Ernest Nagel’s Commemoration of Morris Raphael Cohen [Guest post by Joel Katzav]

[This is a guest post by Joel Katzav [University of Queensland].--ES]

Cohen did not think of philosophy as a discipline competing with the various sciences for obtaining authentic knowledge of the world about us. He did not believe that philosophy yields positive information about the primary subject-matters of the sciences, or that it possesses special sources of truth which enable it to pass judgment on the factual claims of science and to set bounds to the scope of its methods. As he conceived and practiced it, philosophy is the disciplined critical reflection upon the interpretations men place on the primary materials of their experience-interpretations which are codified in the bodies of knowledge we call the sciences, in the system of rules we designate as morals or positive law, or in the evaluations of art we label as literary and esthetic criticism. Philosophical reflection, as Cohen understood it, seeks to make explicit the logical articulation of claims to knowledge, the grounds of their credibility and validity, and the import of their content for an inclusive view of nature and man (Nagel 1957, p. 548).

Morris Raphael Cohen was one of the most prominent philosophers in America in the 1930s and 1940s. He died in 1947. Nagel, writing to commemorate Cohen, his teacher, notes that “if frequency of references to him in the current literature is a safe basis for judgment, it must be admitted that few professional philosophers continue to read Cohen or to be influenced by his ideas” (1957, p. 548).[1] Nagel laments this situation and, after doing so, explains, in the excerpt given above, that Cohen was not a speculative philosopher. In 1950s speak, Cohen was kosher.

But Nagel is–and this equally applies to the rest of the commemoration text–misrepresenting Cohen. Cohen was a passionate proponent of a pluralistic form of speculative philosophy. 1910 saw the new realists calling for a philosophical platform–roughly, a party centred around consensual truths and rigorous, logical analysis–one that would guide philosophical research in America. Cohen, among many others, objected and argued that philosophy should be inherently pluralistic and speculative. Here is an excerpt from Cohen’s 1910 plea for speculative philosophy:

A philosophy which would recognize its kinship with literature and with the social sciences would be truly humanistic. It would aim to be scientific, but it would not be afraid to go beyond science just as life and conduct must go beyond knowledge. This, however, would be only a reassertion of the old ideal of philosophy as mediating between the lebenisantschauung of literature and the social sciences, and the weltanschauung of the natural sciences. We may laugh at system building as much as we please, but some such ideal must be held up by somebody if the present anarchic tendency to overspecialization is to be controlled in the interests of sanity (Cohen 1910, p. 409).

Cohen’s pluralism about philosophy, and indeed about science, was underpinned by a form of perspectival realism, one according to which there are a variety of alternative, insightful perspectives on reality. At the base of his perspectivism was a metaphysical principle, the principle of polarity:

 [The principle of polarity] is the principle, not of the identity, but of the necessary copresence and mutual dependence of opposite determinations. It warns us against the greatest bane of philosophizing, to wit: the easy artificial dilemma between unity and plurality, rest and motion, substance and function, actual and ideal, etc (Cohen 1927, p. 679).

For Cohen, the principle of polarity underpins the goal of understanding the substantial truth in the various philosophical systems, e.g., positivism, idealism and materialism.

Nagel, to be sure, had his own metaphysics, one that acknowledges that a “manifest plurality and variety of things, of their qualities and their functions, are an irreducible feature of the cosmos” (1956, p. 7). This metaphysics superficially resembles Cohen’s. But Nagel’s metaphysics is not intended to open the door to a plurality of legitimate metaphysical perspectives; Nagel was pushing for a philosophical platform, much as the new realists were. Nor is Nagel’s metaphysics supposed to embrace the need to go beyond science and thus to be speculative. His position supposedly “articulates features of the world which, because they have become so obvious, are rarely mentioned in discussions of special subject matter” and which are “meagre in content” (1956, pp. 6-7). While Cohen admits that, as a metaphysician, he must go beyond science, Nagel denies that he must and insists that he is just articulating what we already know.[2]

One reason Nagel might have had for misrepresenting Cohen was to promote Cohen’s work to an audience of analytic philosophers. But it is hard to see Nagel’s intent as serious if this motivation is attributed to him. Nagel’s text includes nothing concrete about Cohen’s thought or achievements that might motivate one to read his work. A less obvious possible motivation is Nagel’s own reputation. For one thing, Cohen belonged to the first generation of professional American philosophers of science. Nagel’s reputation as a key source of American analytic philosophy of science may have benefited from a lack of knowledge of Cohen’s work in the field. Nagel does not do more than intimate that Cohen was a philosopher of science (Nagel does not do much better when, in his books, he mentions Cohen; Nagel’s own citations of Cohen’s work are very limited). For another thing, supporting one’s reputation in 1957 required, especially for those who, like Nagel, belonged to pre-1950s American philosophy, distancing oneself from speculative thought.

It would not have been hard to tempt some future readers into learning more about Cohen. Cohen taught quite a few of the second generation of American, professional philosophers of science, including, in addition to Nagel, Sidney Hook, Lewis Feuer, Milton Munitz, Joseph Ratner and Philip Wiener. Moreover, as Cohen’s Reason and Nature: An Essay on the Meaning of Scientific Method (1931) makes clear, his students will have found in his teaching and writing many of the issues, positions and modes of proceeding that later constituted analytic, which was perceived to be ‘logical-empiricist’, philosophy of science. If we avert our gaze from some of the sections in Cohen’s book–especially to the critique of positivism, the chapter on speculative philosophy and the treatment of ethics–we find a template for analytic philosophy of science, including a familiar understanding of the role of logical analysis in philosophy of science, of the issues it faces, of the positions to be examined and much more. Indeed, it is striking how close the topics, and order of topics, in Cohen’s book are those of Nagel’s 1961 book The Structure of Science: a general discussion of the logic of science (laws of nature, explanation, confirmation), followed by the philosophy of physical science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of the social sciences and the philosophy of history). Nagel’s book, of course, was one of the key textbooks of early analytic philosophy of science. Cohen and Nagel’s joint book from 1934, An introduction to logic and scientific method, is a logic textbook rather than primarily a book in the philosophy of science, but here too the formative influence of Cohen’s 1931 book is clear, e.g., in the half of the book which does focus on applied logic and the philosophy of science and in the conception of logic, which is Cohen’s and which Nagel rejects in his later work.

Bibliography

Cahoone, L. (2017) “The metaphysics of Morris R. Cohen: from realism to objective relativism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 78(3): 449-471.

Cohen, M. R. (1910) "The Conception of Philosophy in Recent Discussion." The Journal of Philosophy, 7(15): 401-410.

Cohen, M. R. (1927) “Concepts and Twilight Zones.” The Journal of Philosophy, 24(25), 673-683.

Cohen, M. R. (1931) An essay on the meaning of scientific method. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

Cohen, M. R. (1934) An introduction to logic and the scientific method. London: Routledge.

Nagel, E. (1956) Logic without metaphysics. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press.

Nagel, E. (1957) “Morris R. Cohen in retrospect,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 18(4): 548-551.

 

[1] Cahoone (2017) also notes a dearth of citations of Cohen’s work.

[2] Nor was Nagel really a pluralist about science. Immediately after articulating his metaphysics, he tells us (1956, p. 8) that his position is not incompatible with the existential primacy of matter. Moreover, he never closes the door to the idea that some ultimate physical theory might be able to explain all of natural science.

Comments

[Eric Schliesser]

Hi Joel,
Thank you for your provocative guest-post.
I agree with you that Nagel's relationship to Cohen merits careful, critical scrutiny without romanticism. And this sheds light on the sociological and conceptual formation of American analytic philosophy and a certain rejection, if not, effacement about what came before. But two quick thoughts: (i) Nagel's 1957 retrospect is accompanied by a much longer, and fascinating essay by Leonora Cohen Rosenfield in the same issue: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2707567. She was one of Cohen's daughters but also an accomplished scholar in her own right. I warmly recommend her *From Beast-Machine to Man-Machine, Animal Soul in French Letters from Descartes to La Mettrie*, published in 1941. She also published a biography of her father in 1962. And did important work on reviving interest in Condorcet.
So, a natural division of labor presents itself: Nagel, who is then quite famous academic, is what we would call the click-bait and Cohen Rosenfield provides the concrete substance about Cohen’s thought or achievements and that might motivate one to read his work. (Her essay is fascinating.)
(ii) I agree there are real differences between Cohen and Nagel (who rejects, I think, the principle of polarity). But I think you miss that Nagel does represent Cohen as a kind of pluralist note the "interpretations" in the quote you provide. Anyway thank you for getting us to think about their relationship.

[Joel Katzav]

Hi Eric,

Even if Nagel’s 1957 piece was click-bait, his misrepresentation, lack of charity about Cohen’s contributions to the philosophy of science and limited citations of Cohen would need to be explained. In addition, Nagel fails to draw attention to Cohen’s achievements in the philosophy of science in 1980, when it is the centenary of Cohen’s birth. Thelma Z. Lavine agrees. While her introduction to the work produced for the centenary (‘The Morris Cohen Centenary – Introduction’ https://www.jstor.org/stable/40319909) does emphasise Cohen’s speculative philosophy of science, she notes that Nagel’s contribution to the centenary, as well as the other contribution, by Edel, suggest that it is the legal component of Cohen’s work that is significant.

I don’t think that acknowledging, and reflecting on, the different interpretations of experience comes close to any kind of pluralism about philosophy.