Digressions&Impressions

The PSR, Spinoza and Hudde

I shall presuppose that:
(1) The true definition of each thing contains nothing beyond the simple nature of the thing defined.
From this it follows that
(2) No definition involves or expresses any multiplicity or any definite number of individuals since it involves or expresses nothing but the nature of the thing, as it is in itself.
For example, the Definition of a triangle contains nothing but the simple nature of the triangle, not some definite number of triangles, just as the definition of the Mind, that it is a thinking thing, or the definition of God, that he is a perfect Being, contains nothing but the nature of the Mind, or of God. It does not contain a definite number of Minds or Gods.
(3) There must necessarily be a positive cause of each existing thing, through which it exists.
(4) That this cause must be affirmed to exist either in the nature and definition of the thing itself—because existence pertains to its nature, or its nature necessarily contains existence—or outside the thing.

From these presuppositions it follows that [A] if some definite number of individuals exists in nature, there must be one or more causes which were able to produce precisely that number of Individuals, neither more nor fewer. For example, if twenty men exist in nature—to avoid all confusion I shall suppose that they exist together and without predecessors in nature—it will not be sufficient, to give a reason why the twenty exist, to investigate the cause of human nature in general. [B] What must also be investigated is the reason why neither more nor fewer than twenty men exist. For (according to the third hypothesis) concerning each man a reason and cause must be given why he exists. But (according to the second and third hypotheses) that cause cannot be contained in the nature of the man himself, for the true definition of man does not involve the number of twenty men. Therefore (according to the fourth hypothesis), the cause of the existence of these twenty men, and hence of each of them separately, must exist outside them.--Spinoza to H [Hudde], Letter 34, Voorburg, 7 January 1666. Translated by E. Curley, The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. II, (Princeton 2016), pp 25-26. [Emphasis added.]

This post is triggered by an invite from Karolina Hubner and Justin Steinberg to write on the Spinoza and Hudde (1628 – 1704)) exchange. If we only had the second quoted paragraph above, and not the earlier part of the letter, we might infer that the third hypothesis is a causal principle in the spirit of “ex nihilo, nihil fit” (“from nothing, nothing comes”). What's notable is that rather than using what we may call its negative formulation (ex nihilo, nihi) 'from nothing, nothing...', Spinoza opts for what we may call a positive formulation: "(3) There must necessarily be a positive cause of each..."

The positive formulation of Hypothesis (3) echoes Axiom 11, from Spinoza's (1663) The Principles of Cartesian Philosophy,:

Nothing exists of which it cannot be asked, what is the cause, or reason, why it exists. See Descartes’ Al.
Since existing is something positive, we cannot say that it has nothing as its cause (by A7). Therefore we must assign some positive cause, or reason, why [a thing] exists—either an external one, i.e., one outside the thing itself, or an internal one, i.e., one comprehended in the nature and definition of the existing thing itself. (Curley (1985), Vol 1, p. 246; emphasis in original)

It is worth noting that Spinoza here is explicitly riffing on Descartes' Replies to the Second Objections (of the Meditations), and in the context of his treatment of the Cogito; and that Spinoza does so, as he tells us, because it is "impossible for" him "to think that something may come from nothing." (PCP, Vol 1, p. 242) 

In their SEP entry, Yitzhak Melamed and Martin Lin claim that Axiom 11 is "Spinoza’s earliest statement of the PSR." (They omit the causal principle on p. 242 perhaps because it's possible to read it as Spinoza attributing it to Descartes.) It's worth mention that there is a version of the PSR in the Short Treatise, which may well date from before 1663. (I thank John Grey and Daniel Schneider for alerting me to this.) In part 1, Chapter 6 (the one on predestination), paragraph 4, Spinoza writes:

Regarding our second question: whether there is any thing in Nature of which one cannot ask why it exists? our saying this indicates that we must investigate through what cause a thing exists. For if that [cause] did not exist, it would be impossible for this something to exist.
We must seek this cause, then, either in the thing or outside it. But if someone asks what rule we should follow in this investigation, we say it does not seem that any at all is necessary. For if existence belongs to the nature of the thing, then certainly we must not seek the cause outside it. But if existence does not belong to the nature of the thing, then we must always seek its cause outside it. And since the former is true only of God, this shows (as we have already proven before) that God alone is the first cause of everything. (Curley (1985), VOL 1, p. 86)

Be that as it may, let's return to the first letter to Hudde. Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument that Spinoza's conclusion, which I labelled [A], follows from the four 'hypotheses.'* My interest is in the final clause, "neither more nor fewer." That [A] includes 'neither more nor fewer' [nec maiorem, nec minorem] looks, at first glance, a kind of redundant exactitude requirement. To count as a proper explanation (or ground, etc.) the cause of the existence of some entity (or group) may not overshoot or undershoot. I call it 'redundant' because Spinoza already has stated 'precisely' [in Latin: illum iuste].+ [A] anticipates a principle we find in the Ethics, “if a certain number of individuals exists, there must be a cause why those individuals, and why neither more nor fewer, exist.” (E1p8s2) 

But in the letter to Hudde, from the exactitude requirement in [A] Spinoza infers the requirement/demand [B].++ And [B] seems to demand that the cause X of some entity (or number of entities) Y also explains the omissions of possible entities (Yn) such that only Y. If you think that my gloss on [B] is too strong, fair enough. But it is not wholly improbable interpretation because later, in the Ethics, Spinoza articulates an even stronger version of this principle: “For each thing there must be assigned a cause, or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence”. (E1p11dem). And so it looks like [B] anticipates some such demand for providing causes of nonexistence(s).

I should note that depending on how one thinks of what a cause or reason is, it's not silly to think that an explanation for Y simultaneously helps rule out why all kinds of not Ys do not obtain. If I can show why a projectile with a particular velocity breaks a particular window at a particular time, I can probably also show why given that velocity it is only breaking that window (and not other windows) at that time. If you agree with Spinoza that a definition is a kind of (formal) cause you can run this example through properties of triangles (and which help explain why it's not a hexagon).

So, crucially, then, compared to the Short Treatise and the Cartesian Principles of philosophy, in the letter to Hudde, Spinoza starts packing quite a bit more into what counts as a proper causal explanation of things existing in nature and so also starts developing a heavier duty version of the PSR to be used in explanations of nature.

The foregoing also helps explain why Hudde was confused in the first place. His question to Spinoza was (according to Spinoza) to provide "a demonstration of the Unity of God from the fact that his Nature involves necessary existence." In the Cartesian Principles of philosophy, at the end of his demonstration to proposition 11 ("there is not more than one God") Spinoza had added the following remark:

It should be noted here that it follows necessarily from the mere fact that some thing involves necessary existence from itself (as God does) that it is unique. Everyone will be able to see this for himself, provided he meditates attentively. I could also have demonstrated it here, but not in a way perceptible by everyone, as has been done in this proposition. (Curley (1985), p. 255)**

Spinoza returns to this material in Chapter 2 of the Appendix. And he says somewhat cryptically, "I advise the Reader that by right we infer God’s Unity from the nature of his existence, which is not distinguished from his essence, or which necessarily follows from his essence." (Curley (1985), p 319)

Clearly Hudde -- himself a very accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher [not to say eventually one of the most powerful people in Amsterdam and Holland [and so Europe]] --- had tried to meditate attentively, but had failed in seeing it for himself. And the reason why he had failed in this is, I submit, that Spinoza had actually not yet articulated [A] and [B].

For without such precification or extension of the causal principle it is not obvious how one can even begin to rule out multiple Gods. (I am not suggesting that Spinoza has successfully done so here. Clearly some folk think even the Ethics version fails.) This is especially so if one thinks, not implausibly, that the cause of (a) God can itself be not limited in particular ways  (since it it is powerful enough to cause God and neither involves any multiplicity or any definite number of individuals).

 

On Hayek, Entrepreneurs, Elites and Social Change [Guestpost by Erwin Dekker]

[This is an invited guest-post by Erwin Dekker.--ES]

The Austrian tradition in economics/political economy is known for its theory of entrepreneurship. In its Schumpeterian version the entrepreneur is a heroic character who can break routines, innovate, and persuade others to go along in their endeavor. The Mises and Kirzner version of the entrepreneur is a more mundane figure ‘alert’ to profit opportunities which are not yet exploited by others (recall here and here). Both versions of the entrepreneur emphasize the conscious and intentional nature of the innovative acts. Although the entrepreneur’s behavior cannot be captured in a simple maximization framework, it does fit within the teleological means-ends framework of human action which Mises (Hayek’s teacher) developed.

Intentionality fades slowly from Hayek’s later work. In the Constitution of Liberty (1960) he argues: “Humiliating to human pride as it may be, we must recognize that the advance and even the preservation of civilization are dependent upon a maximum of opportunity for accidents to happen” (29).[1] Hayek contrasts the ‘countless number of humble steps taken by anonymous persons in the course of doing familiar things’ with ‘major intellectual innovations which are explicitly realized’ (28). Change in his social philosophy is more a process of adaptation to changing circumstances than the result of human imagination or alert actions to improve the everyday run of things.

It has always struck me as surprising that the most famous Austrian thinker is essentially silent on the theme of entrepreneurship. One plausible explanation is that Hayek was worried about a typical version of romantic individualism, which attributed too much uniqueness to the individual mind and will, as Eric has recently suggested here. A contributing factor is that Hayek was always more of an evolutionary thinker who emphasized the market process rather than the actions of individuals within such a market. His famous critique of the static nature of (perfect) competition in neoclassical models therefore does not blame it for lack of attention to entrepreneurship, but for its lack of attention to the dynamic interactive process of competition. More generally he emphasizes mutual adjustments rather than social change through intentional agency.

And yet, upon rereading the Constitution of Liberty for a recent weekend of the Adam Smith Fellowship program I could not help but being struck by the elitist nature of the theory of social change in Hayek. The key chapter in this regard appears to be the innocuously titled ‘The Common Sense of Progress’ (chapter 3), in which he first argues that the rich bear most of the costs of experimentation, because they are the first to buy new goods which come to the market, initially in limited quantities. Hayek, as is typical for him, does not dwell on examples or empirical substantiation, but at least up to this point we might understand this as a stylized empirical fact: new products are first offered to a small elite which adopts them, and if successful the product will be produced in larger quantities at lower costs, and become available to the middle classes.

But Hayek is aware of the fact that economic inequality in this way breeds social inequality, because: “most of what we strive for are things we want because others already have them” (45). The effects of which he calls cruel, but inevitable: “[in a] progressive society, some must lead, and others must follow” (45). To drive the point home as it were, he turns his more narrowly economic argument into a social argument, by suggesting that it is the rich who engage in experimentation with “new styles of living”, which over time will make these new styles ‘accessible to the poor’, without which the poor would advance much slower. It is important to see that we have moved here from a narrower argument about differences in purchasing power to a broader argument about the role of the rich in advancing society.

Hayek then develops this argument into the political realm by suggesting that a similar dynamic plays out among nations. Just like the poor in a given society benefit from the experiments in buying and living of the rich, so the populations of other countries benefit from the experiments in buying and living of those in leading countries. Both the British labor classes and the rest of the world benefitted from ‘a rich class with old traditions [which] demanded products of a quality and taste unsurpassed elsewhere’ (48). It is an argument that Tyler Cowen has occasionally made about the way in which European regulated welfare states benefit from innovation and permissiveness in the United States.

The flipside of the argument that the rich are those who experiment and therefore bear the costs of social change, is that it is only the rich which are truly free. An implication which would bring Hayek surprisingly close in outlook to Schumpeter, who believed that the masses were merely following rules and customs, while entrepreneurs were those who could psychologically break free from these everyday constraints and imagine better alternatives. One might suggest that such a reading is somewhat uncharitable, but Hayek himself asks the reader at the start of chapter eight ‘Employment and Independence’ to wonder whether the arguments he developed still holds in modern times: “in which a relatively larger part of the people, and most of those who counted in the forming opinion, were independent in the activities that gave them their livelihood” (118).[2]

One might expect Hayek to make the argument that rising living standards mean that more individuals are now in a position to engage in economic and social experimentation. Quite to the contrary he suggests that when the franchise was extended to workers, they quite naturally looked to limit the freedoms of the rich for they could not imagine what these were good for. There are moreover important sociological consequences of the fact that wage-laborers do not assume risks or personal initiatives: “A man who works under direction for a fixed salary or wage may be as conscientious, industrious, or intelligent as one who must constantly choose between alternatives; but he can hardly be as inventive or experimental” (120).

In what follows Hayek continues to systematically distinguish two classes in society, the dependent wage-laborers, and the men of independent means, who have ‘an indispensable role to play in any civilized society.’ They are of particular relevance beyond the market: “in the field of cultural amenities, in the fine arts, in education and research, in the preservation of natural beauty and historic treasures, and above all, in the propagation of new ideas in politics, morals, and religion” (125). So essential does Hayek consider the role of this social class, that if it did not exist, he suggest it might have to be created through a kind of lottery which would free a certain group of individuals to exercise true independence and freedom, although these individuals might lack the education and familiarity with wealth that the children of the rich have. In the absence of such a lottery, the merits of this social class provide an argument in favor of inheritance for Hayek.  

The Austrian tradition, Hayek included, is typically known for its emphasis on the heterogeneity of individuals. But in his theory of social change Hayek suggests that such heterogeneity is in fact largely limited to a small subset of individuals who are free of many of the (material) obligations that life in contemporary society brings with it. His own theory that changes come about through a response to changing circumstances which necessitate adjustments for individuals all over society is seemingly contradicted by his suggestion that only the rich are truly free to experiment. Hayek’s plea for the importance of local and contextual knowledge of time and place next to, or even above, general scientific knowledge, has strong democratic undertones, which completely disappear in the way he talks about the generation of new knowledge through market and social experimentation. This surprisingly makes Hayek theory of social change elitist in a way not too dissimilar from that of Joseph Schumpeter, Hayek even refers repeatedly to the rich as an avant-garde, a favorite metaphor of the maverick Schumpeter. Although, it must be said that Schumpeter, like John Stuart Mill before him, puts more emphasis on differences in character and energy between individuals, while Hayek stresses differences in material circumstances.

Another notable difference with John Stuart Mill is that the experiments in living which both he and Hayek discuss, have no intrinsic value for Hayek. In Mill they foster a spirit of individualism and turn human beings into a ‘noble and beautiful object of contemplation’. Hayek worries that such individualism might upset the social order and the process of coordination, but more importantly he is not at all concerned with the value that individuals might derive from experimentation and deviance, or how it might reinforce a liberal spirit.

If there is a real tension between the broader Hayekian tenets of dispersed knowledge, mutual adjustment, and process theory and his theory of social change, this implies that a Hayekian theory of social change is still to be developed. In my book on the Viennese Students of Civilization I noted similarities between the work of Norbert Elias, who essentially developed a trickle-down theory of social change through imitation of the superior ways of the aristocracy and that of some Austrian economists. Later social theorists, including sociologists originally inspired by Elias, have suggested social change originates from the fringes of society, where individuals have either less pressure to conform (and so the costs of deviant behavior are lower) or oppressed so that individuals stand relatively more to gain from experimentation and protest. Especially since Hayek is explicitly progressive on social liberal issues, he praises: “the abolition of slavery, penal and prison reforms, the prevention of cruelty to children or to animals, and a more humane treatment of the insane” (127).

This tension is also relevant for a political economic analysis of power in society. One might expect that those with independent means will primarily be interested in protecting the status quo, rather than changing it. Hayek admits that this class is more likely to produce ‘bons vivants than scholars and public servants’, but he never entertains that they might abuse their economic and social power to corrupt the political system in their favor. Whereas Schumpeter praised the rotation of elites in one of his characteristic metaphors which spoke of the elite as the top floor of a hotel which is always full, but always with different people. Hayek seems more concerned with the disappearance ‘of a cultural elite’ which resulted from the combined effects of inflation and taxation (129).  

Hayek’s own emphasis on heterogeneity and his plea for maximizing the chances for accidents to happen, could equally well be developed into a social theory which suggests that social change is more likely to occur when opposing groups or individuals with different values meet each other, and the necessity for mutual adjustment emerges. This is also what Mill concluded about the reason why pressures for social conformism have not led to social stagnation among the European family of nations. This was not due to the superior excellence in any one nation or class, but a result of: “their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable, their.” This is in line with more recent work in (cultural) economics which suggest that more social diversity is good for growth and  development.

Closer to Hayek’s own epistemological liberalism there is increasing attention in the philosophy of science for the benefits of cognitive diversity (see Ryan Muldoon's overview). Most importantly, it would take more seriously the stylized facts which Deborah Coen in her Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty made central to Viennese liberal thought: the increasing heterogeneity between all individuals in an increasingly complex society, spurred on by the division of labor and the resulting division of knowledge. I think with Mill that a liberal should find such heterogeneity on its own desirable, but it also supplies a better starting point for theorizing social change, than the one that Hayek provides.

Russell, Locke and Order without Authority

There is, of course, imperialistic commerce, where men are forced to buy at the point of the sword; but this is not the kind that generates Liberal philosophies, which have flourished best in trading cities that have wealth without much military strength. In the present day, the nearest analogue to the commercial cities of antiquity and the middle ages is to be found in small countries such as Switzerland, Holland, and Scandinavia.
    The Liberal creed, in practice, is one of live-and-let-live, of toleration and freedom so far as public order permits, of moderation and absence of fanaticism in political programs. Even democracy, when it becomes fanatical, as it did among Rousseau's disciples in the French Revolution, ceases to be Liberal; indeed, a fanatical belief in democracy makes democratic institutions impossible, as appeared in England under Cromwell and in France under Robespierre. The genuine Liberal does not say "this is true," he says "I am inclined to think that under present circumstances this opinion is probably the best." And it is only in this limited and undogmatic sense that he will advocate democracy.
    What has theoretical philosophy to say that is relevant to the validity or otherwise of the Liberal outlook?
    The essence of the Liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment. This is the way in which opinions are held in science, as opposed to the way in which they are held in theology. The decisions of the Council of Nicaea are still authoritative, but in science fourth-century opinions no longer carry any weight. In the U.S.S.R. the dicta of Marx on dialectical materialism are so unquestioned that they help to determine the views of geneticists on how to obtain the best breed of wheat, though elsewhere it is thought that experin1ent is the right way to study such problems. Science is empirical, tentative, and undogmatic; all immutable dogma is unscientific. The scientific outlook, accordingly, is the intellectual counterpart of ·what is, in the practical sphere, the outlook of Liberalism.

    Locke, who first developed in detail the empiricist theory of knowledge, preached also religious toleration, representative institutions, and the limitation of governmental power by the system of checks and balances. Few of his doctrines were new, but he developed them in a weighty manner at just the moment when the English government was prepared to accept them. Like the other men of 1688, he was only reluctantly a rebel, and he disliked anarchy as much as he disliked despotism. Both in intellectual and in practical matters he stood for order without authority; this might be taken as the motto both of science and of Liberalism. It depends, clearly, upon consent or assent. In the intellectual world it involves standards of evidence which, after adequate discussion, will lead to a measure of agreement among experts. In the practical world it involves submission to the majority after all parties have had an opportunity to state their case...

    I conclude that, in our day as in the time of Locke, empiricist Liberalism (which is not incompatible with democratic social­ism) is the only philosophy that can be adopted by a man who, on the one hand, demands some scientific evidence for his beliefs, and, on the other hand, desires human happiness more than the prevalence of this or that parry or creed. Our con­fused and difficult world needs various things if it is to escape disaster, and among these one of the most necessary is that, in the nations which still uphold Liberal beliefs, these beliefs should be whole-hearted and profound, not apologetic towards dogmatisms of the right and of the left, but deeply persuaded of the value of liberty, scientific freedom, and mutual forbear­ance. For without these beliefs life on our politically divided but technically unified planet will hardly continue to be pos­sible.--Bertrand Russell (1947) "Philosophy and Politics" in Unpopular Essays (1950),  p. 14-20

Because George Reisch's (2005) How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic is so beautifully written and so carefully argued its thesis has become part of the lore about our intellectual fathers and (fewer) mothers that after a brief flowering of socially relevant philosophy in Red Vienna, they retreated (cowed like little schoolboys--I exclude Anscombe here) into the ivory tower where they could contemplate their crystal clear arguments about minutiae. I suspect this lore is peddled in part by continental philosophers, who after having lost the war,  can feel that they are now on the right side of history, and in part by our kewl kidz who, in order to climb academia's greasy pole, have to burry the previous generation--and better yet if it buries the boring liberalism of Pax Americana.

I exaggerate, of course, but as regular readers know, I think Reisch's book didn't quite capture properly the mainstream liberal alternative (as articulated by Ernest Nagel) to the Sturm und Drang of Neurath and Carnap, and so obscured the political nature and political aims of the disciplinary choices (see here for the scholarly argument). As it happens Reisch mentions the significance of Russell's politics  -- as an important representative of "the anti-Stalinist left" (158) -- throughout his book, and has a whole section on the The Russell Affair, but he does not actually say much about Russell's political theory such as it was and when he does, he treats him as a pacifist and socialist (50). Now Russell's pacificism was heroic, and there is no doubt that Russell's mature heart was a species of socialism (see here for a fine essay).

As the quoted passages above reveal, Russell's socialism was of a kind that is very much part of a broader liberal tradition. And it is worth noting that the essay I quote contains true praise of Popper's Open Society and its Enemies. (This is something one wouldn't expect in light of Reisch's treatment which treats The Open Society as a target of the folk he admires.) Now, Popper's views are also compatible with a kind of liberal, tempered social democracy, so I don't think Russell's admiration is a coincidence. 

But few socialists can bring themselves to write so admiringly of Locke as Russell. And few would be so open about their reservations about democracy, and their "limited" support for it. And so something also goes off track if one merely calls Russell a 'socialist.'

At the start of his then recent, History of Western Philosophy, Russell treats Locke as the representative of a "half-way compromise philosophy, the doctrine of liberalism, which attempted to assign the respective spheres of government and the individual." (I mention the book in part because Russell self-plagiarizes from it in the essay!)* And later in the book, when he introduces Locke, he says, "The first comprehensive statement of the liberal philosophy is to be found in Locke, the most influential though by no means the most profound of modern philosophers."  I don't mean to suggest Russell only admires Locke. My favorite passage in the History is this one: "No one has yet succeeded in inventing a philosophy at once credible and self-consistent. Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite." And while Russell is critical of Locke going all in on the defense of property, he thinks Locke's political philosophy is the least worst (in the History) or the last one standing ("Philosophy and Politics").

Now, unlike Nagel, for whom his liberalism is intrinsic, even constitutive of his philosophy (including his philosophy of science), Russell's political writings are often treated, not the least by Russell, as non-philosophical. And, speaking as a historian, that is not wholly without merit--his political essays are often unlike the works that established his philosophical credentials. Russell himself acknowledges in the "preface" to Unpopular Essays, that his essays "may seem flippant." And they certainly do not seem to belong to what professional philosophy was becoming in the age (under the influence of Carnap and Nagel). But Russell once quite rightly described his "life" -- in a self-authored "obituary" that is, in fact, in dialogue with Hume's little autobiography -- as having "a certain anachronistic consistency, reminiscent of that of the aristocratic rebels of the early nineteenth century." (p. 171) And, crucially, he claims that his principles "governed his actions." That is to say, as these essays articulate these principles are philosophical by the lights and standards of that earlier epoch. And this is the use of 'philosophy' in the final paragraph quotes above (e.g., empiricist Liberalism is the only philosophy).

Order without authority is, of course, an excellent summing up of liberalism,+ even if, too often, there is more than a hint of violence supporting that order. And not unlike the more classically liberal Michael Polanyi, Russell insists that science and liberalism are kind of mirrors of each other (another version of this idea can be found in Ernest Nagel as I argued.) I intend to return occasionally to the character and content of Russell's liberalism (in which there is plenty to criticize). 

But here I want to close with an observation on Russell's claim that "The genuine Liberal does not say "this is true," he says "I am inclined to think that under present circumstances this opinion is probably the best."" Now, there is a natural, epistemological reading of this such that the 'present circumstances' just refers to the evidence supporting it. (This is, in fact, Nagel's version of pragmatism in the era.) And what I am about to say is not meant to contradict the natural reading. But I also think one could read "present circumstances" as referring to the political and social circumstances of the age--that strikes me as quite plausible in light of the argument Russell is putting forth. And that suggests that the social significance or social effects (including inductive risk) of an opinion enter into its evaluation. And this puts Russell's account into the realm of responsible speech (just like Nagel's political defense of analytic philosophy).

If the previous proposal is plausible, then for Russell a liberal's views are sensitive to political circumstances. So, say, one's defense of democracy is sensitive to the particulars of one's age or place and one's considered judgment how 'human happiness' can be promoted. And so while the non-liberal will see lack of consistency in first order judgments, the liberal will see merely different tactics while aiming for order without authority in the service of happiness. 

 

On Throwing Out Philosophical Babies with the Bathwater

Newton's Corollary VI, however, is not in the Principia for mere ornament. Newton needs it to establish that to a first approximation, the system of a planet and its satellites can be treated as an isolated gravitating system if one ignores the shared orbital motion around the sun. Thus we have a case--treating the sun's gravitational field in the region of the system in question as essentially homogeneous--of what Einstein was to call the "principle of equivalence." Indeed, Newton's sixth Corollary (which deals with a homogeneous field of acceleration), and Huygens's discussion of centrifugal force (which deals with an inhomogeneous one), together adumbrate the principle, exploited so fruitfully by Einstein, that the dynamical states and behavior of bodies in no way distinguish between, on the one hand, a certain kinematical state, and on the other, a second kinematical state implying the same distances and rates of' change of distance, together with a suitable applied field of force. It is a little surprising that Mach, with his relativistic view of motion and his interest in seventeenth-century mechanics did not at all notice these things.--Howard Stein "Some Philosophical Prehistory of General Relativity." Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 8 (1977): 20.

Last week, after my digression on Harman's rediscovery of Adam Smith, I mentioned in a correspondence with Nathan Ballantyne, that Howard Stein also had documented a case in which a philosophical move/insight/distinction had been lost (and then recovered). And after stating this confidently, I thought it prudent to re-read the Stein piece I had in mind (and only belatedly realizing I had blogged about this material before--today's post is thus a retracing of steps). Before I get to the Stein piece a few words of introduction.

Let's stipulate that due to linguistic or geographic isolation or the (deliberate and accidental) destruction of sources sometimes philosophical moves or distinctions are not available at a later date. These may well be cases of linguistic injustice (recall), but do no present further philosophical challenges.

Then there are cases -- now known as Kuhn-losses -- in the sciences, where insights in a discarded paradigm are not ready-at-hand in a new ruling, scientific paradigm. I use 'ready-at-hand' in order to make clear that not all such cases of Kuhn-loss have to involve strict incommensurability.  The insight from the discarded paradigm may just be thought unintuitive or unlikely-to-work in a new paradigm. (This is especially likely to occur in complex policy contexts.) In so far as paradigms structure the availability of intellectual choices (we might call them theoretical affordances), Kuhn-losses are just a natural effect of the disciplining of an intellectual community by text-books and a shared sense of salient experiences (statistical regularities, decisive experiments, etc.). I say 'natural' because time and cognitive attention are scarce goods, and so at the margin there will be a trade-off between the cost of memory and the costs of advancing the paradigm (etc.). The previous sentence may seem abstract, but some such reasoning was (and is) often used to remove the history of the discipline from the graduate curriculum in a field of expertise/science. There is more to be said about such matters, but hopefully that's sufficient for present purposes.

Now, since philosophy does not have paradigms in the scientific sense, and since graduate education in philosophy is not standardized in the way the sciences and the discipline's history is preserved within the graduate curriculum, the existence of the philosophical analogue to Kuhn-loss in philosophy is prima facie a puzzle. Because Kuhn-loss is a term within the philosophy of science about science, and I both deny that philosophy is a science and -- more polemically -- think it a bad idea to think about philosophy in terms familiar from the philosophy of (Kuhnian) science (because unhealthy to the flourishing of philosophy), I use (after nudging from Ballantyne) 'throwing out the baby in the bathwater' when discussing prima facie puzzling cases of the loss of philosophical insight/moves, and distinctions.

And as I noted last week, Harman felt the force of the puzzle. As it turns out, in my reconstruction of the case, it was Sidgwick's strategy, to turn philosophy into a text-book-driven field with the aim of both (i) demarcating normative philosophy from empirical psychology and (ii) to treat ethics as aiming at (and now I use the felicitous phrase of Aaron Garrett) "comprehensive and coherent normative moral theories" that basically caused Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be dropped from quasi-standard reading lists in philosophy. And this entailed that some relatively cutting edge responses to objections to impartial spectator theories were not ready at hand when the topic was revived. This opened the door to what we may (in honor of Liam Kofi Bright) call historical arbitrage. 

I think such arbitrage is needed when whole eras of philosophy are treated with disdain in subsequent ages. It's pretty clear that the early moderns actively promoted disdain toward and a lack of acquaintance with scholastic philosophy. And this meant that lots of distinctions and concepts developed by the scholastics were removed from philosophical vocabulary or emptied from a lot of previous significance. And without wishing to raise a prejudice against the practice, we can see that post-Kantian university philosophy in Germany and later in Anglophone world re-introduces a lot of these distinctions and terms back into mainstream philosophy. (To what degree these are really the same concepts given shifting background metaphysics I leave aside.) 

Now, re-reading Stein (one of my doctoral supervisors) was instructive.  First, I was reminded that my own rejection of the ban on using anachronistic terms -- a ban common among certain historians of philosophy (inspired by a species of contextualism)--, is anticipated by Stein (whose paper I read in graduate school).  His version of the argument is instructive:

For the avoidance of anachronism, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to restrict 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. (p. 14)

Stein is explicit that Mach is an example of such shallow empiricism. (p. 14; recall also.) But perhaps forms of operationalism  may also be classified as such. Be that as it may, Stein is right that one can still be anachronistic in interpreting the past even if one only uses actor's categories. For, one may well add apply these categories in a way that is a-historical and at odds with the historical sources. I once claimed (rather too polemically in a NDPR review) that this had happened among scholars who polemically rejected looking at the past through the prism of contemporary issues, but who had tacitly projected a version of the fact-value distinction (in fact, I now understand it was Sidwick's) onto the past that was anachronistic. Moreover, as Daniel Schneider taught me, by using actor's categories, which may well be contested concepts, one is likely to take sides (without always realizing it) in past debates. So, Stein seems to me right that the deployment of anachronism can be illuminating of the historical actors' actual positions (etc.). Stein himself does this throughout the article.  

Okay, now let's turn to the baby with the bath-water. First, in the major key (as it were), Stein himself is an anti-Kuhnian. He concludes his essay with the the claim that "I see, from the seventeenth century up to today a profound community of concerns and a progressive development that has involved both cumulative growth and deepening structural understanding." (27) Stein does not deny a 'conceptual revolution' by Einstein (building on Riemann).

Second, in the minor key (as it were), but my present interest, Stein recognizes that within this profound community of concerns, historical cul-de-sacs and forgetting are possible. Mach really misses something that was available to Newton and Huygens. And while Stein does not  harp on this, plenty of folk influenced by Mach (even after the Einsteinian revolution) missed the point when describing seventeenth century relativity and its development. That the later folk do not see as clearly is especially striking because not only is the seventeenth century mathematical vocabulary is relatively impoverished relative to the later ones, but also there is intellectual continuity from late seventeenth century thinking through the nineteenth century. No major texts are lost and the philosophical vocabulary of the seventeenth and eighteenth century about physics and astronomy does not pose major difficulties to the nineteenth century mind. 

Now, while Mach's case happens within science (broadly conceived), it also involves what we may call the metaphysical principles of science and so, also part of (natural) philosophy proper. (Mach's own institutional position reflects this in his own shifts from mathematics and physics to becoming one of the first professors in the history and philosophy of science.) I put it like that because full awareness of the implications of the "principle of equivalence" seems to have been missed. Now I don't think of myself as an expert on 19th century physics, so take this with a grain of salt. But it's pretty difficult to test empirically the principle of equivalence and so was, perhaps, not of active concern to practicing physicists and natural philosophers. In addition, and this seems to me crucial to Stein's argument, later reflection on relativity was shaped primarily by Leibniz's views (who was treated as the standard bearer for relativistic thinking).

I think this happened in part because of the effect of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence on philosophical thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This displaced interest in Huygens' views (some of which were hardly accessible) and let people to miss that Newton himself had important stuff to say on the topic. While I am pretty convinced that Leibniz-Clarke shaped people's views of Newton's natural philosophy (to this day, alas), I also say this with some nervousness because I don't know if anyone has checked in a systematic way what folk did with or commented on Newton's sixth Corollary. Of course, and this I feel confident in saying, in many places people studied physics through text-books that while Newtonian in some expanded sense did not follow Newton slavishly at all. Even so, because Newton's achievements were culturally so central to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is really striking that some of his most profound insights were only appreciated in the development of a physical theory that surpassed his. 

At this point one may be impatient and suggest that in fact the case at hand while no Kuhn-loss is the effect of paradigmatic thinking in science, which can, in fact, obstruct the insights of (what we may call in homage to Kuhn) the scientific-legislator of the paradigm. And that by creating a division of labor in science (among different fields, but also among theory and experiment), it was left to relatively few to study relativistic theories while Newtonianism ruled. And, in fact, once Maxwell's equations and concerns about the ether opened the door, relativistic principles were explored by (say) Poincare in the late nineteenth century. So the critic may refuse to accept the example as a case about lost philosophical babies.

Fair enough. But, of course, one of the effects of the split between philosophy and science, and the relatively high status of physical science, is the tendency toward paradigmatic thinking in science and philosophy. And one may well conclude, as I do, that in so far as paradigmatic thinking and the prestige of science within philosophy as such shape philosophy we should expect the bathwater, even one nourished with the fruits of science, to carry away important insights. Of course, documenting such cases involves a kind of practical contradiction because in the very act of retrieval the baby is saved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gil Harman (RIP 1938-2021): On Adam Smith, Kuhn-Loss and Historiography

One important type of ethical theory treats moral properties as analogous in certain respects to "secondary qualities" like colors. According to this sort of theory, whether something is right or wrong depends on how impartial spectators would react to it. In the 18th Century, the Scottish philosophers Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith explored theories of this type.1 In the 20th Century this sort of theory has sometimes been discussed under the name "ideal observer theory."2 Recently, especially in England, there has been renewed interest in this sort of ethical theory and its comparison between moral properties and secondary qualities.3

One possible objection to an impartial spectator theory is that it seems to require an -overly aesthetic conception of morality to take the primary point of view in ethics to be that of a spectator rather than that of the agent.4 If the spectator is taken to be primary, then the agent's aim would seem to be to produce something that will or would please the spectator. But that is just wrong. Such an aim is too "outer directed" to count as a moral motive. Morality is more agent-centered than that. It is much more plausible to take the agent's point of view as primary. In the first instance morality is a matter of the moral reasons an agent has to act in one way or another, where these reasons derive from the relevant moral rules rather than from a desire to gain the approval of spectators.
A few years ago, I pressed this objection myself when I discussed the ideal observer theory in a textbook of ethics.5 But I was too hasty. In reading Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, I discovered that Smith explicitly considers this issue and provides a plausible reply to the objection.
Because 20th Century discussions have tended not to consider such "psychological" questions as why agents might be motivated to act in ways that impartial spectators would approve (or, for that matter, why impartial spectators would care about anything), I will in this paper ignore recent discussion and return to the three great versions of the theory that were developed in the 18th Century by Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith, indicating why I think Smith's version of the theory is superior to the others.--Gilbert Harman (1986) "Moral Agent and the Impartial Spectator" The Lindley Lecture, The University of Kansas, p. 1. [HT: David M. Levy]

For many years, I heard a story about the late Gilbert Harman, who by all accounts was a supportive mentor, that he put up a sign on his door that said, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ And I heard the story from folk, who approvingly treated Harman as an authority within the profession, and those (mostly historians of philosophy) that were horrified by the message this sent about the value of their work and the development of curricula across the profession. The story always puzzled me because thanks to my outside reader on my PhD, the economist David M. Levy, I was familiar with Harman's Lindley Lecture, which is a major contribution to the study of Adam Smith (and his relationship to Hutcheson and Hume).

I quietly wondered whether Harman subscribed to the view -- that I am familiar with from (recall) reading, say,  Samuelson's obituary of Viner -- that only disciplinary royalty should work in history of the discipline, while the rest are worker-bees solving particular, localized problems (including puzzles in the presentation of historical works relevant to the undergrad education of the discipline). And I mused on the fact to what degree his colleagues and students even knew about the Lindley Lecture, which was, in fact, very hard to acquire in the early-internet days when I was a PhD student in Chicago in the 1990s. 

And so I always quietly assumed that Harman was on party 'team progress' (familiar from Kuhn): we need a division of labor within philosophy, and with text-book driven education sufficiently shared background commitments as a baseline that will make, just like the practice of the natural sciences, such progress, or the illusion of progress, possible. And that requires a kind of domestication of the past (and, as Michael Della Rocca has argued the rest of philosophy, too). 

At some point, I became aware of Tom Sorrell's correspondence with Harman on this very topic. But I never tried to figure out its contents. Helpfully, the Princeton website records (a good chunk) of the exchange here. And it suggests the sign was put up in the context of a controversy over the undergrad curriculum. In addition, it quotes Harman's own views on the matter:

I believe my views about the history of philosophy are mostly orthodox nowadays. The history of philosophy is not easy. It is very important to consider the historical context of a text and not just try to read it all by itself. One should be careful not to read one’s own views (or other recent views) into a historical text. It is unwise to treat historical texts as sacred documents that contain important wisdom. In particular, it is important to avoid what Walter Kaufmann calls ‘exegetical thinking’: reading one’s views into a sacred text so one can read them back out endowed with authority. For the most part the problems that historical writers were concerned with are different from the problems that current philosophers face. There are no perennial philosophical problems.

On the whole, these views about the history of philosophy are quite close to those of my late friend Margaret Wilson.

For reasons I do not fully understand, I have sometimes upset people by distinguishing between philosophy and the history of philosophy or by noting that philosophy is what the history of philosophy is the history of.

I also think as an empirical matter that students of philosophy need not be required to study the history of philosophy and that a study of the history of philosophy tends not to be useful to students of philosophy. (Note ‘tends’.) Similarly, it is not particularly helpful to students of physics, chemistry, or biology to study the history of physics, chemistry, or biology.

Of course, it may be helpful for students of physics to start with classical Newtonian physics before taking up relativity theory and quantum mechanics. But it tends not to be helpful for them to read Newton.

The playful sign that was once on my office door, ‘History of Philosophy: Just Say No!’ was concerned with whether our students should be required to do work in the history of philosophy.

That is not to say that I have anything against the study of the history of philosophy. I do not discourage students or others from studying the history of philosophy. I am myself quite interested in the history of moral philosophy for example and have occasionally taught graduate seminars in Kant. I have done a certain amount of work on Adam Smith’s relation to Hume and others.

These remarks suggest I was mostly right about Harman. I have spent a good chunk of my blogging here and previously (sometimes in debates with Mohan Matthen) at NewAPPS, explaining why I think the Kuhnian team progress picture is a bad idea for philosophy (and the historians of philosophy), so won't repeat it here. But as Harman himself stresses his adherence to it is only partial; he recognizes and accepts explicitly that sometimes the history of philosophy is useful to the philosopher. And he reminds his interlocuter that he himself teaches history, and has done it.

As an aside, the denial of perennial philosophy is a self-aware form of the Kuhnian picture of team progress. Within the sciences, the textbooks will treat the pre-paradigmatic states of the discipline as immature babblings about the same topic. Within philosophy, the status quo will treat much of the pre-paradigmatic states as very imperfect expressions on our topics, or material irrelevant to our concerns. After all, so much was packed into philosophy once that we now ignore (for various reasons).

Okay, and returning to main thread, what's left obscure by the exchange reported on the Princeton website is when it is useful according to Harman to do history. As it happens the introductory material in The Lindley Lecture articulates this: the past can be a source of information on moves that are missed in present professional discussions.

This is especially so, when a particular view or theory is re-discovered or renewed without -- one may add -- much attention to prior discussions. In such circumstances an argument or objection can be taken as decisive by a particular, localized professional community and the argumentative (ahh) dialectic is halted prematurely. And while one can discover this in the armchair, too, this is much harder if one is a partisan to the debate (or swayed by local authority). In those latter cases, a careful, sympathetic engagement with the past, without reading the present status quo back into the past, can help those on top of contemporary discussions discern that one has missed an argumentative turn.  Notice, that this suggests another, related use to history. When discussions on particular topics are renewed/revived, it might be helpful to do a careful survey of previous episodes.

Of course, the uses discussed in the previous paragraph -- let's call them 'The Useful Retrieval Task(s)' or 'TURT' -- require the availability of material/texts and specialist knowledge of where to find such episodes. That is to say, what we may call contextual historians of philosophy are a collective good to the profession that it pays to have a large enough pool to have around. Somewhat amusingly, the more antiquarian and bookish these historians of philosophy are the more useful they might possibly be on the rare occasion that retrieval of a missed distinction or argument can be useful. The same argument applies to historians of philosophy that specialize in (so-called) non-Western philosophy. (I once quoted a plea by David Chalmers to that effect, and discussed it critically in an engagement with Amy Olberding here.) Much of such philosophy will be about different matters (again no perennial philosophy), but that does not prevent multiple discoveries of the same problem at different times and locations far apart.

Now, at this point I wanted to discuss Harman's treatment of Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith as an illustration and examination of what I take to be the practice that he preaches. This is also worth doing because I think I can show some of the limitations of that approach. But since this digression has gone longer than it ought, I won't do that now, and hopefully can return to it some other time. 

So, let me close on another detail of Harman's Lindley Lecture. Near the end of his lecture, he writes that "Smith works this theory out with a mass of detail which I cannot try to summarize. I believe that the book in which he works this out, his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, is one of the great works of moral philosophy." (p. 13). And then he adds a remark (labelled postscript 2):

Finally, it is perplexing that Adam Smith's ethics should be so relatively unread as compared with Hume's ethics when there is so much of value in Smith. What I have talked about here only scratches the surface. Why should Smith's ethics be so neglected? Is it that Hume also had a metaphysics and an epistemology and that Smith did not? Or is it that Smith was a more important economist than Hume? And why should that matter? I do not know.19--Harman (p. 14)

Footnote 19 starts with "I am indebted to David Levy for getting me interested in this project." The older I get the more this footnote amuses me because it turns out that TURT can be outsourced to different disciplines. Of course, since professional economists have actively tried to eliminate professional historians of economics from professional economics (on grounds that look like the party of progress familiarized by Kuhn, and, as I have shown [here and here], actively promoted within professional economics before and after Kuhn), there is a real risk (tragedy of the commons) that no discipline will curate the possibility of TURT.

I am also amused because at my dissertation defense, David Levy asked me Harman's questions. At the time (almost twenty years ago), I already knew that Smith's ethics was constantly forgotten and rediscovered in philosophy. My favorite example of this can be found in C.D. Broad's (1950) review in Mind of A.N. Prior's Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Although, I don't think I realized then, as I do now, that this is itself an older, recurring trope. Levy himself thinks that Harman's use of the trope is distinctive because he is rare in thinking that Smith's ethics is in some key respects superior to Hume's (recall the quote at the top of this post).

In my (2017) book I show that Smith does have a metaphysics and epistemology (one that also crucially deviates from Hume), but they are mostly submerged in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I reconstructed them primarily (note!) from other texts collected in Essays on Philosophical Subjects. To be sure, I did not write my book to address Harman's questions! And I am unsure if having showed this we can make (ahh) progress on Harman's last three questions in postscript 2.

But if we take a step back, we can see that postscript 2 asks the reader to consider the grounds of what Harman takes to be (what has come to be known as) "a Kuhn-loss." And here Harman clearly recognizes that he is on unsure grounds. He plausibly suggests that Smith's TMS got written out of the discipline (philosophy) in virtue of the fact that Smith became part of economics. And I have noted, these two disciplines became conceptualized as non-overlapping complements in the late nineteenth and twentieth century (see especially this article).

But I do think the answer to Harman's Kuhn-loss question is relatively simple. Sidgwick, who is (recall this post on the effect on Rawls) partially responsible for developing the party-of-progress conception in philosophy, wrote textbooks, including Sidgwick's Outlines of the History of Ethics, in which Smith was clearly presented as a lesser (proto-Utilitarian) Hume.

This happens in two ways, when in the Introduction of that influential book, Smith is first introduced, alongside Hume and Hartley, only Hume's views are briefly summarized and Hume's views are treated as not especially significant for ethical matters. They are treated as psychologically significant. (Sidgwick is here developing and anticipating the manner in which the empirical-normative contrast turns out to prefigure disciplinary salience). So, a natural effect of Sidgwick's introduction is that it looks like there is little in Smith for those interested in ethical affairs.

That Sidgwick actually does not intend this implicature about Smith only becomes clear obliquely. When discussing J.S. Mill, Sidwick notes that Mill's treatment of justice is very indebted to Adam Smith (p. 241 in the 1886 edition). 

But that point itself may not be noticed by those readers especially interested in Sidwick's views on Smith. For earlier, he treats Dugald Steward as a (superior) synthesis of the insights of Shaftesbury and Smith (note 2 on p. 221 in the 1886 edition).

Of course, if one reads the section devoted to Smith in Sidgwick's Outlines, one may well come accross two important features. First, that according to Sidgwick, Smith clearly improves on Hume on what Sidgwick calls the "quality of the moral sentiment" (205). But, this, too, is treated more as a contribution to psychology and the "analysis" of its phenomena (206), than to ethics. 

Crucially, for Sidgwick (p. 207), Hume and Smith jointly anticipate the view of the origin of the moral sentiments "current in the utilitarian school." (A point, as noted above, he clarifies on p. 241 in the context of Mill.) But he goes on to say that jointly their "methods of explanation compare unfavorably with that of Hartley," (pp. 207-208). So, at this point there is really no reason for a reader of Sidgwick's Outlines to come away thinking they should read The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). And when he summarizes his view of Hartley, he (Sidgwick) observes that:

Hartley is obviously in earnest in his attempt to determine the rule of life, the systematic vigour which still gives an interest to his psychology, in spite of his defects of style and treatment, is not applied by him to the question of the criterion or standard of right conduct; on this point his exposition is blurred by a vague and shallow. optimism that prevents him from facing the difficulties of the problem. A somewhat similar inferiority appears in Adam Smith's work, when he passes from psychological analysis to ethical construction. He takes care to assure us that the general rules of morality impressed on us by the complicated play of sympathy which he analyzes are "justly to be regarded as the laws of the Deity;" but it can hardly be said that his theory affords any cogent arguments for this conclusion, or in any way establishes these rules as objectively valid. It would seem that the intellectual energy of this period of English [sic] ethical thought had a general tendency to take a psychological rather than a strictly ethical turn. In Hume's case, indeed, the absorption of ethics into psychology is sometimes so complete as to lead him to a confusing use of language.--Sidgwick, Outlines, pp. 211-212.

Again, a natural effect of Sidgwick's treatment is that in so far as Smith's account in TMS is interesting at all, it is primarily as a moral phenomenology or psychology of empirical affairs. But that even in that area, Hartley is more interesting. I think Sidgwick's conclusion is, in part, the result of projecting backwards a particular (anachronistic) version of the fact-value distinction onto Hume and Smith. One that become part of the professional DNA of both economics and philosophy such that a mutual, agreeable division of labor is possible (and in context Sidgwick and Marshall accepted this division).

So, I hope to have answered here Harman's postscript 2 questions (at least in provisional manner). But I also want to note that my answer illustrates one of the dangers of relying on authoritative textbook traditions (which is required by the party of progress). These can shape the self-conception of even advanced students, that even once important and famous books are mistakenly neglected. So, even the party of progress must leave room, as Liam Kofi Bright has suggested to me, for arbitrage opportunities and allow the development of seemingly epiphenomenal intellectual activities (such as history of philosophy and/or economics) that make it possible. 

On that Great Policy Idea that remains floating between being and not-being; on stationary research programs

Academics have been discussing carbon taxes as a way to save the environment for more than four decades. (There is a 1977 Nordhaus paper. But if you play around with scholar.google, you may find anticipations.) It's a huge, interdisciplinary scholarly discussion by now with economists, philosophers, policy types, all kinds of environmental scientists, and quite a bit more chiming in (papers, conferences, books, congressional presentations, foundations pushing it, etc.). While governments adore new sources of income, it's remarkable how little uptake the (uniform) carbon tax has had even in relatively high tax countries with (say) considerable taxes on fuel/petroleum. (Here's a list.) I don't mean by this it cannot be explained (lots of theories in economics and political science can do that). But rather, given the breadth of intellectual commitments and fire-power (and Nobel enhanced prestige), this has been a gift that governments have, by and large, refused to accept.

 There are more such policy oriented intellectual communities that have managed to draw in very smart and savvy supply of young minds: for example, universal basic income  (UBI) is a very old idea. In the academy, it's been debated in various ways since the 1960s and it has had a professional community since the 1980s. Not unlike the carbon tax, it draws on all kinds of different academics (perhaps with some competition from and overlap with the negative income tax, etc.). Despite the existence of the welfare state, a full franchise, and the transferring around of 40-50% of GDP by the government in most wealthy countries, it, too, has had relatively little uptake (given the formidable intellectual cross ideological investment).

I think one can tell stories like this about the (slightly more recent) capability approach (and the human development index), cold fusion, and, perhaps, gene therapy (here's the current list). I welcome your own suggestions. The phenomenon I am gesturing at is, of course, not limited to policy salient (and medical) sciences. I grew up on breathless stories of string theory and particle accelerators. The latter has had some successes, but relative to the investment of talent and (oh, you damn economists) opportunity costs, it's meh. 

So, there are these decades long, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary research projects (okay, maybe string theory is a bad example) that, at any given time slice, are eminently plausible and exciting. They are the foundations and mortar for scientific cathedrals. And because they have not had policy uptake [yes, okay, write your angry comments] -- which is the proof in the pudding --, it would be wrong, a category error, to call any of these a degenerative research program. 

Grant me, for shits and giggles, that it's constitutive of science, at least since the scientific revolution [and if I am right, Seneca already grasped it], that if you are in a scientific project that a) with time and (b) the division of labor (c) lots more such knowledge will be attained, including (d) entirely unforeseeable knowledge, that (e) will seem entirely obvious to future generations so that (f) they will look back at Seneca's time as ignoramuses, but, (g) there is no reason to think the enterprise of knowledge ever comes to an end. But in policy/bio-medical sciences, there has to be (h) uptake. Because only with uptake (be it as field experiments or as pilot programs, and then [drumroll] an agency devoted to it), can you have (i) lift-off with further refinement in light of a feed-back loop with messy experience. And it's (i) that is the life-blood of what when I was a kid used to be called a 'progressive' research program in the policy sciences. 

So, on the ideal-type picture sketched here, all science, policy or not, is to be overtaken by the future. But for the policy science caught 'in the form of limitation between un-being and being' (that is, the ones without uptake, but with fresh recruits to the cause) there is no real future, except as a kind of thought experiment.  

What I am describing has been studied, of course in an analogous context.  Harry Collins wrote a beautiful book on Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) before its success. And I am sure that the social-psychological issues are not dissimilar. But if LIGO had always been unable to detect those waves, then at some point that would have been informative about (ahh) nature. (Not that it would have stopped Collins from writing more.) But the lack of uptake in a policy science is different. In general, the lack of uptake of policy-salient multi-disciplinary, multi-generational is not theoretically informative about people or the political process. I don't mean they can't be studied fruitfully from without. Perhaps, archeologists and historians will find half-built cathedrals informative, but probably in order to illuminate the fully built and/or destroyed ones.

Now, since academic life is full of disappointments, rejections, and delayed gratification, I doubt the phenomenological experience of being in such a long range, ambitious multi-disciplinary, policy oriented projects without uptake is any or much different from other academic communities. Challenging, technical problems continue to solved, and clever new review articles will be written. I doubt there is any trouble with motivation (perhaps even less so because of shared, necessary religiosity about the project). I have to admit, I have never been part of an intellectual community that understood itself as progressing, so I actually have no first hand access to what that phenomenological experience is like (except the growth of citation scores).

Obviously, such coriolis research programs may be incubators for and welcoming ecological niches for launching other projects (presumably there is a way to tell a story about NASA or Bell Labs like this). Excellent universities and research communities always are welcoming to people who may, in hindsight, just be passing through to their big thing. 

I wish I had a lovely take home message about the significance of it all. But perhaps, the petering out of this post is sufficient homage to the topic. 

 

 

Leibniz, Clarke, Newton, and Reformation of the Solar System

Thanks to Leibniz, there is a common reading of Isaac Newton in which Newton is committed to the idea that God periodically restores the solar system. I do not mean to suggest Leibniz is solely responsible for this; Clarke's response to Leibniz fails to disabuse clearly the reader of this. And since for a long time Clarke's response was taken to be authoritative of Newton's views the idea has persisted.  

Here is Leibniz's charge right at  the start of the Correspondence:

Sir Isaac Newton and his followers also have a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty needs to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to move. He did not, it seems, have sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. No, the machine of God's making is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen, that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work; he must consequently be so much the more unskillful a workman as he is more often obliged to mend his work and to set it right. Leibniz to Clarke (November 1715), Letter 1, par. 4 (copied from the Ariew edition).

The charge is curious because [A] Newton never claims that God needs to rewind the universe (or solar system) and [B] Newton never compares, I think, God's work and his creation to a watchmaker and watch. Newton's favored analogy is God as the perfect geometer. There are subtle similarities and differences between the two analogies, but I will explore these in a future post.

In his response Clarke comes very close to noting [B], but he fails to do so unambigiously and simultaneously muddies the waters: "the notion of the world's being a great machine, going on without the interposition of God as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a clockmaker, is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends (under pretence of making God a supramundane intelligence) to exclude providence and God's government in reality out of the world." Clarke's first response, par. 4 (copied from the Ariew edition). It is quite natural to read Clarke as accepting [B] and endorsing [A].

As an aside, that Clarke actually rejects [B] (the clock analogy) only becomes clear indirectly. In the fourth response to Leibniz, in the context of explaining that gravity does no fit the mechanist's conception of causation by contact, Clarke writes: "If the word natural forces means here mechanical, then all animals, and even men, are as mere machines as a clock. But if the word does not mean mechanical forces, then gravitation may be effected by regular and natural powers, though they are not mechanical." (par. 46) The natural powers that Newton has really shown to exist make it impossible, ipse facto, to conceive the universe as a (mechanical) clock. (See also Clarke's fifth reply ad 110-116, which also seems to assume this kind of argument.)

Notice, too, in his first response to Leibniz, Clarke does not actually concede the mending charge. All he wants to insist on is God's "providence and God's government." And this he is opposes opposes to "materialism" (Epicurean/Hobbesian system) and "fate" (Spinozism).  The key here is their denial of (general) final causes and the idea that there is really a three-way debate among the systems of fate, materialism, and mind/providentialism. Of course, this also turns on what he might mean by 'government.' I also think Kenny Pearce (whose tweets on the topic prompted this post) is right to claim that "Clarke's response to Leibniz's allegation that Newton's God is an incompetent watchmaker depends essentially on Clarke's view that there are no absolute miracles, only relative ones." I'll let him explain why this is so.

As it happens, in my own work on Newton (following Ted McGuire and Howard Stein) I am not inclined to treat Clarke as authoritative on Newton. So, it is worth explaining why I think Leibniz's charge shouldn't have gotten off the ground at all.

It is, I believe, agreed by all that the following passage from Query 31 of Newton's Opticks gave rise to Leibniz's original charge:

For while comets move in very eccentric orbs in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in concentric orbs, some inconsiderable irregularities excepted which may have arisen from the mutual actions of comets and planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase until this system needs a reformation. Such a wonderful uniformity in the planetary system must be allowed the effect of choice.

I included the final sentence in the quote because I think this helps explain Newton's reasoning. Notice, first that Newton does not mention clocks or watches here. Second, the argument is directed against the system of blind fate and in favor of the system of God's (providential) choice. I think this nobody would deny. 

Now, it is natural to assume that [C] Newton is here anticipating the eighteenth century debate over the stability of the solar system. And that [D] his answer is negative. And if one thinks Newton is committed to [C&D] then it's quite natural to assume that Newton thinks that God needs to rewind the solar system regularly. But I don't think Newton should be taken here to be committed to be thinking about [C-D.]

For, notice, that the claim about the system requiring a reformation is offered as a reductio of the system of fate. And the underlying claim is that the particular patterns of motions we see in the solar system, must be the product of intelligent choice.  That is to say, rather than being worried about the stability of the solar system, Newton is interested in cosmogony (the origin and evolution of the system). And the underlying claim is that from the perspective of the system of necessity one cannot device a system of laws that can account for the simultaneous origin and evolution of the irregular motions of the comets and the regular motions of the planets (and their moons) and their interactions. So, the charge is that Spinozism (which, as Clarke and Newton argue elsewhere, lacks a compelling physics) does not provide an account of the particular motions we observe and would be internally inconsistent if it tried. In my view (see here for details) variants of this argument are trotted out by Newton in his exchange with Bentley and in the General Scholium, and by Clarke in his Demonstration (also directed against Hobbes and Spinoza). 

 

RIP: Noel Swerdlow (1941-2021)

My graduate school classmate at The University of Chicago, Matt Kerrigan Frank, alerted me to the fact that Noel Swerdlow recently passed away. (See this obit.)

I met Noel on one of the first days in graduate school back in September 1995. The seminar room was busy filling up with faculty and graduate students from philosophy and history of science for one of the many, weekly joint seminars I would attend during the next seven years. I was trying to impress David Malament with my knowledge of the Huygens/Newton debate which I had been researching under the guidance of George Smith (one of my undergrad gurus). An old crank -- I now realize he was then barely older than I am now-- interrupted my narrative to tell me that Huygens' objections to Newton's inverse law were primarily metaphysical. I tried to explain to the guy that Koyré's view had been refuted (by George and me). I never get a chance. I asked David, "who is that old man?" and he informed me it was Noel Swerdlow.

Over the next few years I saw Noel in action at the various joint seminars: often abrasive and impatient, but at times quite brilliant. Some of his exchanges with visiting scholars could be quite spirited. (His exchange with Motti Feingold was legendary, but they were or became close friends.)

My relationship with Noel evolved once he spent some time away at Dibner (where George had become director). After we met again on campus, he told me with a big smile "you could have told me about all the archival research that went into the Huygens paper [see here]. I thought you were just bluffing. It's really marvelous work--I love the argument with the maps." I meekly tried to say, "i tried." But something had changed, I was now on his good side. And to receive a compliment from Noel (or anyone in graduate school) was one of the highlights of my graduate career.

He was famous for his work on Babylonian astronomy (he was a student of the legendary Otto Neugebauer), but I have to admit that as a PhD student I loved learning about Copernicus and his (obscure to me) peers from Noel. I also have a memory of him playing piano, but I have not seen this mentioned in any obituary so maybe I am confused. We discovered our shared love for opera at the Lyric, and I always looked forward to seeing him there. (He was very learned on opera.)

When I was nearly done with my PhD, I had the luminous idea to ask him to read Adam Smith's posthumous "History of Astronomy" with me. This piece was central to my dissertation. I was delighted he agreed, and even more that he had never read it before. (I always assumed Noel pretty much had read everything.) I expected that Noel would be extremely critical of Smith as a historian (as the editors of the Oxford edition are). But Noel was, in fact, quite impressed with Smith's historical acumen and, more importantly, gave me a graduate seminar on all the possible sources Smith could have consulted during the 18th century. He also flattered my vanity in assuming that I was intimately familiar with all the works of Regiomantus, Riccioli, and Peuerbach. Often after our reading group at The Medici I had to go to special collections to figure out what he was saying. (This was before the age of google.books!)

Later, when I realized I had bombed out on the job-market first time around, he even helped me apply (and wrote a letter) for a project on Smith as historian of astronomy. But that was not funded.

At the time, i assumed it was normal for historians of astronomy to have a position in an astronomy department.  So, I later used that as an argument for my paper on "philosophy and a scientific future of the history of economics" But I have learned it is much less common (although archeoastronomy is sometimes practices by professional astronomers). 

That paper was part of a rather contentious symposium. organized by Paola Tubaro & Erik Angner. To be clear the symposium was lovely but our audience of established historians were underwhelmed. I think referees managed to prevent bublication of some of the papers.
Anyway, my core idea was that the history of economy theories could play an evidential role in present day economics as the custodians of the theories and data of the past. This was not well received at all. But it let to an invitation by Bertram Schefold to reflect on the possibilities and significance of economic history. I did not know much about the practice of economic history. But as I was musing about the invite, I wondered what the oldest economic data might be. The hunch being that if you have data very far apart this might help you to calibrate important measures.  So on a lark I googled (!) "Babylonian economics" and I was directed to Alice Louise Slotsky The Bourse of Babylon Market Quotations in the Astronomical Diaries of Babylonia, which I read and loved.

I was astonished to learn that the very clay tablets with astronomical data Noel had studied also had economic data on them! I started drafting one of the craziest and fun papers I ever wrote, "Prophecy, eclipses and whole-sale markets: A case study on why data driven economic history requires history of economics, a philosopher’s reflection." [published in Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte/Economic History Yearbook 50.1 (2009): 195-206.]

With some trepidation I sent an early draft to Noel. Rather than scolding me for my amateurishness (this was the initial response of some of my Leiden colleagues who were experts on ancient Mesopatamia--I think they really thought I was crazy), he wrote lengthy letters on the quality of the data that I wanted to use. (The published version of the paper includes excerpts from his letters to me. ) Nobody seems to have read this paper, but it was good enough for me that Noel (who called my attention to relevant other scholars) took it seriously enough to try to help me improve it.

In later years, Noel would always read works I sent him. Sometimes even my blog. Even when I relied on impeccable scholarship of others, he would correct mistakes that had crept into now famous scholarly works. My favorite letter, however, is this one-liner, "Take it down; it's nonsense!--Noel."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientific Pragmatism Confronts Political Realism (Nagel vs Morgenthau)

Mr. Morgenthau's positive proposals as to how social problems ought to be approached exhibit an irresponsible romanticism. He rejects "scientism" because its universalist conception of social laws is allegedly unhistorical--though already J. S. Mill, for example, was entirely clear that the principles of Ricardian economics are applicable only under certain historical conditions. But what is sauce for the goose is evidently not sauce for the gander, for as the passage cited above shows, Mr. Morgenthau has no scruples in affirming "eternal" laws, provided that "more-than-scientific" man asserts them. There can be no mistaking Mr. Morgenthau's low opinion of what controlled inquiry can contribute to the understanding of social processes, or his enthusiasm for men of "higher insights." He has the courage to say that "There is no indication that the trained social scientist as actor on the social scene is more competent than the layman to solve social problems, with the exception of technical problems of limited scope"; and he does not hesitate to assert that "while fundamental social problems are impervious to scientific attack, they seem to yield to the efforts of ill-informed men who, while devoid of scientific knowledge, possess insights of a different and higher kind." Advances made through institution of rational methods of inquiry into such matters as public health, treatment of the insane, administration of the law, or education of the young, are apparently insignificant and merely technical achievements in his eyes! Just what social problems exist which are not specific and technical, is not clear from Mr. Morgenthau's rhetoric. And it is worth at least passing mention that the high esteem he exhibits for the daemonic "ill-informed" man endowed with a "higher kind" of wisdom, involves a fundamental surrender of critical intelligence to dogmatic authority. For to accept an insight simply because it is claimed to be a higher wisdom, is to declare as out of bounds the demand for a critical public appraisal of policies arrived at by such insights.
The pinnacle of political wisdom, Mr. Morgenthau contends, is recognition of the tragic character of life. Life is necessarily tragic, according to him, simply because all action is inherently "sinful" and "evil"-sinful and evil, since the springs of action are "irrational" forces, and the consequences of our actions can be neither calculated in advance nor controlled. However, political success must be measured by the degree to which one can and increase his power over others; and accordingly, "To know that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is Mr. Morgenthau does not realize that his supposition that inherently irrational is intelligible only on an anthropomorphic nature. For the term "irrational" is meaningful only if the term is-and how is one to conceive of "rational forces" if not on the hypothesis an over-all plan and design? Indeed, Mr. Morgenthau's entire conception human nature is built squarely on Calvinistic foundations, though benefit of Christian theology. He defines the good life (with, despairing "alas!") in terms of domination over others; but he himself of any basis for evaluating political behavior except successful assertion of power. His political ethics is thus inherently and in his conception of things the anguish of those who have the struggle for power must simply be accepted as part of the sinful character of the world. That Mr. Morgenthau should think higher wisdom is certainly good reason for adopting a tragic view.

Mr. Morgenthau has misconceived the issue which those who see in the extension of scientific method to social problems regard emphasis is on intuition and insight as sources of political wisdom, to think proponents of scientific method wish to exclude religious experiences as contexts in which inspiration and belief But what is at stake in the debate between himself and "scientism" question concerning the sources or origins of political ideas and is at stake is the question how claims to knowledge and wisdom The recommendation to use scientific method is the recommendation of a way for deciding issues of factual validity and adequacy; it is not the recommendation of an exclusive way in which the universe may be confronted and experienced. Until Mr. Morgenthau recognizes this difference between questions of validity and of origin, he will be fighting with wind-mills. And until he proposes a better and more reliable method for establishing claims to knowledge than the method of science, his eloquence in behalf of "more-than scientific" man will count as eloquence in behalf of intellectual obscurantism.--Ernest Nagel The Yale Law Journal, May, 1947, 56(5): 908-909 reprinted in Logic Without Metaphysics.

Morgenthau's Scientific Man vs Power Politics is one of the founding documents of the so-called realist stream in international relations theory. IR theory has a kind of shadowy existence within contemporary analytic philosophy. In so far as there is any engagement with it, it tends to come through a Kantianized global justice perspective (with more recent work on ethics of immigration, global justice, global environmental ethics, human rights law, etc.) or various utilitarian approaches. I have found, for example, no mention of Morgenthau in Rawls, who is incredibly well read, in Nozick, or Amartya Sen.* Unsurprisingly, Shklar does cite Morgenthau.

I don't wish to claim that the hostile review Nagel gave of Morgenthau can explain such a pattern of silence. But it may be instructive for the mutual indifference. It also opens a window into Nagel's larger political theory. A key part of Nagel's response to Morgenthau is to claim that Morgenthau is criticizing "the dead duck of 19th century individualistic liberalism;" Nagel agrees with Morgenthau that it had a "shallow optimism" and "tidy rationalism of what is essentially the philosophy of the Enlightenment." Nagel agrees that mere "appeals to reason" won't solve humanity's problems. (LWM 378). Much of the best parts of Nagel's review expose the dated (implicit) philosophy of science of Morgenthau.  

The mention of Mill, above, signals that for Nagel liberalism can take on board not just a more historicized understanding of social explanation/science, but also, romanticism's insights into human need and individuality. That is to say, against Morgenthau's "irresponsible romanticism" (indebted to Nietzsche), Nagel places a more responsible romanticism indebted to Mill.** 

In fact, the previous paragraph alerts us to the fact that for Nagel, liberalism itself has changed character. In a companion review  of a political history (of A Generation of Materialism: 1871-1900) by Carlton Hayes it becomes clear that Nagel shares in the liberal self-understanding (familiar from people as broadly apart as Hobson, Mises, Hayek, and Lippmann) that "traditional liberalism" (LWM 383) was defeated by the rise of "neo-mercantilism" and "imperialism" amongst other isms (not the least racialized eugenics) at the end of the nineteenth century. And while Nagel's own views should not be confused with the neo-liberalism that can be traced back to the 1938 Lippmann colloquium, he understands his own liberalism as new, too. And while it is tempting to call his pragmatist liberalism, I am going to use 'scientific liberalism' as a term of art for Nagel's version.

Unlike other liberal friends of technocracy, Nagel's scientific liberalism is not oriented toward (possible) consensus. As I have noted (recall) it embraces pluralism, and this pluralism is rooted in a pluralist metaphysics in which no single perspective is ultimately privileged. In addition this metaphysics provides a kind of template for society: each individual has objective existence, but is simultaneously socially embedded. For Nagel, science is exemplary for, and instrumental to, how societies can progress in light of an be responsive to reasoned criticism. This is echoed in the criticism of Morgenthau's great man politics, when Nagel hails the "advances made through institution of rational methods of inquiry into such matters as public health, treatment of the insane, administration of the law, or education of the young." (LWM 380)

Now, much can be said about Nagel's diagnosis that Morgenthau's anthropology is de facto Calvinist. And that the recognition of a tragic character of life is no more than a mild cover for treating domination over others as the true end of politics. It is a tricky question to what degree this is a misreading. 

Nagel clearly thinks that a scientific politics ground in rational methods of inquiry is possible. And the implication of his argument is that Nagel thinks this is also possible in international affairs. It is unclear, however, whether Nagel believes that this is so because the international arena is not characterized by "the ineliminable struggle for power" (LWM 378) or whether he thinks, more likely I think, that rational methods of inquiry are also capable of properly analyzing such a struggle.

Somewhat surprisingly, part of Nagel's response to Morgenthau is to claim that Morgenthau confuses what may be called the context of origin/discovery from the context of validity/justification. And Nagel is happy to grant Morgenthau that non-scientific methods can be good sources of, what we may call, political nous. But Nagel denies that we should ground policy on them. Public policy should be guided by claims/theories have has survived the stringent testing and experimentation of science. 

It is a bit of shame that Nagel does not say a bit more about how scientific practice can develop experimental knowledge of international affairs. And one wonders to what degree he has developments at the Rand Corporation in mind. But let's leave that aside. While one can heartily embrace Nagel's #noheroes. Nagel's argument against Morgenthau is weaker than he may have realized, even on its own terms.

For, science is by its very nature a slow and at times frustrating process. Even if one grants that science is the only "reliable method for establishing claims to knowledge," it does not follow that the knowledge one would like to be guided by is ready at hand. (I am also leaving aside the question to what degree the values of public policy are aligned with the assumed values in the scientific community.) International crises and emergencies, or new technologies or diseases may cause new circumstances, that may unfold more rapidly than science can handle at first. As we have learned this year, fast science may create its own political challenges that call for forms of ungrounded- decisions. In conditions of radical or even moderate uncertainty it is possible that Morgenthau's statesman have to rise to  the occasion. To say that is not to slide into the dark side of obscurantism, but it is to recognize the possible present imperfections of our best forms of knowledge.