Digressions&Impressions

Necessary Illusions in Love and the Great Machines of Happiness: on Emilie Du Châtelet's Discourse

In order to be happy, one must have freed oneself of prejudices, one must be virtuous, healthy, have tastes and passions, and be susceptible to illusions; for we owe most of our pleasures to illusions, and unhappy is the one who has lost them. Far then, from seeking to make them disappear by the torch of reason, let us try to thicken the varnish that illusion lays on the majority of objects.--Emilie Du Châtelet, Discourse on Happiness [Discours sur le bonheur.] translated by I. Bour & J.P. Zinsser, p. 349.

At the heart of the so-called 'age of reason,' we find an embrace of the utility of illusions. For, according to Du Châtelet illusions are necessary to feel certain pleasures, and these pleasures ("satisfied tastes and passions") make us happy. In order, then, to enjoy some tastes and passions one must be in the grip of certain illusions. It's clear from what follows that according to Du Châtelet not all tastes and passion require illusions. Some goods like -- food or certain 'sensual pleasures' -- can be enjoyed without illusions (but see **). So, on her behalf, I'll distinguish between simple pleasures and complex pleasures. It's only the consummation of complex pleasures that require illusions in order to be enjoyed.

Before I get to the nature of complex pleasures, it is worth marking Du Châtelet's distinction between prejudices [préjugés], which are to be emendated, and illusions. A prejudice "is an opinion that one has accepted without examination, because it would be indefensible otherwise." (p. 352) All inherited tradition, which is tacitly or explicitly assumed correct,  falls under this definition; it is no surprise that religion is Du Châtelet's exemplar of a prejudice. While Du Châtelet is clearly some kind of (Leibnizian) Deist, she is no friend of revealed religion which she thinks makes people unhappy (in this life). As we know from her commentary on Scriptures, she finds these texts to be full of contradictions and absurdities. But the key point for Du Châtelet is that it only requires ordinary intelligence and modest education to correct prejudices. Prejudices are not useful (to healthy souls).*

According to Du Châtelet, an illusion is "not an error." For errors are "always harmful" (354). She defends the "love of study" as a sure means to happiness, especially in independent and magnanimous souls (357--some other time I discuss her self-attribution of magnanimity and her analysis of glory in this context). So, an illusion is a defensible opinion, which gives us an "agreeable feeling" accompanying complex tastes and passions.** Such an opinion one has accepted after scrutiny, even though it's possible, even likely, to be false, but one chooses not to destroy their functionality (355). On an epistemic level Du Châtelet's category of an illusion is close in spirit to the character of Spinoza's universal tenets of faith, which can be beyond rationally knowable, but ought to avoid knowable falsehood. (Of course, Du Châtelet's illusions have a different social role than Spinoza's tenets.) While one can choose to correct or maintain an illusion, one cannot control becoming in the grip of one; it's involuntary and relies on natural mechanisms (physiology, imagination, etc.); in this context she speaks of the "great machines of happiness." She offers as an exemplar optical illusions, which tend not to disappear even when one knows quite a bit about optical science.

Love is sustained by such necessary illusions according to Du Châtelet. Now, it seems that when speaking of 'love,' Du Châtelet has in mind loving another and not being loved, although the fact that one's love may be reciprocated is necessary part of love. That is, she is writing from first-personal perspective and not analyzing the relation or relationship of love. Love involves a kind of pleasure that follows from a giving oneself over to one's feelings of tenderness. Being tender to another feels pleasing, and this just is love. Such tenderness comes in degrees: the love she feels for a plant (which is barely capable of reciprocation) is different from the love she felt for Voltaire. In fact, it's quite clear from context is that Du Châtelet is more interested in passionate tenderness than a wholly calm tenderness.

Love has two further characteristics: (i) it makes "us wish to live"++ and (ii) it promotes  gratitude not to the one that loves us, but to God or Nature.+ That is to say, love indirectly makes us aware of and receptive to something larger than our human selves. For lack of a better word, I'll use 'cosmos' here.

• So, love is a pleasing, passionate tenderness for another that makes us wish to live and makes us receptive to the cosmos.

Interestingly enough, Du Châtelet notes that there can be excessive love such that there is no space for reciprocation. And she thinks men in her social class get turned off by excessive love.

But what, then, are the illusions that accompany love? On this point Du Châtelet is rather terse, despite the fact that she has quite a bit to say about love and, especially, how to comport oneself after a beloved loses interest. This is, I think, also a clue: in love, one must believe that it will last forever.

Thomas Pogge, Yale University, and the Trial By Internet

The phenomenon of the "trial by internet" has been around for some time now. It's a very serious thing that, in many cases, does very serious professional and psychological damage to those who find themselves in the position of the accused. Leaving aside Pogge's curious decision to post his caution about "trial by Internet" on the Internet, we can understand the fundamental concern: anything repeated often enough inevitably gains the ring of truth. There is no unringing the bell of rumors and gossip. Or, as Pogge himself (somewhat hyperbolically) claims :

            Trial by internet will always be a greatly suboptimal procedure. But our individual contributions determine how far it falls             short. At its worst, trial by internet is as haphazard and unfair as stonings in Afghanistan. At its best, it can clarify the issues             and achieve at least a partial weighing of the evidence.

The assumption at work in the passage above is that discussions about certain matters of import, when they take place on the internet, are had amongst decidedly non-ideal "knowers" whose access to reliable information is limited and whose awareness of relevant circumstantial facts is incomplete at best, erroneous at worst. Ergo, judgments arrived at by such discussants ought to be non-binding and provisional or, better still, discussants ought to suspend judgment altogether in deference to their nescience. 

...

In professional philosophy, where sexism and sexual assault is the wide open secret about which the general dispositional attitude is to keep one's eyes wide shut, victims are rarely afforded the luxury of an ideal epistemic environment in which the wrongs done to them might be judged fairly and impartially.  Correspondingly, wrongdoers are frequently afforded the luxury of using the discipline's systemic sexism and inattention to sexual exploitation as a shield to cover what appear to be innocent appeals to ideal standards of judgment, but are in fact nothing other than socially-, politically-, and professionally-motivated self-interest.

"Trial by internet" is sometimes closer in character to a trial by ordeal than it is to a jury trial.  That is to say, trials by internet frequently presume guilt and thus can be, as Pogge claimed, "haphazard and unfair.". But that isn't always so and, in many cases, trials by internet are neither haphazard nor unfair. (See: Edward Snowden) It may be a "suboptimal procedure" in ideal circumstances, but the circumstances that determine the deep struts-and-girders of professional Philosophy's social ontology are neither optimal nor ideal.

Absent the conditions for "ideal" knowing-- which are rarely, if ever, present-- we make do with what we have for forming careful, considered, albeit incompletely-informed judgments.  Given what I know, and given what anyone else who has bothered to pay attention to the scandals of our discipline over the last half-decade or so should know, there is more than enough sufficient reason to suspend the requirements of ideal epistemic standards in one's judgments about the verity of female philosophers' accounts of sexual exploitation.

Where there is smoke, there is not always fire.  But where there is smoke, there was, at least, very recently a fire.

And almost everywhere in professional Philosophy, the smoke is suffocating.--"Trial by Internet" and the Presumption of Innocence by Leigh Johnson.

There is a difference between (i) receiving criticism and disapprobation from one's professional peers, (ii) a university firing a professor, or (iii) the state sending somebody to jail. Let's stipulate (for now) that these three scenarios (i-iii) are increasingly costly (including in opportunities foregone) to the targeted individual and society. In particular, the downside or (to use HPS jargon) inductive risk of getting things wrong increases in each scenario. (If you like analytical epistemology you substitute your own jargon here.) So, it makes sense that epistemic standards are more demanding as one moves from (i) to (iii) [see, for example, this argument by Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa; see also Brian Leiter].  In what follows, I ignore how we should treat the presumption of innocence; rather I wish to use the opportunity "to clarify" some of "the issues."

Does it follow that the standards of judgments must be lower in (i) than in (iii)? No. One could demand that one's epistemic standards in (i) are just as demanding as in (iii). If anything else, adhering to this demand requires self-restraint: I have some professional friends that have insisted that they withhold public judgment about, say, Professor's Pogge's behavior until a university tribunal or a court of law has issued its public verdict. There are lots of solid reasons -- from an embrace of liberal values to a suspicion of mob rule-- to defer to local judges that can make situational, contextually sophisticated judgments based on fair procedures and weighing of evidence. I respect this stance. But we should not fetishize withholding judgments and fall into mute silence: publicity and agitation are often required in order (a) to get universities to take proper action and (b) level the playing field among agents with unequal power. Of course, there are lots of speech acts between silence and a public judgment. By now it is a familiar fact that internet anonymity does not bring out the best in people.

As it happens -- this is a contingent fact -- journalists have revealed that we now know there have been judgments against Pogge by, it seems, two universities (Columbia and Yale) for different kinds of infractions, but which previously have been kept confidential (Buzzfeed; recall also my post). This practice of confidentiality primarily seems to protect the reputation of universities. In fact the most interesting fact to appear is that some folk at Yale seem to have been aware of the existence of a prior incident when they hired Professor Pogge. So far no individuals have been implicated in this fact, but to keep quiet about this fact rewards wrongdoing and reinforces the problem. So, it seems a bit odd to withhold all judgment, especially of the decisions by Yale University (and, perhaps, some of our peers there).

Obviously, journalists may be selective and may sell or be fed a story on behalf of some side or another. (Something like this happened to Jan Boxhill, who may well have been scapegoated by her own university.) In fact, the interests of the profession and the interests of universities often come apart, and the media, which has its own interests (sometimes financial or ideological), is an imperfect mediator among different stakeholders. But, again, to discuss a case is something different from generating sanctions. Obviously, the manner of discussion may generate its own (to borrow Leigh M. Johnson's point) trial by ordeal. I return to this below.

So far, I have pretended, first, that (i) receiving disapprobation from one's professional peers is is less bad than (ii) a university suspending or firing a professor, and, in turn, less bad than (iii) the state sending somebody to jail. But obviously for some peers -- you know who you are -- one's professional identity, in particular one's status in the profession and respect from one's peers, is far more important than other goods. Such people may feel far more damaged by professional disapprobation than, say, the (temporary) loss of income. Such individuals may certainly wish for very high epistemic standards before they are judged by their professional peers absent a university tribunal or a court of law.  The second pretense thus far is that (i*) harms against the profession or harms against an individual-qua-professional are trivial compared to (ii*) harms against the university as a corporate body and (iii*) breaking the law of the land. Just as receiving serious disapprobation from one's professional peers can be awful to some,  harms against the profession or harms against an individual-qua-professional may be thought the worst. It is by no means obvious that this is perverse.

Let me give a scholarly example: plagiarists are often banned from the profession (they may also lose their job). The harm against the profession and the harm against particular plagiarized scholars is evident. But as moral infractions go, from the vantage of eternity or the laws of the land, it is certainly less harmful than lots of crimes. Yet, the professional response tends to be a lot more severe against a plagiarist than against a criminal. Moreover, journal editors, volume editors, and peers do not wait until a university tribunal to come to their own judgments about plagiarists. Of course, it is helpful if a university investigates a particular plagiarist [after half a decade of reading Retractionwatch -- undoubtedly a biased sample -- it seems likely that a professional that has been caught plagiarizing once has probably done so more than once], but, as it happens, this is an extremely low priority in lots of universities (due to cost and, alas, concerns over reputation).

The way we treat plagiarists -- ejection, shunning, publication bans, etc. -- reveals that we recognize harms against the profession and that we are willing to act rather severely against  violators of professional norms. It shows, in fact, that we tacitly recognize that even if the world is wholly corrupt and fallen, we treat norms of the profession with utmost seriousness (a seriousness that seems ridiculous to outsiders). This is not hypocrisy.  But rather an acknowledgment that we take the collective pursuit of knowledge (wisdom, truth, etc.) as a fundamental collective good. It is collective not in so far as we expect society to endorse our commitment to a substantive good, or to echo our sanctions of violators, but it is collective in so far as we remove norm violators as members in good professional standing.

As it happens, the Buzzfeed story accuses Pogge of treating letters of recommendation as a form of currency to elicit more favorable behavior from young women he encountered. Even if the accusation were true it does not follow that Pogge's letters of recommendation are not to be trusted; it is compatible with the accusations that Pogge only wrote actual letters of recommendations for people whom were not involved in any (proposed) quid pro quo.

I have no idea if these accusations about treating letters as currency are true. In an ideal world, some of the institutions that proudly list Professor Pogge's name on their website (Yale, Oslo, London, etc.) would investigate this charge. The more likely, utterly imperfect, response is that wholly innocent junior folk start scrubbing traces of Pogge from their CV, when possible, and removing his letter from dossiers. As is usual, the downside risks are unevenly distributed and fall on the less powerful. Here withholding public judgment is tantamount to buck passing professional norm enforcement to those with least professional influence and status. To accept the previous sentence, does not entail that public judgments must go against Professor Pogge without a ruling authority (which may be very imperfect,  too) individuals will come to their own imperfect judgments. One option is to use the occasion to rethink the role letters of recommendation play in the discipline and to make them instruments that allow for less abuse.

Now, even if one allows that there are genuine harms against the profession that need to be sanctioned, it does not follow, unless one embraces the unity of the virtues, that the profession needs to be a moral community. That is, the profession and professional peers have, all things being equal, no business policing private morality in the profession (although we may have individual obligations/duties). In practice, there may be lots of exceptions to the previous sentence, but that's for another occasion.

Yet, relationships (inside and outside the classroom) between supervisors (or letter writers, teachers, etc.) with students constitute, in part, the profession. And how we view the components (grades, letters of recommendation, quality of teaching, etc.) of these relationships is a matter of ongoing deliberation and reflection on existing norms and practices. In addition, we philosophers happen to be members of a profession where reflection on the nature of philosophical education, social epistemology, and the fine-grained distinctions among professional and moral norms just are ways of doing philosophy. What are called 'Internet trials' are thus imperfect opportunities to debate and explore professional norms and the nature of professional philosophy in light of practice. The previous sentence is a self-interested defense of blogging, so I add: in such a trial nobody's judgment is authoritative or definitive.

 

On Masculine Democracy and Women's Absence among the Geniuses in the History of Philosophy

In the nineteenth century, philosophy was still considered the pinnacle of theoretical knowledge; it was seen to have the power to demarcate and distinguish all the other branches of knowledge, to decide the value of alternative avenues of inquiry and methodology. To be admitted into the sphere of philosophy, publicly via published texts, was to partake of a singular form of public power: to be a philosopher was to be a shaper of culture. But what if the sphere of philosophy became democratized? What if, for example, “philosopher queens” ruled in the polis? To imagine such a dismantling of male hegemony at the birth of modern democracy was more than even Condorcet, its staunchest supporter, could manage. Even he claimed that women had displayed "genius" in a number of fields, so far none had done so in philosophy. He says this, while also citing Catherine Macaulay, Marie de Gournay, Madame du Chatalet, and Madame de Lambert as women lacking "neither force of character or strength of mind."

My examination of the reasons for the absence of women in modern histories of philosophy has moved us from a consideration of reasons internal to philosophy’s own development to reasons ultimately rooted in the emerging democratic political order. In part, my aim has been to show that explanations are readily available for the disappearance of women from our histories, only rarely are there justifications for the exclusion of specific women. And, as we might have expected, no justification exists for the wholesale exclusion of women philosophers from the history of our discipline. Perhaps all of this should make us suspicious about our histories; about the implicit claim that our criteria of selection justify our inclusion of philosophers as major, minor, or well-forgotten figures; about our ranking of issues and argumentative strategies as central, groundbreaking, useful, or misguided.--lEileen O’Neill (1998) "Disappearing ink: Early modern women philosophers and their fate in history,"38-39 [(emphases in original; Thank you Stephen Bauer!]

Thomas Pogge interrupted (recall) a piece about O'Neill's Disappearing Ink. I had decided to re-read O'Neill's piece because of Justin Smith's essay "Garfield and Van Norden on 'Non-European' Philosophy," (and recall my response). Smith noted that (a) philosophy played a role in nationalist modernisation campaigns (NMCs).  I had modestly chided him for not emphasing enough that (b) NMCs are closely linked to the development of the modern research university (funded by that very state, too) with its highly specialized disciplines (it's the age in which natural philosophy gets displaced by special sciences). As the evidence in O'Neill's piece suggests, it turns out that (a) and (b) jointly also facilitate the exclusion of women from philosophy's self-understanding (and sometimes this is a national self-understanding even when the thinkers taught have cosmopolitan commitments) so that in the long nineteenth century women get displaced from the narratives of progress from one 'genius' (recall my treatment of boy-wonders) to the next that philosophers are disciplined into at university. This also entailed, as O'Neill notes, that projects that were even vaguely associated with women's reflection (education, care, etc.) or just did not fit the notion of progress also get marginalized or  turned into 'applied' topics. So, it turns out, then, that at its inception, philosophy as a specialist discipline is founded on a series of conceptual movements that make progress possible while simultaneously generating both a forgetting of women and inscribes a gendered hierarchy  into professional philosophy's self-conception. 

As an aside, O'Neill implies ("dismantling of male hegemony") that in so doing professional philosophy continues the traditional gendered hierarchy. While undoubtedly, a gendered hierarchy within philosophy predates the nineteenth century and is indeed the traditional conception, but there are strands within the prior history of philosophy, especially ones inspired by Plato, that allow for more equal conception of men and women qua philosophers. (In fact, as her chapter shows, many such conceptions are developed even perfected in the early modern period (some of them inspired even by Descartes). Hobbes, too, provides resources for such a conception (recall and here). 

In addition, and in some respects more important, as O'Neill implies, modern (that is, post-revolutionary) national democratic politics, which has universalist and inclusivist aspiratons too, is simultaneously founded on an act of exclusion. Now this is not surprising in one sense (and quite familiar)--the national citizenry (often) excludes non-citizens within its borders and also excludes those denied entry from without. But O'Neill reminds us that democracy was also a way to extend male hegemony. On the conceptual level, this is probably the Republican bequest to then current democratic theory, which also in its eighteenth century incarnation simultaneously defended self-rule while allowing rule over others (including slavery--as the critics of Republicanism noted).

One anesthetizing narrative we tell ourselves from within liberal democracy, is one of progress and emancipation in which the egalitarian potential of democratic values are actualized over time in which Jews, Women, Blacks, Gays, and, soon, Trans-gendered people (and eventually robots, animals, etc. -- this list has local variation of course --) are drawn into the democratic fold and recognized/treated as equals. But as O'Neill reminds us, it's also possible that national democratic projects can, when founded, be steps backward (or partial moral/political regress) and -- as history shows amply -- can be less than righteous in their behavior toward those that do not fit the self-conception of the masculine (and ethnic) national, democratic order. It is not impossible, in fact, that some non-democratic empires have a better track-records in some respects with (ethnic, linguistic, etc.) minorities than national democracies. As reading the daily newspaper reminds us, passionate attachment to the (potentially hierarchically organized) manly tribe, which wishes to rule over or exclude others, is always a live possibility in democracy. 

Garfield and Van Norden on 'Non-European' Philosophy. - See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2016/05/rejectionofphilosophy.html#sthash.Hbt6oU8x.dpuf

 

RIP: Carolina (Lini) Bunjes-Rosenthal 1918-2016

Lini was born in Utrecht. On her mom's side (Cohen) the family was orthodox. She never told me much about her dad's side. In her teens she drifted toward communism and anarchism, and like many idealistic youth in the period she ended up fighting in the Spanish civil war. (I have seen evidence that she was probably a photographer in the Republican army.) She married a Spaniard who was executed by Franco, while Lini was pregnant and jailed. After the war, in Italy, several of her friends, who lived in the mountains above Sestri Levante, were anarchists, who were as hostile to Franco as to the Stalinist communists. In 1940 the Dutch ambassador managed to free her from jail, and she returned to (NAZI) occupied Holland, where she promptly joined the resistance. Much later, in the early 1990s, after she went bankrupt my dad tracked down the last remaining member of her resistance group, who attested to her war-time-heroism and helped secure her a modest veteran's pension and apartment in the heart of Amsterdam.

After the war she met my dad and his parents in Amsterdam, and became a family friend. She never denied outright the persistent rumor of an affair with my grandfather, preferring to say, with a chuckle, Schliesser men are all talk, no action. Eventually she met and married Mr. Rosenthal, who sold his business and together they moved to Sestri Levante, a charming town on the Italian Riviera, where she ran Hotel Mimosa in the hills above town.  My dad's family remained a regular visitor to the hotel, where I spent many happy Summers during my childhood in the early 70s (although as an infant I did almost drown in the kid's pool of the hotel). With her family she ran the hotel, but she was the dominant figure, including in the kitchen. (She would terrify me by showing me lobsters up close.) One oddity of the hotel, which dawned upon me as the years passed, was that most of her clientele consisted of German and Austrian veterans, including undoubtedly SS/NAZI veterans of WWII. A family lore is that in the 1960s she bailed my dad out of the town-jail because he and some friends had been drunk in public.

 In 1990 I followed the Dutch soccer team around the World Cup in Italy. At one point, I was in a train with Dutch supporters from Palermo to the North. The tracks were blocked by Italian farmers protesting (presumably EU farm-policy). The only food and beverage on board the train was beer. After the train got moving, I intended to get off the train in Rome in order to get washed and nourished. But the train was directed straight to Milan, where we were awaited by media and police, eager to tell a story about Dutch Hooligans. (The train was, indeed, in bad shape.) Everybody who could not show a valid ticket for the Holland-Germany match was taken into custody. (One of my friends was also arrested on weapon's charges because of his fancy swiss army knife--he was paraded in front of the cameras.) While I was in custody I asked the lieutenant of the carabinieri in charge of me if we could make a phone-call (pre-mobile phone days). Much to my amazement he allowed it, and from the holding area in the central station of Milan I called Lini, who, mercifully picked up the phone at the hotel. I explained what happened, and she requested to speak to the lieutenant. He came on the phone, and received a terrible dressing down. (She later told me she had told him that he was a gigantic fool and would get into the worst trouble because he clearly had no idea how important my Dad was in Holland and Italian-Dutch trade (all false).) Within moments, I stood outside of the station with a courteous salute, too.

Later that Summer, after one of the most exciting soccer matches I ever saw (Argentina-Brazil in Turin), my dad directed me to Sestri to check on Lini. There, to my dismay, I found a lot of angry creditors and a bewildered Lini, who had clearly been swindled out of her hotel and life-time savings by her latest lover who, as she contemplated retirement and her kids's future, had convinced her to convert the hotel into apartments and then sell these off.

During the last twenty-five years of her life she split her time between Amsterdam (in the government provided apartment) and Pontassieve, a lovely town near Florence, where she lived with her daughter (Catherine) and not far from her granddaughter and her children. She was a never-ending source of dry humor, especially on the politics of our times. (I was pleased for her she lived to see Berlusconi's electoral defeat.) She maintained a keen interest in politics and world affairs, and read books until the last year of her life. She always spoke her mind -- including a plea to my dad not to marry my mom --, and combined courage and steely determination with a great deal of tenderness and generosity to those she trusted. She could be a royal pain to her enemies, big and small, yet I have not known a greater soul; I miss her already.

 

A Methodological Observation on Adam Smith's proposal for the disestablishment of Religion

The sect which had the good fortune to be leagued with the conquering party, necessarily shared in the victory of its ally, by whose favour and protection it was soon enabled in some degree to silence and subdue all its adversaries Their first demand was generally, that he should silence and subdue all their adversaries.--Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations 5.i.g. 7)

The quoted passage reveals that Adam Smith is adamantly opposed to established religion; he treats politically successful religions as lucky and intolerant partisans. Here Smith omits kind words for either the national churches of Scotland or England, which, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 often appealed to Providential plan in their public justification.

Instead Smith revives interest in the “plan of ecclesiastical government, or more properly of no ecclesiastical government, was what the sect called Independents, a sect no doubt of very wild enthusiasts, proposed to establish in England towards the end of the civil war.” (WN 5.i.g.8; for an excellent analysis, see Muller 1993, Chapter 12). Without an established religion, which would allow “every man to chuse his own priest and his own religion as he thought proper,” and each religion treated equally under the law. Smith expected:

There would in this case, no doubt, have been a great multitude of religious sects...Almost every different congregation might probably have made a little sect by itself, or have entertained some peculiar tenets of its own. (WN 5.i.g.8)

Smith's hope in Wealth of Nations that with near absolute freedom of religion (something neither Locke, Spinoza, nor Hume advocated), competition among religious sects will lead to a “pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established." (WN 5.i.g.8)

Smith assumes that disestablishment will lead to an extreme proliferation “into two or three hundred, or perhaps into as many thousand small sects,” (WN 5.i.g.8). In context Smith does not offer a detailed explanation of why one would expect such a proliferation, but it seems clear that he thinks the division will promoted by the entrepreneurial “zeal” of individual church leaders who will promote themselves and different “particular” speculative “tenets.” (WN 5.i.g.9)

Smith’s arguments for such disestablishment are a mixture of prudential political considerations and sociological ones. With extreme, adversary competition among lots of sects Smith expects most of the sects to become relative moderate in its tone over time. In fact, he expects that “The teachers of each little sect, finding themselves almost alone, would be obliged to respect those of almost every other sect, and the concessions which they would mutually find it both convenient and agreeable to make to one another, might in time probably reduce the doctrine of the greater part of them to that pure and rational religion.” (WN 5.1.g.8)

Smith does not really explain his grounds for optimism. It is by no means obvious why a free market in religious ideas would have to converge on religious tenets free from absurdity. In fact, it is in order to combat potential ‘market failure(s) in religion’ that Smith suggests two state-sponsored remedies: first, the promotion of “the study of science and philosophy” among the common people, and, second, the “entire liberty” of people to promote “without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, musick, dancing; by all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions, would easily dissipate, in the greater part of them, that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm.” (WN 5.1.g.14-15)

Unlike his proposal for a parliamentary union between Great Britain and her American and Irish colonies, Smith does not treat his proposal for religious and cultural freedoms as unreachable given the political situation. There are no clear hints that he considers it utopian. Unlike his proposal for a parliamentary union, his disestablishment proposal was taken up with enthusiasm by the American Founders (Fleischacker 2002; McLean & Peterson 2010).

There are some peculiar aspects about Smith’s proposal: first, Smith makes no reference to the Dutch experiences with religious toleration. (In fact, he only focuses on the likelihood of schism (WN 5.1.g.36). His proposal is remarkably a-factual; it is basically one extended thought experiment (or counterfactual supposition). The only empirical evidence he points to is a single sentence: his plan has already “been established in Pennsylvania, where, though the Quakers happen to be the most numerous, the law in reality favours no one sect more than another, and it is there said to have been productive of this philosophical good temper and moderation.” (WN 5.1.g.8) Smith provides no source or argument for the conclusion.

Smith’s is also not an economic argument; he does not discuss nor evaluate an argument popular in seventeenth century Dutch Republican circles (e.g., Spinoza, the de la Court brothers, and echoed in Mandeville): that religious freedoms are supposed to be good for business by attracting skilled artisans and immigrants. He is not tempted by the Spinozistic argument that cultural freedoms are good for technological development.

Another peculiarity is that in this chapter Smith cites Machiavelli approvingly and heaps praise on Hume; neither is exactly confidence inspiring to Smith’s religious readers. Are these the “wise” who would approve of the pure and rational religion that is the outcome of competitive religion? Smith never explains.

As is well known, Smith was unwilling to get involved in the publication of Hume’s Dialogues. Yet, while he ends up disagreeing with Hume’s proposal of state (financial and political) control over religion; the disagreement is primarily focused on means not ends. Smith thinks his proposal leads to greater political stability for the state—in effect, the idea behind Smith’s proposal is that religions will be so distracted competing with each other and individually so small that they cannot effectively disturb the public peace or wield political power. Of course, that is all compatible with the further idea that keeping religion out of politics is in the interest of religion, too. Smith implies that political ambitions corrupts religion (WN 5.1.g.7). So, in effect, Smith agrees with Spinoza that religions should focus primarily on morals and stay out of politics.

One final peculiarity about Smith’s argument is that he does not connect it with one of his main concerns throughout WN: the freedom of movement and settlement that he promotes. The poor laws of England prevent the poor from leaving their parish. (WN 1.10.c.44ff.) “To remove a man who has committed no misdemeanour from the parish where he chuses to reside, is an evident violation of natural liberty and justice.” (WN 1.10.c.59) Smith disestablishment proposal effectively disconnects territory and religion from each other. Yet, Smith does not spell out this implication. It is hard to imagine he would not have noticed how the freedom of religion and freedom of movement would interact, especially because he discusses urbanization from the countryside, that is, movement between parishes, when he discusses the merits of his disestablishment proposal. Smith’s proposal on religious disestablishment, thus, is remarkably disconnected from factual constraint. His discussion is, thus, very much in the spirit of Hume’s way of proceeding in “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth:” Hume had drawn the contours of the “most perfect in the kind, that we may be able to bring any real constitution or form of government as near it as possible.”

Thomas Pogge and the Disappearing Ink

A few days ago, while I was drafting a post on Eileen O’Neill's classic, (1998) "Disappearing ink: Early modern women philosophers and their fate in history," the Pogge story broke--, finally. [Yale's Thomas Pogge responds here [recall my criticism of his rhetorical use of polygraphs]]. I was unable to complete my draft post on O'Neill because I started mulling a part of the story that had not appeared in print before and that deserves more attention:

In an affidavit quoted in Lopez Aguilar’s federal complaint, a Columbia professor who was on the faculty at the time wrote that Pogge “had written a series of sexually harassing emails” to a student, “and there had also been some physical interaction between them.” Pogge was later “forbidden by the university administration” to enter the philosophy department “whenever the student had classes there.”

(The unnamed student later left the program, according to the affidavit. BuzzFeed News was unable to reach her.)--Buzzfeed.

Here are some reflections:

• A Columbia professor who was on the faculty at the time is a credible witness. This suggests strongly there has been a finding of sexual harassment against Pogge at Columbia. If that is right, he seems to have lied about this to the folk at Yale several times. ["Pogge told the hearing panel that he had indeed been accused of sexual harassment at Columbia, but that the allegation was false. Yale knew about it, he said, and an official “took great pains to investigate what had happened” before offering him a job."] Pogge's detailed, published response skips over this material, yet it is by far the most damaging to his reputation. (I am surprised that this has not prompted Yale to reconsider its stance toward Pogge.)
• Presumably we had not heard about the Columbia case in print before because most such cases involve non-disclosure agreements. Universities pretend that such non-disclosure agreements protect victims and the accused, but, in practice, they seem primarily designed to protect the PR of universities. [According to the Buzzfeed story, Yale apparently also uses such non-disclosure agreements because they seem to have offered one to Fernanda Lopez Aguilar.]
• The story also clearly suggests that at least some folk, including professional peers, at Yale knew that a serious incident had occurred at Columbia before they hired Thomas Pogge. Presumably some of the folk that knew are still alive, and somewhere in the profession, and have seen this story unfold over the years, and kept quiet. <--That's what I call a 'culture of silence.' I know some faculty at Columbia, Yale, and elsewhere, who saw Pogge operate up close, and who worked tirelessly to mitigate his impact through formal and informal means. But we should be under no illusion: professional philosophers did too little, and much of it only too recently, to protect other young women. This is our collective neglect (and shame). No amount of prestige, recognition, and fine words we offer each other can remove this stain from our discipline.   
• I am not surprised that Yale apparently spent $2000 to keep Fernanda Lopez Aguilar from telling "anyone about Pogge’s behavior," given that this acknowledged behavior apparently included sharing a hotel room with one of his own thesis advisees. Given how wealthy Yale is, I am amazed they are letting him continue to teach undergraduates rather than ensconcing him, say, in some fancy research-only institute--you would think this would be a no-brainer for the university's risk office (or whatever they call it at Yale).
• At various points in his "Response," Pogge suggests that money may be a motive of his accusers ("we know of law firm going after rich institutions for the sake of winning large financial settlements"; "left her determined to take me down and, after her loss in the Yale proceedings, to win a financial settlement from Yale;" and "But I fear that such talk of legal action is no more than a cover for legally extorting a financial settlement.") Oddly, he also mentions that he knows that Fernanda Lopez Aguilar is from a wealthy family. If she were as wealthy as Pogge implies, she would not need his money and so mention of this motive is just a red herring. So, it is utterly unclear why he should mention her wealth, especially because this is the kind of thing that could endanger her life in Honduras. To be sure, I am not claiming that he is deliberately endangering her life, but it is reckless to discuss her purported finances in public without her permission.
• In a follow up piece, Buzzfeed notes how Pogge's Response misrepresents his case:

  In his statement, Pogge claimed Lopez Aguilar’s assertions had already been disproven: “One version of her allegations was thoroughly investigated in quasi-judicial proceedings by a Yale committee of five faculty members and one Federal judge, who found her charges of sexual harassment to be not credible.”

  The panel’s actual finding was that there was “insufficient evidence” with which “to corroborate either Ms. Lopez’s or Mr. Pogge’s differing accounts.”

• Pogge has been an excellent mentor to many talented and accomplished women. This has been great for the profession, which, as we all know, has struggled to recruit and maintain women in the field. To recognize this, is not to deny that he has also been an awful professional colleague to other women (humans can be this imperfect); and, as the reports make clear, several of these have left the profession to our great shame. In addition, there must be quite a few witnesses (I have spoken to a few unrelated to the cases discussed in the press) who may not have interacted with Pogge personally, but who saw that he would get away crossing boundaries without anybody lifting a finger. How many more left the field in disgust (or anger)? Given that the profession is such a status hierarchy, bad behavior at the top can generate a huge pattern of exclusion. This is our generation's disappearing ink.
• The Buzzfeed story accuses Pogge of treating letters of recommendation as a form of currency to elicit more favorable behavior from young women he encountered. If this is true, he betrayed not just these women's trust in him, but he also broke professional norms and our collective trust.
• Some other time, I reflect on to what degree and how our evaluation of Pogge's arguments may be influenced by his conduct (recall The Arthur Koestler problem). Here I just note that we are not just dealing with arguments; Pogge turned his professional status into a prominent place in public and political life. (This is why the story has attracted so much attention.) There may be nothing wrong with that as such. (Even if one thinks, as I do, that professional success/status involves considerable luck and, perhaps, injustice, it is also the case that most of the professionally successful are very skilled at professional philosophy.) The problem is that the very institutional mechanisms (references, job opportunities, PhD supervision, citations, charisma, etc.) that allow him to secure such a place are some of the means by which he seems to have operated to promote his bad behavior (I am not claiming all allegations are true, but it seems some are). In addition, it is not impossible that because many of us like his politics/policies, we allowed ourselves not to become conscious of what we were facilitating. It would be worth the time of our social epistemologists to reflect on how we can improve the institution of philosophy such that we become less vulnerable to repeat. While we understandably focus on individual human conduct, we should not ignore the institutional mechanisms, professional norms, and incentives -- Pogge calls attention to "the intensely competitive worlds of academia and university politics" -- that generated this situation.
  

 

On Pogge, Polygraphs, and Pseudo-Science

I took and passed a polygraph test denying this and various other accusations. I propose and offer to pay for additional polygraph tests of both parties’ conflicting claims with a mutually agreeable expert.--Thomas Pogge, "Response to the Allegations by Fernanda Lopez Aguilar.

I was baffled to read the quoted sentence in Thomas Pogge's Response to the Allegations (see here) My gut reaction was, "if a mutually agreeable experts can be found, such an expert would be a fraudster." It is widely known that Polygraph testing is a pseudo-science.

But then doubt crept in: Pogge's "Response" looks like it has been vetted by a lawyer, and surely s/he would not encourage reliance on incredible, pseudo-scientific means. A quick google search landed me on the website of  the American Psychological Association. Here's what that APA writes:

Evidence indicates that strategies used to "beat" polygraph examinations, so-called countermeasures, may be effective. Countermeasures include simple physical movements, psychological interventions (e.g., manipulating subjects' beliefs about the test), and the use of pharmacological agents that alter arousal patterns....

Polygraph testing has generated considerable scientific and public controversy. Most psychologists and other scientists agree that there is little basis for the validity of polygraph tests. Courts, including the United States Supreme Court (cf. U.S. v. Scheffer, 1998 in which Dr.'s Saxe's research on polygraph fallibility was cited), have repeatedly rejected the use of polygraph evidence because of its inherent unreliability.

It does not follow that Pogge's denials are wholly false. But it does follow that his offer to pay for additional polygraph tests, while perhaps sincere, is based on bullshit. I don't know if Pogge and his legal team are aware that polygraphs are unreliable, but they should quickly withdraw the offer. Conflicting claims cannot be tested in a meaningful way by a polygraph and to maintain otherwise is a form rhetorical (if not legal) hucksterism.

Rejecting Philosophy: On The Very Idea of Western Philosophy, Again

Some have argued, for example, that considerable violence had to be done to Chinese intellectual traditions in order to shape them into something recognisable on the 'world market' as philosophy (for example, they had to be divorced from what we can only identify, in a trivialising manner, as 'calligraphy'), that this only happened as a result of the pressures of nationalist modernisation campaigns late in the 19th century, and that the result was a mere fossil specimen, easily teachable in new western-modelled curricula, but only because it was by now no longer alive. See for example Anne Cheng, "Y-a-t-il une philosophie chinoise? : est-ce une bonne question?" in Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 27 (2005). This sort of concern, about what exactly it means to belong to a culture that can claim to have its own philosophy, and how this meaning has changed over time as a result of broader historical processes that for the most part do not play out on the plane of ideas, is one to which, for better or worse, academic philosophers interested in promoting diversity will also need to turn their attention. The resistance to doing so exposes yet another deep bias, which is not only harmful to the dead people it ignores: the bias of presentism.--Justin Smith Garfield and Van Norden on 'Non-European' Philosophy.

Almost a decade ago, I was talking to a young scholar who had sought me out to discuss shared research interests (on Newton & Spinoza). We were having an animated discussion, and I mentioned my research on Babylonian economics and astronomy. Undoubtedly, I was bragging a bit about my esoteric interests in a way that a peacock shows off useless tails. My youthful interlocutor said without any apparent satire or irony that the Greeks invented philosophy and so that while my project may well be interesting for the history of science it would have no bearing on the history of philosophy. Something triggered in me, and I shot back that my paper, first, shows how Plato and Aristotle (in the Politics) engage with the relevant material (and recycle tropes about visiting Chaldeans and Egypt) and that some enduring philosophical distinctions can be traced to it, and, second, given that the Babylonians clearly were capable of rather subtle modeling and theory-mediated causal analysis, and supported a cultural and institutional infrastructure to maintain centers of serious learning, we should not rule out that there were practices we would call 'philosophy' present in the culture. (Because I did not sense much receptivity, I decided to keep quiet on the role of omens in Babylonian intellectual life.) My interlocutor did not relent, and suggested that the Babylonians lacked self-consciousness and could not, therefore, be philosophical. Because it vaguely reminded me of the kind of thing Nietzsche satirizes, I wondered if that was the kind of thing nineteenth century German philosophy professors would say. Our exchange sputtered on, but because my attempt at being a philosophical peacock had been defeated, I gave up on the topic.

It was not the first time I had encountered the thought there was something distinctive about 'the Greeks' and the tradition inspired by Socrates et al. At some point, I started to notice that in the Platonic corpus we find a rejection of rustic wisdom, and, in its reception by Stoics, an assimilation of philosophy to the superior life under law in the polity as opposed to the barbarian outside the gates. Along the way, the form of thought of (say) the rather cosmopolitan and often wise Herodotus also got treated as non-philosophical. This alerted me that in the process of waging war on sophists/sophistry, there is also a kind of lack of generosity from within the tradition in recognizing philosophy outside certain political and institutional circumstances. 'Generosity' is probably the wrong word, but it will have to do for now.

Since I regretted that continental philosophers and lit crit types had monopolized these themes (because it left me no space to contribute to the topic) because it's pretty clear that from the start of the Platonic philosophical tradition there are distinctions and contrasts, including ones that get racialized and gendered, that in some political circumstances have pernicious consequences. If philosophy is the best life, as Plato (and arguably Aristotle) and a whole host of others at least through Spinoza argue, then what counts as 'philosophy' is not merely honorific, but practices that are not properly philosophical are tacitly devalued. 

In his piece, Justin Smith reminds us that having (a) philosophy played a role in nationalist modernisation campaigns (NMCs). Justin is undoubtedly right to call attention to this, although he does not emphasize that NMCs are closely linked to the development of the modern research university (funded by that very state, too) with its highly specialized disciplines (it's the age in which natural philosophy gets displaced by special sciences).

Justin allows that it is contentious if "representatives of non-European intellectual traditions would even want, or would have wanted, to adopt as a description of what they are doing, or whether rather describing these traditions as philosophy does not already force them into a mould they did not grow up originally to fit." Now, there are tricky issues here on the nature of such representation; when it comes to participating in a tradition, I tend to think of folk instantiating or extending (or reviving it)--even sometimes of 'heading' it (some intellectual traditions have magisters). I feel that representation always also involves some kind of displacement (but that may be because I am in the grip of some species of Platonism).

More important, Justin raises the possibility that somebody from without while looking in to the traditions we call 'philosophy' comes to reject it because (as Smith hints) it somehow disfigures or distorts their own practice. We need not accept Justin's organicist use of the mould trope (which has deep roots in the Biblical influence on our philosophical tradition) to hint at the issue, to see the issue--even if, when we  tried to fully articulated the issue in careful steps we would domesticate the point from within philosophy.

Now, we're not unfamiliar with rejections of the philosophical life. There are branches of Christianity that seem to treat philosophy as either to be rejected or as the ladder to be thrown away. Al-Ghazali, too, opts for Sufism, I think, as a step beyond philosophy. And, after Nietzsche, quite a bit of Continental philosophy flirts with anti-philosophies (of some sort or another). But these are all within the orbit of the Platonic origin.

But in the essay I quoted, Justin points us to the possibility of traditions that do not require to be cleansed from our vices and our (sometimes miserable) track-record of exclusion (or worse). By allowing us to contemplate the possibility of such a 'philosophical tradition which is not philosophy,' he hints at the promise of a kind of (philosophical?) rebirth, but that, just is Platonism. That's to say, the previous sentence reminds me it's not so easy to escape the clutches of one's tradition while the urge to imagine one can do so (cf. The Tempest) is a permanent temptation.

On Late Analytic Philosophy: or the age of David Lewis

In the last 25 to 30 years historical attention has been directed toward analytic philosophy: some analytic philosophers have begun reflecting on the philosophical tradition they belong to, while many other scholars have been working on what is by now become a well-established discipline known as “history of analytic philosophy”. Yet this historiographical perspective mainly focuses on early analytic philosophy (Frege, Russell, Moore, the early Wittgenstein…), or on middle analytic philosophy (Carnap, Ryle, the later Wittgenstein, Quine…), whereas – by contrast – proper historical investigations of late analytic philosophy are still greatly needed. By “late” we mean analytic philosophy approximately in the last 40 years, which is a long enough period to deserve a separate investigation. Furthermore, we surmise that the development of this philosophical tradition in such a time span has some distinctive features, which could be profitably studied from different perspectives: philosophical, metaphilosophical, historical, sociological… In fact, such a multifaceted approach is in a sense required by the huge and increasing volume of philosophical production (due to processes of professionalization and specialization), which can hardly be dealt with satisfactorily if one takes the narrow point of view of a single discipline. For instance, it is arguably difficult to focus on prominent figures and main arguments of late analytic philosophy as a historian of philosophy would do for an earlier period, just because it is not obviously settled who the main figures are supposed to be. For this reason this call is addressed not only to philosophers and historians of philosophy, but also – hopefully – to scholars coming from other disciplines such as sociology of knowledge, institutional history of science, social epistemology, etc.--CFP History of Late Analytic Philosophy (monographical issue of "Philosophical Inquiries").

I love the idea of late analytic philosophy. If you are mischievous -- and why not, this is a blog after all-- you may think this is a fine way to describe a philosophy that failed to be timely: it missed (the Hegelian) Dusk, and so missed its appointed hour with destiny.

Kidding aside, I wish the cfp well and I am eager to read their volume. By “late” the authors of the cfp mean "analytic philosophy approximately in the last 40 years. 2016-40= 1976 [corrected]. That's the age of David Lewis. (Perhaps at the start of this forty year time-slice it may have been thought the age of Kripke.) By this I mean that Lewis's work both defines the parameters of a lot of analytical research, it has inscribed a form of cost-benefit analysis on adjudicating relative strength of positions, and is the great exemplar of how to do philosophy: modular, technical, crisply written, open to metaphysics, with simultaneous willingness to be commonsensical and outlandish, etc. This is not to say that that his work is hegemonic in all respects and all sub-fields of analytic philosophy, and that everybody would agree with me. But note  two facts: first, I am neither a partisan nor student of Lewis (recall the first paragraph of this review); that is, my claim is not self-serving in that I am trying to advance  my own research agenda. Second, the claim is backed up by citation data. 

Sure, others ("sociology of knowledge, institutional history of science, social epistemology,") may tell me a story that points in a different direction: say, the rise of applied ethics (which increasing journal space, social impact, citation increases, etc.) or the growing influence of grant agencies (public and private) on the direction of research, or, as the cfp suggests, just the increasing volume of philosophical production (bleh: the very idea of philosophical production fills me with revulsion). But even so, and here comes the philosophically and historiographically contentious claim, until a future philosopher or philosophical movement/network gives a philosophical reason to rewrite our times in light of their understanding of the direction of philosophical telos, I stick to my guns.

That is to say, I reject some non-trivial premises in the cfp. First, the idea that a historian of philosophy takes the past as given or as "settled who the main figures are supposed to be." No, that's maybe true in our teaching, but not our practice as historians of philosophy. We're constantly sifting the past trying to figure out who and what problems, argumentative moves, etc. matters to either a better understanding of the past or that are useful for understanding the philosophical present or for shaping the future (historians disagree over this). For example, during early analytical there was a consensus that Spinoza, while inspirational, really did not matter much to philosophy--Leibniz was the key historical figure (middle analytical philosophy added Kant back to the story).  During late analytical philosophy, Spinoza was rediscovered for historical and philosophical purposes. (Similar stories can be told about the changing status of Berkeley, Locke, Newton, etc.) Late analytical philosophers are also rediscovering the greatness of earlier women, including, I hasten to add, the women in early analytic (the female Polish logicians, Stebbing, etc.).  After all, somebody did the settling. And this settling is done, in part, by the historians of philosophy.

Second, just like anthropological tools can be turned to 'western' societies, economic tools applied to the family, and formal methods can be applied to philosophy, so can historical methods be applied to contemporary philosophy. (Hint: I have been doing that during half a decade of blogging.) Again, this is not to deny that others methods are potentially instructive. But, in fact, throughout history lots of history was written by eye witness spectators, sometimes interested spectators-participants (Thucydides, Xenophon, etc.).

Third, the history of early analytic is with a few notable exceptions not properly historical by this I mean that the historians who do tend to buy the narratives they have inherited from their teachers or the tradition about who matters and why. (Some other time I will name names and pick fights.) They are, in fact, products of the tradition they are supposed to be describing. Ramsey, for example, is treated as a philosopher and mathematician, but not as economists. W.E. Johnson does not figure in these histories (unless it is written by a decision theorist or somebody who has read A. Prior on determinables), etc. Just recently, we have started to recover a sense of the debates with non-analytical philosophers of the period.  I know of almost no work that looks critically at the practice of journal capture or department capture in the development of analytical philosophy; or the use of formal methods to bully technically less adept philosophers into silence, etc.

Finally, forty years of production -- "which is a long enough period to deserve a separate investigation" -- is an odd way to settle on a subject-matter.

    Long enough of what? One may ask.

    Answer: for more philosophical production, it seems.

If production becomes our end, Heidegger wins. That is to say, without a philosophical or political (or sociological, etc.) ground for desert, it is by no means obvious when a period is "long enough." I am reminded by the saying (perhaps incorrectly attributed) to Zhou Enlai:

The impact of the French Revolution? “Too early to say.”

The impact of the French Revolution? “Too early to say.” - See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/06/it-is-too-soon-to-tell-the-real-story.html#sthash.BIICP11E.dpuf

 

 

Halley and Seneca's Prophecy of Open Ended Scientific Progress

But Seneca the Philosopher, having consider'd the Phenomena of Two remarkable Comets of his Time, made no Scruple to place them amongst the Coelestial Bodies: believing them to be Stars of equal Duration with the World, tho' he owns their Motions to be govern'd by Laws not as then known or found out. And at last (which was no untrue or vain Prediction) he foretells, that there should be Ages sometime hereafter, to whom Time and Diligence shou'd unfold all these Mysteries, and who shou'd wonder that the Ancients cou'd be ignorant of them, after some lucky Interpreter of Nature had shewn; in what Parts of the Heavens the Comets wander'd, what, and how great they were. Yet almost all the Astronomers differ'd from this Opinion of Seneca; neither did Seneca himself think fit to set down those Phenomena of the Motion, by which he was enabled to maintain his Opinion: Nor the Times of those Appearances, which might be of use to Posterity, in order to the Determining these Things. E. Halley A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets translated (1705)*

Yesterday, I noted that at the start of chapter 7 (on comets) of her (1749) Commentary on Newton's Principia, Émilie du Châtelet writes that "Seneca seemed to have had an inkling of what would one day be discovered about these celestial bodies, but the seeds of the true principles that he had sown were not allowed to grow by the doctrine of the Peripatetics, who, transmitting from century to century the errors of their master, maintained that comets were meteors and temporary fires." (Translated by Isabelle Bour & Judith P. Zinsser, 337-8) I suggested that the point of the passage seems less designed to give credit to Seneca as it is to castigate the Scholastics. I went on to discuss Seneca, who seems to have invented the very idea of open-ended scientific progress within a division of intellectual labor.

Now, it's possible, of course, that Du Châtelet's remark was inspired by her own reading of Seneca. But because her mention of Seneca lacks detail and seems primarily to designed to castigate slavish following intellectual authority, I wondered if she was not relying on another source. I first checked Newton's Principia, but he does not mention Seneca. As the quote paragraph above suggests, I had better luck with Halley's (1705) Astronomiae Cometicae Synopsis. Given that she discusses the comet named after Halley, it is likely she looked at this work in Latin (or in English, which she knew well). One reason to suspect this, is that in Halley's treatment Seneca is indeed paired with Aristotle, who is blamed that the study of comets "lay altogether neglected." But Halley does not blame the Scholastics (or if he does only be implication), although later in his narrative he does make fun of the Schoolmen (but unrelated to Seneca). Nor is her treatment of Aristotle's account of comets as 'meteors and temporary fires' really identical to Halley's treatment of Aristotle's doctrine on comets as sublunary or "airy meteors," that is, "vapours floating in the ether." (Both are fair but by no means complete treatments of Aristotle's Metereology (1.7).) So, it is also unlikely that Du Châtelet is following Halley on Seneca.

The observational start of this science, Halley dates to back to 1337 (crediting the observations by the Byzantine astronomer Nicephorus Gregoras). Halley anticipates many of the points I made about Seneca in yesterday's blog post: he also treats Seneca as a philosophical prophet who is committed to  the idea that (a) with time and (b) the division of labor (c) lots more such knowledge will be attained, including (d) entirely unforeseeable knowledge, that (e) will seem entirely obvious to future generations so that (f) they will look back at Seneca's time as ignoramuses. But, (g) there is no reason to think the enterprise of knowledge ever comes to an end.

So far so good, except that Halley rejects (g), the open-ended nature of science. That is, Halley treats Newton as having completed the science of comets ("unfold all these Mysteries;" see also his evaluation of his own table at the end of the Synopsis: "it might come forth perfect, as a Thing consecrated to Posterity, and to last as long as astronomy it self." ) That Halley rejects (g) is surprising because in his original preface to the Principia, Newton signals his own commitment to (g): "I hope that the principles set down here will shed some light on either this mode of philosophizing or some truer one." (Translated by I.B. Cohen & Anne Whitman.) To later readers the point is underlined in the third (1726) edition of Principia, as George Smith has emphasized in his scholarship, by the fourth rule of reasoning (first published in the third edition): "In experimental, propositions gathered from phenomena by induction should be considered either exactly or very nearly true notwithstanding any contrary hypotheses, until yet other phenomena make such propositions either more exact or liable to exception." Other Newtonians were quick to embrace (g), but they would do so in a manner very different from Seneca and Halley.

 

At the start of chapter 7 of her (1749) Commentary on Newton's Principia, Émilie du Châtelet treats Newton as a decisive breakthrough in generating "some knowledge" of comets' "nature." Indeed, Newton had closed the first edition of the Principia with one of his crowning achievements: a (somewhat clunky) means to calculate the elliptical orbits of comets before ending on some speculative remarks on the ways comets maintain a kind of inter-stellar commerce and are possible sources of life. Du Châtelet then writes, "Seneca seemed to have had an inkling of what would one day be discovered about these celestial bodies, but the seeds of the true principles that he had sown were not allowed to grow by the doctrine of the Peripatetics, who, transmitting from century to century the errors of their master, maintained that comets were meteors and temporary fires." (Translated by Isabelle Bour & Judith P. Zinsser, 337-8) Without explaining Seneca's views, Du Châtelet treats Seneca as a distant and historically uninfluential predecessor to Newton. Because she does not explain in what way Seneca anticipated Newton, we may infer that the point of the passage seems less designed to give credit to Seneca as it is to castigate the Scholastics - See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2016/05/on-the-invention-of-progress.html#sthash.k2Anjb9f.dpufMeteorologyMeteorology