Digressions&Impressions

REPORT OF AN EMERGENCY ROOM PHYSICIAN (Guest Post by Natalie Eggermont)

[Natalie Eggermont is a trained moral philosopher (a former student), an environmental activist, politician, and ER physician in West Flanders. This post first appeared in Dutch on March 26, 2020; the translation appears with permission.--ES]

The night shift in the ER. There is no certainty about how the crisis will develop. Keep on fighting. And let off steam together. About the shortage of material and excrutiating political choices.

I know this feeling. I sense the impending impact. Last year I had an accident in a MUG [that is, physician led ambulance].* In the middle of the night we flew through the intersection with screaming sirens. When I saw the other car coming from the right, I knew that a collision was inevitable. After the blow, everything went in slow motion for a few seconds. The airbags inflated, I braced myself. Waiting for things to come. Would we flip? Crushed against a post or facade? Disintegrate? Was this the end?

It is that feeling with which I crawl into the car for the night shift. I recognize it. Only this time it is painfully slow and the end is not yet in sight. The email I just received from management haunts me. We are seeing an exponential increase in patients and expect it to continue for at least two more weeks. "There are no objective reasons to think that doomsday scenarios like those in Italy, Spain and France can be avoided here." I'm trying to master that awkward feeling. The next few weeks are going to be hellish. On the radio, the presenter asks what people do at home against boredom.

In the meantime, the emergency room has been completely redesigned; the flow of “corona” and “non-corona” has been separated. During the handover - where the ten of us in the small kitchen try to keep 1.5 m apart - the last guidelines are listed again and we receive an update on the state of affairs in our hospital. The many questions are answered as best as possible.

Cannon fodder
It is also the time to let off some steam. Someone derides the cabinet-ministers and years of savings in health care: "And now they are clapping hypocritically for us!" The lack of mouth masks is also reviewed: "If we had bought two F-35s less, I would not be here with one mask per shift." Few fans of Maggie tonight.* Management had sent us the new guidelines from the federal government by email: you wear a mask for eight hours, "to prevent and/or limit shortages." According to scientific guidelines, they are no longer safe after four hours.

It is beyond shame. Are we suddenly jointly responsible for preventing shortages? Experts warned the government in 2009 (!) that in our country the stock of masks was “below average” and that “saving on these expenses was ethically unacceptable.” The various governments did nothing for ten years. Even worse: in 2018, Minister De Block decided to destroy and not replace 6 million high-quality mouth masks. Now caregivers, store clerks, home nurses, garbage collectors, cleaners, truck drivers, dockers… must risk their health due to guilty neglect on the part of the government. Just like during the Great War, ordinary people are used as cannon fodder in the fight against the enemy.

Health versus profit
Planned shortages and a sluggish policy. It does not only pertain to face masks. There is a patient in the suture-room, a work accident. "What kind of work are you doing," I ask, inspecting the wound in his palm. "I work in the metal industry." "In the metal industry, why aren't you at home?" I react surprised. "Is that essential work?"+ "Like hairdressers, for sure," he laughs wryly. "I'd rather be home, though."

I do not understand. We have no objective reasons to believe that we can avoid doomsday scenarios, hospital management says. We are short of protective equipment for our healthcare personnel. Then why are so many people still working to make things that we don't need now? That is asking for further spread of the virus. That will translate into deaths we could have avoided. When [medical ethicists at] universities develop guidelines on who should and should not be put on the ventilator and economists call to keep working as much as possible to mitigate the crisis (the economic one), I am caught in a nauseating mix of grief and anger . So I'm going to have to let patients go because some bosses don't want to close their businesses? Patients who may not have had a visit for days and cannot have a dignified funeral. And is that just being said and supported by our politicians without blinking? Now we know how coldly unfeeling our economic system makes its choices. In times of crisis, capitalism shows its true face.

The hidden consequences of social distancing

Back to our kitchen. It is suspiciously quiet in the ER. We fear that many people who should come are afraid to do so. We hear it every day: "My son, my daughter, our home nurse told me to come." People don't like to come to the hospital. Certainly not now. There is fear of corona. People know that no visitors are allowed. And above all, there is no social monitoring anymore. No son or daughter visiting [their aged parents] and sounding the alarm. No caregiver noticing that speaking has become more difficult. For example, there are now three patients on intensive care with severe inflammation and kidney failure who probably would have come earlier in other times. Two of them have since died. The many initiatives, including from city councils, to actively call up vulnerable people are heartwarming and much needed. If anyone ever tries to tell you again that man is a solitary and selfish being, think back to this time. We are thoroughly social beings.

Someone bursts into tears. I want to give her a hug but it is not allowed. Loneliness is beginning to weigh on us too, although we are never alone. People fear us because we come into contact with the virus every day. We all feel it. "You shouldn't give mom kisses or hugs anymore," said one husband. He also kept his distance, bed and bathroom were separated. However, it is the love and support of family that keeps us straight after a long shift.

I hope it doesn't get too hellish tonight. Because during the weekend there is no cleaning crew at night and every potentially infected box is one box less in anticipation of the first rays of the sun. We have to laugh notice that when the ambulance is called, I have to crawl into the trunk of the physician led ambulance, otherwise we are too close together.

We laugh, cry and fulminate at politics. We are concerned about the people. Each in their corner in the small kitchen. With a mouth mask that has to be usable double the duration. On the table are cakes, pralines and pots of apple sauce, made by people who give us a hope

 

The ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme a big deal; here's why. (Pt. II) [Guest-post by Jens van 't Klooster]

[This is an invited guest post by Jens van 't Klooster, who is a FWO Postdoctoral Fellow in philosophy at KU Leuven and a member of the research group A New Normative Framework for Financial Debt at the University of Amsterdam.--ES]

Last week the ECB announced a new Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP). The purpose of the programme, as I explain here, is to support fiscal measures taken by individual member states. This puts it in conflict with the infamous monetary financing prohibition spelled out in the ECB’s mandate. The PEPP is, in this regard, a new chapter in the decades long titanic struggle over the interpretation of this one article from the EU’s 1992 Maastricht Treaty. Following my earlier blog, I will draw on my current historical work on ECB risk management to explain just how much the PEPP breaks with the ECB’s earlier approaches to government debt.

Currently known as Article 123 TFEU, the monetary financing prohibition prohibits the ECB from providing credit to individual member states and also, crucially, the “direct” purchase of government bonds.[1] The latter qualifier was originally introduced to allow for so-called sale and repurchase transactions (or “repos”).[2] Article 123 is meant to prohibit actual (so-called “outright”) purchases.

Beyond Article 123, the ECB’s legal mandate does not say much about sovereign debt. The main issues are for the ECB itself to decide, which it avoids doing for the first years of its existence. In 2005, the ECB commits itself to a strict market-based approach. For one, the objective of the ECB’s collateral policy, also in relation to government bonds, is from then on only to protect the ECB from financial risk. Moreover, its risk management strategy is meant to follow, rather than shape, market practices. The ECB’s conservative French president Jean-Claude Trichet announces that the ECB would from then on only accept a government bond “at its market value, so that if the markets would assess that the paper was less credible and the spreads would augment, then the value of the paper that we would take as collateral would diminish.” To this end, the ECB makes the collateral eligibility of government bonds conditional on a sufficiently high credit rating issued by Moody’s, S&P and Fitch.

The ECB’s reluctant approach to government bonds is a driver of the 2010-12 Eurozone crisis. The core financial dynamic of the crisis is a self-enforcing negative spiral between the individual member states and the stability of their domestic banking sector. Stopping it requires restoring trust, which only a strong market participant can do. The ECB is very reluctant to do this. Instead, its market-based collateral rules amplify the effect of private credit rating downgrades on the crisis-struck member states. Moreover, in evaluating the eligibility of sovereign bonds solely from a risk management perspective, the ECB leaves open the possibility of ineligibility,--none of this helpful to crisis-struck member states.

The ECB only reluctantly gives up its market-based approach to government debt. In July 2012 Mario Draghi ends the Eurozone crisis with the (then improvised now famous) words “within our mandate, the ECB is ready to do whatever it takes to preserve the euro. And believe me, it will be enough.” Anticipating a legal challenge, the programme that the ECB unfolds rests on quite a narrow interpretation of that mandate. Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) is a programme that allows the ECB to buy bonds of member states that get into trouble. It side-lines the monetary financing prohibition by buying bonds from other financial market participants, rather than directly from governments (it buys in “secondary markets”). Moreover, on the ECB’s own account, OMT should be understood not just as part of its monetary policy, but in fact merely instrumental in allowing it to achieve its price stability objective.

A group of German lawyers indeed became very angry over the OMT programme and took the ECB to court. Although the case is unsuccessful, the European Court of Justice does rule that “sufficient safeguards must be built into its intervention to ensure that [the ECB] does not fall foul of the prohibition of monetary financing”. The Court leaves it to the ECB to decide those safeguards.

The OMT is never used, but in 2014 the ECB starts purchasing government bonds. This time not to help individual member states, but rather as a part of a quantitative easing programme (or QE). In quantitative easing, the central bank purchases government bonds and other financial assets to stimulate the economy. In designing this programme, the ECB imposes a range of constraints on itself to ward off further legal challenges. The most important constraints are that government bond purchases should follow the ECB’s capital key, which is determined by the population and GDP of individual member state. The ECB also takes various measures to ensure that secondary markets continue to shape interest rates paid by individual member states.

Finally, the programme also becomes subject to the minimum credit rating that the ECB applied to eligible collateral in its repo operations. To be eligible for ECB QE, the main requirement on issuers was that they had an investment grade rating from Moody’s, S&P or Fitch for eligibility. This leads to the exclusion of Greece and the inclusion of Shell and other highly rated multinational firms. To include Portugal despite it lacking an adequate rating, the ECB adds a fourth rating agency which applies more lenient conditions.

So, in what sense does the PEPP constitute a radical break with ECB’s previous crisis-fighting measures? As I already explained in my earlier blog, the key passage in the ECB’s announcement of PEPP comes at the end:

"To the extent that some self-imposed limits might hamper action that the ECB is required to take in order to fulfil its mandate, the GC will consider revising them to the extent necessary to make its action proportionate to the risks that we face."

In contrast to earlier crisis-fighting measures, the ECB has given up the attempt to shoehorn everything it does under price stability. The ECB also asserts that most limits hitherto applied to its tools were self-imposed and can be revised in light of its objectives of price stability and supporting the economic policies in the EU. With this justification the ECB permits itself to give up the capital key, the earlier secondary market restriction and the minimum credit rating. The ECB now considers adequate financing for government expenditures itself a necessary condition for achieving the objectives spelled out in its mandate.

There are some procedural worries about all of this, which the German lawyers to their credit have amply highlighted. My article on the ECB’s response to the 2010-12 crisis from two years ago already looks dated but contains some things worth reiterating. It compares the ECB’s crisis response to the Roman emergency law, where I note that the latter was subject to quite sophisticated check and balances. The ECB is for now alone. It determines what constitutes an emergency, what it is allowed to do in an emergency, does its thing in the emergency and gives only a very formal accounts of why it did that thing when the emergency is over. That raises all sorts of procedural concerns. There is also a quick fix. Article 125 (2) TFEU allows the EU to specify the definition of monetary financing. This offers a clear avenue for a more adequate approach, which should also be kept in mind when we return to thinking about the climate crisis.  

The ECB’s Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme a big deal; here's why. (Pt. I) [Guest-post by Jens van 't Klooster]

[This is an invited guest post by Jens van 't Klooster, who is a FWO Postdoctoral Fellow in philosophy at KU Leuven and a member of the research group A New Normative Framework for Financial Debt at the University of Amsterdam.--ES]

Wednesday night’s ECB announcement of a Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) is a radical break in the institution’s existence. It will see the ECB issue €750 billion in new money, which is by now sort of business as usual. What is really new is the ECB’s overt willingness to fund fiscal measures that the member states take in response to the pandemic.

The rationale for PEPP is not immediately clear, since the economy does not exactly need a stimulus. The pandemic measures will have cataclysmic economic impact, likely  worse than that of the Global Financial Crisis. But, the damage comes from people being at home, rather than consuming and producing. The emergency is that without government intervention, people can’t pay rent and firms will collapse this month. ECB president Christine Lagarde explicitly acknowledges that she is not in any position to counter those effects, since the economic damage is itself integral to the virus-fighting program: “Essentially, for a temporary period, a large part of the economy is being switched off.” Mitigating these effects, meanwhile, requires targeted measures. The pandemic has a devastating impact on some sectors. It has much less impact on others, where employees should just work from home, wait and not go out and shop. Better access to credit can help those who are struck in the short term, but the ECB has better tools for that. More lending, moreover, will ultimately only add to already historically unprecedent levels of debt, which may ultimately end up on the governments plate in any case.[1] PEPP, therefore, should not be understood as monetary policy aimed at easing private sector credit. Its primary role is to support EU member states who then decide on their own targeted policies. The ECB has even opened the door to favouring those member states struck hardest.

The key passage in the ECB’s announcement of PEPP is not in the list of measures, but comes at the end:

"To the extent that some self-imposed limits might hamper action that the ECB is required to take in order to fulfil its mandate, the Governing Council will consider revising them to the extent necessary to make its action proportionate to the risks that we face."[2]

What does the ECB say here? The first thing to note is the term that does not appear anywhere in the press release: Price stability. This may be unsurprising to outsiders but I can’t remember ever seeing an ECB document that does not contain these words. Instead, the release uses the more generic term “mandate”, which here refers to the ECB’s objectives. This is important because although the ECB’s primary objective is price stability, it is also tasked with supporting “the general economic policies in the Union”.[3] So, in contrast to earlier crisis-fighting measures, the ECB has not attempted to shoehorn what it does under price stability. The second thing to note is the admission that most limits hitherto applied to ECB tools were self-imposed.[4] Therefore, the ECB asserts, they can be revised in light of the objectives. This is relevant with regard to three types of restrictions that the ECB until now adhered to. First, the ECB took various measures to ensure that markets continue to shape interest rates paid by individual member states. It may now give up some or all of these restrictions. Second, earlier government bond purchases were subject to a minimum investment grade rating but now Greece, despite lacking such a rating, is explicitly part of the programme.

Most consequential, however, is what the ECB could now do in relation to its previously strict allocation of purchases in accordance with its capital key. The ECB capital key is determined by the population and GDP of individual member state. Giving up on this restriction allows the ECB to target purchases on member states that need funding most. This intention is clear from Lagarde’s statement that the PEPP “is tailored to manage the staggered progression of the virus and the uncertainty about when and where the fallout will be worst.” Divergence from the capital key, Lagarde suggests, may not just happened in response to what bonds are available in the market, but also in response to the severity of the crisis in individual member states. That would not be in line with the legal constraints that the ECB previously imposed on itself, and hence open it to new legal challenges.

If implemented, targeted bond purchases would be a huge deal. 92% of the interest that governments pay on bonds currently purchased goes straight to their national central bank, rather than to the ECB, and is paid back as central bank profits at the end of the year.[5] In theory, the ECB could sell the bonds that it purchases. In practice, it is highly unlikely to do this with the over three trillion euros in bonds currently parked on its balance sheet. The ECB will most likely not only keep the bonds but also replace them when they mature. But, if that is true, then states do not actually need to repay their debt and targeted purchases provide them with free cash. In envisaging targeted purchases, the ECB acknowledges that adequate financing for government expenditures is itself a necessary condition for achieving the objectives spelled out in its mandate.

If operations no longer have a clear price stability objective, we should probably even be hesitant to describe them as quantitative easing. Instead, the economic term would be monetary financing transactions.

It is possible that the ECB’s dramatic announcement will motivate the member states to come up with something better. Is that Lagarde’s strategic aim in opening the door to radical central bank activism? It’s too soon to say. The Dutch and German member of the ECB Governing Council are already said to have voiced their misgivings. In any case, the ECB’s current approach breaks with its role in the Eurozone crisis, when it waited until the member states created the European Stability Mechanism before announcing its bond buying programme. This time, the ECB has acted first and thereby put pressure on EU governments to propose a more adequate burden sharing mechanism (Eurobonds, helicopter money, anything really is on the table). But, as Daniela Gabor points out, it is unlikely that all crisis measures can be funded through debt, so that at some point the member states will also need to think about taxes.

For now, it is clear that even the suggestion that the ECB may target government bond purchases makes PEPP a big deal, which has the potential to radically change the Eurozone. For better or worse, it has finally endorsed its status as, to put it in the words of Nicolas Jabko’s unduly neglected article on this topic, “the boldest expression of a nascent federal power at the EU level”. I will write a second blog later this week that draws more on my current historical research on ECB risk management. There I will focus on the PEPP’s significance in light of the ECB’s decades long struggle with its monetary financing prohibition.

Update (30.3.2020): The ECB has now published the legal framework for the PEPP programme, which retain the capital key but give up another self-imposed restriction: The requirement that the ECB does not buy more than 33% of debt from any issuer individuals, which makes the PEPP potentially unlimited in size. I say more on this in a German blog based on this one at the Dezernat Zukunft.

Women philosophers in the Philosophical Review (1900-1970) [Guest post by Joel Katzav]

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

The proportion of work published by women in the Philosophical Review (PR) drops substantially after the first three decades of the twentieth century and does not recover at least until the 1970s. The numbers in the first three decades are partly explained by the policies of PR’s editor, the Hegelian James Edwin Creighton. His death in 1924 and the policies of subsequent editors, including, among others, his Hegelian student Gustavus Watts Cunningham, help to explain the decline in women’s contributions to the journal. The takeover of PR by analytic philosophers, including, among others, Max Black, Norman Malcolm and Gregory Vlastos, in the second half of the 1940s sees a worsening of the situation. It is known that the emergence of American analytic philosophy was facilitated by the marginalisation of work by non-analytic philosophers at PR and other key journals (see here). This emergence also involved excluding the work of Indian philosophers from PR (see here). We can now add that it involved a worsening of the situation of women in academic philosophy, at least when it came to their place in PR.[1]

The first three decades of the twentieth century saw dozens of women publishing their work in PR, the most important philosophy journal in America at the time. The period 1920-1930 (inclusive) saw 19 women publishing in the journal. Their publications included 21 full-length articles, 1 discussion and 39 book reviews and notices. The full-length papers amounted to 9.5% of the full-length papers in the journal. The total number of items published by women in the journal was 61, which amounts to 8.1% of the items in it. The period 1910-1920 saw 7.7% of the full-length articles and 20% of the discussions being contributed by women. The total number of items published by women in the journal was 98, which amounts to 10.8% of the number of items in the journal. During 1900-1910, 7% of the full-length papers (16 papers by 8 women) in the journal are by women. In understanding these figures, keep in mind that only 29 women were awarded a PhD in philosophy in the USA before 1900 (Rogers and Dykeman 2005).

During the period 1930-1940 (inclusive), however, 4.7% of the full-length articles in PR are by women.[2] Moreover, things did not get any better in the following decades. The period 1950-1960 (inclusive) saw 18 women publish 25 items in PR. These include 8 full-length articles, 7 discussions and 10 book reviews. The full-length papers by women amounted to 4.4% of such papers in the journal. The total number of items published by women in the journal amounted to roughly 2% of the total number of items in it. The period 1960-1970 was comparable and saw only 16 women contribute to the journal. For comparison, Kieran Healey, with the help of Nick Bloom, reports that the percentages of articles by women in PR in 1993 and 2013 were 11% and 14% respectively.

 It thus seems that the first three decades of the twentieth century saw a percentage of contributions by women to PR that was higher than the three following decades. The period 1920-1930 had a proportion of contributions that was comparable to what was found at the end of the twentieth century. The 1930s saw a halving of the proportion of articles by women. In addition, the total number of items by women undergoes a fourfold reduction at this time. While the total number of women contributing to the journal in the 1950s is slightly higher than what it was in the 1930s, the community of American academic philosophers grew fivefold during the period 1920-1950, assuming the growth in numbers of APA members is indicative of the growth in the overall community of American, academic philosophers; there were 252 APA members in 1919 and 1248 members in 1950.

	1900-1910	1910- 1920	1920- 1930	1930- 1940	1950- 1960	1960- 1970
Percentage of articles by women	7%	7.7%	9.5%	4.7%	4.4%	5.1%
Percentage of discussions by women		20%	2%		4.6%	2.4%
Percentage of reviews and notices by women		11%	8%		1.8%	3.2%
Total number of women contributors		22	19	14	18	16
Total number of items by women		98	61		25	23
Percentage of items by women		10.8%	8.1%		2%	2.4%
Total number of items		908	758		899	669

The low numbers of women publishing in PR make it hard to determine precisely when its policy about work by women changes, but it is plausible that the change occurred by 1932; during the period 1900-1927, women publish full-length articles in PR every year, except for 1903 and 1918, but during the period 1928-1932 only publish papers in it in 1930 (though there are 3 papers in PR in that year). The numbers of full-length papers by women do not recover after this. There are a number of editorial changes at the journal that might explain the change in editorial policy at this time. For example, Ernest Albee is no longer editor from 1928, leaving two of those who took over from Creighton in place, namely William Hammond and Frank Thilly. It is possible that the decision was theirs when Albee left. Possibly, the decision was made in 1925. In any case, the changes in the team of 2-3 journal editors during the 1930s brought no further changes in journal content. The longest serving editor during this period, starting in 1930, was Cunningham.Part of the explanation for the numbers of women contributing to PR in the early decades of the twentieth century is its then being edited by Creighton. He was joint editor of PR, with his teacher Jacob Gould Schurman, from 1896 until 1902, and then main editor until October 1924. Schurman and Creighton were also the founders of Cornell University’s Sage School of Philosophy (Auxier 2005). A surprising proportion of Creighton’s students at the School were women. The 1917 edited collection of papers Philosophical Essays in Honour of James Edwin Creighton (Sabine 1917) is a collection of works by his students. 5 of the 22 contributors to the collection are women. In addition, during this period, Cornell was the most successful philosophy department at mentoring and placing women philosophers (Rogers and Dykeman 2004). Not surprisingly, quite a few of the women philosophers writing in PR during the first half of the twentieth century were Creighton’s students.

While the period during which PR was under the influence of Hegelians saw fluctuations in the fortunes of work by women philosophers in its pages, the decades immediately following its takeover by analytic philosophers in the second half of the 1940s did not. Indeed, it appears that the period 1950-1970 was one during which it became even more difficult for work by women to find its way into the pages of PR. As noted above, the number of women publishing in PR in the 1950s and 1960s was slightly higher than the number doing so in the 1930s, but there was also a fivefold increase in the number of academic philosophers between 1920 and 1950. Whether the worsening of the situation of work by women philosophers in PR was primarily due to the numbers of women in the profession, to the openness of PR and its analytic editors to work by women, to some combination of these factors, or to other factors, is an issue I leave open.

In summary, while the early decades of the twentieth century saw an impressive (given the period) number of women philosophers contributing to PR’s pages, the rest of the twentieth century did not. It seems that the takeover of PR by analytic philosophers in the second half of the 1940s saw it become even more difficult for work by women to make its way into the journal. Perhaps this should not be much of a surprise. We already know that the emergence of analytic philosophy in America involved the exclusion of non-analytic work from prominent journals when these were taken over by analytic philosophers. We also know that the takeover by analytic philosophers of PR involved excluding work by Indian academic philosophers from its pages.

[1] In preparing the data for this note, women were first identified by their names and then, where possible, by independent checks. Men were identified by name and, in special cases, by subsequent, independent checks. Thanks to my student Bailey Carthouser for his help in collecting the data.

[2] The women publishing in PR during the period 1900-1940 include Alice Ambrose, Nann Clark Barr, Eleanor Bisbee, Gladys Bleiman, Gertrude C. Bussey, Mary W. Calkins, Ivy G. Campbell, Mary Sophia Case, Marion Crane Carroll, Helen M. Clarke, Mary Evelyn Clarke, Marie T. Collins, Marion Delia Crane, Lucy Shepard Crawford, Anna A. Cutler, Grace N. Dolson, Seba Eldridge, Mary P. Follett, Katherine E. Gilbert, Marjorie Glicksman, Kate Gordon, Winifred Hyde, Marguerite W. Kehr, Marjorie S. Harris, Estelle Allen De Lacy, Christine Ladd-Franklin, Margaret W. Landes, Frederica de Laguna, Grace A. de Laguna, Flora I. McKinnon, Diana Monsman, Vida F. Moore, Elsie Murray, Marjorie H. Nicolson, Hilda D. Oakeley, Helen H. Parkhurst, Ethel D. Puffer, Clarissa Rinaker, Eliza Ritchie, Eleanor H. Rowland, Ethel E. Sabin, Edna Aston Shearer, Ellen Bliss Talbot, Alma Rose Thorn, Margaret F. Washburn and Mabel V. Wilson.

[Guest Blogger Amy Olberding on] Corpse Display and Anger

[This is an invited guest post by Amy Olberding.--ES]

Eric’s recent post about anger and corpse display left me unsatisfied with how anger is typically and traditionally addressed.  There’s no tidy way to trace out the concatenation of ideas Eric’s post inspired – it starts with Xunzi talking about how to treat a corpse respectfully, turns then toward Plato considering Leontius’ viewing of a desecrated corpse and, more broadly, what looking at a desecrated corpse is meant to inspire, and then ends up at Agnes Callard on anger.  Maybe the simple explanation is this: display of desecrated corpses is an especially vivid case of human anger, and it often does interlock with moral sensibilities in curious ways.  As Eric notes, the display of the corpse summons the eye and then a response to what is seen.  Anger would standardly inform the reasoning to display the corpse in the first place, and some of that anger is likely meant to transmute and become the witness’ own.  So display of the desecrated corpse is clearly a case that invites consideration of anger. 

But maybe it’s also useful as a way to think about the limitations of our philosophical discussions of anger.  That, at least, is what occurs to me. 

Callard’s recent article divides philosophical accounts of anger into two broad types: pro-anger or anti-anger.  Both sides inevitably need more nuance than this.  Recognizing the moral perils of anger unchecked, the pro-anger advocates are left to argue for management and regulation, lest anger run away with us.  Likewise, recognizing anger’s motivating power where moral ills are concerned, the anti-anger advocates are left to argue that we still need (the far more bloodless) indignation to respond to injustices.  The “sides” here, Callard argues, inadvertently converge because both are trying to recognize a morally palatable anger (or anger-ish?) response when injustices demand some moral-emotive response.  They’re both engaging in moral reasoning that aims to tame and domesticate the wild in us – to encourage measured or regulated abhorrence at wrong without licensing the brute unreasoning stuff that inspires revenge and grudges.  Callard’s argument then pivots to considering the simpler, less attractive conclusion that efforts to purify anger overlook that anger’s impulses – revenge and grudges – are rationally justified. We are left then, with the conclusion that “anger implicates all of us in moral corruption.”  The purified forms of anger moral philosophers are ready to endorse are “a philosopher’s fiction” that work to “distract us from the crisis at the heart of anger, which is that affective response to injustice clings to the taste of blood.”

My concern, I suppose, is that it’s all a philosopher’s fiction – that the way philosophy’s methods typically oblige us to speak of anger clarify (if they do) because the phenomenon of anger is severed from other elements with which it may interlock.  This was Eric’s reservation too – if I can put what he said in my own idiom.  He is effectively arguing that we won’t get a satisfying account of anger if we neglect to register its social aspects.  State violence and social norms may have anger embedded in them and, indeed, it may be an important function in some norms that they transmit or summon anger in citizens.  This is why displaying a desecrated corpse to raise the “spirited” in witnesses can be important, in Eric’s example.  So, we might end up with philosophers’ fictions every time we analyze anger as a phenomenon of individual agents.  This was, I take it, Eric’s point.  Mine is similar:  Insofar as our accounts of anger conceptually isolate it from other emotions, they isolate our analyses from the world and from at least some of the people who exhibit anger. 

Because Eric was discussing corpse display, my thoughts turned to the corpse of Emmett Till, a young boy of 14 beaten, mutilated, and shot to death in 1955 by white men who justified their brutality by accusing him of flirting with a white woman.  When Emmett’s corpse was sent home from Mississippi, where he was murdered, to his mother in Chicago, she gave him an open coffin service so that his beaten, distorted, unrecognizable face was visible to all who came to mourn.  Mamie Till-Mobley deliberately displayed what had been done to her boy, displayed his battered dead body and, as Plato’s analysis might suggest, commanded the eyes of all upon him in a way that would summon in them emotional reactions kindred to her own.[1] 

Whatever a philosophical moral account of anger can do, I want it to explain Mamie Till-Mobley.  I am tempted even to say that Till-Mobley is my pre-theoretical constraint for an adequate account of moral anger, such that I take an analysis of anger that I cannot apply to Emmett Till’s mother to be missing something important.  And I don’t think most of our classical accounts or Callard’s can explain her well.  The trouble here, I think, is that we philosophically talk of anger in isolation.

Mamie Till-Mobley is not only angered, she is grieved.  Her action – displaying her son’s corpse – cannot be understood apart from both anger and grief, to an emotive response in which these are profoundly, inseparably joined.  To separate her anger from her grief, to analyze one without the other or lay claim to understanding one without the other would be, to borrow phrasing from Dostoyevsky, false to the fact.  Till-Mobley’s anger and grief are one body and they unite in the display of her son’s body.  Because of this, accounts of anger that seek calibrated, domesticated forms of anger or that would “dark side” our nature in anger just sit ill here.  There is nothing tame in Till-Mobley’s display of her son’s body – it is an action primevally wild and raw – but neither, I think, is there the moral corruption of which Callard speaks.  Contra Callard’s analysis, at least, I think Till-Mobley is exactly “responding rightly to being treated wrongly.”

Some angers are not unmixed but still fully, even emphatically, need to count as forms of anger morally necessary to consider.  Mamie Till-Mobley’s emotive range and reach, evident in the symbolic aching grief and anger in her son’s display, is richer than I think philosophical analysis gets. It is undeniably and potently anger but it’s not only anger, and that seems to me not only what we’re missing in such analyses, but thereby also what we risk missing in our moral-emotional civic cultivation.  To speak of what we ought do with and about anger, we have to speak about the rest with which it often comes – the grief.  What morally angers us can also and often grieve us.  Perhaps, even, what morally angers us ought to grieve us.  But highlighting that alignment changes the kinds of things we ought be saying about anger and, more particularly, anger at injustices.  The thing we call anger is a thing more complicated than “anger” captures.

The methodological claims I suppose are implicit in what I’m stumbling after here are three.  First, I often counterfactually wonder about how different our philosophical work would be were it not lodged too deeply in the traces of its past.  Western philosophical accounts of anger were inaugurated by men who took as their exemplars and standard-bearers for understanding the concept other men, typically men involved in martial contexts.  There is a lot of anger in the world that plainly is not this.  The world is also full of angry, heartbroken mothers.  Were they the original exemplars, I can’t help thinking the philosophical history of anger would look different. 

Second, when we seek to isolate discrete concepts in order to philosophically clarify a phenomenon, we often pre-emptively set aside too much of how the phenomenon operates in the world.  We end up with conceptually cleaner concepts, but lose the moral world we’re trying to track with them.  In short, it’s not obvious that the tidy concepts that make for good, focused, and clarifying philosophy map the messy world.  Anger treated apart from grief will only capture some of anger, and perhaps only the simplest, least experientially vexed kind. 

Finally, where moral improvement of the world is concerned, concepts that don’t answer to the mixed nature of human experience won’t be effective at steering that experience.  Presumably, the motivation for talking about anger at all is figuring out what to do about it and with it.  What to do about it, I hazard tentatively, might require talking about the stuff with which it mixes, all the stuff we’ve left aside to focus on anger alone – not just grief, but perhaps also disappointment.  I can’t defend this – here or even in my own head yet – but if it turned out that some moral anger inextricably involves a richer capacity for grief, we are unlikely to see that and thus to say it and make use of it.  I am quite tempted by the thought that were we more attuned to grief, our understandings of anger would be richer, better, and more useful.  But while anger and grief can be inseparably wedded in a person like Mamie Till-Mobley, our philosophical analyses of both anger and grief live in different conceptual worlds.  So we can’t explain her or direct well toward a world where responses like hers are understood, much less cultivated.

A Letter from Vernon Smith [Nobel 2002, Economics]

[This is an email written by Vernon Smith on January 29, 2020, republished with permission. Yesterday's post,  prompted some discussion between us.--ES]

Eric:

Here is a 500-word summary of my position; I copy Sabiou,* as we have been working it out together for markets, since July 2019:

Beginning with Cournot, market theorists began to model agents in terms of the outcomes of their actions, turning away from the classical focus, first, on the origins of action, then on outcomes. Cournot wrote D = f(P) for the first time [so did Dupuit, independently, six years later. The time was ripe!] Cournot could not model price formation, as in Smith (1776, ch VII), a text known well to the French followers of Smith. So Cournot got price by summing the quantities offered by sellers, inverting f (P) and computing P. I now understand this move as a well-meaning cop-out from the perspective of classical style thinking and articulating.

This outcome focus describes how I had come (through my graduate education) to think about economics, but all that changed beginning with the first experiment in 1956. Somewhere in my early papers I referred to the Cournot price as emerging from a black box after you fed it D, but I did not yet understand the true significance of that reference: A metaphor for economic theory.

For the utilitarian youth, 1862-1870s, especially in the Jevons-Walras formalization of Ui (x1, x2,...), all action was concerned with the i (individual). Now, because i chooses the xi's to Max U, there is no distinction between origins and outcomes, and the whole economics profession--one paper at a time, each beginning with an immediately preceding paper--cannot even think in terms of origins. All are deeply committed to the proposition:

               Action implies outcome, if and only if max U.

The pervading error is in the "only if." The behavioral economists, for example, cannot imagine any form of other-regarding action that is not utility function motivated, so U becomes U (Own payoff, Other payoff) and a whole sub-discipline emerges from the "social preferences" slogan, and they imagine they have rescued economics from its foundation in self-interested action. The BEs do good experiments, however; the problem is with the straight-jacket motivation, in which every newly discovered experimental "effect" is put into U, ex post hoc, and always confirming their program. The psychologists knew and know better, but they do less-interesting experiments, and have infected the sampling population with lies (deception) and coercive (as a condition for a major) participation.  

In HUMANOMICS, Bart and I show that the "only if" is dead wrong by simply providing one counter example, Smith’s TMS in which all are strictly “and rightly” self-interested. If there is one counter example there must be many.  TMS enlightens the out-sized failure of theorist to predict observed outcomes in the trust (and ultimatum) games of the 1980s-90s

But the same issues apply to WON, where Smith’s analysis was the complete converse of the utilitarian’s: He went from quantities, xj, that the j's wanted and revealed a willingness to pay for, to the collective of buyers and sellers who found prices, as in my first experiment—trivial, anyone can do it.

My position is that we are only returning to that tradition. If that be radical, so be it.

Vernon            

CC: Bart Wilson, Sabiou Inoua

 

When you have no time edit (a volume or special issue).

[This post was invited by Helen de Cruz on behalf of The Philosophers' Cocoon, where it runs simultaneously here.] 

Once you have received tenure or (in Europe) a permanent position, the time available for research often goes down drastically. You will be expected to take on more leadership, mentoring, and service positions in the department and university. With job security you are more like to start a family. The challenge is that parenthood, even when joyful, can make constant demands on your time. In a discipline like philosophy (and most of the humanities and social sciences), where ‘research’ primarily presupposes having continuous, uninterrupted stretches of time to think, read, and write, you find that this simply evaporates in the period you are most eager to develop your ambitious projects into a (second) book, an ambitious grant, etc.

Being a good parent, partner, colleague, director of graduate studies, teacher, and researcher is demanding in the best of times; it feels nigh impossible when you are also sleep deprived because one of your kids has night cramps and your spouse is on rotation at the hospital. It becomes really difficult to maintain good cheer when the subject of ‘research’ comes up. Even when you can ignore office email on intersessional holidays, these offer little respite because this is now key ‘family-time.’

The problem can be masked, for a while, because you are finishing projects, including working on revise and resubmits. But at some point, you realize that your backlog has disappeared and is showing up in print. What to do? There are, of course, lots of time-management strategies (worth discussing), including spending less time on twitter and blogs; but the problem is without solution. There are periods in one’s life where research in the sense of having continuous, uninterrupted stretches of time to think, read, and write is simply impossible.

Not accepting this fact is a recipe for frustration, self-loathing, and worse. One of the most frustrating features of trying to do research when stretched for time, is that each time you start up the project you make no advance at all. When I am in the pure research and initial drafting of a paper stage, I need a bit of time – thirty to ninety minutes -- to orient myself to the problem each time I fire up my laptop. My kid used to have a 42-45 minute sleep cycle. He would awake just as I was reaching the possibility of a new ‘start-of-research-flow’ moment.

My slogan is: when you have the least amount of time for research that’s the best moment to do editorial work for a special issue or an edited volume. (Okay, that won’t go viral.) For, while editing presupposes considerable skills, such editing work has three key features that speaks in its favor for time-stretched-academics: (i) it can be cut up in lots of discrete units; and (ii) the work done is, when properly structured, generally cumulative. While one should take care in wording emails that nudge authors (and referees), the time needed is relatively brief (and repetitive, cut and paste does most of the work) compared to getting oneself up to speed at where one was, say, in embedding a partial grounding relation inside different kinds of action-guiding modal landscapes.

Moreover, editing other people’s work (iii) allows one to stay abreast of developments in one’s field precisely when one often has least time to attend conferences or (ahh) read journals. Yes, editing can be drudgery. There is nothing thrilling about reading a peer’s not quite polished paper for the third time. Sometimes the academic life simply is no more than work.

But editing is the plumbing of the discipline. You help maintain standards and you are a key-sounding board that can help guide other people’s advances. I don’t want to suggest one is shaping the field by editing a special issue; but it is not an impossible outcome.

Yes, there are other tasks that await the time-stretched-academic’s attention. You could referee more. But the time-stretched-academic is most likely to be the unpleasant referee #2. Moreover, refereeing does not solve the problem of a collapse of the appearance of research productivity noted above; it worsens it. That is to say, when you have the least amount of time for research that’s the best moment to do editorial work for a special issue or an edited volume and to decline invitations to referee.

Two final comments. First, editing a volume or special issue can be a lot of work, some of it quite unexpected. I don’t just mean that dealing with other people’s missed deadlines is quite frustrating; but also you need to navigate the demands of publishers and journals. Second, editing also generates the problem it is meant to tackle: you do need to take time to think through the pitch to the editors and prospective authors. More important, editorial guidance or the email in which you ask for major cuts (etc.) may require a quiet moment so you can compose yourself, and take a deep breath, just as you need to run to a meeting. Don’t press send in a hurry.*

 

Theodore de Laguna’s analytic and speculative philosophy [Guestpost by Joel Katzav]

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

The speculative philosopher Theodore de Laguna’s 1922 paper, ‘A Nominalistic Interpretation of Truth’ (NT)* is being published in English for the first time. NT is, as far as I know, the first extended defence of the deflationary view of truth; neither Frank P. Ramsey’s ‘Facts and Propositions’ (1927) nor analytic philosophy were the origin of it all (see here for NT, and here for a discussion of de Laguna’s theory of truth and its place in history). In what follows, however, I want to draw attention to how de Laguna’s deflationary theory of truth is related to other deflationary positions he articulates in NT, positions that depend on his view that the meaning of a word is given by its use. Analytic philosophers, it will become clear, did not even come close to inventing ordinary language philosophy. I also want to offer a partial explanation of why de Laguna, despite being a first-rate analyst, would have thought that analytic epistemology was muddled and, along with his wife, Grace de Laguna, never thought of analysis as more than a sideline; their epistemology was a speculative, evolutionary theory of judgment and had its conscious heritage in Absolute idealism, Darwinism and pragmatism.

(Theodore) de Laguna held (1915) that – and the terminology here is his – the meaning of words is given by their use. Further, anticipating views that ordinary language philosophers would develop decades later, he took philosophical problems relating to truth, existence, universals, identity and inclusion to arise from the misuse of natural language (2019). He notes that, in general, our utterances are susceptible to a variety of interpretations but that some of these interpretations easily become illegitimate in a way that generates philosophical confusion. Thus, for example,

John is good may be regarded as a statement about John, or about John's character, or about goodness; or it may be regarded as asserting a relation between John and goodness, which may be more explicitly expressed by saying that John possesses the quality in question, or that the quality inheres in him. This last mode of interpretation leads, to be sure, to certain difficulties which may raise a doubt as to whether it is strictly valid. For one thing, it points to an infinite regress of relations; for if there is a relation between John and goodness, is there not equally a relation between John and goodness on the one hand and the relation of possession on the other hand -- as appears when one says that the relation or possession connects John and goodness (2019).

And, similarly,

John is good is capable of still another interpretation -- one by which the proposition, as originally proposed, becomes the subject and receives as predicate the quality of truth: It is true that John is good. This predicate may be again applied to the proposition as thus reconstituted: It is true that it is true that John is good; and so on without limit. Here too, then, we have to do with an infinite regress; and we need scarcely recall the fact that the notion of truth is the basis of the family of paradoxes that are associated with the name of Epimenides (2019).

It is, unfortunately, only one deflationary view, namely that of truth, that de Laguna goes on fully to articulate. Here is a succinct statement of the core of his position on truth:

When the subject of the nature of truth is proposed for discussion, it appears to be assumed that truth has a nature -- that is to say, that there are a body of characteristic properties which universally distinguish true propositions from false. It is the object of the present paper to call in question that assumption, and to maintain that on the contrary truth, as such, has no nature; that there is no property whatsoever which is possessed by all true propositions and by no others; and, accordingly, that the problem of truth, as here proposed, is an illegitimate problem, the attempted solution of which can lead only to an endless circle of deception. Truth, in other words, is not a concept capable of clarification, but an idol of the market-place -- a mode of speech exalted to the position of a category (2019).

Interestingly, the concept of knowledge too is among the concepts that de Laguna is inclined to take a deflationary attitude towards. An obvious objection to the proposal that knowledge has no nature is that, at a minimum, knowledge has the property of being true (see, e.g., Prichard 2004). De Laguna, however, recognised that, if truth is not a property, then one cannot rightly claim that knowledge claims at least share the property of being true. So he had a ready response to the suggestion that the nature of knowledge includes, at least, the property of being true.

No less interesting is the fact that de Laguna, despite adopting a deflationary view of knowledge, continued to think of epistemology as central to philosophy. While he found the enterprise of providing analyses of knowledge to be a hopeless muddle, and while he and his wife were among the best analysts of their time and well ahead of their fellow non-speculative analysts in many ways (see here), analysis was for them a relatively unimportant sideline. They took the development of an empirical, evolutionary theory of judgement to be the central task of epistemology. Such a theory, on their view (1910), aims, in part, to uncover the (historical) origin of judgement, including how it evolved from simpler kinds of representations and how it developed into relatively complex forms of judgement such as those found in culture and science. An evolutionary epistemology also includes, on their view, a theory of the functional relationships between judgments and other kinds of mental phenomena (see here for more on their epistemology and how it outdoes Willard V. O. Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’).

Guestpost: On Grace de Laguna’s functionalist critique of type physicalism and her lack of engagement with analytic philosophy.

[This is an invited guest post by Joel Katzav.--ES]

The American speculative philosopher Grace de Laguna would have been right to judge that 1950s state-of-the-art analytic philosophy of mind was playing catch up with the philosophical world of her youth. Ullin T. Place’s 1956 paper ‘Is Consciousness a Brain Process?’ provides the starting point for analytic discussions of type physicalism and it is only later that functionalist critiques of this position are offered by analytic philosophers. De Laguna’s functionalist critique of parallelism, which includes type physicalism, and her associated presentation of a private language argument, date to 1918. Similarly, de Laguna would have been right to judge key aspects of state-of-the-art analytic contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of language to be in need of work. As I have pointed out elsewhere, she and her husband were, in 1910, already well ahead of Willard V. O. Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1951) with regard to confirmation holism and the analytic-synthetic distinction. I could go on, but perhaps what I have said will be enough to at least make it imaginable that de Laguna did not have much to learn from analytic philosophy that was being carried out in her areas of research.[1] Indeed, although she kept abreast of developments in analytic philosophy into (at least) the 1950s, it never played a significant role in her work

Place’s ‘Is Consciousness a Brain Process?’ (1956, p. 45) targets the ‘all but universally held’ view that, since statements about psychical episodes are logically independent of statements about processes in the brain, logic alone suffices to rule out the view that consciousness is a process in the brain. Place’s ‘novel’ suggestion is that the type physicalist identification of mental processes with brain processes can be thought of as a scientific hypothesis. Yet de Laguna’s 1918 “The empirical correlation of mental and bodily phenomena” is an empirical critique of parallelism, including of type physicalism, along with a case for functionalism. She notes that then familiar versions of parallelism take the mind-matter correlation to be either between types of psychical states and types of chemical states, or between types of psychical states and types of physical states, but suggests that Hugo Münsteberg provides a more empirically adequate position, one that takes the correlation to be between types of psychical state and types of physiological state (ibid., p. 535).[2] She writes that, according to his view,

the correlative of a specific mental process is not a geometrical figure of the dance of brain atoms, nor even necessarily a particular chemical reaction, but the occurrence of similar physiological processes in definite physiological structure (ibid., p. 535).

De Laguna goes on to observe that all would acknowledge that, for every change in psychical processes, there is a change in the cortex, but that parallelism tells us that characteristic groupings of psychic phenomena are traceable in the cortex (ibid., p. 535). According to Münsteberg’s version of parallelism, the relationship between material and psychic events is not the causal one; it is, rather, the stronger relation of determination. Psychic events are ontologically determined by, and are explained by, material ones (Strong 1892, p. 183 & p. 187). Münsteberg’s position is thus similar to Place’s type physicalism; according to Place, mental phenomena are composed of, and are thus ontologically dependent upon, brain processes.

De Laguna argues, however, that no version of parallelism is “an adequate description of the empirical facts” (1918, p. 534). First, parallelism fails to recognise that the primary function of the central nervous system is the adjustment of behaviour to the external world of goods and dangers (ibid., p. 536). She writes, reflecting on John Watson’s observation that some mental disorders cannot be ascribed to physiological problems within the cortex, that

[i]f Professor Watson is right, it is evident-though he himself apparently does not draw the conclusion-that normal and abnormal functioning of the cerebral cortex may be distinguished, not on the basis of any determinable physiological differences, but by the relative appropriateness of the cerebrally controlled behavior to environmental-say even social-conditions (ibid., p. 536).

De Laguna concludes that actions of the nervous system should be individuated by their function in controlling behaviour in an environment, including the social environment. She offers a further empirical observation in support of her position, one she illustrates in the case of fear and which is echoed in what much later became familiar worries about type physicalism. She notes that fear has characteristic bodily expressions as well as expressive reactions, and that it is on the basis of these that fear is identified. She adds that empirical evidence has

failed to discover in such physiological activity any specific correlate to a specific emotion. Yet these varied modes of response and the differing cortical action leading to them mediate a common experience- fear. What the various stimuli have in common is no set of similar physical characteristics. It is the common relation in which they all stand to the individual, the relation of being dangerous (ibid., p. 537).

De Laguna acknowledges that the case of sense-qualities is a challenge to her position since such qualities are, according to common sense and psychology, classified “on the basis of ‘immediately felt identities’” (ibid., p. 539). But, and here she provides her private language argument, she argues that, if mental terms have significance,

it is only by reference, direct or indirect, to their function in securing the adjustment of the individual to his environment, physical and social. The fear which the psychologist studies is not a hidden feeling cherished within his breast; it is precisely that feeling which is inspired by determinate objective conditions, and which impels him to characteristic expressions and acts. He can identify a given experience to himself as "fear" only in so far as it sends cold shivers down his back, or gives him a sinking in the pit of his stomach or makes his knees shake beneath him. But even these private earmarks are phrases whose significance is set by common usage (pp. 540-541).

De Laguna’s overall position is – as indicated by her suggestion that mental terms need only have an indirect function in guiding behaviour and contrary to her label as a behaviourist – an instance of what we would call broad content functionalism, a position she develops further in her book Speech: Its Function and Development (1927).

De Laguna would have rightly judged quite a few other 1950s ‘innovations’ of analytic philosophy to be unoriginal. I have pointed out that she (see here), and her husband, were ahead of Quine already in 1910 when they offered their critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, a critique that came along with a sophisticated form of confirmation holism. Her husband Theodore de Laguna, had written that “[i]t is common usage that gives words their meanings” (1915, p. 225), almost a decade before he wrote a less than admiring review (1924) of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I could go on, but it should by now at least be imaginable that (Grace) de Laguna had little to learn from analytic work that was being carried out in her areas of research. Indeed, while she knew analytic philosophy well, it never played an important role in her intellectual life. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, her focus was firmly on writers such as Whitehead and Heidegger (see, e.g., her 1951 and 1966).

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.