A very similar transformation actually occurred in Western philosophy not too long ago. When a major European university began to teach the ideas of a particular noncanonical thinker, mainstream philosophers on the faculty objected that the new philosophy was not part of “our tradition,” and that it was watering down the curriculum in the name of a misguided fad. Because the new philosophy was inconsistent with many widely held positions, some philosophers resorted to a flaccid relativism, arguing that there were “two truths” on these matters. This sort of approach only convinced the mainstream philosophers that the new philosophy was nonsense. However, a brilliant philosopher argued that the best way to discover the truth is through a pluralistic dialogue with all the major world philosophies. This philosophical genius was Thomas Aquinas. In the thirteenth century at the University of Paris, Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and others encouraged students and colleagues (who had previously only learned a form of Platonized Christianity) to expand the canon and learn not just from the philosophy of the pagan Aristotle (only recently rediscovered in Western Europe), but also from Jewish and Muslim thinkers. The result was to reinvigorate and deepen the Western philosophical tradition.... The case of Aquinas and the rediscovery of Aristotle is just one of many examples that illustrate that the Western philosophical canon is not, and never was, a closed system. Philosophy only becomes richer and approximates the truth more closely as it becomes increasingly diverse and pluralistic.--Bryan W. Van Norden (2017) Taking Back Philosophy: a Multicultural Manifesto, 18
The widespread turn to meta-philosophy, even discussion of the merits of progress, if any, in philosophy are simultaneously signs of self-confidence -- as Montaigne, Pascal, and Margaret Cavendish show it takes a certain courage to question oneself -- and a sense of malaise, not always fully justified, induced by a sense of exhaustion of approaches that have had their trial. And this turn to meta-philosophy occurs after vanquishing -- a word I don't use lightly --, its parochial rivals, and benefitting from soft association with imperial power, analytic philosophy strides the world as a global hegemon increasingly being taught in colleges, often branded with American and European names, around the world.
While there is a strain of argument in Van Norden's Taking Back Philosophy preoccupied with the distribution of jobs in 'ranked' departments (e.g., 2; 5; 25-26; 31-34 162; see also Garfield's foreword, p. xii; xx) and the scarce resource of time in the curriculum (e.g., xviii-xix; 8, 36, 103, 115), his more important argument is that philosophy would benefit from what is known as 'diversifying' its canon. And the paragraph quoted above is supposed to offer an instance of such fruits.
Before I get to that, it is worth noting three features about contemporary analytic philosophy: first, analytic philosophy has exceedingly few substantive dogmas. I don't mean this only as the bad joke that Quine and Davidson jointly could only count to three (and with Socrates we may ask where is the fourth?). But rather in the more serious sense that analytic philosophy always has been like a sponge drawing in ideas and techniques from the sciences and logic, and even rival schools, and, like a high energy shape-shifter, has had an open-ended capacity to reinvent itself. This is why most critiques of analytic philosophy lodged by its rivals often seem so comically off-base within a short amount of time.*
Second, because analytic philosophy's self-identity is constantly re-invented over time, it has no felt requirement for a fixed canon of texts to give it identity.** So, for example, Feigl's and Sellars' (1949) Readings in Philosophical Analysis. was welcomed as a "book" which "contains a good number of the classics of analysis and should therefore provide useful source material for courses in Contemporary Philosophy, Problems, and Methods." Most of the authors of these classics are still familiar names, - "Feigl (4 essays), Kneale, Quine (2), Tarski, Carnap (3), Frege, Russell, [C.I.] Lewis (3), Schlick (4), Aldrich (2), Adjukiewicz, [Ernest] Nagel, Waismann, Hempel (4), Reichenbach (2)" - , but it is to be doubted that most of the articles themselves, or what they argue for, play much of a role in contemporary undergraduate or graduate education (outside those that cater to specialists in history of analytic). I bet a few names are completely unfamiliar. One can play a similar game with Rorty's more recent (and larger) Linguistic Turn. To be a classic within analytic philosophy is to risk oblivion quickly from the perspective of eternity.
As an aside, the author of the review from Philosophy of Science just quoted, Russell L. Ackoff, became one of the founders of operations research and systems thinking in management science. Even the limited biography of Wikipedia suggests wonderful avenues of research for sociologists of analytic philosophy.
Third, analytic philosophy is, despite inhabiting extremely steep prestige and economic hierarchies, and having become a (near) mono-linguistic culture, still a dispersed discipline with many local nodes doing their own thing. And while a shift to standardizing text-book education may change the dispersed nature, for now analytic philosophy evolves -- despite our natural tendency to be guided by the Williamsons', Chalmers', Siders', Pauls' (etc.) -- in virtue of countless many relatively independent, contingent curricular and refereeing decisions. And while, with Condorcet's jury theorem in the back of the mind, such a structure may offer confidence that we're somewhat truth-apt, it also means that the content of the destination of such a dispersed philosophical 'market' in ideas may be intrinsically uncertain. This means there is also space for local arbitrage opportunities, including (as Justin Smith has remarked) richly supported non-university think-tanks funded by (self-proclaimed) Libertarian billionaires.
Okay, let's grant Van Norden his main claim that a philosophical tradition can be reinvigorated by a kind of systematic exposure to another tradition or, as in the thirteenth century example, a diversity of traditions. It doesn't follow, as he tacitly recognizes, that it will always do so. Some novelties, regardless of their sources, are fads and claims to ancient wisdom may, upon inspection, be banality. In that respect, it is striking that the thirteenth century transformation involved purportedly incompatible, even contradictory traditions. The contradiction could only be resolved by the genius of a synthesizing mind who created a kind of aufhebung.
My criticism is not that Van Norden seems to presuppose civilizational intellectual traditions with a true essence here (he denies that the page before, see the quote below); nor is that Van Norden seems to have replicated a basically neo-Hegelian-Romantic scheme of progress and (so the worry goes) imposed it on the historical 'data'. But rather that if the mere fact of contradiction is not a reliable means toward distinguishing fad from source of renewal, the episode seems to teach that one can never know that some innovation isn't fad (given our canons of rigor).
So, I do like Van Norden's other exemplar better, which is closer to our current situation:
There are also clear historical examples of intellectual traditions accepting and being broadened by alien systems of thought. When Buddhism was brought to China by missionaries from India in the first century ce, there already existed a robust and diverse native spiritual tradition, including Confucianism and Daoism (each of which had a variety of competing interpretations). Buddhism was a completely alien system of thought that challenged many of the fundamental ethical and metaphysical assumptions of the classic Chinese thinkers. However, Chinese philosophers studied Buddhist works, translated them into their own language, learned a new technical vocabulary, and engaged with Buddhist arguments. As a result, the Chinese intellectual tradition was permanently deepened. Even if one refuses to bestow the label of “philosophy” upon any of these systems of thought, the fact that Confucianism and Daoism were able to adapt to and incorporate Buddhist ideas dispels the illusion that intellectual traditions have an unchanging essence that makes them hermetically sealed (17)
What this example reveals is that intellectual traditions can be internally heterogeneous and still sufficiently distinct from each other such that internally heterogeneous alternatives may seem, at first, 'completely alien.' And that members of a resourceful home tradition can bring themselves, despite the barriers of entry [language, technical vocabulary, techniques, argument styles, etc.], to study such an alternative system of thought. I am sure that Van Norden could name these intrepid philosophical explorers/abitreurs that created intellectual trading zones among Confucianism & Daoism and Buddhism at various sites. But these these under-laborers are not named, and the local turmoil that surrounded them effaced, even if (despite presumably some unnamed Kuhn-losses) their fruits are "permanent."
So, one way to think of attempts at diversifying analytic philosophy, and its relationship(s) to a 'canon', is to generate the conditions of such self-transformation of the tradition without -- pace Condorcet -- any guarantee of success, but with the expectation that the unknown destinations may well give us rewarding sights, even, as I learned from Eileen O'Neill, a better, but painful, political and intellectual self-understanding, and, as collective transformative experiences, unexpected views on the truth.
*Derrida being the exception. But his has not been understood.
**In this post I ignore the relationship between analytic philosophy and a wider, but rather narrow, historical canon [Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant] that it partially teaches to undergraduates and graduate students (something I addressed here in response to Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman; earlier here John Drabinski); and in my introduction to Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy.
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