marxism is to junk it, and the second thing to do is scavenge it for anything useful. Some say that the third thing to do is to rebuild a new and improved Marxism (which paradoxically expresses what Marx really meant!), but I don’t agree at all.
I sometimes use Dewey as an example of what philosophy could be, mostly because Rorty did, but I’m not a Dewey devotee, or a Nietzsche devotee, or a James devotee, etc. Marxist / Freudian / Lacanian […. n] devotionalism is crap.
March 27, 2009 at 4:38 pm
There’s something to be said for a catholic Weltanschauung: all villains, thieves, whores, hypocritcal clergy, Ulysses-like hustlers and pimps etc will be accounted for….Inferno way. And you get to keep your Mind, objective ethics, Reason, the greeks etc. Vaya con Dios!
March 27, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Um, tos, I’m sure you’ve read much more Marx and everything else, that’s not the problem. Your problem seems to be that all that stuff is getting converted in your head into some rather primitive caricature.
March 27, 2009 at 6:03 pm
I think that’s your approach to Marx; besides Marxism IS primitive.
Perhaps you’d like to come out to CA this fall and work with some of the marxists on the harvest? Marxism was about labor. Marx didn’t want philosophers or even academics. He wanted
mechanics, electricians, better factories, farms, tradesmen etc. He was closer in thinking to DeLeon than to a Zizek or Chomsky.
March 27, 2009 at 6:07 pm
Ah did you make it through Descartes’ Meditations, yet abby? A bit steeper than, workers of the world unite.
March 27, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Let’s keep the personal shit down, guys.
March 27, 2009 at 6:34 pm
See, I really have no “approach to Marx”, nor do I care in the least of what Marx wanted or didn’t want.
It occurred to me just now that it might be cool if you could express your thoughts on the subject in the form of a comic strip. Would you try?
March 27, 2009 at 7:20 pm
No.
Perhaps google some of the old Descartes-Hobbes battle. Let’s put it this way, in brief–Cartesianism, if mistaken, merely results in various empirical-naturalist alternatives–Hobbes, to Hume, Marx, Darwin, evo-psych. etc. Cartesianism, if correct–or at least plausible–results in a type of metaphysical dualism, and then religious truths of some sort could hold, and Hobbes, to Hume, Marx, Darwin,et al rest in some nasty district of the Malebolge.
March 27, 2009 at 7:42 pm
In brief indeed. All or nothing, either in Hell or on Mount Olympus. Got it.
March 27, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Purgatorio a possibility as well–tho’ not for the usual calvinist rat. As with Hume. With a mind as exquisitely cool and rational as Hume, maybe after a few thousand years or cleansing, he’s ready for Mt. Olympus (Marxy Marx as well).
March 28, 2009 at 5:04 pm
The French aren’t simply Cartesian — the point is to synthesize Descartes and Montaigne. Hume has some of spirit of Montaigne in him, which makes him a far cry from today’s heavy handed and humorless acolytes of scientism. It’s silly to put Hume in the same tradition as your typical “evolutionary psychologist” today.
March 28, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Ah belle-lettres time. Who was talking about the “french”?–that was continental, as in continental philosophy. Descartes was not as influential in England, especially after-Newton; for that matter, the Encyclopedists and Voltaire were mostly opposed to the Cartesians (both in terms of physics and metaphysics), and following Newton and Locke (Hume, perhaps, too, but he was a Tory, and not as sympathetic to revolution, though probably sympathetic to the purge of the first estate).
And I wasn’t the one who said DH was merely an evolutionary psychologist, though I have read that Darwin and TH Huxley had read Hume. Hume was a proto-positivist. Carnap made mention of various Humean topics–the is-ought problem, the matters of fact/relations of ideas (synthetic/analytic distinction , more or less), the induction issue, etc.
March 29, 2009 at 4:10 am
For me, it’s not AP but HP (but Holbo’s OK).
March 29, 2009 at 11:52 am
Holblo claims to be an APer. His generalized, chatty rhetoric (liberal vs conservative! wow), provides little evidence to support that claim. He drops in a few dozen paragraphs of a Great like JS Mill (utilitarianism, the philosophaster’s version of a straw poll), engages in some lightweight policy wanking, points out how someone in the Blog Biz linked to his policy wanking, etc. Then a few days later he’s discussing the latest Batman comic or somethin.’
March 29, 2009 at 4:32 pm
The contemporary AP generation is trying to repopulate some of the ground that was devastated between 1950 and 1980. More power to them, but as far as I can tell they still are terribly cramped by the AP paradigm.
March 30, 2009 at 12:22 pm
I know I’m a good week late and more than a few guilders short, but my newspaper (nrc.next, it calls itself) has a weekly column in which a chap called Rob Wijnberg rounds up a bunch of philosophical ideas and puts them to work in confronting the Issues of the Day.
This enterprise has now spawned a book, Kant and Nietzsche Read the Newspaper (Kant en Neitzsche lezen de krant), which I have no particular interest in spending twenty(20) euros on, since I mostly read them as they came out.
All of which is a very roundabout way of wondering if it is therefore OK if Anglophone p-theory[1] doesn’t, in fact, particularly rankle my arse. (It did used to bother me a lot more when I lived in Blighty, for sure.)
[1] I appreciate that the term “analytic philosophy” irritates Boombastic Brian Leiter, and this alone justifies its use. But I prefer p-theory as a name for the kind of philosophy that aspires to the condition of mathematics. (In fact I would prefer to classify the bits that are based on mathematical logic as a form of applied mathematics. The main difference from the usual form is that instead of using their mathematical models for something they start bickering inanely about which of them is “true”.)
March 30, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Hm. And exemption for the Afgescheidenen in Holland? Hm, I don’t want to set a precedent. Could you just do a little ritual rankling once in awhile?
March 30, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Oh all right then. I will rankle in sympathy with my Anglophone comrades on special occasions. You should maybe inaugurate an Analytic Philosophy Enranklement Day for the benefit of all of us outside its hegemony, otherwise we might very easily forget.
March 30, 2009 at 3:31 pm
The status of mathematical knowledge itself a central issue of AP. Quine’s doing something quite different than Frege was. Many in phil-biz seemed to have forgotten that the early Quine was a nominalist, more or less (along with his crony Goodman). He vacillated a bit (the ontological relativism bit) on nominalism, yet the only mathematical realism he allowed was the indispensability argument.
AP should not be assumed to be equivalent to mathematical realism; Quine was still closer to the vienna circle and analytical empiricism than to the logicist school of Frege and Russell, or set theory.
March 31, 2009 at 6:05 pm
Speaking of Russell, however quaint and/or arrogantly-aristo he may have been, BR’s cool prose–and moderate socialist vision– seems fairly appealing compared to the Jane Pauleys-on-crack of Unfogged and similar sites.
The Unfogged sort of faux-liberal doesn’t really argue for a particular POV or policy; instead, she points out the bad taste of her enemies of the day, or whines about what a crypto-nazi-loozer he is, with lapdogs like Apo chiming along. Sort of like a Contra Costa switchboard gone wild (and those are yr peoples, JE).
The Sally Fields-left should rankle yr ass as much as the cerebral AP types do.
April 3, 2009 at 12:48 am
April 13, 2009 at 12:48 pm
You’re out of touch, old man. The latest rage in philosophy is “experimental philosophy” (“x-phi”), in which analytical methods are subordinated to statistical and laboratory studies. It’s philosophy made adjunct to experimental science. Not quite the return to the humanistic orientation that you (and I too) would like to see, but not the same old early 20th-c. Oxbridge it’s-all-language-games same old either.
April 13, 2009 at 8:16 pm
I’m not sure what to say, except huzzah.
Have you read any of Schacht’s work on N?
April 13, 2009 at 9:50 pm
138: no, please name some.
137: Hardly seems like much of an improvement, probably a slightly more concrete version of AP — the kind of stuff I would relegate to the sciences themselves, for them to dispose of as they wished.
April 14, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Well, all the young dudes (they’re practically all dudes) of x-phi would say that they’re revolutionary in that they demand empirical verification of any conclusions about ethics or cognition, which are generally their favorite concerns. They decry what they call “armchair philosophy” — i.e., working from intuition. That’s what’s been wrong for the last 2500 years of the Western philosophical tradition. The favored image of x-phi partisans is the burning armchair (though I don’t know if they’ve actually gone and made ‘burning armchair’ t-shirts).
Check out the blog of Eric Schwitzgebel (“Schwitzsplinters”) to see an example of a well-regarded youngish (he’s 41) academic philosopher who promotes empirical methods in cognitive theory and ethics. Schwitzgebel also publishes occasionally on Chinese philosophy. (He uses English translations. Personally I think studying philosophical texts requires proficiency in their original language, but evidently that’s not an issue for bona fide philosophers. And they pride themselves on their rigor. Hah.)
April 14, 2009 at 10:19 pm
It seems to me that the advice to get more PhD philosophy cab drivers involved in this enterprise is a symptom of the very problem being described. Philosophy is seen as a kind of mental gymnastics done by people who are invisible except to people with PhD’s in the art. If you want to change philosphy you need to bring people to it who are not highly trained specialists.
I know essentially nothing about the art. That gives me a perspective that can be immediately dismissed as naive by its practitioners. But again, I think to do so might be a mistake.
I have read a few tidbits by Hume, Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. I find Gauthier’s Morals by Agreement to be interesting. I have no idea whether Gauthier is a credentialled philosopher. I find flaws in his reasoning and flaws of fact. But I give him credit for taking on a topic that deserves some treatment. It is clear that one of the big problems faced today among all secular democracies is how to motivate people to behave in ethically constructive ways when religion no longer suffices to do so. Morals by Agreement, for all its flaws, starts the discussion.
Philosophy’s branches of physics and metaphysics have given birth to science. Science has gone far; but the problem of overspecialization takes its toll there, too. Still, I think it is wise to let science take on the task of describing the physical world instead of philosophy. Similarly, I cannot help but wonder whether various branches of the social sciences and humanities are not better equipped to take on questions about social organization and interaction.
I’m afraid I really don’t know what contemporary philosophy does. But I think what Americans need most is to unlearn a narrow focus on facts, to unlearn certain bad habits of mind, to learn how to ask good questions, and to synthesize information well. If philosophy can help us do these things, it deserves to thrive. If it continues to grow ever more arcane and esoteric, its influence deserves to wane.
April 14, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Well, all the young dudes (they’re practically all dudes) of x-phi would say that they’re revolutionary in that they demand empirical verification of any conclusions about ethics or cognition, which are generally their favorite concerns. They decry what they call “armchair philosophy” — i.e., working from intuition. That’s what’s been wrong for the last 2500 years of the Western philosophical tradition.
I see people talking about empirical ethics and have no idea WTF they can be talking about. Is there an ethical iridium standard somewhere to measure against?
I agree that most of cognition and much of philosophy of mind should be passed over to the relevant sciences. But as you know, I’m suspicious of claims to rigor.
April 15, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Schacht is, to my mind, the best of the post- Deleuze and Nehamas Nietzsche scholars, but I’m one of those damnable perspectivists, be warned. A good starting point is “Making Sense of Nietzsche”. Slightly clunky title, fantastic work. In some ways it’s a response to Nehamas and criticism, in other ways it builds on him.
If you’re not familiar with Alexander Nehamas, you should be. His work is very cognizant of the dangers and weaknesses of the discipline you’ve mentioned, and brilliant. There are flaws to his approach to Nietzsche, but he’s been invaluable in clearing away mistaken traditions, especially from Heidegger.
April 15, 2009 at 4:55 pm
And, just in case you haven’t read it, I have to recommend Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game”. Besides being a Nobel Prize winning piece of fiction, it’s very much about the concerns underlying this post.
April 15, 2009 at 8:53 pm
I love it! We start with a long harangue about overspecialization, lack of concern with how things fit into the greater picture, how philosophy is completely controlled by credentials, how it grows ever more irrelevant because of this problem. And when a clueless person who is not specialized, who wonders how philosophy fits into the greater picture, who has no credentials, and who is interested in knowing how the discipline might be resurrected cluelessly wonders into the room he is invisible.
April 16, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Sorry Steve. I couldn’t think of any specific response to your comment, which was pretty general.
May 17, 2009 at 3:38 pm
So your main beef with analytic philosophy is that it is too rigorous? Uh huh.
And when good philosophy, inevitably, collided with bullshit continental philosophy I’m sure you would be the first one to start pulling loose threads and argue that it failed because it wasn’t rigorous enough.
Weak.
May 17, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Heavy-handed sarcasm is rarely an effective debating tactic, Fool. You also seem to be one of those who can only think of two kinds of philosophy, with “continental philosophy” being the Brand X Washington Generals Hamilton Burger designated losers. But I’m a pragmatist.
Analytic philosophy sacrifices scope for supposed rigor, at the price of often disengaging from actuality almost entirely in pursuit of hypotheticals and conundrums. It’s a Potemkin false-front rigor — what you’re allowed to see is perfectly done, more perfect than the real thing, but you’re not allowed to ask whether the house has an inside ore a back.
May 18, 2009 at 1:51 am
Its not that I think philosophy only has two branches, obviously. I specified continental philosophy because 1) you specified it in your description of yourself as something you were influenced by and 2) because much continental philosophy is glorified bullshit.
Yeah being rigorous makes for a tougher slog than not being rigorous and saying lots of cool shit. Of course, its easier to talk about lots of exciting sounding cool shit when you sacrifice rigor, just like its easier to play tennis when you don’t use a net.
It’s like the difference between a physics journal and a popular science book or magazine. Yeah, The Dancing Wu Li Masters or Discover magazine have more surface appeal than the American Journal of Physics, since they all those golly gee whiz discussions and cool illustrations and photographs. And understand, I’m not entirely knocking The Dancing Wu Li Masters or Discover magazine. I have enjoyed them both. But they have nothing on the American Journal of Physics when it comes down to getting at the truth of science. (Actually my examples aren’t even good ones because much continental philosophy has distinctly more of an element of fraud and dishonesty than either The Dancing Wu Li Masters or Discover magazine).
What exactly do you think analytic philosophy has given up in terms of scope?
May 18, 2009 at 3:23 am
Fool, I see no evidence in either of your comments that you even read my post. Your Wu Li Masters example is just the same-old same-old kind of sneering counterexample analytic philosophers pull out of their butts when dimly they get a sense that their field is not loved.
What I said was
The key words were “very limited”. I was specifically trying to preclude the kind of comment you made. I could have made that more explicit in my originally piece, but I wasn’t writing for the likes of you. But here it is: I admire Nietzsche, Foucault, Marx sometimes, and no other “continental” philosophers.
Dude, you’re not ready for prime time. I was hoping for dialogue on the piece I wrote, not for generic kneejerk polemical ejaculations of the standard AP type. For all your pretensions, you guys are just too fucking dumb. sometimes
May 19, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Sorry, you did say it was very limited. I read it quickly and lost the qualifier. But, whatever your influences may be, I still think that the attack on analytic philosophy is wrongheaded. They may not do everything you would like them to do. But they do what they do. And what they are doing is the nuts and bolts. Its up to YOU, perhaps, to use those nuts and bolts to construct something bigger.
But there is a good reason why they do what they do. Its because people can always ask the question, “Why?”. Continental philosophers and pragmatists of the Rortyian stripe can always say, “Well what about this?”. They are simply trying to meet objections and I applaud them for that. The alternative is lots of naked assertions and vague claims that never acknowledge objections much less meet them.
May 20, 2009 at 3:23 am
I’m not terribly impressed by what they do, and I really deny that it’s “nuts and bolts”. I think of it more as a dead end. But what I especially object to is the way they crowded out better stuff for a generation or more.
June 9, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Here are some comments Timothy Williamson made in response to a similar question:
“It seems to me that people shouldn’t spend too much time worrying about whether what they’re doing is significant. It’s better that they worry about whether what they’re saying is true.”
“I think that what people have to realise is that if you ask an exciting question, and then you make a serious effort to find out what the answer to it is, you just can’t expect that every step on the way will be equally exciting. The point of rigour is actually to enable one’s mistakes to be as easily spotted as possible, so that they can be corrected. It seems to me that people who don’t care about rigour are really treating the question that they’re supposed to be answering unseriously, because they’re not doing their best to give them the right answers.”
August 6, 2010 at 5:17 am
Hmmmm… Yes and no.
Frustration I understand. However, to listen in the midst of frustration is what impresses me. And no, I don’t think you know what I mean.
But I do agree that Charles Taylor has quite the right way of going about things. He also happens to be a master listener.
Cheers!
November 17, 2010 at 9:08 pm
I like the spirit of this post, though I think it has its problems.
I agree with (1-3). You’re perfectly right on those points.
(4) seems like a misreading. There is a strain of analytic philosophy that thinks that normativity derives from the social. Some of the classic analytic philosophers held a kind of constructionist view, which gives a social answer to the question of normativity. Rawls, for example, is a kind of constructionist — he thinks that his vision of distributive justice emerges only against the backdrop of a certain liberal tradition. Rorty is a pragmatist, but he’s as Anglo-American as you like, and his emphasis on solidarity has had an influence. Really, examples slip off the tongue when you put your mind to it — Burge, “Kripkenstein”, Davidson, Searle, Gilbert, Frankfurt, Haslanger. In fact, if you wanted to make a complete list, you would certainly need to add Prof. Leiter to it, since he studies many of the things that you’re interested in.
But you’re right in the sense that the social aspects are not necessarily the most *celebrated* parts of analytic philosophy. But the argument from “opportunity costs” seems to be deflated.
I like the general point you make in (6), but I don’t think that a focus on truth has to overshadow the decisions we make. In ethics/meta-ethics, that certainly doesn’t happen.
I think the points from (8) onward are unconvincing. To take just one fragment, “a whole can be a part”. That’s a commonplace in certain kinds of mereology, but it’s worth asking just how seriously we’re supposed to take it.
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February 26, 2016 at 8:52 pm
Looks like it’s been a few years since the substantial part of the conversation dwindled out, but this is a great topic of debate, and enough has not been said yet on it. Here is what I’d add to Emerson’s list, (though I don’t necessarily take everything as gospel, I feel similar frustrations and want to reorganize the table.)
Most of the philosophical traditions can neatly be cordoned off as history/literature, as, I believe Rorty proposed 20 years ago.
Plato should be taught as an adjunct to Western religions–or monotheisms in general.
The methods of the analytics should be taught as advanced English courses–NOT as a method to get past Kant, (because that clearly didn’t work). These methods can be used as a set of tools to understand how interpretation works. Given that there’s no necessary connection between thoughts and air vibrations and objects/events in the world, this is precisely what analytic philosophy should be doing.
Can we please, please please let go of the idea of Truth with a capital “T”? There isn’t any such thing that our perception machinery can get to. Everything comes pre-interpreted, pre-judged, preconceived. Once we swallow that pill, there is a kind of liberation. We don’t get to be gods or pure spirits who touch on the underlying truths of the universe without first understanding that these truths may or may not be temporary or accidental, or simply incompletely true.
That doesn’t mean all is awash in relativism, either. Relinquishing Truth doesn’t mean we get to shit our pants and rape babies. This is true for the same reason that we don’t need the Bible to tell us that steeling is wrong. Social consequences teach the “truth” about babies and property.
In the meantime, philosophical inquiry should be focused on developing techniques/ technologies for thinking about the world that help us remove our preconceptions and ultimately do some work for us. Philosophy, as I see it, should be working hand-in-hand with neurophysiology to see if we have good theories that make sense of the most relevant data about our physical operating system. These are not separate things. I’ve had my fair share of dealings with the ivy tower crowd, and many of them feel a hint of underutilization, though most don’t. Philosophy is best used as proto-science. Get to it!
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