Is Professional Philosophy Pseudo-Philosophy?

I adore being a professional philosopher; I teach undergraduates and advanced students in courses that I get to design; some of my students have gone on to improve the world in all kinds of important ways. I get to write and publish a lot of research on topics that I find interesting. Academic institutions and various taxpayers have treated me very generously with good working conditions and even grants to fund my own PhD students. Through my research and professional status, I have met fascinating scientists, lots of terrific economists, musicians, and novelists. My peers have given me more recognition than I ever imagined when I contemplated committing to the profession. Much to my amusement I have even been interviewed on film (in Dutch) because I am a "philosopher." All in all, there is no doubt that I am a lucky winner in a very unfair lottery.

 

But what if professional philosophy, while honorable in lots of ways, is not really philosophy? By this I do not just mean that in general it is far removed from the study or love of wisdom traditionally associated with philosophy. I also do not mean to focus entirely on the complaint that it fails to connect our technical apparatus to matters of existential import (although sometimes it does). Nor do I mean by this anguish that too much of what we do seems to reinforce -- for lack of better words  -- existing ideology. 

 

What if professional philosophy today is essentially a kind of pseudo-philosophy? Rather than offer rambling autobiography here, I have an alternative opportunity. For, remarkably enough, this (that professional philosophy is now pseudo-philosophy) is the very well-worked-out-view of a fellow professional philosopher (if you are impatient for evidence for this claim, you can skip to the last two sentences in the quote below):

So, in summary, what is Carnap’s accusation against Heidegger? He accuses him of trying to use assertions where only expression is appropriate—and where, given the danger involved, even expression ought to be limited to brief hints. He accuses him, in particular, of putting himself (or leaving himself) in a position where he must treat religious dread as if it revealed a being, an object—accuses him, that is, of idolatry, or (what comes to the same thing from a Kantian point of view) of putting a theoretical dogmatics before ethics. This is a very serious criticism indeed. [snip] This, I think, is enough to establish what I set out to here: not an attack on or defense of either Carnap or Heidegger, but simply a case for taking the one as a serious reader of the other.

If we don’t end up in a position to takes sides in Heidegger and Carnap’s debate, however—and surely, philosophy having moved on, it is far too late for that—then what philosophical good is our conclusion? We cannot take sides in this debate in part because it has changed from a debate into a fundamental structural fact about the philosophical world as we have inherited it. Here in the English-speaking part of that world, in particular, the stamp of Carnap’s will is everywhere present. The way we “do philosophy”—the way we speak, write, publish; the way we divide our field into disciplines; the way we arrange requirements and syllabi for our students—none of this, of course, is the product of Carnap’s influence alone. But there is nevertheless no corner in which his influence is not felt... [snip]. If we can understand Carnap as having chosen among alternatives, and, more importantly, as having chosen for a reason, then we are on the road to once more attempting philosophy’s always-repeated task of relating to (knowing) itself and thus becoming free. In other words, we are on the road to once again becoming philosophers. --Abraham Stone, "Heidegger and Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics."

In this passage, Stone re-actives an old trope: 'the road to true philosophy.' For example, in his History of England, David Hume describes Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, and (more subtly) himself as being on the road to to true philosophy (here and here). In Hume there is only "one road" to true philosophy. Presumably, Hume thinks there is quite a bit of traveling on roads that lead to false philosophy or philosophies.*

 

On the tropological view presupposed by Stone, an associate professor of philosophy at The University of California, Santa Cruz, nearly all of professional philosophy is, not really philosophy. It's not involved in its true task.++ In fact, Stone's view implies that even if we (my professional peers and I) would deliberately aim at being true philosophers we wouldn't be in the position to do so because most of us would never imagine that to do so, we would have to try to understand Carnap's choices. Philosophy today is simply not in the business of preparing us to make judgments of character.

 

Stone's account treats Carnap as a kind of (Nietzschean) philosophical legislator that in virtue of his conceptual and institutional choices created, in part, a framework** that other professional philosophers inherited even after professional philosophers stopped reading Carnap himself. It matters to Stone's enterprise to show that Carnap understood himself in this fashion, but nothing is lost if we would find Carnap's diary saying, "I never intended to be a philosophical legislator." To avoid misunderstanding, one can be an enduring, philosophical legislator even if most of one's doctrines and beliefs are now discarded. For, what is at stake here is more closely associated to style and practices of the sort studied by sociologists of knowledge. That is to say, Carnap bequeathed us a way of thinking about philosophy that allow its practitioners to flourish within modern universities. This involves -- among other things -- an embrace of an intellectual division of labor with specialization, a problems/puzzle-solving-oriented approach, the embrace of formal methods, grant-making, and the embrace of the journal article as preferred medium of communication (etc.). All of this is, of course, how lots of disciplines have adapted to the bureaucratic university after the rise of the Weberian state. Through the important work of David Lewis, cost-benefit analysis has become the norm while evaluating competing philosophical projects (recall this post).

 

To be clear, Carnap's framework for us is not opportunistic (while it may be that, too); it's fundamentally a moral one in the double sense that (i) it embraces philosophy as a Weberian vocation and (ii) it allows one to avoid certain systematic sins (associated with Heidegger in the Heidegger/Carnap debate). Note that Stone recognizes and respects Carnap's probity and possibly respects his judgment, while still being very critical of Carnap's legacy for philosophy today.

Carnap's framework for philosophy is essentially forward-looking; even if one does not embrace his particular account of conceptual engineering, professional philosophy understands itself as  being in the business of providing means toward solving problems on the way of understanding the truth or society's (mankind's) problems. Understanding Carnap's constrained actions is, perhaps, a worthy activity for some scholar (who is a specialist in, say, 'early analytic philosophy'), but it is not really at the core of today's philosophy. 

 

Stone could easily pass as some such scholar of early analytic philosophy; yet, by his own lights, his historical project is the means toward preparing philosophy for its self-recovery. Thus understood, Stone's project is not modest; it involves preparing the way for a new philosophical legislator (this, too, is a Nietzschean project). And note that it follows from Stone's analysis that there is no guarantee that a future framework does any better than Carnap in avoiding the roads to false philosophy.

 

Now, there is no need to offer satire on Stone's paper; it has been cited a mere ten times in the decade since it has been published. Even so, we should not underestimate Stone's project--he is clearly playing a long-game.

 

One sign that Stone may have discerned the winds of change before the rest of us is that since he wrote his piece there has been an explosion of interest in methodological self-reflection and so-called meta-philosophy among professional philosophers (including the most accomplished ones) during the last decade. Such a period of methodological self-examination can (but need not) be the stage that leads to a more general philosophical revolution. Of course, it is quite possible that the renewal of philosophy that Stone wishes to prepare comes from the periphery of professional philosophy, or, perhaps, from the desert beyond, if at all.

 

 

 

*Scholars have noted this tropological opposition.

 

++ Some other time I explore Stone's account of philosophy's task.

 

** I am using 'framework' as a homage to Carnap, although what I have in mind is closer to a Kuhnian 'paradigm' than a Carnapian framework.

Comments

[Charlie Huenemann]

Excellent post - and thanks for making me aware of Stone's work. I agree that Carnap's legacy was in conceiving philosophy as a discipline akin to physics (explicit in the first preface of the Aufbau) - leading to all the things you mention, plus that it can be done ahistorically, it hosts multiple subdisciplines in which piecemeal progress is made ("stone upon stone"), it must employ variables, etc. It ends up looking pretty comical, really.

[Enzo Rossi]

Carnap bequeathed us a way of thinking about philosophy that allow its practitioners to flourish within modern universities. This involves -- among other things -- an embrace of an intellectual division of labor with specialization, a problems/puzzle-solving-oriented approach, the embrace of formal methods, grant-making, and the embrace of the journal article as preferred medium of communication (etc.). All of this is, of course, how lots of disciplines have adapted to the bureaucratic university after the rise of the Weberian state.

This sounds plausible, but then do other humanities (who don't do much of that all) flourish any less than philosophy?

Glad to see you're blogging again, by the way.

[Eric Schliesser]

Thank you for the kind welcome.
I really can't speak on the state of other humanities.

[j.]

not to take anything away from stone—i think his work is fantastic—but i think that in all your questions about pseudo-philosophy and professional philosophy you could really stand to acknowledge that this is a thoroughly cavellian point in stone's work.

[Eric Schliesser]

Stone does not hide his debts to Cavell.

[Jan Sleutels]

Well, more than once I found comfort in Kolakowski's remark: "A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading." Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror (1988)

[BLS Nelson]

Nice to see you're still around, Eric!

The connection between Carnap and the professionalization of philosophy was something I was thinking about during the early autumn. Your post on Stone above sparked a renewed interest, which I should thank you for.

At points here you seem to be quite skeptical of Stone's long game; I guess I'm wondering how far your skepticism goes. Probably much like you, I see no harm in Carnap's programmatic aspirations, and I do not condemn those who would take up the mantle as non-philosophers. But there does seem to be something very wrong with any school of philosophy that is incapable of articulating and promulgating good reasons for theory choice and features of the philosophical character.

Here is a substantive argument we can make which makes the worry more explicit. Suppose we adopt the platitude that the method of philosophy is to give and take reasons. Obviously, it should then be vitally important that philosophers possess the traits of character which allow them to both give and to take reasons. But it seems to me that mainstream contemporary philosophical subcultures emphasize the process of giving reasons in the form of arguments, and does not train people to *take* reasons by way of listening effectively. e.g., the use of the principle of charity between conversation partners who are both fluent in a language encourages credulous interpretation worthy of the sermon, while the tradition of bloodsport encourages strategic interpretation, which is more fit for the politician than the philosopher.

Both of these failures in the profession seem to be characterisable as defects of philosophical character. They both seem to involve a kind of tone-deafness to the fact that most philosophical theories are upheld both for reasons and as choices. While strategic interpreters ignore the reasons for a choice, credulous listeners avoid the fact that those reasons were choices and not mere truths. If those are fair inferences, then there is a very sense in which professional philosophy must leave philosophers incapable of doing half of their job, according to a more or less platitudinous conception of how philosophers ought to do their job. So perhaps Stone has got a lot right.

[Eric Schliesser]

I hope to be 'around' for a while longer! But, thank you.
I think your way of articulating one of the issues at hand is astute, but (ahum) needlessly offensive. (Yeah, I know, I have no right to say that.)
I prefer to think about this issue in terms of the limits to topic neutrality; a method that is topic neutral cannot offer justifications for itself (w/o begging some big qestions.)