Digressions&Impressions

Zera Yacob and Intellectual traditions; a note on the origins of Africana Philosophy

What should we make of this similarity? Note that it would be anachronistic to describe Zera Yacob’s argument as “Lockean,” for the Second Treatise of Government was published over two decades after Zera Yacob wrote his Hatäta. This points us toward the limits on the usefulness of viewing Zera Yacob and Locke as sharing an early modern world. Consider Richard Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (1979), which explores categories of Roman law, locates the birth of natural rights discourse in the late medieval period, and examines figures like Hugo Grotius, John Selden, and Thomas Hobbes before giving Locke attention in the final chapter. Scholarship like this places Locke in a certain lineage of thought, which shaped him just as much as the political context of his times. Zera Yacob does not stand in that lineage. Indeed, when comparing Zera Yacob to Descartes and Locke, we should remember that Locke read and was influenced by Descartes, learning from his approach to philosophy even while rejecting central views of his. There is a sense in which Locke and Descartes share a modernity that Zera Yacob does not, a point that need not lead us to deny that Zera Yacob is a modern philosopher but rather to say that he inhabits a different modernity. (p. 130)

[W]hile Zera Yacob can be seen as similar to Descartes but must be recognized as outside the lineage leading to and branching out from him, Amo, like Locke, did philosophy in the wake of Descartes and critically responded to his work. (p. 132)

 

What I think this means is that, for Cugoano, as for Zera Yacob, the idea of natural rights is not really embedded within a modern European intellectual tradition. Certain formulations of it may be paradigmatically European, but it is ultimately a concept that transcends cultural boundaries, which also means that one can come up with paradigmatically Fanti formulations of it. Cugoano thus does not fit neatly into the framework of modern Africana philosophy as a form of modern European philosophy into which Amo and Haynes fit. But, of course, neither is he disconnected from the European tradition in the way Zera Yacob is. Cugoano, I believe, represents modern Africana philosophy as a convergence of African and European intellectual trajectories, a hybrid case of radicalizing European thought from within, as with Haynes, while also modernizing African thought through comparing indigenous and foreign viewpoints and using reason to decide what makes the most sense, like Zera Yacob.

I take Cugoano to be, in this way, a model for Africana philosophy going forward. The riches of the Western philosophical tradition must be valued but also made sharper and more liberating through the use of a critical philosophy of race lens. At the same time, there must be constant efforts to transcend the Western framework by rooting Africana philosophy in oral and literary traditions from Africa and the diaspora. In many instances, we may come to a conclusion like Cugoano’s about natural rights: that what we thought of as particularly Western is not and that the cross-cultural recognition of a shared concept may strengthen our sense of commitment to the value at stake. (p. 138)

The quoted passages are all from Chike Jeffers' (2017) "Rights, Race, and the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy." The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race. This is a text that I assign as required background reading to the session that roughly goes from Las Casas to Cugoano and discusses slavery, mercantile political economy, and rights in my lecture course on the History of Political Theory. This is a required course with enrollments between 500 and 600 students. Jeffers' paper is short and hits the sweet spot because it offers helpful historical context, makes important distinctions, and it explains the ongoing significance of the material discussed. It's also astonishingly brief, and clear. I warmly recommend it. 

 

But as I was preparing my quiz about the text, and so re-reading it, I became uneasy in reflecting on the passages quoted above. To be sure, the underlying idea of what Africana philosophy should be going forward (articulated in final paragraph, but also made available throughout the chapter) strikes me as rather attractive and is not something I am going to challenge here. In fact, in some ways I am going to reinforce Jeffers' main point because I want to suggest that Zera Yacob is much more connected to what Jeffers calls 'the European tradition,' although what I prefer to call the (partially overlapping) 'Abrahamic-Platonic traditions' that also shaped non-trivially Descartes and Locke. What do I have in mind?

 

First, Yacob (1599 – 1692) is, in part, polemicizing against the Jesuits and, now I quote Jeffers, "as “Franğ,” a Ge’ez word that literally means “foreigner.” But note that he uses that word in a way that is interchangeable with “Catholic.”" (p. 131) And, in fact, if you read Zera Yacob’s Hatäta "or “inquiry,” commonly called his Treatise" (p. 128) it's very clear that Yacob was rather acquainted with their teachings (which he largely rejects).+ Now, Descartes was taught by Jesuits at La Flèche. (Descartes was there between 1607-1614.) So, there is a non-trivial sense in which they were exposed to largely the same views. (The Jesuits standardized their curriculum.) Obviously, I am not claiming that they had the same teachers (although Jesuits did move around so it's not wholly impossible they encountered the same people--how cool would that be?), but I would be amazed if the Iberian Jesuits who are his targets did not bring with them ideas shaped by, say, Francisco Suárez's metaphysics and moral/political theory, including his theory of rights. (Suárez was an intellectual celebrity of the age.) Suárez is rather important to Descartes and, as I have noted (here), Suárez also shaped the social contract tradition (including Hobbes and perhaps -- I will not make the case today -- Locke).

 

Second, Yacob is quite clearly evoking Augustine's Confessions at various points. This is not just in virtue of the auto-biographical style, but also in particular details of the narrative (not the least the early sinful behavior and the attraction to various alternative intellectual traditions). One important commonality is the significance of David's Psalms to both. I don't think either can do without an explicit or implicit allusion to Psalms on a single page! (I suspect one can write a PhD about this.) I return to this below. Either way, Descartes' debts to Augustine, and Augustine's Confessions has itself generated a huge scholarly enterprise. In saying this, I don't mean to suggest there are no differences between Descartes or Yacob, but just to point to the fact that they share in an overlapping tradition even if they may be mediated by different sources and contexts. (I don't mean to suggest that Descartes himself was especially shaped by Psalms--I leave that aside, although intrigued to reflect on it.)

 

Third, a good chunk of (what we might call) the philosophy in the Hatäta draws on the Book of Wisdom (which Yacob, as is common, attributes to Salomon). I don't want to make this claim more precise here. But while Yacob is plenty critical of the particularity and some of the laws of Judaism, the Hebraic sources in his text are abundant. This he does share with Hobbes and Locke. I don't mean to suggest that the sources are exclusively Jewish; I would love to know, for example, if Al-Ghazali's Deliverance of Error (with with the Hatäta and the Meditations share non-trivial commonalities) was circulating among the Muslim scholars he encountered and debated. 

 

But it's only if one denies that the Book of Wisdom (which itself is shaped by Hellenistic philosophy) is philosophy or insists that the Hebrew Bible is non-philosophy (as some who are in the grip of  the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens might claim) that this is not part of the overlapping tradition(s). (I have argued against this claim in many digressions, but start here.) In addition, it's quite clear that Yacob identifies with David's enforced exile from court, and perhaps (I put this more tentatively) even the Israelites in the dessert. 

 

So, while it is undoubtedly true that Yacob and Descartes and/or Locke did not share the exact same modernity, I also suspect that in some non-trivial respects they did. It is striking that both politically and religiously the question of religious pluralism and the role of using state authority to impose a single religion dominate France and Ethiopia (and England) in their life-times, including rather dramatic reversals of fortune. I am not especially fond of 'modernity' because it is often inscribed in complex conceptual hierarchies (involving 'feudalism,' civilization vs barbarism, etc.), but it can be useful to point to the symmetry of conditions that these thinkers faced.

 

Does anything hinge on this? Well, I am certainly not the first to note debts of Africana philosophy to Hebraic and Abrahamic sources more broadly. But when in 2019 Peter Adamson (who has collaborated with Jeffers) writes, in the context of Zera Yacob that the "Ethiopian philosophical tradition simultaneously belongs to at least two larger stories: that of philosophy within various Christian traditions of the East, and that of African philosophy," that is factually true, but it effaces the Hebraic contribution to at least the former (and, perhaps the latter--in so far as Hebraic philosophy itself was developed, in part, under African skies). A similar claim can be made "about ancient Egyptian philosophy" (which Adamson goes on to mention) in so far as Philo is a rather signicant presence in it. 

I don't think this is merely a matter of geographic score-keeping. It has important contemporary political salience when 'philosophy' plays a role in identity formation and articulation (as it seems to do within Africana philosophy--that is not a criticism!). That there is also a very clear Hebraic root in Yacob [!] and all the figures discussed in the Beginnings of Modern Africana Philosophy (with perhaps partial exception of Amo) is, thus, non-trivial (if only because the bondage and exodus of Israel resonate within it). It also may facilitate discussion today among Africana philosophers and those philosophers that takes Hebraic sources seriously. This is no small matter given the polarizing effects of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism in our world.

 

Including the Hebraic tradition(s) into the narrative may also be epistemically useful if Yacob is right. Because he thinks that when different traditions agree, we are more likely to find truth, whereas their differences reveal their errors--and in religious conflict we de facto always defend error. It's probably more natural to read him as saying that this is so because when traditions agree they latch onto the truth (a thought like this can be found in Montaigne, too). But I'd like to read him Spinozistically as suggesting, and I'd like to argue for this at some point that this is his view, that through dialogue when we find ways to agree, and so live in peace with each other, we instantiate or generate the truth.*

 

Jonathan Swift and Pessimistic Meta-Induction

[Aristotle’s ghost] freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally exploded. He predicted the same fate to attraction, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters. He said, that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; even those who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined.--From Jonathan Swift's (1726) Gulliver's Travels. Part Three, Chapter 8. 

Swift let's Gulliver recount through Aristotle's Ghost what we may call a pessimistic meta-induction (see here in the Stanford Encyclopedia). Swift is not the first to produce such a meta-induction I am familiar with several version of it to be found in Montaigne's Apology of Raimond Sebond -- involving induction over multiple sciences  --, and I would not be surprised if it has an ancient Skeptical pedigree. Montaigne wrote in the aftermath of the Copernican revolution so it is no surprise he is sensitive to this opportunity to argue for his version of skepticism. 

We are inclined to read Swift's version as, perhaps, displaying his scientific experience. How could one claim that Newton is mere 'fashion' and founded upon 'conjecture?' In his edition of Swift, Sir Walter Scott, suggest that this passage shows "the Dean understood little natural philosophy."* Scott may correct about this. While one can wonder why another novelist fails to recognize that a writer need not agree with his character, I leave that aside. But Scott underestimates Swift's remarks.

First, note that Swift correctly grasps that Newton had made Descartes's vortex theory obsolete. It's little noticed fact that Newton offered the first quantitative vortex theory and showed that it was incompatible with the empirical evidence (for explanation see this paper--the argument is Smeenk's.) This was by no means the consensus everywhere. (And, in fact, Newton's argument rested in part on a subtle mistake in his treatment of torque recognized by Bernoulli.) But Newton had clearly shifted the burden of evidence; Descartes version was doomed.

Second, it is worth noting that 1726 was also the year of publication of the third edition of the Principia. (So, Gulliver was written in the shadow of the second edition.) Even so, the most controversial empirical results of the Principia (shape of the Earth, universal gravity, the lunar orbit etc.) were still very much contested. These were not settled until more than a decade later in groundbreaking work of Maupertuis, Clairaut, and Euler. While there were many sympathetic defenses of Newton in circulation, that even in the British Isles, Berkeley and Toland had demonstrated that there was space for works that were not uncritical of Newton (along many dimensions).

Now, one may still think Swift should not have said (or let Aristotle's  Ghost say via Gulliver) that the Principia was grounded in conjecture. But that was not an uncommon view (see here for evidence) among the learned who had good evidence to think that the empirical world did not favor Newton's theory and that he violated standards of intelligibility. 

Moreover, the idea that the use of mathematical is a matter of fashion and context specific is one that is key to a series of important arguments by Mandeville developed in his (anti-mathematicist) treatment (see here) of using the incentive structure of medicine to support epistemic claims in his A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Diseases (recall my old posts here and here.) I believe Mandeville's arguments were inserted in the second (1730) edition. If so, then Swift may well have encouraged Mandeville's development of the point. Mandeville's argument is so much more thoroughly developed than Swift's remark that I hesitate to call it an influence. 

Anticipating Kuhn (and Adam Smith), Aristotle's Ghost treats the commitment to a particular scientific paradigm as akin to a religion. And while he does not claim that the acceptance and rejection of scientific theories is entirely due to social context, social context is a key factor. And, in fact, it would be useful to read this passage alongside the critical treatment of the royal society in his description of his visit to Laputa and the floating island, but that's for another voyage, I mean digression.

 

Is Blogging philosophy (or science), really?

In short, Fiske doesn’t like when people use social media to publish negative comments on published research. She’s implicitly following what I’ve sometimes called the research incumbency rule: that, once an article is published in some approved venue, it should be taken as truth. I’ve written elsewhere on my problems with this attitude—in short, (a) many published papers are clearly in error, which can often be seen just by internal examination of the claims and which becomes even clearer following unsuccessful replication, and (b) publication itself is such a crapshoot that it’s a statistical error to draw a bright line between published and unpublished work...

Fiske is annoyed with social media, and I can understand that. She’s sitting at the top of traditional media. She can publish an article in the APS Observer and get all this discussion without having to go through peer review; she has the power to approve articles for the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; work by herself and har colleagues is featured in national newspapers, TV, radio, and even Ted talks, or so I’ve heard. Top-down media are Susan Fiske’s friend. Social media, though, she has no control over. That’s must be frustrating, and as a successful practioner of traditional media myself (yes, I too have published in scholarly journals), I too can get annoyed when newcomers circumvent the traditional channels of publication. People such as Fiske and myself spend our professional lives building up a small fortune of coin in the form of publications and citations, and it’s painful to see that devalued, or to think that there’s another sort of scrip in circulation that can buy things that our old-school money cannot.

But let’s forget about careers for a moment and instead talk science.

When it comes to pointing out errors in published work, social media have been necessary. There just has been no reasonable alternative. Yes, it’s sometimes possible to publish peer-reviewed letters in journals criticizing published work, but it can be a huge amount of effort. Journals and authors often apply massive resistance to bury criticisms....

Let me conclude with a key disagreement I have with Fiske. She prefers moderated forums where criticism is done in private. I prefer open discussion. Personally I am not a fan of Twitter, where the space limitation seems to encourge snappy, often adversarial exchanges. I like blogs, and blog comments, because we have enough space to fully explain ourselves and to give full references to what we are discussing. Andrew Gelman "What has happened down here is the winds have changed."  [HT L.A. Paul & Liam Kofi Bright]

Gelman's post is reading in full, although I should mention that his useful historical timeline ignores the very important work done by Deirdre McCloskey (and her collaborators) on statistical significance, and the very early work (1990-3) [here, here, etc.] on the problems of replication in the social sciences by my mentor David Levy and his then collaborator Susan Feigenbaum. These papers by Feigenbaum and Levy were largely ignored (although they influenced my own work and early blogging). I know from conversation with David that NSF was uninterested in funding work on problems in replication at the time. The market in ideas is inefficient and the self-correcting mechanisms of science are imperfect, yet in philosophy we nearly always assume/presuppose an image of science that posits these. Okay, now let me get to the point.

Within professional philosophy (and science [you may substitute science for philosophy in this post]), blogging is currently treated in four predominant ways:

(i) A place to discuss and debate professional issues/norms (think of all the work Jennifer Saul and her collaborators have done to get gender-related issues discussed)

(ii) a means to convey news about the profession;

(iii) a way to try out ideas among sub-set of interested specialists and would be specialists; in fact this often leads (iii*) to the development or reinforcement of intellectual communities around some issues (with the risks of generating echo-chamber).

(iv) A means to promote developed and published views to the profession and the public.

There is recognition that (i) is a service to the profession and that curating blogs that cater to (ii-iv) is also a professional service. Publishing a blog post is generally treated as akin to an editorial--a part of public outreach or public service. Few are willing to treat blogging (v) as a species of philosophy, let alone professional philosophy that contributes substantially to the ongoing development of philosophy (or some other discipline). This last point is true even though some of the debates over the norms of the profession fall very properly and centrally under what goes by the name of 'meta-philosophy' (which in some quarters is becoming a recognizable area of specialization (AOS) or (AOC)). It is notable that both (iii) and (iv) require considerable philosophical skill to do so in a way that does not undermine professional reputations. Brian Weatherson, for example set the bar very high (on iii) in his earlier years at Thoughts Arguments and Rants.

There seem to be two arguments that prevent recognition of blogging as (professional) philosophy (science): first, it is not refereed (in fact, blogging is often, but not always, self-publication); second, the blogging format deviates in content and style from the existing professional formats (that is, the refereed journal article and scholarly monograph). Both are contingent arguments against treating blogging as a means to contribute substantially to professional philosophy as such. (Nobody would say Aristotle is not philosophy because he was not refereed.) For, while undoubtedly evaluating a blogger's quality would require some innovation in one's metrics/criteria, there is no principled reason why one could not evaluate the quality and impact of a blogger's blog post(s) post-facto in, say, a normal tenure review and promotion. In addition, quite a bit of objective data (about visits, links, discussion, prizes/honors) can be collected to contextualize interest in a blogger and his/her impact. Obviously, some of these metrics may reinforce (recall) the worst tendencies in contemporary, technocratic scholarly evaluation, but that's something that can be addressed.  Moreover, while it's true that blog posts deviate from existing academic formats, they are often contiguous with other formats found in philosophical history (including letters [e.g., Seneca, Margaret Cavendish], and linked essays [Bacon, Addison, Montaigne]), and commentaries [De Grouchy]--this is, especially relevant for members from historically marginalized groups whose philosophical contributions often appeared in non-academic formats in the past.[1]

By contrast, I would argue (in self-serving fashion) that blogging (in the manner of v) has some non-trivial professional virtues that can contribute substantially to philosophy not just as a service but as a means to advance the content/core of the discipline: (a) it is fundamentally not-gated, so there are few barriers to entry (anybody can start a blog) and criticism (most blogs have a comment option--or one can start another blog commenting an blog), so it removes a status quo bias in existing research. Non-trivially, one of the ways it removes barriers to entry is that blogging is (b) also to lower cost (it is truly open as opposed to the many pseudo-open science projects). In addition, (c) blogging can be dialogical with audience members reviewing (including structured peer review) and responding to/commenting on posts. A blogger can (d) make transparent connections and links by linking to other works within a particular blog post (and so, thereby, reveal or call attention to systematic entailments or presuppositions) and within the life of a blog or blog-persona. While some element of this (d) is also the case in traditional academic formats, a blogger can (e) respond to events in real time and continuously update her position (if she so wishes) and (e*) reveal the ways her thought has developed. In particular, (f) blogs can shape the events and discipline in real time (e.g. Gelman).  Finally, a blog can (g) try out or host different kinds of voices, and, thereby, explore a wider range of experiences.

While there is no reason to wish for the total displacement of the traditional scholarly formats – there are important virtues attached to peer review, and the slow accumulation of research findings --, it seems clear that blogging can expand the ways in which true scholarship (science, philosophy) is practiced. For too long we have conflated the peer-review process not just with the gold standard, but with the only legitimate standard. But while there is a lot to be said for the virtues of peer review and attempts to improve it via smell steps of introducing better and better practices, there are also known systematic fragilities with that process that no amount of tinkering will eliminate (because humans are not angels). (This is more general vice in the sciences where one method becomes fully hegemonic (e.g., evidence based medicine and randomized control trials are promoted in ways that create foreseeable fragilities.)) 

Thus, my claim is that blogging is a means toward making philosophy (science) more truth-apt because it allows us to become more robust. This is why we need to prevent the situation that only tenured folk can really afford to invest in blogging (v) as a way to contribute to philosophy. Now, nearly all the prolific bloggers are folk with tenure who, having figured out how to produce a steady stream of ordinary scholarship, can leverage their professional status to get an audience for their view(s). But this just reinforces species of status quo bias. Until we are willing to recognize blogging as a species of true philosophy and reward that professionally, young folk will be reluctant to run all the risks associated with it.

The argument here is agnostic on the virtues of blogging as a means toward public philosophy or disseminating philosophy to a wider audience, although it is clear that some of the arguments offered here carry over  to these realms, and may be even more compelling, in cases of blogging as a species of public philosophy.*

 

[1]O’Neill, Eileen. "Disappearing ink: Early modern women philosophers and their fate in history." Philosophy in a feminist voice: Critiques and reconstructions (1998): 17-62. See also, Lisa Shapiro (ms) “What is a Philosophical Cannon”

In Medias Res

After more than 170 consecutive posts , I am taking a short break in order to enjoy a family holiday.

Out of the twenty most widely read Digressions,  nineteen pertain to 'professional' issues and norms in academic philosophy (and university life  more generally)). I am grateful for your trust, interest, and occasional commentary. I recognize that not allowing anonymous commenting has inhibited discussion--I regret this on some days of the week because it entails that fewer perspectives are represented in a shared, public discussion. I infer (perhaps mistakenly) that professional philosophy is less of an egalitarian republic of letters than I had hoped; and that in people's perceptions the risk of a price to pay by being associated with a particular position is too high for the gains to be had from commenting. But on other days of the week, I welcome the reduced stress from more gentle moderation of discussion.

I am especially grateful for the continued interest in my more focused, philosophical posts. When I left NewAPPS, I had hoped to be part of a breakthrough in doing philosophy on the web. But upon reflection I realized I lack technological savvy. The now familiar format of a daily post was decided in a moment of hubris. Along the way I have come to appreciate the achievements of Seneca, Montaigne, Bacon, and Addison amongst others that have showed the great possibilities of serial development of philosophy. In an age of ever increasing professionalization and specialization, I need these Impressions to revisit and revive the sources of joy and wonder that got me on the path to philosophical inquiry; I am pleased some of you share the road with me.

And what about the outlier, you ask? The twentieth is on blogging.

I  return in early August.

Montaigne, Collier and Painting (and Spinoza?)

Having considered the proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had a mind to imitate his way. He chooses the fairest place and middle of any wall, or panel, wherein to draw a picture, which he finishes with his utmost care and art, and the vacuity about it he fills with grotesques, which are odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive from their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes. And in truth, what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other than accidental order, coherence, or proportion? [Que sont-ce icy aussi, à la verité, que crotesques et corps monstrueux, rappiecez de divers membres, sans certaine figure, n'ayants ordre, suite ny proportion que fortuite?]—Montaigne, Essays: Of Friendship.

The Vanitas Still life with Works of Montaigne represents in addition to a globe and several symbolic reminders of the brevity of life, a representation of the Dutch edition of Montaigne's Essays in Glazemaker's translation. The painting is signed "Charles Field," but Dror Wahrman persuasively argues in his Mr. Collier's Letter Racks that it was painted by Edward Collier (recall this post); in fact, the painting is one of four nearly identical paintings that Collier almost certainly had more than a hand in: one with Collier's signature, one without signature, and two with signatures ascribed two others, although all four paintings have Collier's initials ("E.C.") inscribed in them. The Glazemaker translation appeared in 1672 (The Dutch "disaster year"), but in all four paintings the represented date does not correspond to any known editions of Glazemaker's translation. (In the "Field," the fake date is given as 1753, and Wahrman notes that "53" is a "fairly accurate" reversed "E c" as "digits allow." (152)) Collier's Vanitas plays many of the same games as his Trompe-l'œils, creating the illusion that the depicted objects are really, well, real, while at the same time constantly undermining the stability of identity with elaborate games and hidden messages. In one's logic one might assume that A= A, but upon closer inspection you can't be so sure.

Wahrman does not link Collier's art to the contents of Montaigne's Essays, which is a shame given Collier's more general skepticism about identity. So, I started paging through my copy and my eye fell on the opening of the essay "Of Friendship," which I have reproduced at the top of this post. There Montaigne claims about his own craft that (against Plato's injunctions) he will happily imitate the method of a certain kind of painter. Montaigne's imitation is partial; by this I do not just mean that Montaigne seems to skip the content of the painter's picture altogether, but also, and more importantly, that Montaigne seems to be imitating (methodologically) only the stuff outside the frame of the carefully crafted picture frame!

Of Fleeting Impressions, or an author's frailty

The Circumstance which gives Authors an Advantage above all these great Masters, is this, that they can multiply their Originals; or rather can make Copies of their Works, to what Number they please, which shall be as valuable as the Originals themselves. This gives a great Author something like a Prospect of Eternity, but at the same time deprives him of those other Advantages which Artists meet with. The Artist finds greater Returns in Profit, as the Author in Fame. What an Inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be confined only in one Place and made the Property of a single Person?--The Spectator, No. 166. Monday, September 10, 1711. Addison.

At a conference, I recently caught Menachem Fisch engrossed in Dror Wahrman's fascinating Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, which Menachem warmly recommended. The passage from Addison is partially quoted on p. 51; Wahrman cuts it off at "Eternity." In context, Wahrman is not interested in the trade-off between profit for unique works and enduring fame that Addison posits (although fleetingness of life, of print, of identity (etc.) is a major theme of the book). Because duplication undermines scarcity -- it even risks effacing property --, it generates too much supply, and lowers what one might call "exchange value." (As Addison recognizes, the intrinsic or use value remains, and may, in fact, be increased because more folk can enjoy the fruits of one's labor.)* Addison imagines counterfactually, "What an Inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be confined only in one Place and made the Property of a single Person?" Yet, unique properties, which have a huge upside in exchange value, are vulnerable to the destruction wrought by time: statue, buildings, even pictures are fragile--and  even when they survive they may -- despite the necessity of the logicians -- be disassociated from the name that ought to be associated with it.

That is to say, one can be rewarded in money and approbation. If one scribbles in the right sort of medium, one can even hope to rewarded with posthumous applause. Addison's little counterfactual implies, in fact, that the truly talented (Virgil, Homer, Cicero, Aristotle) correctly favor the possibility of extraordinary posthumous fame over extraordinary riches in one's life. As Hume insisted, while subtly correcting Addison's implicit axiology, that there was such a thing as a "most durable, as well as justest fame," and offered as examples:

On Finding a Home

‘we are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom…’--Otto Neurath

[Aristotle’s ghost] freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally exploded. He predicted the same fate to ATTRACTION, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters. He said, that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; even those who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined.--Gulliver's Travels, Chapter VIII of Voyage III.

Today starts the bi-annual HOPOS conference (HOPOS = History of the Philosophy of Science) that my department is hosting in Ghent. Attending this meeting is a kind of intellectual home-coming because it is the only conference where I don't feel I need to justify my academic specialization to fellow philosophers. Even among early modernists, I felt like an outsider as long as I understood myself, and perceived others to look at me, as 'one of those weird Adam Smith guys.'

HOPOS, which has been around a few decades or so, is an anomaly in the profession: unlike other historical-philosophical topics it is not organized around a central figure -- although I often joke it is a coalition of folk that like Carnap and folk that like Newton -- nor characterized by a historical epoch. I am unfamiliar with professional societies devoted to HOM (History of Metaphysics), HOPOL (History of the Philosophy  of Language), HOE (History of Ethics), HOA (History of Aesthetics), etc. It is prima facie odd that a sub-specialization of philosophy, philosophy of science, would merit a society devoted to its history as an area of research (with even its own journal). The oddity of HOPOS (I have been a proud steer at one point) is deepened by the fact that there is a general sense that GPOS (General Philosophy of Science) is being displaced by more specialized sub-disciplines (PoX, that is philosophy of biology, philosophy of economics, philosophy of physics, etc., and even sub-disciplines of these: space/time, QM, etc.). Perhaps, the gradual demise of GPOS is a necessary pre-condition for the rise of HoPoS (history as burying the dead?), but I have never heard anybody say that.

In principle, HoPoS is a way of doing philosophy of science. So, after philosophy of science turned historical, say, with Kuhn, it is natural, albeit not necessary, to become reflexive about this turn and understand one's own activity historically. It's not clear that one could really go meta from HoPoS to, say, HoHoPoS, so it seems the potential infinite regress is blocked at HoPoS. To be concrete: I have long been puzzled and fascinated by the fact that some of the most significant features of Kuhn's Structure, were anticipated in Adam Smith's "The History of Astronomy" (written in the first half of the eighteenth century). Apparently thinking of science as an open-ended succession of revolutions between systems of thought that are in some sense incommensurable with each other is a kind of permanent open possibility in philosophical-logical space. That idea has a history, too (see the quote from Gulliver); it is, in fact, somewhat of a skeptical trope (while researching my dissertation I found a version of it in Montaigne).

On Searle on Williams

Yes. Well, Bernard was a very good friend of mine. He had an enormous influence on me of the kind that would be hard to describe because it was mostly just admiration for his sheer intellectual abilities. I think Bernard was as intelligent as any human being I’ve ever met. He had a kind of quickness which was stunning. Now one consequence of that is there’s a sense in which people who knew him well, or at least in my case, we always feel the published work is not up to the level of the Bernard we remember. Yes, it’s wonderful and admirable, the published work, but the particular fire and light that came from discussions with Bernard are lost on the printed page. Now whether that’s inevitable, or whether or not he had actually been more patient about sitting down and doing a hard slog necessary to write a great book, I don’t know. I know that in the last years of his life he suddenly became very productive. I think -- I mean now since we’re talking about somebody I admire -- that in some ways his career was a disappointment to his admirers because he never produced a work of the calibre of his highest ability. And one of the reasons for that is he had all this other stuff going on. He was always on some Royal Commission, or dining in Buckingham Palace...

He could see instantly the flaws in arguments, including his own. This was the fatal element: that Bernard could see the limitations of philosophical theories, but they led to him seeing the limitations of his own theories, and that was partly debilitating.--John Searle interviewed by Tim Crane [HT Dailynous]

Searle's recent interviews have been making a splash (recall). I am a bit sad that in these interviews, nobody knowledgeable interrogates his exchanges with Derrida.

Anyway, Searle's comment on Williams has escaped, I think, scrutiny. Williams's career was not a professional failure; he was at one point Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and Deutsch Professor at Berkeley. His books are widely cited (I blogged about his truth book once), and some of his thought experiments have become evergreens in moral philosophy. I read Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy before I went to graduate school and it assured me that analytical philosophy need not be forfeited to the technicians. (Recently, I wrote a paper on moral luck in which I offer a correction to his account from the vantage point of Adam Smith's treatment.)

Searle's comments remind us of two non-trivial facts: (i) it's very hard to capture in print "the particular fire and light that came from discussions;" (ii) even the most talented and best situated amongst us (e.g. Williams) are unlikely to write "a great book." The two facts are connected, although not by logical entailment. The known professional ways of communicating philosophy -- the journal article, the book -- are both designed to prevent 'fire and light.' Some such affect, "quickness," and "insight" (a key word in the interview with Searle) are not the product of journal articles and books, specially written in the registers of analytical philosophy, in particular; it embraces the ideals of responsible speech in its self-image opposed to purported Heideggerrian nonsense.