There is a larger reason I do not find the positivists embarrassing: the contrast case on the continent. The positivists, not just those two I have emphasized, wrote with scientific and liberal ambitions, and at least with a passing connection with mathematics and science; in a time in which philosophy on the continent was embracing obscurantism and vicious, totalitarian politics they stood for liberal politics. When National Socialism came, they left home and country, but not in some cases, as with Hempel, before helping to ferry Jews out of Germany. Compare Heidegger, whose defenses of National Socialism echo some of his philosophical views...[his]* political heirs are English professors who remonstrate about sexual oppression, but have never guided a frightened woman through a mindless, aggressive crowd to a clinic. That’s embarrassing.--Clark Glymour.
Glymour's defense of "the positivists" is not just political ("liberal") and ethical, but also personal. That is to say, he praises the character of (some) positivists (e.g., Hempel) in virtue of their good deeds; he links their character to their humane ambitions. Glymour compares the exemplary leaders of, as it were, the school with the less than noble deeds of alternative schools of thought. That is to say, he judges the philosophical commitments of streams of thought by the practices they generate.
I may have more tolerance for the cowardice, opportunism, and hypocrisy of others than Glymour. Even so, while one does not want to evaluate philosophical commitments solely by their ethical consequences -- one may, for example, also wish to appeal to beauty and hope --, he is right that it is perfectly legitimate, even necessary, to evaluate the institutions and practices of philosophy by their psychological, moral, and political consequences, too. (One can recognize this, and think that Glymour is inconsistent in failing to acknowledge the potential for heroism and decency that, say, Existentialism inspired in some (recall).)
How to make such judgments while avoiding political opportunism and allowing for human frailty is not an easy matter. It is, for example, a fact that Glymour's generation was less than heroic in confronting, say, sexism in our midst. The practices entrenched in his generation generated lots of patterns of exclusion within the profession. Given that it is unlikely that any generation will achieve heaven on earth, most of us will be negligent about, and complicit in, many small and often large acts of injustice within the profession and the societies to which we directly and indirectly contribute.
So, the Heidegger problem will not go away for Continental philosophy. But we can't get mileage out of Hempel forever either--our sins of omission and our acts of brutality are accumulating. We should certainly not take dumb pot-shots at English professors!
When I joined professional philosophy, I thought one 'could make it' in the profession by adhering to a 'do-no-harm (to others and self)' principle. Now, I am not so sure. For example, I now think it likely that professional philosophy deforms our moral judgments (recall this piece and this one inspired by Ruth Chang). Not unlike Glymour my politics are Liberal; but if Liberal politics are fundamentally tied to the Liberal state, it's not obvious how we can avoid being held accountable for the lengthy list of misdeeds by Liberal states past and present. It's no use pointing to the 'pure' or un-corrupted versions of Liberalism in our ideal theories; we are, in part, judging by real world consequences, after all. I love to contribute to the improvement of science (if I can), but one cannot be blind to the fact that science, too, is implicated in lots of injustices large and small. Rousseau was a real narcissistic, jerk, but he was not all wrong about the balance of risks and opportunities provided by scientific progress. After Hiroshima, and while we are heading toward ecological disaster, one might even say he was far too optimistic. Of course, in so far as Rousseau's legacy is implicated in a variety of totalitarian experiments we should be cautious in trying to erect a new school on his commitments. Hume was indeed much nicer than Rousseau, but I am pretty sure that in addition to being a racist he was a friend of Liberal imperialism. Neither Hume nor Rousseau made the kind of efforts that Mandeville, a physician who genuinely contributed to his patients's well-being, did to make visible the injustices done to women of their times. Do we commit another act of injustice by forgetting Mandeville while remembering his critics? Or can't we do injustice to the past?
Some existentialists and psychoanalysts claim we are constantly trying to forget death. This morning I caught myself thinking that, perhaps, in my philosophy, I am also frequently trying to forget the horrors of the world, including the refugees that are imprisoned in my home country, the arms-sales that indirectly pay my salary and grants, and, not the least, the many acts of looking away when some would-be-peer or student needed my help.
Stoic withdrawal seems like the wrong approach, too.
*My "his" is meant to capture the general, intended meaning of Glymour's sentence in context, even though it changes the literal meaning.
With gratitude for the agreement, one comment on the complaint about "my generation" above. My generation struggled for civil rights and against the Vietnam war. My first serious girlfriend, Donna Howell, was a freedom rider, raped in the process; my cousin who grew up in my family as a brother, went to Canada; I dropped out of graduate school to campaign across the country against the war; my student, David Malament, went to prison. And when we grew up, we fought for women's rights. Match it.
Clark Glymour
Posted by: Clark Glymour | 01/19/2018 at 04:15 AM
Thank you for your response, Clark. I am proud to count David as one of my teachers and exemplars of philosophical integrity.
Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 01/19/2018 at 03:50 PM
With apologies, an edited version:
Professors, with respect there is a leap being made from a Heidegger problem to a problem of "Continental philosophy" that needs to be interrogated. Heidegger's malfeasance is, on the Continental side, balanced by men and women of integrity whose heroic actions parallel, if not outstrip those of the positivists. As the extreme example there is, of course, Edith Stein. But there is also the great bulk of Husserl's most prominent students (and others who embraced his and Heidegger's work) who fled Germany and totalitarianism for the United States: Moritz Geiger, Herbert Marcuse, Fritz Kaufmann (who remained in Germany for years after his dismissal from his teaching post to offer Volkshochchulkursen to Jewish children), Maximillian Beck (who fled Germany to prevent the Nazification of his journal), Felix Kaufmann, Aron Gurwitsch, Karl Lowith, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Alfred Schutz, and Herbert Spiegelberg (who joined you as an activist against the Vietnam War). By this coterie I am far from embarrassed.
Posted by: Jonathan Strassfeld | 01/19/2018 at 07:09 PM
It is baffling to me that a person who has made foundational contributions to statistical inference is saying things like this. I mean I get rooting for one’s home team, rhetorical posturing, bragging. I do. I engage in all of them. But infering from “Hempel was a better human being than Heidegger” to “continentals are embarrassing and analytics not”?? (And from there to “I can dismiss the former’s theoretical work.) In addition to Jonathan’s list above, I’m not seeing any dissection of Frege. Nice list of Clarke’s friends, but do we add Searle, in our assessment of the moral character and relation to movements of generations of philosophers?
Is there anything not patently silly about these generalizations?
I’m happy to see aspirational calls like yours, Eric, that ask “us” as a profession to do better. That makes clear sense when the “better” concerns what we do professionally, and it has some value when it is a call to contribute to the great struggles of our time, though there really is no “us” of professional philosophers in that context. But using these to prove that one group of philosophers was superior to another, or one generation more moral than another is descriptively silly and aspirationally destructive.
Posted by: Mark Lance | 01/20/2018 at 12:33 PM
I refuse to take anyone seriously who would take that absurd and baseless swipe at English Professors who remonstrate against sexual oppression blah blah. Sorry. Just stupid. And that's too bad. The question of bad politics/good work is an interesting one that ramifies across the history of philosophy and literature. My own very strong inclinations are against the genetic fallacy. But I'm sorry. The quotation is juvenile.
Posted by: Jonathan | 01/20/2018 at 04:35 PM
While the Academy and Philosophy has a long way to go to rid itself of sexism, it was Clark's generation that transformed the Job Market from one in which department chairs called up their friends and said, send me one, to an institution with advertised jobs, interviews and all the rest of the stuff we are familiar with today. By no means perfect, but believe me, a whole lot better than what went before.
Posted by: Margaret Atherton | 01/20/2018 at 05:15 PM