Digressions&Impressions

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.

 

On the Strange Afterlife of Kant (the Antinomies) in Analytical Philosophy/metaphysics; some reflections on our methods

There are two mutually reinforcing founding myths in analytical philosophy: the one centered on Cambridge, England, tells the story of how G.E. Moore and Russell liberated us from the unintelligibility and inflated metaphysical pretensions of British Idealism by the application of common sense and conceptual decomposition aided by Frege's new mathematical logic that the young were using to dismantle the cowwebs of intellectual dinosaurs (like Bradley). The other is centered on Vienna, where in the aftermath of Einstein's overthrowing of Newtonian physics, it was understood that Kantian philosophy (with outdated commitments on space, time, causation, etc.) was untenable and (with help from Wittgenstein) forged a powerful program that mixed logical acumen, again indebted to Frege, and respect for the sciences, even Enlightenment values. From the vantage point of these two narratives, the ongoing attractiveness of transcendental philosophy and species of idealism within Continental philosophy is a kind of intellectual embarrassment--hadn't they heard the news -- one might ask paraphrasing Nietzsche -- of the death of  Kantianism?*

Yes, such myth(s) is no history, but during the last few months, in reflecting on the inexorable march of (knee-jerk realist) metaphysics within analytical philosophy, and the hardening of attitudes toward anyone willing to doubt the solidity of Moorean facts (despite the existence of widespread semantic and pschological illusions discovered by way of the sciences), I have started to wonder about the following question:

What happened to the antinomies in the rise of analytical philosophy?

For, the antinomies, diagnosed by Kant, do not go away just because Kant got physics wrong. In fact, while the new logic is a fantastic tool, it also gave rise to new logical antinomies (starting with Russell's paradox and rediscovery of very old ones, e.g., The Liar).

Of course, the logical antinomies stimulated extraordinary fertile, ongoing attempts to develop logic(s) in ways that circumvent even clarify these antinomies. So, rather than ignoring the antinomies they can present research opportunities either by acting as known constraints or as obstacles to be overcome. Reflecting on this history made me see analytical philosophy in a different light.**

For, one can understand the methods of analytical as responsive to the threat the antinomies pose. Here's a rough and ready taxonomy:

The first, and dominant, approach is to espouse a systematic caution that expresses itself in various ways within the analytic tradition: by this I do not just mean the obsession with rigor and clarity, nor a certain ponderousness about the mundane (e.g., ordinary language philosophy) but also a certain self-limitation on what can be expressed.+ In Carnap, this is exhibited in a fondness for precise, engineered languages, or frameworks, and a suspicion of questions that are external (or optative) to these frameworks. In Quine, it entails deference to a suitably regimented language that collects the findings of science. In both there is, despite the best efforts of Stebbing, also a mistrust of metaphysics as such.

Of course, in Lewis the caution is methodological in that any philosophical system has to find some optimal cost-benefit equilibrium between common sense intuitions and theoretical desiderata and is to be expressed in some final-physics language (for a more careful presentation of the conservativism in Lewis's program see here). To this day, some analytical metaphysicians discuss their projects in terms of the ontological/ideological features of a hypothetical, ideal language at the end of the progress of science.

These examples of systematic caution all respect the challenge the antinomies pose without having to address them and even without having to be aware of them. (If it turns out that my historical speculations cannot be substantiated in the record, I can always say  that I am putting my finger on -- to borrow a phrase of Dennett's --free-floating rationales without representation.) Such systematic caution connects with another familiar fact of analytical philosophy: its focus on puzzle-solving rather than systematizing. (Analytical philosophy has always rewarded specialization rather than breadth [recall].) The advantage of this kind specialization and precision is not just enhanced focus and skill at puzzle-solving, but one also avoids bumping up against antinomies that would reveal themselves if one were forced to systematize. (As an aside, this may help explain some of the status-hierarchies within philosophy: a flatter hierarchy among areas of specialization runs the risk of accidentally  generating the kind of systematicity that would generate awareness of antinomies.)

Of course, while the Kantianism in Carnap, even Kuhn, is now well-established, a second approach is to be found in other analytical philosophers, who explicitly reverted back to structural features of Kant’s philosophy most notably Strawson at Oxford. Strawson's ‘descriptive metaphysics’ is a metaphysics of what (that other important Kantian), Sellars at Pittsburgh, would call the ‘manifest image’ of ordinary life not fundamental reality. The widespread interest in normativity reminds us of the enduring vitality of this approach.

The third method is to treat philosophical systems as (revisable) inferences to the best explanation in which one appeals to theory-world fit in light of a variety of scientific virtues. In principle, this approach need not respect the threat of the antinomies (despite its origin in Pierce's philosophy), if it remains focused on relatively isolated topics. Those that advance it also advocate the disciplining (Williamson's term) of philosophy by constraining it in light of the demands of, say, some formal system. This piggy-backs on the ways in which the logical antinomies have been deflected and tamed. The downside of this approach is that one's philosophical commitments get blackboxed in one's formal apparatus.

So, here's a prediction: as analytical philosophers are emboldened to get ever more systematic and to bring the problems of cosmology, consciousness, and axiology, including politics, into their collective orbits, the antinomies will reappear in modern guise, especially if they are using inference to the best explanation in each individual area or topic.++

 

On Narrowing of One's Professional Soul

Surprising negative: how narrow and incurious many philosophers are (and how conventional and unimaginative much work in philosophy is). Philosophy would be (I thought) the place that people went because they wouldn’t drop awkward and insistent questions that didn’t fit into disciplinary constraints. I expected philosophers to be open-minded explorers of ideas.

I think I can explain the phenomenon. Philosophy is immensely challenging. All of its parts relate to one another and, of course, to all of the different disciplines to which philosophy responds. Yet no one can expect to master them fully, so a defensive reaction is natural. When people meet something outside their background that is potentially challenging the reaction too often is: “If it doesn’t fit in with what I know and work on it, can’t be significant.” Still, it continues to be extremely disappointing.--Michael Rosen commenting at Leiter Reports.

 

Then I graduated, hit the job market, and moved to different temporary jobs (UBC and Tampa) twice. And from that time (6+ years ago) until now? It occurred to me: I have literally done nothing else than try my darnedness to get a tenure-track position. Aside from listening to iTunes, I have no hobbies. I have no close friends. I have literally ate, drank, lived, and slept philosophy (and sometimes, not even slept!). Were it not for my wife, who gives my life love, some liveliness, and grounding (our friends are her friends), and my dog, who never fails to put a smile on my face, I would pretty much have one thing, and one thing only: philosophy.

In some respects, this ain't so bad. I love philosophy...I wonder sometimes if this is how it should be--if the way in which professional incentives today can (and do) lead people to focus on academic philosophy above just about all else, we not only compromise ourselves as persons but also as philosophers. Let me explain why.--Marcus Arvan Philosopherscocoon.

Once I had been invited to give a talk on Newton at a conference; but since a lot of very good Spinoza people had been invited, too, I talked the conference hosts into letting me present new work on Spinoza—a philosopher I had not published on yet and had been teaching for a few years alongside my other research commitments. I lucked out because Michael Della Rocca was assigned  to be my commentator. It turned out my paper was a bit of a mess; hyper-ambitious and not quite clear on the main issues. Michael’s comments were helpful and generous, and down the road I published some of the still, imperfect material in an edited volume.[1] It was an exhilarating experience, and I hoped that folk could see that the underlying approach was promising. But I also sensed that I had not impressed my specialist peers. Most, tactfully, simply avoided comment on my paper. One bumped into me in the coffee-line during the break, and I had the following exchange:

[Big deal peer:] “You're so broad.”

[Me:] “Ahh...thank you, I guess.”

It's true that I take a vain delight in my broadness, especially since I have moved to Europe where the compartmentalization within departments and their specialist research chairs (around Systematic, Practical, and Historical groups) feels very pronounced. Even so, I know that being thought broad is not always thought a good thing in research circles. (It may help, perhaps, in landing a teaching oriented position.) It can be thought charming and endearing, but generally 'broad' is code for unclear, uninteresting, non-core, safely to be ignored, etc. Like all properties in a zero-sum status hierarchy, it can be inverted at the top, so that for some -- very special -- philosophers a certain kind of bravura, broadness (nod to Veblen or Bourdieu here) adds to the hip-factor. I have never been hip, alas. (Don't cry for me.)

Of course, there are a lot of inquisitive, fascinatingly broad folk among professional philosophers, and they are undoubtedly over-represented among you, my dear Impressionable reader. (Flattery works if it is plausible, after all.)* But even so it's very hard to keep one's interest fairly broad through a career in professional philosophy. I find that I use my (undergraduate) teaching to keep reading widely. But there are curricular limitations to this (and sometimes one discovers a displeased territorial colleague along the way). Even so, Rosen's explanation (quoted above), while correct, is incomplete psychologically. It also ignores some professional and disciplinary dimensions.  On the psychological side, it ignores the joyful feeling one can obtain in the control over, and understanding of, an ordered whole (nod to Nietzsche here). Often such control is only acquired by treating the target-puzzle as a relatively isolated system (Spinoza's "Letter on the Infinite" is an early criticism of this). 

On the disciplinary side, in particular, a conceptual-puzzling-solving ethos -- as is broadly embraced within analytical philosophy -- encourages one to focus narrowly on the issue at hand; one learns to discard irrelevant and distracting detail; one peels away layers of cultural and empirical accretion that jam clarity of focus in order to isolate the conceptual core of an issue. There is a suspicion of cultural artifacts that thrive on polysemy, while there is a fondness for assertion.

Recently Tim Maudlin defended this ethos in noble fashion against ignorant physicists. But I was struck that Maudlin closed his essay with a rousing quote from Einstein in which Einstein went well beyond Maudlin's defense by suggesting, in addition, that the history of thought/theorizing/use is also non-trivial part of conceptual articulation and conceptual isolation. ("It is by no means an idle game if we become practiced in analyzing the long commonplace concepts and exhibiting those circumstances upon which their justification and usefulness depend, how they have grown up, individually, out of the givens of experience.") That is to say, in practice, as Maudlin's example shows, we tend to focus on analysis and not on the cultural/historical/political/social contexts of conceptual articulation and development (and some of us harbor a suspicion that such activity may reveal a genetic fallacy or a failure to distinguish between the history of pragmatics vs semantics).+

Moreover, professionally, (soul-narrowing) specialization pays; that's the best strategy within the intellectual division of labor. Analytical philosophy, suspicious of great men as gurus, embraced specialization from the start and so flourished in the modern, twentieth century research university. (Yes, I am familiar with countervailing tendencies -- Wittgensteinian fondness for depth over technicality, etc. -- including local hero-worship.) So, on the whole, the hedgehogs outperform the foxes in our zero-sum environment--again, there are interesting and subtle exceptions to this rule. This pattern is worsened by the administrative duties that start to increase as one transitions from graduate student to tenured faculty (even in a research friendly environment).** 

I don't have easy solutions (see Arvan's beautiful piece for one approach). I continue to be inspired by the wonderful intellectual friends I encounter within the profession and, by embracing the history and philosophy of X, that is, working across disciplinary divides, in other disciplines. There are also tactical opportunities away from the beaten path that allow one to use one's professional activities as a means toward life-long learning; more about that some other time. But one can understand these Digressions as the curricular vitae counterpart to my professional self. 

Magnanimous David Lewis, Exemplar

As to the market: The reader thinks that the likely readership is limited to those who have the expertise and fancy true contradictions, plus a few who find the formal development interesting in its own right. I think this is quite wrong. And not just because there are many who do not now fancy true contradictions but might readily be persuaded to. I think that there are many reasons for an implacable opponent of true contradictions—such as myself—to take great interest in what Priest and his allies are doing.4

If the book is a commercial success, as I think it might be, here is the form I think its success might take. The immediate, ready made market does indeed consist of the sympathizers, and is indeed small. After that, the book makes its own market. Some outraged defender of classical virtue (I have in mind here the very man for the part, but let me not name him) hears of this new heresy and decides to squash it once and for all—and it is apparent to all that his attempt is question-begging and worthless. Others set out to do the job properly: of course we all know that Priest is wrong, but you have to refute him this way. No, that won’t work, it has to be this way . . . Then the difference splitters: you have to grant Priest this much but then you can hold the line here . . . In short: a snowballing, complicated debate among opponents about how the paraconsistent position might best be resisted—and of course the paraconsistent manifesto is required reading for participants in the debate. The increasingly obvious disarray of the opponents helps Priest to gather converts who themselves pitch in. . .

I premise this scenario on two beliefs. (1) Many people will think that it is an easy thing to refute Priest’s position, decisively and in accordance with customary rules of debate. It is not an easy thing. I myself think that it is an impossible thing: so much is called into question that debate will bog down into question-begging and deadlock. (On this point, Priest disagrees with me: he thinks that shared principles of methodology might provide enough common ground.) I think this calls in question the very idea that philosophy always can and should proceed by debate—itself a heretical view, likely to be vigorously opposed.5 (2) Many philosophers hold an unprincipled and unstable position: they have been persuaded by Quine and Putnam that logic is in principle open to revision, they are prepared to contemplate revisions of logic that seem to them to require only small and esoteric changes, yet they still think it absurd to countenance true contradictions. Give these folks a good shaking, and I suppose we’ll see a lot of conversions—some souls saved for staunch classicism, some lost to Priest, and doubtless some novel positions as well.--David Lewis quoted by Graham Priest In Contradiction (Preface to the Second Edition, xix),

Franz Berto called my attention to the Preface to the Second Edition of Priest's book. I had heard the story about Lewis's noble intervention in getting a book -- with which he disagreed on a fundamental level --, that was being rejected by lots of publishers, published. Disciplinary gate-keepers repeatedly prevented the publication of a book whose technical skill they could admire, but whose position they abhorred. It turns out that not so long ago it's easier to publish defenses of infanticide than defenses of true contradiction.

But I don't want to use Lewis's extraordinary letter to rail at the way too many professional philosophers have internalized the worst feature of Kuhn's philosophy: that one can legitimately ignore alternatives to one's own. In the letter Lewis shows that he believes that this is serious mistake intellectually. And as Priest notes in a footnote, this did led the magnanimous Lewis to reflect in print on how hiring practices in times of scarcity should be organized (and are organized) by a tacit treaty.* Rather, Lewis's remarks reveal somebody who is a true master of what one might call philosophical politics.+

First, as Priest notes in his footnote comment on the quoted passage,  there is Lewis's remarkable prescience. It turns out that Lewis truly understands the "market" of philosophical ideas. He has a firm grasp of the sociology of the profession in his own time as revealed by his successful (qualitative) prediction of the manner of the uptake of Priest's work.

Second, he carefully distinguishes between those philosophers that react to genuine novelty from understanding and those ("the many") that react from prejudice. The latter are those that think it will be easy to refute Priest. Their response also reveals their lack of understanding of the limitations of existing methods. It is not that Lewis expects agreement among those that understand--he notes that Priest and he disagree over the extent and potential fruitfulness of existing methodology. In light of the fact that meta-philosophy and debates over methodology have become so common in the 'core,' we can say that Lewis was more in the right on the strength of then existing philosophical methods.

Third, Lewis reveals himself as capable of functioning with great success in the profession while himself holding "heretical views." The heresy itself is, of course, extremely interesting. Philosophical progress is not achieved solely by argument and debate (and presumably score-keeping on a balance-sheet) alone.  Readers who ignore this aspect of Lewis miss his other philosophical skills (which they may even not understand as philosophical).

Fourth, Lewis also sees the strategic utility of promoting Priest's position. I mean strategic in two senses. For (i) the responses to Priest will decisively exhibit the instability at the core of the Quine-Putnam edifice. Even if Lewis does not agree with Priest, this is a welcome result to him. (As an aside, this is one way in which his philosophical skill is revealed; he recognizes that his own tools can not undercut the Quine-Putnam edifice as decisive as the debate over Priest will do.) Lewis can play philosophical chess on multiple boards at once (while also famously seeing very deeply into particular positions).  Moreover, (ii) he thinks it's a good thing to open up certain philosophical "conversations." He appears to think this is healthy for the discipline and, more likely, he thinks these conversations will take us closer to philosophical truth.  He clearly thinks that some existing consensus can be "unprincipled;" conversations (over controversies) reveal the tacit, shaky commitments that hold the existing consensus together. 

 

 

Why the Canon Fight is Different in Analytical Philosophy; on Heroworship

For a brief spell in the 80’s and 90’s, higher education was consumed by the canon wars. For those too young to remember, the canon wars were some earnest and intense battles among people who couldn’t agree on which authors needed to be taught for students to be considered properly educated.--Inside Higher Education (2013).

A year ago Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman succesfully managed to ignite discussion within professional philosophy about the status of the canon (recall my response).* Other humanists might think -- paraphrasing a quip falsely attributed to Heinrich Heine (which doesn't stop the Wall Street Journal from recycling it) -- that philosophy is the Netherlands of higher education, everything happens there three decades later. (Genuine humanists know that debates over the canon are as old as the canon itself.) While there are solid sociological-demographic reasons that help explain why philosophy remained aloof from the canon wars (the short version: professional anglophone philosophy is overwhelmingly white, male, change-averse and unreceptive toward unmasking narratives), there is also a key intellectual reason: within analytical philosophy the (Western) canon is largely irrelevant to disciplinary conversations.+ No command over the details of the text is ever presupposed. This is no surprise because analytical philosophy was founded -- self-consciously mimicking Descartes's dismissiveness toward book-knowledge -- as a revolt against historical approaches to philosophy.

While the days may be gone in which one could count on all literature professors to recite Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Virgil, Goethe, Dante, and the other mighty dead, especially Middlemarch, from memory, to this day working knowledge of some such books provides a shared, contested frame of reference in literary and cultural studies even if nobody thinks that command of such books is a mark of civilization or even a signal of one's cultural capital. And while close reading persists in college courses, the idea that literature can replace Scripture has long been deconstructed, and De Man unmasked; I would not be surprised if it has had its brief, ironic revival prompted by a Simpsons episode.

By contrast even when I present on David Hume's Treatise to professional historians of philosophy, let alone generalist philosophical audiences, I make sure to prepare detailed excerpts of key passages. Hume is the fourth most admired philosopher in history (according to a recent poll); he is the highest ranked English language philosopher--his Treatise the acknowledged masterpiece.** Even the anti-historical logical empiricists would say nice things about Hume. My excerpts are not merely aids to memory; I know that the passages I am calling attention to are simply unknown. Professional philosophy is not a discipline in which texts from the past are internalized. (Yes, there are a few Hume scholars that have working knowledge of some texts, but even among that lovely crowd -- dominated by professional philosophers -- there are very few people that know Hume's major works really by heart.)

Even when working positions come to be known as Humean or Carnapian (etc.), odds are we are dealing with Hume* or Carnap*. It doesn't matter, really, if Hume is not a Humean. (The relationship between, say, Carnap and contemporary Carnapians is very interesting and illuminating.) While there are a few magisterial clubs within professional philosophy -- Kantians often really try to get Kant right (even at the price of introducing anachronism), Wittgensteinians even have a second-order debate whether it makes sense to get Wittgenstein right, etc. --, philosophical puzzles and controversies do not get settled by authoritative interpretation of major texts. Of course, interest in such puzzles can be started by way of some such interpretation. 

The above is not to deny that there is an image of philosophy prevalent within professional philosophy in which a limited number of historical, canonical figures are very prominent: starting with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle through Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant (etc). These folk are often, indeed, implicated in subtle and not-so-subtle forms of ideological domination (or worse). It is worth serious reflection why Gorgias's Helen is unread; why even specialist scholars are unaware of the male feminism of Toland, Mandeville, and John Millar--all eighteenth century figures that were once extremely famous. (Even world class Nietzsche scholars tend to be ignorant on the genealogy of genealogy.) It is shocking that (the first) professional interest in early modern female philosophers only commenced less than a generation ago.  

If we abolish the canon in professional (analytic) philosophy, we just give folk another excuse not to read books. This trend may be unstoppable anyway: the textbook is beloved by university technocrats who hire cheap labor to teach pre-set curriculum with well-defined (achievable) goals.

For, in addition to the image of philosophy, there are classic works, often drawn from those canonical figures that figure in the image of philosophy, which are routinely but not exclusively used to introduce students to philosophy (e.g., an intro to ethics course with Aristotle, Hume, Kant, and Mill--hopefully Sophie de Grouchy before long, too) [recall, recall, and more if you use Google]. Arguably, Nietzsche has become canonical within professional philosophy because teachers could not resist the allure of assigning him in their courses. There could be quite a bit more experimentation and innovation in the pool of such classics. In preparing a course on Islamic philosophy, I encountered Ibn Tufayl (recall) and was certainly not the first to be struck by how easily he could fit in any text-based introductory course in epistemology, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. 

What does exist in professional philosophy is a kind of hero-worship of living authority figures and the recently deceased.* Manifestly odd views can endure because they are associated with some such hero and, more importantly, because they put (often informal, but no less tight) conceptual and methodological constraints on what is acceptable within professional discussion. Williamson describes the mechanisms involved in a recent essay: he patiently explains the fear factor that surrounded Quine for a while [recall my post]. This is why in the overthrow of such heroes we find more than argument--there is also rhetoric; Williamson describes Lewis's metaphysics as "extreme" (9) and memorably, but unflatteringly, notes that Lewis is "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." (8)

This hero-worship is associated with a lot of the worst features of the discipline; the common cruelty, the lack of respect for viewpoints associated with outsiders, the willful ignorance, and the awful systematic demographic patterns of exclusion. So, if we abolish the canon in professional philosophy without ending the hero-worship not much will change about the professional practice.

On Intellectual Decline

In Mach, of course. we have a classic case of this abusive empiricism. It is a case that also exemplifies a characteristic tendency. a kind of Nemesis, of what we might call "hypercritical" philosophic theories-theories that lay down methodological standards or criteria which are actually impossible to practice. The tendency is to lose, at crucial junctures. basic critical control of the conceptual process.--Howard Stein (1977) "Some Philosophical Pre-History of Relativity," 14.

This time I quote Stein's judgment on Mach not to discuss the varieties of empiricism (recall), despite Stein's tempting characterization of 'abusive empiricism.' (Stein's searching, critical treatment of Mach's famous criticism of the bucket experiment is deservedly legendary.) Rather, in Stein Mach is exemplarary of a certain kind of philosophical (and scientific) vice. Amusingly, Stein diagnosis an analogous vice in historiographic practice: 

For the avoidance of anachronism, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to restrict one's conceptual vocabulary to that of the period under discussion. To impose such a restriction is to inhibit flexibility of thought without any important compensating guarantee against error. It is an intellectual stratagem analogous to that of the shallow empiricism in science, that seeks security in rules for the construction of concepts, and achieves only a hobbling of theory. Stein, 14.

It is hard to read (or re-read) Stein's paper and not be struck by the live possibility of intellectual decline even in a topic -- discerning the structure of nature guided by developments in physics -- where the underlying science is advancing. (Thus, reminding us, that philosophy is not easy.) Despite lacking an adequate mathematical vocabulary,* Huygens and Newton are exhibited as having surer footing in their conceptual analysis than many that have followed them (through the nineteenth century) as well as those with a higher philosophical reputation (e.g., Leibniz). Stein's historical account is not exhaustive, but the point about the decline in insight can be defended. 

Stein is not a declinist; he makes no claim that intellectual decline is necessary, or to be expected. Moreover, decline is not inevitable (in Stein's account Riemann and Einstein recover lost insights).  Stein's diagnosis of the source of decline is what may be call ideological; later thinkers lose the secure path because they end up in the grip of intellectual commitments that block insight.* In addition to Newton's tendency at terseness in expression, we can add lack of transparency as a further reason in the case that Stein describes; not all of Huygens most insightful observations were fully available to later thinkers buried as they were in notebooks and correspondence. 

Of course, if absent, say, the inquisition, general economic depression, warfare, inadequate scientific education, one age can decline on a certain metaphysical reflection (and the generations after Newton and Huygens included brilliant minds -- a string of Bernoullis, Diderot, Euler, D'Alembert, Wolff, Du Châtelet, Maupertuis, etc.  --), then other ages of philosophical decline on some dimension or another are also possible. For example, Harry Frankfurt is convinced that the age of giants is over, and we have entered an age of decline ("the field is quiet. We seem, more or less, to be marking time.") 

By contrast (to Frankfurt), regular readers of my musings know that I broke with my own (lazy naturalist) education in the philosophy of science, and have come to think that until David Lewis reintroduced quite modest [modest because largely modular] systematic considerations, much twentieth century analytical philosophy is a philosophical waste-land despite the brilliant distinctions and the non-trivial conceptual (and formal) innovations of the period (which turned out to be fertile for other sciences); the reputations of many third and fourth generation analytical philosophers are overblown, despite often endless praise ("eminent," "distinguished," "brilliant," etc.), their work exhibiting lack of durability and systematic robustness (recall). 

In a puzzle-solving, abductive regime, results are -- at regular pace with lots of hard labor -- cheap. (Of course, they can generate quite a number of success goods to the puzzler who gets there first or most elegantly; or has enough students to keep citing him, etc.) But in such a regime the concepts are not really stress-tested until they are taken up in empirical or technological sciences (as happened with formal semantics, computing theory, game theory, and a wide variety of philosophical concepts in psychology and linguistics etc.). That is to say, and to reiterate, puzzle-solving regimes can be extremely fertile for the special sciences; that's compatible with decline in other respects, especially absent systematic, durable background theory. Lewis re-opened the search for that elusive prey. (Sadly, many Lewisians are far narrower in range than he was.) Stein reminds us that this search must be tempered with ongoing sensitivity to how scientifically stress-tested-concepts (see this paper by Stone) bear on experience.