Digressions&Impressions

On Aristotle's Cave (on Plato's Cave via --- ahh, yes -- Cicero) and Design Arguments

Great was the saying of Aristotle: 'Suppose there were men who had lived always underground, in good and well-lighted dwellings, adorned with statues and pictures, and furnished with everything in which those who are thought happy abound. Suppose, however, that they had never gone above ground, but had learned by report and hearsay that there is a divine authority and power. Suppose that then, at some time, the jaws of the earth opened, and they were able to escape and make their way from those hidden dwellings into these regions which we inhabit. When they suddenly saw earth and seas and sky, when they learned the grandeur of clouds and the power of winds, when they saw the sun and learned his grandeur and beauty and the power shown in his filling the sky with light and making day; when, again, night darkened the lands and they saw the whole sky picked out and adorned with stars, and the varying lights of the moon as it waxes and wanes, and the risings and settings of all these bodies, and their courses settled and immutable to all eternity; when they saw those things, most certainly they would have judged both that there are gods and that these great works are the works of gods.' Thus far Aristotle.--Quoted from Ross's Works of Aristotle, quoting Cicero (who is quoting Aristotle), On the Nature of the Gods (2. 37. 95-96[see here for Cicero's latin].), pp. 85-6. [HT Eric Brown & Monte Johnson]

In the context of Balbus's articulation and further elucidation of what I have dubbed (recall) the 'Posidonian argument,' the passage attributed to Aristotle above is quoted. Bywater (1876; HT Eric Brown) offers compelling reasons to believe that this is a fragment of Aristotle's lost dialogue, "On Philosophy" (or can at least traced back to it; Bywater's essay is worth re-reading for more reasons). 

Some other time I want to reflect on how we can read this passage as a comment on Plato's famous Cave (especially striking that Aristotle's cave dwellers have pictures and statues). Here I'll focus primarily on the passage itself (and the use Cicero makes of it). The inhabitants of the cave have everything that is thought needed for happiness. I am unsure, if we need to read into this Aristotle's disagreement with what is thought. But I am going to assume that this makes no difference to Aristotle's general claim.

What may well make a difference is that happy cave people have heard about God's will and power (numen et vim deorum). This is worth noting for two reasons: first, more speculatively, it may indicate that Aristotle is toying with the idea that stories about the gods (we may say that's the original sense of 'theology') arises naturally in any human community.* Elsewhere Aristotle connects the θεολόγοι with the circle around Hesiod (see Metaphysics 1000a9).

But earlier, okay here's some Plato: Aristotle allows that others (Plato) think that such ('theological' θεολογήσαντας) reflection on the gods predates philosophy greatly and goes back to earliest times (Met. 1.983b). So, it's possible that the whole Aristotelian thought experiment is meant to reveal something about Plato's anthropology/philosophy (for the political significance of this recall this post on Republic 427; and this one on the city of pigs).

Second, one wonders to what degree the fact that the cave-dwellers already had views on god influenced their judgment about the perception of the phenomena. That is, intentionally or not, Aristotle's thought experiment raises the question of confirmation bias (or theory mediated perception). Of course, I can't prove this claim, but it is worth noting that at least one of the perceptions they have -- orbits of astronomical bodies settled and immutable to all eternity --is not the product of mere unmediated impressions. Let's allow that the former cave dwellers can discover in fairly short notice that the planetary motions are sufficiently regular. But that their orbits are eternally fixed requires something which cannot be founded in such experience, but requires cosmological and physical backgrounds commitments.

To be sure, I am not denying that even without the supposition that the orbits are eternally fixed, the inference from celestial regularity to a providential god may still be likely. In particular, Cicero's Aristotle, relies on the grandeur of nature (and we are extremely close to the sublime here; yes, that is supposedly anachronistic, but I am capturing the repetitive magnitudinem pulchritudinemque.) Even so, in the thought experiment, the celestial bodies are made co-extensive in existence with the eternal god(s). That is to say, if you are properly primed, then the fact that nature is grandly ordered generates the natural, even inevitable inference that it (the order) is god(s)'s workmanship.

So, the way I read the Aristotle passage it could be part of an unmasking error theory,+ but it need not be so. After all, there may well be independent arguments for the existence of gods and their magnificent workmanship. In fact, Cicero's Balbus uses the passage in this latter (non-unmasking) way. For according to Balbus once you have been exposed to philosophical arguments for the existence of god -- and the previous passage offers a wonderful argument against the epicureans that (i) from start of great disorder random motions can never produce the particular order we have, and (ii) if they could, why not also houses and palaces (so much easier than a whole universe)? -- order in nature is evidently due to rational design.** 

 

Philosophy of Science in The Nobel Prize (Economics) Lecture by Stigler

I propose on this occasion to address the same kinds of questions to an entirely different market: the market for new ideas in economic science. Most economists enter this market in new ideas, let me emphasize, in order to obtain ideas and methods for the applications they are making of economics to the thousand problems with which they are occupied: these economists are not the suppliers of new ideas but only demanders. Their problem is comparable to that of the automobile buyer: to find a reliable vehicle. Indeed, they usually end up by buying a used, and therefore tested, idea.--George Stigler (1982)  Nobel Lecture (Economics), Stockholm.

As regular readers know, the Nobel (Chicago-economist), George J. Stigler, had a lifelong interest in the philosophy, and sociology of science. I have remarked in the past that this interest was not entirely disinterested; it's clear that Stigler's work also aimed at influencing the discipline (for example, encouraging consensus-aiming practices that would allow one to ignore criticisms) and I have argued here that he was rather successful at doing so and so is worth paying attention to how philosophical ideas shape scientific practice.

Somewhat surprisingly and unusually Stigler chose to structure his prize lecture around his interest in the sociology/philosophy of economics. I call it unusual because he won the prize for his "seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation," and ordinarily the Nobel lecture is an elegant discussion of and introduction into the material that generated professional recognition often  accompanied with polite recognition of folk who did not get the prize, but paved the way to it. Stigler deviates from the precedent. It's not that he does not discuss these topics at all -- and one could argue that he is discussing the functioning of the markets in ideas -- , but they are all framed by his sociological interests in science. These interests are long-standing, and they were shaped not just by his teacher, Knight, but also his encounters with Merton (a colleague at Columbia) and Talcott Parsons (probably a colleague at Stanford), and his early readings of Kuhn. 

As an aside, Stigler was a world-class historian of economics, even long after that had become professionally non-fashionable. This lack of fashion was itself a consequence, in part, because he would (while echoing Kuhn) tell folk that a sign of scientific maturity was that disciplinary history became of little interest to the puzzle solving economists (thus providing justification for the elimination of history of economics from graduate curricula).

In fact, the previous paragraph is not really an aside. The Nobel lecture relies explicitly on [A] a distinction "between prescientific and scientific stages of a discipline." (This is quoted from the abstract.) It also relies (more implicitly) on a [B] distinction between those (the few) that supply "new ideas" -- akin to Kuhnian legislators --  and those ("most") that "demand" ideas to be applied to the determinate problems with which they are occupied (the Kuhnian worker-bees, or puzzle-solvers). (The quoted material is the second paragraph of the lecture.)

It turns out however that the few are, from Stigler's perspective, unusual characters, I quote the relevant paragraph before I comment:

Those economists who seek to engage in research on the new ideas of the science to refute or confirm or develop or displace them are in a sense both buyers and sellers of new ideas. They seek to develop new ideas and persuade the science to accept them, but they also are following clues and promises and explorations in the current or preceding ideas of the science. It is very costly to enter this market: it takes a good deal of time and thought to explore a new idea far enough to discover its promise or its lack of promise. The history of economics, and I assume of every science, is strewn with costly errors: of ideas, so to speak, that wouldn't run far or carry many passengers (530)

Kuhnian legislators have two roles: being [C] developers of new ideas and, unless they have disciples willing to do the work, [D] persuaders of others to accept them. [D] means there is a need for scientific entrepreneurs and the art of rhetoric in science. It turns out that [E] there are high barriers to entry to become a Kuhnian legislator both because (i) it requires a lot of effort and time to be on top of existing science and develop new ideas, as well as (ii) the risks involved of producing ideas that do not pan out. Some of the costs involved, are (iii) investments in prior social infrastructure of science ("the machinery of intellectual exchange-journals, learned societies, and conferences"(535)) that make a "large expenditure of time, intelligence, and research resources" possible (536). Notice that such ideas may well be true, but if there is no uptake (recall [D]) and so no "prestige, reputation, and income" (530) worth having, then this, too, will be treated as failure.*

Famously, Kuhn divides the immature and mature stage of science in terms of consensus or lack thereof. Stigler had used such a measure, too, in the past. But in the Nobel lecture he offers a different criterion: the pre-scientific stage "is characterized by absence of a set of interacting practitioners who are devoting a large part of their lives to the accumulation of knowledge, and hence it is characterized by the absence of cumulative progress." (530) There are really two claims here: [F] in the scientific stage a science is progressing. More important, [G] a science is characterized by the presence of practitioners who (i) recognize each other as fellow travelers/scientists, who (ii) are professionals (in the sense that science is their main occupation), and (iii) who form a communicative community. It's not always clear if he thinks whether [G] causes [F] or [G] is a symptom of [F.]

One interesting feature of the absence of progress and lack of a scientific community in the pre-scientific stage that Stigler notes is that descriptions of it often (a) "almost totally lack a time dimension." In pre-scientific stages it makes little difference in what order doctrines are discussed. An interesting feature of the presence of a scientific community is that (b) detected errors will be refuted, and "only the detected errors of unimportant economists are spared a prompt reputation." (531)

Another criterion he offers between the pre-scientific and scientific eras, is that in the pre-scientific era the problems of a would-be-science are shaped by the (often practical needs of the) environment. While Stigler does not deny that "new circumstances" (political and technological changes) can spur interest in some questions and even innovation, but at bottom his view is that "an empirical science such as economics is to provide general understanding of events in the real world, and ultimately all of its theories and techniques must be instrumental to that task. That is very different from saying, however, that it must be responsive to the contemporaneous conditions and problems of the society in which it is situated." That is, Stigler [H] denies what in earlier work he had called “environmental theory.” And, in fact, it is accompanied by a further claim  that [I] "A science requires for its very existence a set of fundamental and durable problems." (534) One may say that these problems are part of the identity conditions of the science and the ones that Kuhnian legislators help illuminate.+ But in the moment it's very difficult to distinguish between fruitful ideas and dead-ends. And this means [J] that all sciences will be subject to fashions that after the fact prove illusory in fruitfulness.

Because Stigler treats mature science as a fairly efficient communicative community, the [K] new ideas that will prove to be fruitful must in some sense be a natural and small enough, discrete extension from existing practices ("science also progresses through time without making large jumps" with an explicit nod to Darwin's Natura non facit saltus. ) This commitment follows quite naturally from the way demand in economics is conceived. For [L] any idea to have uptake it most (and Stigler credits his Chicago colleague,  Gary Becker) be deploy-able by applied practitioners (who have specific human capital) with little extra cost and more potential reward (and who are risk averse). It also follows that given the structure  of the market of economic ideas that there is a bias against novelty from the majority because their "capital would be reduced if [their] knowledge were made obsolete by the general acceptance of a new theory. Hence, established scholars should, in their own self-interest, attack new theories." (538) That is to say, [M] there is considerable status quo bias in any scientific discipline that also (and Stigler does not point this out) helps stabilize the boundaries and the identity conditions of the discipline.

In fact, [N] often novel ideas will be subject to controversy, although Stigler points to the uptake of his own work in the economics of information as an exception (there was little controversy). Stigler thinks this was due to the fact that "no established scientific theory was being challenged by this work." (539) So there are for Stigler [O] two kinds of new ideas: those that extend a theory or apply a known tool in a new area (relatively little controversy) and those that challenge existing practices. The latter can form the basis of a true challenge to the status quo [P], "it takes a theory to beat a theory." But Stigler admits that [Q] a true test is rare because it is rare that "a theory in economics has a well-defined domain of applicability." (542) Instead theories are tested indirectly for "fertility,"  by deploying them to "explore a variety of problems." Such [R] indirect tests take time and a theory can linger for a long time before it is ultimately discarded.

Stigler explicitly recognizes that there may be more other interesting factors. But we can treat [A]-[R] as the main factors of Stigler's public choice model of science. (He credits Downs, Buchanan, and Tullock, but seems to have been unaware of Tullock's The Organization of Inquiry, which (recall) anticipates many of his own views.

Because I have gone on too long for a blog post, I will not offer critical commentary today. I just note one final feature of Stigler's philosophy of science. For, Stigler, thus [Q] a science is characterized by fundamental Knightian uncertainty about its own development ("No one can describe the precise characteristics or content of a new piece of scientific work that will find ready and eager reception from the scientists of a period." (538))** This commitment to Knight's ideas is especially notable because he rejects the thought (which he explicitly associates with his teacher Knight) that the subjects studied by economists are mistake prone and do not grasp the effects of their policy choices (recall also my treatment of his Tanner lectures).

 

RIP: Stanley Cavell 1926-2018 (Guest Post by Abraham Stone)

[This is an invited guest post by Abe Stone (Santa Cruz, Philosophy)--ES]

I remember distinctly the moment I learned that David Lewis had died. It was during my years as a postdoctoral fellow, when I was more than a little isolated, and so it turned out to have been some time — months, maybe — since the event. I recall thinking: the world in which I thought I was living, during those months, turned out not to be the actual world, and so I turned out not to be the person I thought I was, but merely a counterpart of that person. And thus arose the half-formed thought (still only half-formed now, alas) that therein lay some insight into what is actually at stake in the conflict between counterpart theory and transworld identity.

There are very many different ways in which philosophical writing can be difficult. In Lewis’s case (as in Hume’s), the obscurity derives most of all from irony: philosophical theses are argued for, urgently, fluently, and with elaborate and ambitious systematicity, but there are only scattered and sometimes conflicting hints about whence the urgency derives. In Cavell’s case (as in Emerson’s, or Thoreau’s, or Wittgenstein’s) the difficulty lies largely in a different direction. There are a series of statements or short passages, each clear enough in itself, and some, at least, dealing with matters of obvious importance;[1] but the rule of the series, the reason one follows another in just this order, is thoroughly opaque. Hence Cavell’s death leaves me with different thoughts: about the continuation and breaking of series, about whether we can carry on, and whether we should.

Moreover, although I met Lewis only once, I was Cavell’s student for many years, and in fact he is the one person I regularly refer to (in talking to my students, for example) as “my teacher.” But I was not one of his closest students. Our relationship was always difficult, no doubt in large part because of my deafness to so much of what he heard. And what he heard that I did not was not limited to such minor items as poetry, jazz, opera, and what to me are just some mildly amusing and/or disquieting old movies. It often extended rather farther, to the words coming out of my own mouth: I might realize too late, after leaving the room, that he had been responding to what I, without knowing it, had literally said. And yet this was a good way to be his student, because, beyond the many listable insights, methods, approaches, even simple facts that I learned from him, the biggest lesson of all, and the one most central to his thought, was about the philosophically essential and impossible nature of that relationship between teacher and student. The teacher, so to speak, at some point, breaks off and says: now continue as I would; and what happens next, if it is not just complete failure, may well involve violence or the threat of violence, or flattery and slavish imitation, or treachery and betrayal, or (as in King Lear) all of those combined.[2]

Cavell’s death comes at a time when, though some think that Western philosophy has entered a golden age, others of us fear that it may have ended, that there is and will be no next member of the series after Cavell, after Lewis, after Derrida. But then, on the other hand: it also comes at a time when, having tried (but: fairly tried?) doing good, we find, strange as it may seem, that it does not agree with our Constitution. It comes, in other words, at a time when we may ask: why attempt to follow such teachers? Why not reject them and begin anew? The option of rejection — I mean, the option of rejecting our teachers, rejecting the whole tradition of philosophy from which we have emerged, rejecting America, rejecting Europe, rejecting Athens — seems eminently reasonable, more the voice of conscience than of inclination. This is hardly the first such time, of course, but it would be a poor exercise in induction to conclude that it won’t or shouldn’t be the last: that what Justinian or Descartes or Carnap tried and failed can’t and shouldn’t now finally be accomplished.

Cavell’s response to this, as I understand it, is that the apparent option of rejection is really an option of repression. I can’t say how essential it is that this be taken as a reception of Freud: Freud’s thought is yet another of the things important to Cavell which I feel unable to appreciate, or to which, perhaps, I am resistant. But it explains why Cavell, though he never followed Heidegger into, as he would put it, “the myth of having read everything,” also never followed Wittgenstein and Emerson into “the myth of having read nothing.” He worried constantly over the canonical figures of Western philosophy — not in a scholarly, originalist way, but beginning with them as he had received them, stare decisis (which meant, in some respects: beginning with a mere caricature of them). It explains, too, why lack of recognition, for himself or for his teachers, could so anger him: the story in which “American philosophy” means principally James and Dewey offended him, not as ignorant and inaccurate, but as a deliberate (though unconscious) suppression of Emerson and Thoreau. It explains his anger on one occasion when, responding to his description of the logical positivists as “self-stultifying,” I said that what he took as self-stultification is actually self-control. “How can you make that distinction after Freud?” was his reply. For me, the time now was (and is) after Avicenna, after Descartes, after Kant, certainly, after Nietzsche, maybe even after Wittgenstein, but not after Freud (or after Marx). That was an excuse (elaborative) that he would not accept. But then why isn’t this time also after Carnap (or after Neurath, or after Popper)? Cavell knew he could not, so to speak, point to a set of invisible, strong-as-logic (or even: strong-as-sociology) rails that would send me through one set of stops but not through the other. That he might say, in such a case, “Here my spade is turned,” was to him not a reassurance but a tragedy.

What time is now? What world is actual? The questions are almost the same, maybe, after all. Indexicals show most starkly the irruption of the pragmatic (and the transcendental?) into semantics. If what is salient to me is not, or not often enough, what is salient to you, we can’t speak to one another, even if we speak “the same language.” If a lion could speak, how could we understand it? A lion or other non-human animal — but how do we know which animals are humans? What about drills and children and idiots and Aristotelian or Derridean philosophers? If Locke associates the name “human,” in the phrase “human(e) understanding,” with a complex idea that includes whiteness and maleness (not to mention mechanism, traces of alchemy, Euclidean spatiality …), and if we understand him, must we not make the same association? (Locke, if I do understand him, would say that we must. “I know not, how Men [!], who have the same Idea, under different Names, or different Ideas under the same Name, can, in that case, talk with one another.”) What if our salient points of reference — the chessboard, the well-known beacons and headlands, the orbis magnus — turn out to be non-actual, or no longer actual, already dead? What if the rock on which we hoped to found a wall or a state (or a church), which we had hoped to reach at last by clearing up the ground, removing some of the rubbish (even if that should require a sort of moral bog hoe), turns out to be a myth? If the concepts origin and series (or: permanence, progression and reversion) are mythical, how can we continue any series? How can we fail to?

What I learned from Cavell — what we have all learned from him, if, as I think, the time now is after Cavell — is not solutions, but problems. We may not be able to continue. We may have no choice but to continue.

On Translators-Advocates as Philosophers

I would be unconvinced by an account of translating that passes too quickly over or fails altogether to notice its chance of learning. The chance it offers of becoming expert, becoming-critical, becoming-intimate, becoming a better -- or, if not a better (because are we really getting any better at reading and writing? Is it useful to think of these activities in terms of progress?) -- then certainly a different reader and writer. Translations as the chance -- a translation projects as a means of giving oneself the chance -- of being taught by the other's writing, where answers to the questions of how to be responsible for this writing, and whether or not you or I will be capable of taking responsibility for this writing are, again, in no way given in advance....It's rather to offer a view of translation as a site for learning through reading and writing, through testing and researching, through asking and arguing. Kate Briggs (2017) This Little Art, pp. 207-21o; emphases in original). [HT: Petra Van Brabandt]

One thing Elizabeth Anscombe, John McDowell, Jan Łukasiewicz, Martha Nussbaum, W.D. Ross, and Eleanore Stump have in common is that they produced major translations of complex, philosophical works.  (When I looked up Łukasiewicz I expected to find translations of logic texts, but I learned he produced a translation of Hume's Treatise.) I also believe they did so relatively early in their careers. That they translated is, with the exception, perhaps, of Ross, not a major part of their professional identity. But notable, nevertheless. The list of philosopher-translators is, of course, much longer; plenty of trained and professionally employed philosophers devote considerable attention of their scholarly life to producing editions of translations for use in the classroom and scholarship. But this activity is generally not the way we receive and award professional recognition or credit. This is true, I think, even in (at least some)* areas of the history of philosophy; the fact that, say, Curley, Ariew, Garber, Lennon, Berges (etc.) produce major translations is not the reason why the rest of us admire their work. If anything, if at a conference dinner, we praise the translation too much, we may well be suspected of having a low opinion of their philosophical and scholarly work. 

Last week I noted that absent a translator-advocate, some works of philosophy will always remain obscure outside the home language. I kind of presupposed that in philosophy, a translation alone is not sufficient to make a linguistically distant text available to readers. It will also require philosophical creativity to articulate the significance of such a work to an audience that may be unclear about the problematic and potentially bewildering conceptual framework, not to mention tacit commitments, of such a text. This requires considerable philosophical acuity on the part of  the translator-advocate** because one must understand not only the contemporary philosophical scene to some degree, but be able to learn another, potentially alien approach. That is to say, I tacitly assumed that translator-advocates are over-achieving philosophers, who are also skilled at philosophical politics (recall this post); they can survey multiple cultural traditions and then set in motion arbitrage among them.

Reading This Little Art, a sympathetic and enchanting guide to the art of translation and the meaning of life, made me realize that my assumptions  need some adjustment. (Briggs is a translator of works by Roland Barthes.) I hope to return to her important book some other time (including the question of responsibility--a theme I often digress about). Here I note that she calls attention to an important feature of translation that's also true of philosophical translation. One may think that translation is the skilled repetition of another's writings in a new language. One can hold on to this image of translation even when one grants the creativity and skill that is required for a philosophically sensitive translation (Google translate has not cracked that code yet). But while we tend to think of repetition as a kind of automatic, machine-like mirroring, in translation it is much more akin a copying of and thereby mastering of another's dance moves (as Briggs shows).

Briggs argues persuasively that the process of translation entails an enormous amount of learning prompted by the source text. Some of this learning may well take place before a translation begins, but a lot of is prompted by the text itself. Here it is important to recognize that what one learns is not just the views expressed in the text ("being taught by the other's writing"). But one also often needs to come to understand a far wider context. Reading Briggs brought me back to my own experience (now almost twenty five years ago) of translating Christiaan Huygens' (1688) report to the Directors of the Dutch East India Company On Finding Longitude at Sea with a Pendulum (and a series of letters connected to this report).+ Before I undertook that translation I had taken a number of courses on seventeenth century physics. So, while I was just a bachelor student, I was not a naive translator.

Even so, it's not just that I had to learn an earlier version of Dutch (my language), and become proficient in seventeenth century Dutch natural philosophy--few dictionaries and professional vocabularies had explanations of all the terms I encountered. (I learned that most work on seventeenth century Dutch is done by art historians, book and literary scholars.) I also had to learn about seventeenth century map-making, the actual practices of longitude finding, the rules governing life aboard an East India Company ship, the complex social relationships among Huygens (a Dutch patrician), Volder (a university professor), and Hudde (a Dutch patrician-politician and director of the Company). Along the way, I had to go to three different archives because I had to figure out what had happened to some of the characters and ships mentioned in the text I was translating. Some of this work generated my first scholarly publications (about seventeenth century sea-maps). En passant, I learned about Jesuit scientific expeditions (recall).

Now, the philosophically significant thing I learned was that the rejection of action at a distance was not merely motivated by metaphysical rejection (as Koyré argued and lots of folk have echoed thoughtlessly) or conflicting- paradigm-induced-intolerance, but Huygens had a decent empirical argument. (That argument turned out to be based on flawed data, but that was difficult to know at the time.) Along the way, I fleshed out the significance of my favorite walk-on philosopher (recall this post). But I also learned an enormous amount about what it was like to engage in the overlapping practices of natural philosophy, mixed mathematics, longitude finding, almanac writing, commercial map trade, map-making, and commercial sea-faring (a dangerous activity) at the time. (I also became something of an expert on Johannes Hudde and De Volder.) Much of this learning was utterly unanticipated, and yet it transformed my understanding of the period.

Briggs hints that the practice of translation can transform the practitioner ('a different reader and writer'). This is due not just to being engaged intensely over an extended period with the thoughts of another at an extreme level of detail. But we also have to be engaged with the significant details of the relevant bits of life-world that go into that author's text. Being a philosophical translator may transform us philosophically (see L.A. Paul). Perhaps, this is why, in our community, we prefer not to talk about the art of translation too much.

  

Epistemic Peers don't always get it (a problem for contextualists historians of philosophy); Dennett on Bennett

Rationality (1964), Jonathan Bennett’s first book, was published when he was thirty-four years old, and it exhibits the intensity of a young philosopher who is quite sure he sees a way to cut through a forest of dubious, ideology-ridden, squishy philosophy of mind and set a few things straight. Since the terrain he was scouting and clarifying was the same terrain that I was then embarking on, with similar ambitions, I read his book when it first came out through the dust and smoke of my own earliest efforts to conquer these topics. The result, I confess, was that I simultaneously misread, underestimated, and covertly absorbed much of what he was on about and then proceeded to reinvent some of his wheels in my own work without realizing it until years later...I was not the only explorer of this territory who chose to find other paths to Bennett’s destination, but here we all are, and a review of his book may consolidate the gains.--Daniel Dennett, (2016) Jonathan Bennett's Rationality in Ten Neglected Classics of Philosophy [ed. E. Schliesser], 256.

Dennett graciously and generously admits here, with the benefit of a half century's worth of hindsight, that he did not fully grasp the content ("misread") and significance ("underestimated") of a work written by a contemporary who shared, in many ways, his intellectual outlook. Bennett went on to have a distinguished career, both as a philosophical historian and philosopher of language as well as as a metaphysician. At Syracuse he helped nourish and steer the revival of analytical metaphysics (less noticed because it does not fall easily in Kripke-Lewis centered narratives we tell ourselves). While this is not a tragic story of gross injustice, it's fair to say that Dennet's reaction to Rationality is not unique; the little book, while not ignored (it has about 250 citations in google.scholar) did not have a huge, recognized impact on the profession. (The impact of Dennett's own Content and Consciousness, which appeared half decade later, is a useful contrast.) This despite the fact that the book is written in accessible, lively language; it appeared in paperback in a then "unduly prestigious series of books" (Dennett, 257), and it avoids unexplained jargon. It also anticipates, as Dennett notes throughout his piece, quite a few insights later developed by others.

The failure of impact is especially notable because Bennett announces, as Dennett notes in his article, that he is doing something significant (and as Dennett notes, original): he describes the work as “extremely ambitious conceptual inquiry”? on p. 1 of Rationality. Before I get to the significance (and further characterization) of the phenomenon that this is an instance of, Dennett offers a few useful suggestions on the lack of impact. For example, the series in which Rationality appeared was associated with ordinary language philosophy, already in decline by the mid 1960s (258). (Dennett also indicts ordinary language philosophy for its comical lack of ambition--a judgment worth reconsidering some time.) By contrast, Bennett's kind of conceptual analysis was more ambitious (and Dennett recognizes that in a sense Bennett is trying to displace Kant's synthetic a priori.) Dennett notes in passing that, "Philosophers get largely ignored by Bennett, aside from brief passing acknowledgments of Kant, Wittgenstein, Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Popper, but it is clear that he is deliberately avoiding tussles with a host of contemporary philosophers, indirectly criticizing their positions." (261) So one may suspect that other philosophers ignored Bennett because he ignored them and was, then, not in a position to get away with it.

One could read Dennett as implying (it's not his main point in context) that part of the problem for Bennett is not sociological, but philosophical:

Here I think the main strength of Bennett’s method is also its weakness. As a piece of conceptual analysis it is hard to fault the claim that conventionality presupposes reasons had by reasoners, but this blinds him to the prospect of an intermediate position which is not readily articulated without a helping of initially counterintuitive innovation— a “move” that I have only recently perfected (to my satisfaction): drawing a quite sharp distinction between doing things for reasons and having reasons for doing things. There are reasons aplenty in nature (I call them free- floating rationales): trees do things for reasons, fungi do things for reasons...but they do not (usually) have reasons for doing these things. (262)

My interest here is not Dennett's philosophical point (important as it is! -- the distinction between doing things for reasons and having reasons for doing things will be very useful in the (philosophy of) social science(s) because it will remove the stranglehold of methodological individualism and renew interest in a species of functional explanation). The point is rather that even if one grants that Bennett missed a step, everybody else did too.

There is, however, a more subtle version of the point in Dennett: "By not quite nailing the distinction between there being reasons and an agent’s having reasons, Bennett misses the intermediate cases that naturalism requires, in order to account for the gradual emergence of function by the march of evolution and by the development of the individual." (264) This suggests a more historical explanation of the lack of uptake for Bennett: he is not easily slotted into the rising wave of philosophical naturalism (associated with Quine and, of course, Dennett). There is something to this point; the non-naturalists that gained distinction (e.g., Nagel, Searle) situated themselves against it. That gave them a place as the opposition. Bennett is much harder to slot into simplifying narratives teachers tell their students. (He was not obscure in the period, because Dennet himself includes Bennett in his "Mid-Term Examination" included in the Intentional Stance, and in that piece Dennett had explicitly recognized the "parallel paths" (348) between himself and Bennett, and their lack of mutual citation (349, where Davidson is included.))

A central theme of Dennett's chapter is that he is not alone in having missed Bennett's point (even when they directly confronted each other's views in print), and he calls attention to the fact that Quine, Millikan, and the Pittsburgh school all did so, too. While there is some self-interest in not fully crediting another with one's own insights, it remains remarkable that such excellent peers missed the point. This is significant because both epistemologists and contextual historians of philosophy put great faith in the discern-ability of such peers. But the fact is, as is recognized in principle, but often not in practice, is that their judgment is fallible. The market in ideas is imperfect, after all. That is to say, sometimes not being a peer or an outsider or being later in time allows one to see with greater clarity (than previously) what is at stake than an active participant. It is an obvious point, but it is dis-allowed by those that privilege peers in epistemology and historical context in history (of philosophy). This is why (a) in epistemology we should also find a place to canvass non-peers, and (b) in history of philosophy make space for anachronism to ensure historical accuracy.

I encouraged Dennett to write about Bennett because I was curious what he would say. For, (a) I had noticed that Dennett (who is one of my undergraduate teachers) notes Rationality in passing in the Intentional Stance; I did so only after (b) I had been a course assistant in a class by Bill Wimsatt on "Philosophy of Mind and Science Fiction" in the mid-90s at Chicago. Wimsatt, a contemporary of Bennett and Dennett, trained at Pittsburgh (and represents the naturalistic wing also associated with the Churchlands), who is primarily known as a philosopher of biology. Wimsatt assigned Rationality and taught it with gusto to his undergraduates. Wimsatt also taught Dennett (in his philosophy of biology graduate seminar), but (to the best of my fragile memory) did not compare Bennett with Dennett.

Somebody eager to defend the judgments of peers may suggest that Wimsatt ought to count as a peer. I fully grant the point. But while it's true that Wimsatt grasped some of the significance of Rationality he did not (I think) really use Bennett in his own work and so his judgment is not reflected in the profession's conversation. This points the way toward a distinction between formal (public) and informal (private) peer judgments, but about that some other time.

 

 

RIP: José Benardete (1928-2016)

Kris McDaniel informed me that my former colleague and mentor, José Benardete died last week. Before I came to Syracuse for my job talk I only knew of José as the other brother of Seth (the classicist), whom I encountered in person and in his writings, and of Diego (the mathematician), whom I knew, through a mutual friend, by reputation. I was no fan of Seth  -- not because of his Straussianism --, because I found that public conversations with him had the character of a blood sport; undoubtedly, my memory is colored because he got the better of me in public. After my job-talk talk, at the reception José cornered me and while I was ducking his arms that he flailed around in animated gestures, I was introduced to one of the liveliest, analytically acute, erudite, and humorous minds I have ever encountered. His was a peculiar charm: he was just as at ease in thinking through multiple permutations of moves and counter-moves of an argument (I was not surprised to learn he really liked chess), as he was placing that argument in world-historical philosophical context that seemed simultaneously  completely obvious and, upon reflection, utterly original. He would regularly tell me  that qua philosophical historian, I lacked spirited ambition -- my true task qua historian was to change philosophy --, yet do so in a way that made me feel elevated, nearer to the clouds (where we could engage not just with Aristophanes's Socrates, but provide Icarus with directions).

José was one of those characters that generated legendary anecdotes (about him), but whose profundity of thought could not be reduced to them. He would corner you for lunch or in your office (sometimes because had locked himself out of his own), and would start talking. Often you had the feeling you were encountering him in medias res, but he had a keen sense of audience. Once he started telling me about Quine's footnotes (later I learned he had actually written on some of these [recall]), and then, en passant, slyly noted that the footnotes of one of the papers I had sent along as a writing sample (on Adam Smith's obituary of David Hume) the year before contained the heart of the matter and that I should stop hiding the important things from my readers. Once a week, we would meet for lunch and the most memorable ones were the ones in which he gave me master classes on either Wallace Stevens's poetry or recent analytical metaphysics.

José started his philosophical life as a funny mixture of Husserlian, Whitehead-ian metaphysician, and Straussian. His dissertation (at Virginia) was on the philosophy of time and philosophical theology. But his (1964) book on Infinity revived the genre of analytical metaphysics [this baffled the readers in the 1960s {in my lecture below I provide evidence for this claim}] and -- inspired by Wittgenstein -- offered a philosophy of mathematical practice. (The Husserlian and Straussian elements are still visible, but do not predominate.) The book dazzles and continues to dazzle with arguments. It is no surprise that when genuine metaphysics returned to fashion in analytical philosophy, Syracuse (with in addition to Jose, Bennett, Alston, and Van Inwagen) in upstate new york was one of its hotbeds. By the mid 1970s his writings exhibit a deep engagement with the then Quine-ean analytical mainstream. I have argued (see below) that the change of register hides a unity of philosophical vision.

Much to my amazement, while I was at sabbatical at Santa Barbara, I was asked to speak at his retirement party back in Syracuse about his book manuscript on magnanimity. For one divine Fall while overlooking the Pacific, I read all the works of Jose I could get my hands on in order to prepare my lecture alongside Spinoza's Ethics (that I was teaching). I discovered he was not just a great conversationalist; to my horror I noticed that all kinds of ideas I thought I had dreamed up -- in light of his challenge to aim to be a philosophical historian of philosophy [cf. 'Wiggins on Locke'] --, were to be found more cleanly and with more acuity (and poetry) in his writings. Below the fold is the invited lecture I gave at the occasion of his retirement in which I try to characterize Jose's meta-philosophical vision.

Jan Cover closes his moving tribute, May there be a place for him, in the heavens, near Plato. I doubt Plato will get much of a word in.

On Arguments from Authority by Historians of Philosophy

The problem with Anselm's Other Argument relates, rather, to the book's aim. The most generous course is to take the aim as to establish and assess a new Anselmian argument, one suggested by a passage in his Reply, the 'other' or the Metaphysical Ontological Argument. Smith does indeed succeed in this aim, but he could have accomplished it without writing most of the first two thirds of the book. Even the third of the book dedicated to the 'other' argument is leisurely and digressive. Smith could have made his point as or more effectively than he does here in a twenty-page article. And, although he has propounded a new argument, it resembles various versions of the Modal Ontological Argument in that it forces the atheists, not to accept that, given premises they would grant, it follows that God exists, but to accept, not merely that God does not exist, but that necessarily he does not exist -- hardly the sort of a concession they would make only through gritted teeth.

Alternatively, the aim of the book can be taken as being to say something about Anselm. Such a construal makes much more sense of the many pages devoted to showing that he did not propose a Modal Ontological Argument and the evident attention given to connecting the Metaphysical Ontological Argument to Anselm's text. Yet this approach would not be a generous one because in any ordinary, historical sense of what Anselm did, he quite clearly neither put forward a Modal Ontological Argument of any of the sorts discussed by contemporary philosophers nor the Metaphysical Ontological Argument as reconstructed by Smith. Smith, indeed, accepts that Anselm did not actually state this position, or various others he attributes to him, but he believes that the arguments are implied by the text. Smith works out what arguments are, and what are not, implied by Anselm's text by a process of seeing, through ingenious argument, what does or does not follow logically from various positions stated there. There may be some quasi-legal sense in which the distinctions he thus draws show what is or is not Anselm's property, but they throw no light at all on what interests an historian, i.e., what Anselm thought. Argument, of which Smith is clearly a master, is never sufficient to determine what someone, even so great an arguer as Anselm, thought. What is required is a sense of historical and biographical plausibility, nurtured by a concern for history -- for what actually took place. And, despite his learning and his scholarly punctiliousness, Smith seems to have no interest in history at all. Historical texts give him the opportunity for an ever-so-clever display of philosophical legerdemain, and Anselm himself slips through his fingers.--John Marenbon, 

I have quoted the final two paragraph's of Marenbon's review of A.D. Smith's Anselm's Other Argument. Before I get to analysis, three disclaimers: first, I have never met Marenbon (I think) and have had no professional interaction with him (although I have read some of his work on Abelard); second, I met A.D. Smith only once, and we disagreed fiercely (over the proper interpretation of Spinoza)--his criticism improved one of my papers (but we never managed to agree); third, I have not read Anselm's Other Argument. What follows is compatible with the possibility that Marenbon is entirely right about his criticism(s) and that I would have little sympathy for Smith's enterprise myself.

But it is worth noting that the last paragraph is entirely an ex cathedra, argument from authority (argumentum ad verecundiam). First, Marenbon offers no evidence for his claim that Smith's reconstruction is historically and biographically implausible. Such a claim would require considerable work because it always runs the risk of conflating the historian's lack of imagination or limitations for the subject matter's conceptual imagination. Even when we think there is an obvious risk of anachronism, it does not follow that there is, in fact, genuine anachronism. For example, Al-Farabi and Mill have very little in common, and wrote in very different intellectual contexts. So when somebody says that Al-Farabi anticipates some of the most characteristic Millian doctrines in his analysis of the democratic city, one may be not just surprised, but also suspicious of the claim. Yet, Al-Farabi and Mill are both very careful readers of Plato and that reminds us what is or is not plausible depends a lot on one's frame of reference.

Second, it is worth pausing at Marenbon's claim that what "interests an historian" is "what Anselm thought." Now, this is actually quite controversial. For to infer what X thought from what X wrote (the evidence) is no easy matter. For in general all one has is the text (with some biographical and historical/institutional detail provided by other texts). One need not accept that Marenbon's claim always involves the so-called intentional fallacy (Cf. Wimsatt and Beardsley), nor the Derridaean claim that there is only text, to recognize that it is by no means obvious we have access to what Anselm really thought on the basis of his writings. At best we have what Anselm wanted us to think he thought. Even authors friendly to Marenbon's claim (say Quentin Skinner 1969) recognize that Marenbon's is far too optimistic of what is historically possible; rather according to them, one has to imaginatively construct a kind of counter-factual audience from historical, contextual evidence to evaluate what it may have understood of the author's intentions. 

Third, Marenbon's claim involves a rather limited conception of what interests an historian--even if it is the kind of thing he heard when he was a student. The interests of historians have shifted dramatically over the centuries (if not millennia). But even the most methodologically conservative historians may also wish to learn how Anselm was understood by others or could have been understood by others. And, of course, there are lots of other purposes that a historian may have. (In fact, Marenbon seems not to have noticed that there has been quite a bit of methodological reflection on these issues by professional historians of philosophy during the past decade.)

Fourth, there is an odd inconsistency in Marenbon's position: for, on the one hand, he denies the legitimacy (as a species of history) of attributing to an author what is "implied by the text," presumably because it goes beyond the explicit evidence. That is, it requires some kind of inference to go from the text of X to the implication of that text. A strict positivist would indeed raise worries here. But as it happens, even Marenbon allows that we're dealing with logical inference, and it is not obvious what blocks such an inference; even if one rules out polysemy or esoteric techniques, all writers routinely imply more than they state. (If they didn't they would become unnecessarily detailed.) Yet, on the other hand, Marenbon thinks it is legitimate to infer from the text to an author's "thought." So, Marenbon has offered no resources to rule out A.D. Smith's aims (if they are his aims) and does so on grounds that would undercut his own purported aims.

As an aside, it's likely, of course, that many authors fail to notice "what does or does not follow logically from various positions stated," but on the whole scholarly communities do not end up studying those authors. And, while it is a plausible assumption that no human author sees all the logical entailments from her stated positions, one cannot assume she does not see any or few. In our age David Lewis was, in fact, legendary for the capacity to see implications (recall). Even lesser lights, like John Hawthorne and his teacher Jose Benardete, are quite capable of discerning (routinely) seven or eight 'moves' deep from a position. It does not follow, of course, that such authors expect all their readers to see all their intended moves; but, it is worth reminding ourselves, that authors, which have a strong sense of the divine presence, may have thereby sufficient audience for all their implied claims.

Finally, while it is touching that Marenbon channels his inner Von Ranke ("what actually took place") [although Marenbon's unwillingness to explore carefully and in detail logical entailments prevents him access to a powerful tool of discerning what might have happened in the past], it does not follow he exhibits much genuine "concern for history." In fact, it is his stance -- lacking generosity and an unwillingness to learn from others -- that is very damaging to the status of history of philosophy in the profession. For, rather than caring about what one might call, living history, Marenbon's preferred methodology entombs the past.

 

Genius and the Herd in Analytical Philosophy

In saying that analytic philosophy now has only a stylistic and sociological unity I, am not suggesting that analytic philosophy is a bad thing or that it is in bad shape. The analytic style is, I think, a good style, and the espirit de corps among analytic philosophers is healthy and useful. All I am saying is that analytic philosophy has become, whether it likes it or not, the same sort of discipline that we find in the other humanities departments--departments where pretensions to rigor and to scientific status are less evident. The normal form of life in the humanities is the same as that in the arts  and in belles lettres: a genius does something new and interesting and persuasive, and his or her admirers begin to form a school or movement....
Rather, we should relax and say, with our colleagues in history and literature, that we in the humanities differ from scientists precisely in not knowing in advance what our problems are, and in not needing to provide criteria of  identity that will tell us whether our problems are the same as those of our predecessors. To adopt this relaxed attitude is to let the institutional tail wag the pseudoscientific dog. It is to admit that our geniuses invent problems and programs de novo, rather than being presented with them by the subject matter itself or by the current state of research.--Richard Rorty (1982) "Philosophy in America Today" The American Scholar, 189.

Rorty assumes that the opposition between (a) a given-problem-solving discipline with extensive division of labor and (b) a herd-like-Genius-following discipline (with constantly invented new problems) is exhaustive (in Rorty Kripke is the exemplar of (b)). The analytic herd is, on this account, defined by an "argumentative" style, that turns us into "quasi-lawyers rather than quasi-scientists." (198)  On Rorty's approach this style is what distinguishes us from other folk that call themselves 'philosophers' and from other disciplines. While Rorty's own trajectory moved him away from this style, it seems he was happy to recommend it to others.

Rorty, then, sugests that philosophers should reconcile themselves (in the Kuhnian terms which he also uses) to permanent crisis or to being in a pre-paradigmatic stage with an "increasingly short half-lives of philosophical problems and programms." (198) As MacIntyre noted in his response to Rorty (recall yesterday's post), Rorty's position relies on a pseudo-history in which the Positivists turn out to be philosophy's last chance (to turn itself into a scientific paradigm).

As Williamson (2014) notes, Rorty ignores David Lewis, who was "Rorty’s colleague at Princeton since 1970;" thereby "Rorty’s radar had missed a serious threat, the central figure in analytic philosophy for the coming decades. Rorty was out of sympathy with most new wave philosophy of language, and the metaphysics that increasingly accompanied it," (33; in context, Williamson is discussing Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature. Recall my posts on Williamson's piece here , here, and here).

As an aside, Wiliamson's treatment of Lewis is respectful on Lewis's professional achievement, but also includes this odd sketch:

The central, most influential figure in the development of analytic metaphysics over the final quarter of the twentieth century, and the contemporary philosopher most cited within recent analytic philosophy, is undoubtedly David Lewis, also known as ‘the machine in the ghost’ for his eerie computational power, mechanical diction, faint air of detachment from ordinary life, and beard from another era (by contrast with ‘the ghost in the machine’, Gilbert Ryle’s summary description of the immaterial Cartesian ego in the clockwork Cartesian body).

Perhaps that passes as funny in Oxford?

 

Be that as it may David Lewis’s system with its peculiar and original mixture of modularity and systematicity generated, as the Healy data showed, a kind of cohesion for a considerable chunk of analytical philosophy. The cohesion is not complete (recall this post, and also this one), and as Rorty already recognizes, for example, A Theory of Justice does not fit this larger cohesion; in fact, it (TJ) "is not a triumph of analytic philosophizing. It is simply the best update of liberal social thought that we have." (188; Rorty ignores the fact that Nozick's Anarchy is more clearly a work of analytical philosophy.)

 

However, it is now likely that analytical ideology studies (recall) and analytical existentialism will in this Lewisian-era, link (to quote Rorty!) "the so-called central areas of philosophy"  to "moral and social philosophy." (188)  And I expect that before long that developments in analytic ideology studies and existentialism will drive technical results in formerly 'core' areas.

David Lewis’s system with its peculiar and original mixture of modularity and systematicity generated, as the Healy data showed, a new kind of cohesion for a considerable chunk of analytical philosophy. The cohesion is not complete (recall this post, and also this one). - See more at: http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/#sthash.9cfulkk6.dpuf

 

Our Lewisian-era also offers us an alternative option to the ones on offer by Rorty [recall: (a) a given-problem-solving discipline with extensive division of labor and (b) a herd-like-Genius-following discipline]. In his writings, Lewis, who did not pretend to excessive modesty, himself eschewed the great-man approach, and (in Australia) he found interlocutors (e.g. Armstrong) that facilitated the presentation, if not development, of his own views. In doing so, he did not put himself above criticism, and he developed his own views along the way.

 

In Rawls and Lewis, then, analytical philosophy of the 1970s (and the decades thereafter) spawned two wildly successful schools in which the founder is open to criticism (and is not conceived as a Genius-legislator; by contrast, Cavell flirts much closer to such a magisterial approach). But the difference between the two schools is also notable: the Rawlsian school has considerable cohesion on doctrinal matters (and its conception of the history of philosophy), whereas in the Lewisian school, respecting the modularity of the 'system,' Lewis's individual papers (and books) are key reference points for discussions, but few people working in it treat any of it as dogma. (If there is consensus it is not over doctrinal matters.) The lack of such dogmas allows new ideas and even new methods to be assimilated along the way (this sponge-like ability has always been characteristic of the best of analytic philosophy).

 

In conclusion, the Lewisian school should also be contrasted with the original mold of scientific philosophy with an intellectual division of labor that makes progress on technical questions from a settled core [Rorty's (a)]. While undoubtedly some Lewisian elements can be found in and assimilated by some such programs (e.g., Williamson's modal logic as metaphysics), it is, in practice, distinct from these.  That is to say, in addition to genius/herd & the we-are-all-workerbees models,* non-reverential schools (that do not exhaust the possibility space) are also possible within analytical philosophy. There is, in fact, nothing to prevent the existence of such schools alongside each other. while I doubt I could self-identify with a school, I think such a possibility is a good thing.

On (a) Kuhnian Crisis in Analytic Philosophy

The essay to which I shall be particularly addressing myself is 'Philosophy in America Today' (Rorty 1981), a central thesis of which is that the present state of analytical philosophy is  to be explained by the disintegration of the neopositivist program of the Vienna Circle and its allies. The consequence of this disintegration, a result of the way in which "all the positivist doctrines were deconstructed by Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars and Kuhn", (Rorty 1981, 4) has been that analytical philosophy has lost any serious intellectual unity. It is no longer can identify itself by references to "a finite number of distinct, specifiable philosophical problems to be resolved -- problems which any serious analytic philosopher to be the outstanding problems." (7).--A MacIntyre (1982) “Philosophy and Its History,” Analyse & Kritik, 102-3.

We might summarize MacIntyre’s analysis of Rorty’s diagnosis of the state of analytical philosophy ca 1980 that analytic philosophy has entered the critical crisis phase in which a paradigm is fracturing and in which revolutionary new paradigms can be forged. The summary of the previous sentence does not do full justice to Rorty’s aims nor, as will be clear soon, to MacIntyre’s full analysis of Rorty (nor, to be sure, all of MacIntyre’s larger aims in his paper, “Philosophy and Its History,” which include the unmasking of the Millenarian tendency in (early) analytic philosophy.)

When I entered graduate school, more than a decade after this exchange, I would hear my professors mutter things like ‘there is no dominant program,’ or ‘I would like to say we’re all Quine-ean naturalists now, except well, you know, all that metaphysics emanating from Princeton;’ or ‘I don’t try to keep up with all the changing fashions.’ Given the way(s) computers and the internet have sped up professional activity and generated more energetic echo chambers, we can confidently say that since the early 1980s contemporary philosophy is no less fashion-driven. In fact, that it is so, is now a tired trope among the folk that are first-mover, trend-setting fashionistas (recall, and, especially, here).

MacIntyre argues, contra Rorty, that the crisis phase is a permanent feature of analytic philosophy: "from the outset it exhibited just that variety, heterogeneity and instability which Rorty sees as a characteristic only of its present post-positivist state...What Rorty takes to be a cause was in fact an effect." (109-110; in Kuhnian terms: it is forever stuck in a pre-paradigmatic phase.) And, to simplify MacIntyre’s analysis, this permanent crisis is to be expected given the ways in which (a) ‘philosophy’ as a profession came to be separated from other intellectual activities that nourish it and in which it plays an indispensable role; (b) ‘philosophy’ has found a home as a profession among others within a modern research university. I quote a passage that gives a sense of MacIntyre’s diagnosis:  

The bureaucratic organisation of academic work which the modern university requires and the 'philosophy' is not treated as the name one discipline among others. Professionalisation with all its drawing of boundary lines and its invocation of sanctions against those who cross them, its conceptions of what is central to 'the' discipline and what is marginal, is the inevitable accompaniment of bureaucratisation. Hence there is at least a tension between the professionalisation of philosophy and its flourishing, except of course as technique and idiom. For professionalisation is always favorable to the flourishing of technique and to making narrowly technical proficiencies the badge of the fully licensed professional; and it is equally favorable to the development of idiosyncratic idiom, an idiom by which professionals recognize one another for the lack of which they stigmatise outsiders. It is not difficult to find examples of these phenomena in recent and contemporary American philosophy...

It is instead from an examination of the nature and influence of the separation of philosophy from the other disciplines that we are likely to draw an understanding of contemporary philosophy. (106)

Even if one recoils from the thought that the institutional context leads to a permanent deformation of philosophy, MacIntyre's diagnosis is as apt then as it was today despite the fact that he (and Rorty) underestimates the extent to which David Lewis’s system with its peculiar and original mixture of modularity and systematicity generated, as the Healy data showed, a new kind of cohesion for a considerable chunk of analytical philosophy. The cohesion is not complete (recall this post, and also this one). (This reminds us that it is, after all, very hard to judge how the work of one's peers will shape the immediate future.) The philosophical and sociological success of Lewis also generates an unexpected, historical irony; through early Lewis quite a bit of Carnap got passed on to future generations that were told that the logical positivists were not worth reading (so much so that we now regularly encounter that elegant hybrid zombie, the Carnapian metaphysician). It follows also, then, that a suitably enlarged, systematic and modular -- perhaps so modular that it will seem unsystematic -- philosophy can provide the paradigmatic unity that eludes us today. It is an open question if such a philosophy can avoid the deformation that (recall, and, say, here) haunts our practices.

 

Poetic Philosophers; (or on Harman on Aristotle and Fodor)

By far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor. That alone cannot be learnt; it is the token of genius [εὐφυΐας]. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.--Aristotle, Poetics 1459a (translated by W.H. Fyfe.)

 Warum ich so weise bin.
 Warum ich so klug bin.
 Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe.--F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

I was reflecting on Graham Harman's and Jon Cogburn's responses to my earlier post on Harman, when I caught another point by Harman:

There is a reason why Aristotle calls metaphor the greatest gift of genius, the one that cannot be taught. He doesn’t say “being able to eliminate fuzziness and speak in clear propositional terms is the greatest gift of genius,” because it isn’t. Fuzziness and lack of precision are relatively minor intellectual problems in comparison with premature or hasty literalization of the world. (Editorial comment: analytic philosophy, for all its achievements, still doesn’t grasp this point, and that’s why it does not produce many impressive writers even though it produces industrial-scale numbers of clear ones. Jerry Fodor once called himself and his friends better writers than Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which just proves how much the point is being missed.)--Graham Harman.

I understand the temptation felt by Harman (and W.H. Fyfe) to translate Aristotle's εὐφυΐας as 'genius;' context makes clear that Aristotle is trying to convey the idea that being good at coining metaphors is a skill that cannot be taught, but somehow a natural talent, that is, it exhibits having fine natural dispositions. One reason to resist the (Romantic sounding) use of 'genius' here is that only a few pages before (1455a), Aristotle had written [διὸ εὐφυοῦς ἡ ποιητική ἐστιν ἢ μανικοῦ:] that is why poetry needs either a naturally well disposed nature or being a manic, and here the inspired ‘manic’ [μανικοῦ] evokes our genius. For somebody with a good disposition may still need a lot of endurance or practice to get good at the skill.

One might think that Harman is just wrong to channel Aristotle on metaphor and apply it to philosophers because, in this context of the Poetics,  Aristotle is discussing tragedy, not philosophy. But, as it happens Aristotle is generalizing about a skill. In fact, the ability to see sameness within difference is, indeed, also a philosophical one.* So, one way to read Aristotle is to suggest that to be a very good philosopher means to have an important skill in common with a very good poet.

As an aside, in context of his post, Harman is engaging with B.P. Morton (a blogger at the new group blog, Philpercs), and it's not quite clear to me what prompts Harman's aside about analytical philosophers and the bon mot put-down Fodor (who, like many not quite great analytical philosophers is a great, entertaining polemicist, but whose stock has been plummeting since his ill-advised, anti-Darwin book not to mention ordinary developments in cognitive psychology).

Perhaps it's because of my analytical training that my first quiet thought in response to Harman’s ‘’ analytic philosophy…does not produce many impressive writers even though it produces industrial-scale numbers of clear ones,” was it's better to produce industrial-scale numbers of clear writers than to produce considerable number of bad poets.+ But I caught myself, because I know that in our time, re-activating  the polemic between analytic and continental philosophy prevents genuine thought. By now we ought to judge these philosophical traditions not by the many, but either by the best or by the potentially enduring contributions they produced (about which some other time more).

Yet, analytical philosophy does not weed out truly great writers: Russell (who won the 1950 Nobel in Literature), Quine, Iris Murdoch, Dennett (go re-read Elbow Room), and Jody Azzouni are all excellent examples.** Even Fodor has quite a few memorable lines when he is not being a polemicist. (I leave aside her the good polemical writing at which we analytical philosophers excel.) This is not to deny that the joy one can find in reading them is different in character from the joy, if it is joy, one experiences in reading Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.

Even if one agrees, as I am inclined to do, that "Fuzziness and lack of precision are relatively minor intellectual problems in comparison with premature or hasty literalization of the world," it does not follow (even if I, upon considerable reflection, agree that the 'literalization of the world' should not be undertaken in haste—it took me a while to understand this phrase) that we should praise or promote fuzziness and lack of precision for their own sakes (although I note that one can deploy fuzziness in precise and skillful ways).

Anyway, I close with this observation (which echoes Benardete on Quinean poetics): while clarity is a core virtue in the self-understanding of analytical philosophers (recall this), the dirty secret of our poetic genius is that we have an enduring love for well-chosen metaphors: for example, content (as in mental content); grounding (as in metaphysical grounding); stance (as in the intentional stance), and, more controversially, analysis (as in analysis is the method of analytic philosophy), etc. That is, like all great philosophical movements, analytic philosophy, too, combines clarity and poetry.