Digressions&Impressions

Major League Philosophers and an Adjunct

The three weirdest things that major league philosophy professors do when talking to those of us playing in the minors (MiLP, consisting of all of triple, double, class, etc. etc. etc. A departments)-

1. Refer to colleagues and/or their major league graduate school teachers by first name, as if we automatically know who they are talking about (i.e. “Oh yeah, I remember how Charles used to get really cranky whenever people crossed him about the deontic/alethic distinction.” Huh? Charles who? Parsons? Hartshorne? Bukowsi? Some Charles whose last name I don’t even recognize?).
2. Less common, but common enough to be a reliable trope, automatically assume that you have read their work (“Don’t forget that I already covered that one in “Pretense’s Pretense.” What? Pretense what? What’s this “pretense theory” you keep mentioning?).
3. Expect you to get worked up that that one or more of their papers is not cited or discussed in places where it should be (say an anthology dedicated to some problem doesn’t even mention them). Everyone in the minor leagues who has published enough is used to this happening to them.

The only sense I can make of all three of these is that major league philosophy is a very small community, at least compared to all of the MilP programs. If you are among the very small group of academics who belong to departments with a non-trivial speaker series and travel budget (and working plumbing in your building for that matter) you have a much better idea of who everyone else in such departments are and what they are working on. As a result you are right to expect everyone else in that small group to know what’s going on with you.--Cogburn "When Major League Philosophers talk to the rest of us." @Philpercs.com

When I arrived in grad school in the mid 90s, I turned out to be the fifth 'Eric' (Brown, Wiland, Brandon) or 'Erik' (Curiel); in addition, there were still fresh enough memories of an 'Erich' (Reck). So, we were simply identified by our last names, especially when talking to each other. Luckily none of us had last names that also doubled as a common first name (e.g., Stanley, Taylor, Hunter, etc.), so further confusion was avoided. Last names were also good enough for our local heroes -- one was either in the Wittgenstein-Anscombe or (the much smaller) Carnap-camp. Because there was a kind of happy indifference to Kripke at Chicago, I reflected little on the fact that names had metaphysical import, but if I had thought about it at the time I would have been suspicious of the very idea of self-identity and certainly not consider it trivial.

The joke of Cogburn's post is that he has been more widely and more regularly read than most living philosophers. Defying all the old status rules of the profession, he has better name recognition within the profession than (say) your average NYU grad. For a while I would be often asked what he is really like. After all, I spent nearly three years in intense, daily contact with Cogburn. But, while I have very fine-grained (and surely false) theories on the subject, I always deflect the question because I have never met the man in person to this day; he is the only one of the old NewApps crew that falls in the unmet category, which proves his point: most of the others I met on my or their work-related travel, funded by generous taxpayers and endowments.

Even after we went our separate ways, I have stayed compulsively addicted to Cogburn's blogging because he is mostly unpredictable (his recent turn to T.S. Eliot excepted), often profound, and distinctly unwilling to activate the tiresome and endlessly repeated Memes about the profession that circulate elsewhere.

Philosophy is an unusual profession in that our status hierarchy conforms, in very large part, to the objects of our knowledge, that is, the scribblings and occasional bons mots of other philosophers. Yes, other professions and arts also have status hierarchies in which folk emulate and keep track of each other; and, of course, in academic disciplines they are also supposed to cite each other. But the naked truth is that even when -- let's stipulate -- it is meaningful, much of professional philosophy has no outside referent; when it does, it is constructed or imagined by those very same philosophers or other academics--this is true even of much work in the philosophy of special sciences and applied ethics. This means a good chunk of philosophy just is about philosophy or the way the world is imagined by philosophers. This has an obvious corollary: while officially we keep arguments, moves, and distinctions distinct from identity, we have made it when our names have become a short-hand for them (cf. 'to Quine'; Platonic; etc.).

If we really believed what we say, 'our arguments stand or fall regardless of the speaker's authority,' then why has there not been a proliferation of anonymous or group pseudonyms in our best philosophical writings (since, say, Kierkegaard)?* The rare exceptions tend to involve motivated hoaxes and political concerns. (Impossible you say? Mathematics had Bourbaki.) Professional philosophy is best compared to a credit economy with currency controls; there are a lot of inflated reputations, but the bubbles tend to last rarely for more than a decade.

In his post, Cogburn, suggests that there is an escape from  this credit economy. But as he recognizes, you can't really write about about the path toward freedom and still be convincing. Amusingly enough Cogburn's post went viral and was shared by professional philosophers on Facebook who, well, play in the majors.

I never got sophisticated about engaging with Kripke. When I was still historicist, I used to think that rigid designation is a metaphysics apt for a society that embraces the one-drop-rule. After I rejected historicism, I was relieved to discover Lewis, embraced counterpart theory, and decided to keep worlds fairly small.

Dailynous has directed me to the obituary of Dave Heller, who with a master’s degree in American literature ended up teaching (ahh) philosophy; since his death, his life has been turned into a symbol of  the plight of adjuncts in our oligarchic universities that represent our oligarchic times--a noble cause. He also seems to be an exemplar of somebody who lived a true philosophical life and, thereby, experienced the kind of freedom Cogburn describes. (That's not intended as an argument for ongoing exploitation of adjuncts.) Google directed me to snippets of his life (as a salesclerk at the Magus bookstore in Seattle); I was thrilled to learn that his shtick involved him asking, “Are you re-reading anything?” No text stays the same, after all.+

 

On Continental Philosophy as Cultural Capital

Reports of the death of the analytic/continental divide are highly premature, and the rampant claims that this division is "merely sociological" seem to imply (in rather un-Latourian fashion) that sociology deals only with figments of the imagination.--Harman on  Latour, p. 11.

During my last visit to the pre-renovation-era Stedelijk, I attended a friend's wedding in 2002. As it happens it was also the last time I got really plastered at a party because I had falsely assumed dinner would be served at the event. The wedding was an artsy affair because the bride (an editor/writer) and groom (a journalist) had lots of friends and family who were musicians and (Protestant) clergy.  At the time the museum was still controlled by the municipality and private parties were not permitted; but somebody close to the wedding-couple knew a curator. I vividly remember a solitary walk through the darkened, then-still-slightly-shabby museum with an extended meditation on Van Dongen's Anna de Noailles. (I had no idea then she was was a famous artist in her day.)

Yesterday, we went to see the 'Matisse and his friends' exhibit (as I call it) in Het Stedelijk with our son. I was surprised there were fewer crowds than its neighbors (Het Rijks and Het Van Gogh) attracts; we had no wait to enter the exhibit. The expanded building feels very clean.

When I was a kid, there had been obligatory, school-visits to local museums. At most of these, I was more fascinated by other visitors, especially the earnest art-students with their drawing pads who would patiently copy the paintings on the wall, than by the art works on display. But, at Het Stedelijk, I was mesmerized, even frightened, by Edward Kienholz's The Beanery. To this day, when I see a mechanical clock I recall -- by the magic of association -- that installation; and sometimes when I walk into a dive, I encounter clock-heads before my brain tells me I am wrong.

At the end of our visit, we went to the gift-shop to buy a Matisse-post-card. To my surprise, the fancy store had an excellent and broad selection of books in twentieth century (Continental) aesthetics, critical theory, and Continental philosophy more broadly--all attractively displayed in the gift-store. The only analytical philosopher in sight was Danto. I was bemused to see so much once-radical-chic assimilated to a tasteful, bourgeois environment.

But as I reflected on the book display, with my finger-tips sensually caressing the elegantly designed covers, I recognized that these densely argued, jargon-rich books were expected to sell. There is evidently a market for this kind of philosophical elitism--one associated with the twentieth century avant-garde and conceptual art. When I was an undergraduate, and even a PhD student, I was assured, always in passing, over and over again, that Continental philosophy is bullshit and rubbish; that its jargon masked the empty rhetoric of charlatans; of course, I was also repeatedly told that Heidegger was a Nazi (recall, and here). (Nobody ever seemed to notice that if Continental philosophy was fully implicated in Nazism it was the opposite of empty rhetoric.)

The gift-shop, which is managed, at least in part, by the up-market German artsy-chain, Buchhandlung Walther König, offers Lacan, Zizek, Sloterdijk, Butler, Arendt, Deleuze, Badiou, etc. (I even saw a book by Sylvère Lotringer for the first time.) Evidently, Continental philosophy is either status-enhancing and, thus value-added to the art-replicas, post-cards, and glossy catalogs on display in the store, or it is, by now, firmly associated with modern art and part of the same market. I looked around me. I saw several people picking up books and heading toward the cash register. (I bought Harman on Latour.) I scrutinized their faces; I didn't think they were buying these books to be displayed on coffee-tables alongside the heavy-glossy, Works of Brancussi. I wondered how large the public was that would seek out the challenge of grappling with continental philosophers during the holidays.

Whenever analytical philosophers make a public impact, I feel a kind of Humean pride, even when I know I ought to feel better. In Holland several of my former teachers -- Dennett, Nussbaum, etc. -- are TV personalities, and whenever they are featured this pleases me greatly (even if I disagree with their utterances). I don't feel the same emotion when I encounter media attention for Continental philosophers (except, of course, my NewAPPS buddies). In fact, in looking over the book-store display, I felt a soft-jealousy. 

In practice, analytical philosophy is slowly displacing continental philosophy in the modern, grant-driven university research environment of the European Continent; the grant agencies focus on public utility, objective metrics, and embrace a veneer of scientism. We have become little cogs that push the scientific research frontier along. Carnap's bet was prescient.

In much of Europe we are now a generation or two removed from Christianity, and philosophy's role as a secular placeholder -- in the manner of 19th century aesthetic experience as a secular placeholder for religious experience -- of creative theology and public prophecy is fading; the last gasp of such theology can be found in the Stedelijk's rooms devoted to high conceptual or minimal art of the 1980s (e.g. Sol Lewitt). It is, thus, no surprise that the best Continental philosophy is not emanating from Paris anymore. It's Americans or those that lived Marxism that re-fuel it until, perhaps, our newer immigrant populations re-animate the tradition.

As we left the museum, I regret failing to introduce my son to Kienholz's The Beanery.

Guest post by Joel Katzav: Philosophical Competence

[Below is a guest post by Joel Katzav, who inspired my post, which elicited this response by Jon Cogburn (and some discussion) at NewAPPS. It seems only fair to let him explain his position, after I hijacked his idea. The usual caveats apply.--ES]

Eric recently characterized my view that philosophical competence should be taken to include the ability constructively to participate in multiple philosophical traditions. I mostly like his formulation of the view, so I do not want to clarify it further here. I do, however, present some of the reasons I have for preferring it. One reason is pragmatic. The requirement would help to inculcate, in individual philosophers, a better appreciation of the epistemic limitations of philosophy and thus make it harder to maintain the view that philosophy is a science.  Another motivation is more principled. Philosophy, in my view, should be pervaded by forms of inquiry that aim to make no ultimate assumptions in answering its questions, including no ultimate methodological assumptions. Moreover, if it should be thus pervaded, many philosophers should strive not to belong to any philosophical tradition. And all philosophers should generally be able constructively to participate in a variety of philosophical traditions.

The idea that a field of research is a science tends to bring with it the idea that the field has a privileged methodology for addressing its fundamental questions. In the social sciences, for example, the claim that sociology is a science includes a commitment to the view that its questions are best answered by using a certain, so-called ‘positivist’, methodology, one attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the natural sciences and especially to physics. Similarly, when philosophy has been said to be a science, it has often been said to be a science by virtue of its having a privileged method. Russell, for example, told us that

[m]odern analytical empiricism [...] differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy [History of Western Philosophy, chapter XXXI].

Why did you leave NewAPPS?

So, why did you leave NewAPPS, really?

In the Summer of 2006 I was having drinks with a senior philosopher I admire professionally and as a human being. We were celebrating my having landed a tenure track position in philosophy at Syracuse and my interlocuter's endowed chair at a top department. While initially there was shared satisfaction, there was a bit too much of it. In fact, I was shocked to learn (after a few cocktails) that my drinking partner was expressing dissatisfaction with the present chair, and a desire to 'move up.' Status is a scarce good, and I saw with a sudden, naked clarity that even if you have a lot of it from one perspective, it may feel as too little too late, especially if you have nourished the need for some such recognition over the course of a life-time.

A year later, I willingly gave up working with the best philosophical colleagues I could imagine, and moved back to my native Amsterdam. Among many other motives, I feared that all my reasons for staying in Syracuse had been reduced to professional happiness (their collegiality and mentoring) and, crucially, professional ambition. I decided there was more to living than that.