Digressions&Impressions

Yolton's Polemics with Strauss, PT 1

I learned a few days ago -- [HT Michael Kremer] -- that (see here) Gilbert Ryle was the supervisor was of John William Yolton (1921-2005). This made me decide that I should treat Yolton as 'analytic.' That he is an analytic philosopher is by no means obvious when one reads his (1955) "Criticism and Histrionic Understanding" (Ethics (65):3) with its learned references to Hegel, Collingwood, Santayana, Croce, and Cassirer even if one allows that, unlike so many other Analytic partisans, Ryle was himself widely and deeply read in non-analytic philosophy of the age, especially (as Ami L. Thomasson (2002) summarizes) the phenomenological tradition. 

In the 1955 article, Yolton explicitly takes on a claim that he (not implausibly) attributes to Strauss' (1953) Natural Right and History (hereafter: NRH):

For Strauss, there are just two alternatives: either we are able to ground moral criticism in natural rights, or we are faced with moral nihilism. By extension, the same alternative could be posed in aesthetics and social criticism. While Strauss's defense or plea for natural right seems anachronistic, the fears which he expresses are genuine. But though genuine, they are misplaced, based as they are upon a misunderstanding of both the implications of the relativistic analysis of criticism and of the possibilities of criticism in general. There is nothing in cannibalism or civilization, in communism or democracy, which compels us to accept either. Every critical point of view rests upon certain accepted values which are valuable because they are accepted. But to urge that such a view opens the danger of moral chaos is simply to overlook the nature of moral conviction as well as to misunderstand the relation between criticism and values. (206)

That Yolton was familiar with Strauss' NRH, even a critic of it, surprised me greatly. And it is worth explaining why. This post is part of a series -- (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here; here; here) -- on the reception of Strauss by analytic philosophers in the post WWII era (triggered by an invite by Sander Verhaegh). The (1952) dissertation Ryle supervised, was clearly the basis for Yolton's influential book (1956) John Locke and the Way of Ideas (OUP). In its "preface" Ryle is explicitly thanked for his "many critical suggestions" and guidance (p. x).  

I didn't recall any mention of Strauss in the book, so I went back to search for it and found none. Since Strauss' interpretation of Locke is so important to the argument of NRH, and Yolton clearly was highly familiar with it, I was rather puzzled by the situation. Even more so, because Yolton's key claim about Locke's Essay (highlighted in the preface), it that "its philosophical doctrines were almost always directly related to the moral and religious disputes of the day." (viii) And that is Strauss's territory (especially the first two chapters of Yolton's book which deal, inter alia, with the law of nature).

One hypothesis I entertained was that Yolton had decided he didn't need to engage with NRH after (say) reading the highly critical (1955) review of Strauss' NRH in The Philosophical Review 64(2) by John Plamenatz (1912–1975). Plamenatz was (quoting Berlin's entry in ODNB) "trained in the use of the methods of such British thinkers as G. E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, H. A. Prichard, C. D. Broad, and W. D. Ross which dominated the Oxford scene in the 1920s and early 1930s."* And, Jo Wolff includes Plamenatz in his influential survey of the history analytic political philosophy. In his review (which, to be sure, is not only critical), Plamenatz had claimed that "Dr. Strauss's assertion that Locke's conception of natural right is fundamentally the same as Hobbes's is easily refuted." (p. 301). In fact, Plamenatz closes his review with a swipe at Strauss' method:

In several places Dr. Strauss suggests that one or other of the philosophers discussed by him was exercising caution in keeping his real opinions hidden from the vulgar, and that that is why he has been misunderstood. The reader is given the impression that he is being taken into the confidence of some of the greatest thinkers of the past. Whether he finds this impression flattering will depend on what he thinks of Dr. Strauss's book. (302)

But, of course, that a reader is flattered -- and surely Plamenatz is right about the effect of Strauss' writing on some -- is not itself an argument that Strauss' hermeneutics is unreliable or that the interpretations are false.

Anyway, my current guess is that Yolton's book went to the press before he read NRH. But that Yolton recognized Strauss' views were an alternative to his own, and worth refuting, is indisputable. For, in 1958, Yolton published "Locke on the Law of Nature" in The Philosophical Review 67(4). In it, Yolton explains that one of the main reasons "a reappraisal of Locke on the law of nature is" needed is in virtue of "the violently distorted interpretation recently advanced by Leo Strauss." (p. 478; he then cites NRH.) In his (1958) paper Yolton draws on his own book.+ And, in fact, the 1958 article is one long argument that Strauss' method is bogus and his reading of Locke (as, inter alia, a kind of Hobbesian) utterly misleading.

My current view is that Yolton's 1958 essay, marks a sharp distinction in the reception of Strauss by analytic philosophers.** Although its impact was really felt, only after Peter Lasslett's edition of Locke's Two Treatise, which strongly condemns' Strauss' reading of Locke and appeals to Yolton's essay, started to circulate widely. (Yolton's essay is itself barely cited before the mid 1970s.) I return to this paper in a follow up digression.

Okay, with that in place let's return to Yolton's earlier (1955) engagement which is much more respectful and also, de facto, an immanent critique (and also one that kind of anticipates Gadamer's philosophy).

Let's grant on Yolton's behalf  that his position embraces a circularity ("Every critical point of view rests upon certain accepted values which are valuable because they are accepted.") It's not a vicious circularity because the value is, in part, to use anachronistic language that accepted values help solve coordination problems; knowing the wide acceptance of certain values helps predict behavior and also helps organize political life. (This is among the reasons why they are valuable because they are accepted.) This is a kind of Humean point (although Yolton doesn't cite him here.) My reason for mentioning Hume should be clear below.

Okay, how does Yolton respond to Strauss? (Much of the article is a working out of Yolton's own view on the complex relationship between relativity of one's values and possibility of mutual criticism.) Here's what he says after developing his own views (which can be intuited from what I quote which is the final closing paragraph(s) of the paper):

Then it is time to set forth with boldness and firmness the criticism entailed in our position. Histrionic understanding, while being an indispensable condition for worth-while criticism, does not (as it first seems) render criticism impotent; rather it discloses its only valid habitat.

The bias and externality which are provincial and objectionable without histrionic understanding lose their discreditability [sic] when combined with a careful, sympathetic understanding. For some time now the critical problem has been resolved by the historicist emphasis upon the relativity of understanding viewed as conditioned by one's time and place. Such emphasis is obviously overstated since we can transcend our cultural context and understand other points of view internally. Criticism needs to be harnessed to such histrionic understanding, but it is necessary also to free ourselves from the either-or position of assuming, as Strauss does, that either criticism is based upon some absolute, such as natural right, or we end in moral nihilism. The kind of criticism which we make of other points of view is controlled by the kind of values inherent in our own position. Once the other position is understood intrinsically, our own commitments compel us to criticize. Since all criticism must be thus rooted in a point of view, the kind of placid change into cannibalism suggested by Strauss will be avoided simply by vigilance, by speaking and acting in defense of our own point of view. Criticisms cannot be made in vacuo; we must look to some set of values, to some basic convictions in order to determine what criticisms are appropriate in any given situation. Such a recognition of the intimate, dependent relation between accepted values or convictions and criticisms will not, of course, take care of the other problem that bothers Strauss: how can we say that our position should triumph over cannibalism? But the problem here is ill-stated, and the anticipated solution frustrating. The only solution for this problem tolerated by Strauss is some totalistic or some indisputable point of view which can legislate between right and wrong, while itself being immune to such ethical decisions. The desire to solve the issue of such moral and social tensions is urgent and important. But if we assume, as has been done so often in the past, that the solution of this problem must either be justified philosophically (in the sense of finding some absolute basis from which to resolve the conflict) or else degenerate into brute force or moral nihilism, we have misconceived the nature of this particular problem. The resolution of such moral or social conflict cannot be done in the manner required by Strauss simply because it is not a dispute which has that sort of solution: there is no point of view which is itself immune from criticism. Important as this area of ideological tension is, it cannot be solved by theory. We can only trust to reason and the council table for a peaceful coexistence. (211-212)

If I understand Yolton correctly here, his solution to the dilemma posed by Strauss, is to deny that it is capable of philosophical resolution (" it is not a dispute which has that sort of solution.") This has a Humean sensibility. I believe this is also Strauss' all things considered point of view.++ But rather as understanding that as a concession to Strauss, Yolton thinks it is an alternative and he opens the door to wise statecraft: "we can only trust to reason and the council table."

It suspect that Yolton means here to invoke the United Nations' Security Council. But it might be also understood as a metaphor for either great power discussions (this is how I understand what he is saying) or be understood for more general commitment to civilization as peaceful coexistence, that is, (recall this post on Khan; this one on Coetzee) of keeping the conversation going (rather than resort to arms). Either way, while philosophy may not be absent around the council table (recall 'reason') in the end it's a kind of prudence and skill -- Locke might see this as part of the 'art of government' - that maintains co-existence between incompatible viewpoints. While I have some practical sympathy for Yolton's position (and by no means hostile to his kind of relativism), having a seat at the table cannot be taken for granted in the manner he does. To be continued.

On Freeman's Review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, pt 1

Katrina Forrester's book is an engaging history of John Rawls's intellectual development and the outpouring of work in political philosophy his ideas have engendered. She focuses on the evolution of Rawls's theory of justice and the historical conditions from which it purportedly grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s. She discusses the responses of Rawls's notable critics and reviews alternative positions by significant philosophers and political theorists of the era. These include Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Goodin, H.L.A. Hart, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, Susan Okin, Onora O'Neill, Derek Parfit, T.M. Scanlon, Amartya Sen, Peter Singer, Judith Shklar, Charles Taylor, Judith Thomson, Michael Walzer, Bernard Williams, and other leading figures. Forrester concisely summarizes their core ideas and discusses how their work responds to or is critical of the left-liberal position Rawls advocated, liberal egalitarianism. The book provides a significant summary, with few distortions, of the philosophers' ideas it reviews, and is a notable contribution to the history of ideas.

The development and critical response to liberal egalitarian theories of justice has been a central concern within political philosophy since Rawls's Theory of Justice. This is the "shadow of justice" Forrester invokes in her book's title. Her primary thesis is that for the past fifty years, Rawls and the liberal egalitarianism he inspired have defined the intellectual environment of political philosophy, coloring the work of political philosophers of all persuasions. Rawls's shadow also defines the terms of engagement that must be adhered to by political theorists who reject justice as the proper place to begin, or even end, discussions in political philosophy and theory. "The Rawlsian framework came to act as a constraint on what kind of theorizing could be done and what kind of politics could be imagined." (p. 275)--Samuel Freeman reviewing Katrina Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 2019 at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

When back in the day I first read Samuel Freeman's review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, I was a bit puzzled by it. If the thesis of the book was really, as he reported, that [A] "The Rawlsian framework came to act as a constraint on what kind of theorizing could be done and what kind of politics could be imagined," why, from Section II onward, which starts with the observation that "We are in a period of heightened criticism of Rawls's views," did he spend most of the review defending Rawls' theory from criticisms? For the thesis attributed to Forrester [A] is a thesis in the sociology of knowledge or the historical epistemology of philosophy. It's an empirical (with an accompanying modal) claim orthogonal to criticisms of Rawls' views.

Taken as reported, and at face value, [A] is akin to, neither strictly analogous or identical I hasten to add, the claim that [B] in economics Koopmans, Marschak, Arrow, or Debreu got economists to use convex analysis and that this acted as a formal constrain on what kind of economy could be imagined, or at least the vocabulary in which one must speak in order to advance in professional economics.  [A-B] are claims about professional frameworks -- oh damn you Kuhn, I almost wrote 'paradigm' [Forrester uses "philosophical paradigm" [xx].* And while claims like [A-B] are never innocent -- they might well function in unmasking projects or limit theorems -- by themselves they cannot do the work of criticizing claims discussed within the framework or even about the framework.  Yet most of Freeman's review is a defense of the framework (and some of its specific commitments).

From the review I could not infer how Forrester's argument was supposed to work or what it really is. And when I re-read the review, I noticed that most of Freeman's references to Forrester's book where from the start and end of the book. (I now know they are nearly all from her preface and epilogue.) I left it at that. 

Well, that's not quite true. As regular readers know, back at NewAPPS I have blogged a bit about Rawls' annotations in his books (recall here;) and so knew he had read Robbins and Knight carefully (recall also here), and so back in 2015 I had some fun pointing to Rawls' esotericism in The Theory of Justice (really, go read the post). And yes, I lectured and blogged more about Rawls (especially on Knightian uncertainty and how his lectures on history shaped our perception of the past and present (recall), but except for contextualizing Rawls a bit in this essay (here), I held off on doing scholarship on him. Meanwhile, ever since I heard about a historicizing Rawls conference (2017) at Oxford that culminated in this special issue of Modern Intellectual History, edited by Sophie Smith, Teresa Bejan, and Annette Zimmermann, and with the appearance of Forrester's book, I knew that my time to pontificate about Rawls was up. There were now legitimate experts out there who had put the the pearls I had briefly touched but had put away in a safe, to work in important scholarship. (Not my first academic blunder.)

But then I read Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's fascinating review of Forrester's In the Shadow of Justice, in The Nation (here), which prompted a response from me (recall here). That review (which does not mention Freeman's review) attributes to Forrester a mechanism that might support an inference from [A] to a conclusion worth attacking by Freeman: [X] "By redirecting us from both history and sociology and premising justice on abstract game theory, Rawls’s book and its liberal vision of justice ended up promoting a political philosophy that was ill-equipped for the era of sustained academic and popular attention to historical injustice." But from Táíwò's review it's unclear if that claim [X] is in Forrester or Táíwò. [X] could at least explain why the constraint(s) mentioned in [A] would be taken as a criticism of the framework.  But as I noted in my response to Táíwò, Rawls' work had been (repeatedly) used to tackle historical injustice at least in journal articles.

Now, in reading Táíwò's review I had come under the impression that Forrester's book is a kind of intellectual biography. (He doesn't say this, but a lot of the material he discusses is presented in terms of Rawls' biography.) And in going back to Freeman's review after reading and blogging about Táíwò's, I realized that I could not triangulate from both reviews what Forrester's book was about. And since I felt a bit guilty in blogging about Táíwò's review without having read the book, I read the awe-inspiring book over break and even 'life-tweeted' my impressions by chapter. 

The book is difficult to summarize, but Forrester is admirably clear about its main aim: [I] "the book is about the politics of political philosophy and the political implications of conceptual choices." (xxi) Notice that Rawls is not mentioned in [I]. (The whole paragraph that explains [I] does not mention Rawls!) So, strictly speaking the thesis of the book is not about Rawls or his framework at all. Rather, Rawls is an example of [I] or is supposed to illustrate it [I]. Now, if one were to quote [I] out of context it would be puzzlingly ahistorical. The politics of political philosophy has shifted as philosophy has shifted sites and ages. We will never know exactly the circumstances of how Speusippus ended up succeeding Plato and not, say, Aristotle, and it is hard for us to grasp fully if this had effects on the important conceptual choices in the way political philosophy was pursued in (say) Hellenistic times, but we can know that it is institutionally different from the far-reaching effects (as Forrester shows) of the founding of Philosophy and Public Affairs by a then relatively close-knit group connected to (a reading group known as) Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy (SELF). So, we cannot take [I] at face value like that. But in context it is pretty clear what she means; the first words of the book -- "political philosophy in the English speaking-world today" -- supply the required context that makes precise the implied reference of [I].

It should be noted that it is by no means obvious one needs to discuss the politics of philosophy in order to discuss the political implications of conceptual choices. One can, for example, discuss inductive risk of a scientific theory without discussing the way science is organized. But plenty of philosophers of science (myself included) have discussed the two alongside each other. So, I understand the pull to do so. Implied in [I] is a non-trivial and controversial causal assumption that [a] the structure of academic discussion (at least in political philosophy), or at least the way such structure shapes the content of what is taken to be authoritative, has some downstream effects on the way the content of academic discussion is taken up in political life. And while I called it a causal assumption, one might equally suspect that lurking in [I] there is a more normative claim [b] that (a) political philosophy [worth having] ought to guide politics in some sense (and in a good way).  And, in fact, in Forrester's book [b] or something close to it is attributed to Stuart Hampshire (in his critique of utilitarianism, 82 & 242), and Alisdair MacIntyre (p. 82), and at times she is clearly tempted by it herself. 

In the book, the political implications of conceptual choices are primarily or perhaps I should say most recurringly investigated through left-leaning Oxford philosophers (many of whom influenced Rawls and, in turn, were influenced by him) and their aspirations to shape the British Labor party's politics. But is not limited to that, we also get a number of American case studies about how Rawlsian ideas were taken up in areas of applied and global ethics (but oddly not Norman Daniels' attempt to shape Hilary Clinton's healthcare plan along Rawlsian lines). We also learn how these fields came to be known as 'applied' (see, for example, 73).

As an aside, and briefly returning to my remarks on Táíwò's review, 'historical injustice' is indeed one of the cases Forrester discusses. But her argument is that it was Nozick who put historical injustice on the agenda for Rawlsians. For, the need for reparations' for historical injustice(s) falls out rather neatly from his argument because original ownership matters a lot to Nozick (see Forrester's pp. 130-135). And by using Bedau, who stands in as a 'left-liberal' (but whose intellectual formation precedes Rawls' main works), as a kind of guide to the debate, she helps explain why it took so long for Rawlsians to really develop an account of historical injustice (perhaps still insufficiently so to Táíwò). To put it as a joke: Rawlsians had to be invented first before an approach to historical injustice could be articulated by them.

In its arguments, Freeman's review ignores the politics of political philosophy. And so fails in the minimal requirements of reviewing; it does not accurately convey what the book is about. It is not a work in the "history of ideas" as he claims. By this I mean it is neither the history ideas in the technical sense of Arthur Lovejoy (and now barely practiced), the history of tracing unit-ideas (we would say, Memes) through different historical epochs (recall), nor is the presumably  more informal sense that Freeman intends by the the phrase, that is, a work of tracing influence or, as he implies, the evolution of a debate.

I do not mean to imply that Freeman's review isn't shaped by the politics of political philosophy. Note that in the first paragraph Freeman lists an alphabetized group of names he treats both as "significant philosophers and political theorists" and "leading figures." Those honorifics suggest we are not far from today's politics of political philosophy. But his first paragraph fails to convey how when Forrester is practicing history -- which to repeat is in the service of an a-historical claim [I] -- she does it.  

As I noted, Forrester's method, when she is practicing something like history of ideas (in the informal sense--it's more common to call it 'contextual history of philosophy' or 'history of political thought'), is to use a privileged well informed contemporary of Rawls to shed light on how Rawls transforms the debates within political philosophy and even establishes a new vocabulary or register for the field. And while some of the names Freeman mentions are, of course, important to her story, her methodological strategy is not to focus on the all-stars in depth. Rather she uses particular guides, most notable she uses Brian Barry for this very purposes. Not infrequently (but not as prominently as Barry) she uses Hugo Bedau (who is clearly not significant enough for Freeman to be listed among the leading figures). When she focuses on her Oxford theme, she uses Richard Titmuss' work to fascinating effect (and David Miller's). And as I hinted above, Stuart Hampshire shows up throughout the book for such illuminating purposes too. 

Because I have run on long as is, let me note one other aspect of how she understands [I]. She does not treat the politics of academic disciplines as autonomous. By this I mean, that she sometimes suggests that academic influence is itself a consequence of larger social forces. The most explicit example of this is after noting the malleability of communitarianism, her claim that "communitarianism...became influential within political theory because it did not seriously threaten the assumptions of the postwar liberal order." (257; emphasis added). The fuller significance of this is, and it is another way in which 'shadow' in the title of the book functions (and Freeman almost gets this right), is that in Forrester's analysis political theory as distinct from political philosophy becomes constituted, at least for a while, as a field that is un-Rawlsian.

Here she leaves hanging what the source of this status quo bias is (is it ideology, subtle disciplinary pressure from political scientists on appointments, is it funding sources within universities, etc.)? While she is very interested in themes like journal capture, and the way centers promote fields, Forrester is relatively quiet on such mechanisms. But I'll postpone my own more substantive criticisms of the book until I engage with more of the actual argument of the book (and perhaps I'll also return (eventually) to Freeman's effort to refute some of the claims of the epilogue). To be continued.

On the Polemics against Religious Philosophy in Analytic Philosophy

The views which have been noticed thus far attempt to limit the scope of scientific methods on the basis of considerations that are at least nominally scientific in character. The criticisms of science to which attention must next be directed do not even pretend to adduce scientific grounds for their claims, and are frankly based upon explicit theological and metaphysical commitments for which no experimental evidence is invoked. The chief burden of their complaints is that science offers no ‘'ultimate explanation” for the facts of existence; and their chief recommendation is the cultivation of “ontological wisdom” as the sole method for making “ultimately intelligible” both the order of the cosmos and the nature of the good life.

Some citations from recent writers will exhibit more clearly than would a paraphrase the unique mixture of pontifical dogmatism, oracular wisdom, and condescending obscurantism which seems to be the indispensible [sic] intellectual apparatus of this school of criticism. Ernest Nagel (1943) "Malicious Philosophies of Science" reprinted in Sovereign Reason, 37.

One of the sad spectacles of our age is to see otherwise mild-mannered and virtue-seeking religious philosophers cheer on the at times intemperate polemics of, say, Anscombe, Geach, and Plantinga. To say that it not to deny their philosophical contributions and skill in many contexts. And since I am not a stranger to polemics (and willing to grant I make fewer contributions to philosophy), even ill-tempered ones on the role of religion in philosophy, I am not casting stones that couldn't be thrown harder at me! 

It took me a long time to recognize that the championing of philosopher-brawlers (which is still endemic in wider analytic philosophy despite moves toward niceness), and the not infrequent closing of factional ranks, was itself a reflection of the sense of beleaguered-ness. And the reason I found it so hard to enter into that mind-set is that it seemed so self-evident to me that in the wider culture, Stateside, Christianity was by no means going extinct. But in riper age, I have come to recognize that behind all the aggressive political bluster, Christianity today exhibits all the signs of a world-historical implosion in the wealthier parts of the world. (That's compatible with phenomenal growth of Christianity elsewhere on the Planet.)* If I were Hegelian, I would say that the recent joyous flowering of analytic Christian, metaphysics is a sign of this! 

But I am not Hegelian. One oddity, however, is that if one goes over the classics of analytic philosophy, there is little explicit engagement with the status of theology and the role of religion in philosophy. Even Russell, who clearly was no friend of organized religion, claims, in a surprising moment of candor (not the least for the willingness to admit to an esoteric/exoteric distinction), that were he "speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God." ("Am I An Atheist Or An Agnostic? A Plea For Tolerance In The Face Of New Dogmas," 1947.)

And while I do not deny that verificationism undoubtedly also had an anti-Christian element to it, it was, as philosophical doctrines go, short-lived. Even so, it may well have reflected a broader climate that was very slow to disappear. One telling data-point for this thought, and to get a sense of that philosophical climate, it is notable that Gödel never published his ontological proof even after safely ensconced at the Institute for Advanced Studies. 

Okay, with that in place, I return (recall) to Nagel's "malicious philosophies of science." (See also, this post on the role of its companion piece, "Recent Philosophies of Science," in the displacement of dialectical materialism.) The role of 'malicious' in the title of the paper, gives a sense of its tenor. 

Nagel's paper itself has many virtues. He shows that many philosophical discussions -- which are still familiar -- about the purported gulf between mind and world; or how to make the qualitative nature of experience compatible with the purportedly mathematical character of modern science; or  the ways in which mechanistic (and/or deterministic) and physicalist science are taken to be incompatible with an orientation toward (emergentist) life or mind, all tend to rest on impoverished conceptions of the nature of science and the practice of experimentation in which much of science is rooted. 

But, it is notable, in the quoted passage above, that Nagel simply assumes that "experimental evidence" is required to ground or justify "explicit theological and metaphysical commitments." And while one can grant Nagel that science itself need not offer "ultimate explanation" for the "facts of existence" -- and, perhaps, in his day wisely does not try to do so [modern cosmology is frequently not so self-limiting] --, it follows straightforwardly from the undeniable possibility that experimental evidence may not settle all philosophical questions.+

The previous paragraph is not to excuse pontifical dogmatism or oracular wisdom. It's Thursday, and I carry my analytic membership proudly today. Nagel goes on to quote a number of eminent neo-Thomists (Gilson, Maritain and, although no neo-Thomists, Whitehead). I have to admit I do not find what they say especially puzzling or obscure. (But you may disagree.) What these positions have in common is a demand for (i) forms of explanation that go beyond efficient causes; (ii) an ultimate ground for existence beyond experience; (iii) and some connection between (i-ii) that conforms to cannons of intelligibility and a PSR.

The more interesting point I wish to make is that when Nagel shows, correctly, that science itself often goes beyond efficient causation, and even offers answers to 'why' questions, he himself notes that these (tentative) scientific answers are not themselves based on direct experiment: "in science the answer to the question "why" is...always a theory, from which the specific fact at issue may be deduced when suitable initial conditions are introduced." (SR: 29) And Nagel grants that these initial conditions are going to be arbitrary or brute in some sense on so at odds with (iii). (In addition, the theory may well go beyond the experimental evidence that helped generate and confirm it.)

That Nagel recognizes the significance of (iii) is itself made clear when he insists that the appeal to causa sui is itself "mystery." (SR 30) And while I have some sympathy with Nagel's point -- which echoes, in a curious reversal, Clarke's Newtonian response to Spinoza -- that there is something unsatisfactory, especially to those familiar with science's ability to explain surprising difference makers in the world, about the fact that "no matter what the world were like, no matter what the course of events might be, the same Ultimate Cause is offered an "explanation,"" (SR 30) it is a mistake to charge this 'explanation' with mystery. That something is relatively bad at explaining particulars does not make it oracular or mysterious. 

I do not mean here to re-litigate Nagel's polemics. But it is easier to understand that in an intellectual milieu dominated by ideas like, and presumably influenced by, Nagel's a certain kind of counter-polemic may have been welcome. 

Now, so far I have done little to make the animus behind Nagel's position intelligible. But there is no mystery there. Nagel fundamentally objects to two ideas: first, that "only one conception of spiritual excellence is valid." (SR 33) And Nagel clearly believes, not without reason, that his targets promote such (ahh) spiritual monism. And, second, he rejects the dogmatism about such spiritual monism ground in a kind of intellectual hierarchy. The second point is more implied (but see what he says about Maritain).

For, Nagel the two ideas he rejects have no standing because they are not "based upon objective measures of well-being." (SR 33) And such measures must, according to Nagel be ground in careful experimental practice. To be sure it is in virtue of his commitment to this that he lets the reader grasp that shares with the neo-Thomists a rejection of the utilitarian tendency toward eugenics (SR 32). So, unlike many friends of science and experimental practice, Nagel does not deny that science is implicated in many contemporary problems. But he believes that a kind of anti-scientism, "rejects the one instrument from which a resolution of these difficulties may reasonably be expected." (SR 33)**

Of course, even somebody sympathetic to Nagel, like myself, may note that he has no experimental (or historical/conceptual) ground to suppose there is just "one instrument" that can offer such a resolution. He smuggles a lot into what is 'reasonable' to expect. 

Let me wrap up. So while Nagel's heart is in the right place -- after all in line with (recall) his pluralism, he is defending the diversity of spiritual excellence! --, Nagel's argument goes off the rails because he thinks that the neo-Thomists (and other fellow travelers" unfairly take advantage of the fact that in "“in the midst of actual and impending disaster” and in “period of social crisis, when rational methods of inquiry supply no immediate solution for pressing problems” people are to listen to those that disparage or stress the limitations of the sciences. (SR: 18; see also “the mounting economic and political tensions of our age,” further down the page). That is to say Nagel echoes the epicurean and Humean polemic against superstition that it takes advantage of fear. But we don't need to be Yoda, to recognize that countering polemic with polemic is no path to wisdom.

 

 

 

Ernest Nagel's Meta-philosophy of science (and politics)

Scientific knowledge does not depend on the possession of  an esoteric capacity 
for grasping  the necessary structure of some superior reality, nor does it require 
modes of warranting beliefs which are discontinuous with operations of thought, 
identifiable and effective in the ordinary affairs of human life. The achievements 
of science are the products of a cooperative social enterprise, which has refined 
and extended skills encountered in the meanest employments of the human 
intellect. The principles of human reason, far from representing the immutable 
traits of all possible being, are socially cultivated standards of competent 
intellectual workmanship. The life of reason as embodied in the community of 
scientific effort is thus a pattern of life that generates an autonomous yet 
controlling ideal. That  ideal requires disciplined dedication without servitude to
 any ultimate authority, imposes responsibility for performance upon individual 
judgment but demands  responsiveness to the criticism of others, and calls for  
adherence to a tradition of workmanship without commitment to any system of 
dogma. To many commentators, the ideals realized in the enterprise of science are
 also the ideals  which areindispensable to the successful operation of any society 
of free men. Many thinkers, indeed, like John Dewey in America, have based their 
hopes for the future of mankind upon the extension of the habits of scientific 
intelligence to every stratum  of communal life and to every  form of social 
organization. --Ernest Nagel (1954), "The Perspectives of Science and the Projects 
of Man," in Sovereign Reason 306

In analytic philosophy fame is transient. For example, Ernest Nagel is now largely forgotten; a few contemporary philosophers of science are familiar with his writings on reductionism and a few others are familiar with his work on function statements. But I doubt he is the subject of many graduate seminars, and I suspect almost none of his papers are taught regularly. That Nagel was once an academic celebrity in the sciences, the leader of what we may call the scientific wing of pragmatism for a generation, influential supervisor, prolific author across many philosophical topics, introducing countless students and their teachers to Gödel’s Proof, and an intellectual polemicist of the first order is now merely a historical footnote.

So, for example, Misak calls "Nagel, perhaps Dewey’s best graduate student" (116) in her influential, The American Pragmatists. She discusses  him as "the paradigm of an analytic, logically inclined, philosopher of science in America," (150). But while she uses some of Nagel's writings throughout her work in discussing other thinkers, and hints that he may be responsible for the synthesis between logical positivism and pragmatism, (163) at bottom she devotes little space to him. 

This neglect is a shame because in addition to being technically among the more competent philosophers of his generation, Nagel was widely read, fiercely sought out opposing views, and always makes clear that philosophical disagreement may matter to the fate of civilization. As regular readers know I think Nagel decisively shaped the character of contemporary analytic philosophy, including its orientation on puzzle solving (even though in some senses we have not been as ambitious as he hoped as we'll show below). But today I assume that in the background. Here I focus on his own sense that in the wake of Einstein the "classical conception of scientific knowledge" (302)* had to be replaced with something new.

For Nagel, science shapes the broader culture in two distinct ways: first, as the fount of technologies and medicines. Second, by challenging established beliefs and intellectual habits (297). And while the former is more emphasized, not the least by scientists in their appeals for resources (296), the latter can also help re-shape (amongst others) our "basic aspirations," our "moral commitments," and "the principles" by which "actions" are evaluated (297).

These facts generate a "threefold task" for philosophy: (i) clarifying the bearing of trends in scientific inquiry upon pervasive conceptions of our place in nature; (ii) of making explicit the intellectual methods by which responsibly held beliefs are achieved; and (iii) of interpreting inherited beliefs and institutions in the light of current additions to knowledge. (297-298) This has an interest implication. For all three involve philosophy of science. And while we tend to think of philosophy of science as a fairly focused enterprise (characterized by (ii)) -- e.g., "the clarification of scientific procedures" (307) and the stress testing of concepts (306) --, for Nagel, philosophy of science becomes first philosophy: "the boundaries of the philosophy of science are in fact the boundaries of philosophy itself." (298) And while (i) speaks to what we may call the existentialist call to philosophy, the third (iii) involves, more dangerously, philosophical activity with the life of her (imagined) community. 

The quoted passage at the top of this post leaves it unclear to what degree Nagel agrees with his mentor, Dewey, that society needs to be modelled on the post-classical conception of science (which is fallabilist, embraces the significance of what is now known as Duhem-Quine, and which is aware of possible incommensurabilities). Nagel rejects the cult of genius and thinks that science is a collaborative enterprise, which involves the systematic and socially sustained refinement of ordinary cognitive processes. So, rather than seeing a scientific society as a means toward a technocratic elite, the idea that society needs to be modeled on science is thought be democratic in a non-trivial sense.

Crucially, on this model science is not a method of silencing others behind an authoritative consensus, but a mechanism by which one becomes responsive to reasons and participates in a social division of labor that is in some sense self-legislating. And so, this helps generate (through its spokesperson in philosophy of science, and in lived experience) an "attitude, at once critical and experimental, toward the perennial as well as the current issues of human life." (307)

And, in fact, Nagel is explicit that philosophy of science so understood, is "a champion of the central values of liberal civilization." And while in the early 1950s the survival of liberal civilization was more secure than it had been in a generation, it is clear that securing such a civilization is one of Nagel's main aims in all his polemics (recall; and here). And, of course, by providing freedom of thought, liberal civilization is conducive to a humane philosophy of science (understood as first philosophy):

The basis for a general outlook on the place of man in nature is supplied by detailed knowledge of the structure of things supplied by the special sciences— an outlook that contemporary philosophy of science has helped to articulate and defend. In the perspective of that outlook, the human creature is not an autonomous empire in the vast entanglement of events and forces constituting the human environment. Nevertheless, no antecedent limits can be set to the power of scientific reason to acquire theoretical mastery over natural and social processes. Every doctrine which pretends to set such limits contains within itself the seeds of intolerance and repression. Moreover, in the perspective of that scientifically grounded outlook, human aspirations are expressions of impulses and needs which, whether these be native or acquired, constitute the ultimate point of reference for every justifiable moral judgment. The adequacy of such aspirations must therefore be evaluated in terms of the structures of human capacities and the order of human preferences. Accordingly, though the forces of nature may one day extinguish the human scene, those forces do not define valid human ideals, and they do not provide the measure of human achievement. But an indispensable condition for the just definition and the realization of those ideals is the employment and extension of the method of intelligence embodied in the scientific enterprise. A judicious confidence in the power of reason to ennoble the human estate may seem shallow to an age in which, despite the dominant position in it of scientific technology, there is a growing and pervasive distrust of the operations of free intelligence. It may indeed be the case that the temper of mind essential to the exercise of such intelligence has no immediate social future. But the cultivation of that intellectual temper is a fundamental condition for every liberal civilization. By making manifest the nature of scientific reason and the grounds for a continued confidence in it, contemporary philosophy of science has been a servant of men’s noblest and most relevant ideals. (307-8)

It would be tempting to give Nagel the last word. But it is notable that he assigns to philosophy of science also (iv) the task of making manifest "the grounds for...continued confidence" in the nature of scientific reason. The future orientation of this task is quite striking. What could merit that?** So, lurking in Nagel's "naturalist" program is the presupposition that either skepticism can be defeated or, well, that we can be persuaded to it ignore its challenge. 

Quine, Spencer, Neurath, Regimentation & Imperialism

Each elimination of obscure constructions or notions that we manage to achieve, by paraphrase into more lucid elements, is a clarification of the conceptual scheme of science. The same motives that impel scientists to seek ever simpler and clearer theories adequate to the subject matter of their special sciences are motives for simplification and clarification of the broader framework shared by all the sciences. Here the objective is called philosophical, because of the breadth of the framework concerned; but the motivation is the same. The quest of a simplest, clearest overall pattern of canonical notation is not to be distinguished from a quest of ultimate categories, a limning of the most general traits of reality.--Quine Word and Object, 146-147

Quine's philosophy of science is now primarily understood in terms of his naturalism which makes the distinction between science and philosophy, or metaphysics, blurry. But as is, I assume, well known, he also embraced a distinct task for the philosopher: to paraphrase and thereby regiment scientific language into a simpler and clarified language. This task turns philosophy into a mopping up operation behind the research frontiers of science, but better a job than no job. And while Quine keeps his distance from Neurath's preference for orchestration of the unified language of science, it is notable that Quine thinks there is a possible regimented language of the broader framework shared by all the sciences. This part of Quine   ("ultimate categories, a limning of the most general traits of reality") is beloved by post-Lewisian metaphysicians with their fondness for fundamental languages at the end of scientific development.

Quine devotes the whole of chapter 5 of Word and Object to regimentation, so I do not mean to suggest my previous paragraph is suitable paraphrase for the idea. In particular, there are interesting questions to be asked about the nature of the regimented (logical) language, the relationship between the regimented languages of the special sciences and the broader framework language, and what the further point of a regimented language is. Later in the book, Quine casually notes that regimentation in the way he understands it has already a glorious history: "how powerful this combination is has been borne out by extensive logical regimentations of parts of science, especially mathematics, at the hands of Frege, Peano, and their successors."* (208) Quine's use of 'successors' is a bit cheeky, because back in 1936, in a little known essay, "A theory of classes presupposing no canons of type," Quine himself had deployed a "principle of regimentation" he had contributed to this glorious history.

My interest today is  in the word, ''regimentation,' used to describe this philosophical task. In 1957, Quine had used 'regimentation' in the sense intended here in "The scope and language of science," (BJPS, 8:29: 10). And as Peter Hylton and Gary Kemp note, he gives a nice sense of the point of regimentation there: "To some degree…the scientist can enhance objectivity and diminish the interference of language, by his very choice of language. And we concerned to distill the essence of scientific discourse, can profitably purify the language of science beyond what might reasonably be urged upon the practicing scientist." (7) In so far it is profitable, I leave aside here to what degree the return on investment is worth the opportunity costs.

But Quine does not comment on his choice for using this word. An unscientific search in scholar.google, suggested that the idea of regimenting language was not altogether uncommon in the half century before Quine (as the reference to his 1936 paper suggests). To the best of knowledge, however, Quine invented the coinage of regimentation in the sense under discussion.

I was reminded to reflect on this by a late essay by Herbert Spencer, "Regimentation," which appeared in his collection Facts and Comments (1902).+ Spencer himself knew that the "volume herewith issued I can say with certainty will be my last," and so it can be understood as a kind of literary last testament. As Davies notes, the tenor of the collection is fiercely anti-imperialist. (For an excellent treatment of Spencer's views, which dispels many common myths about him.) And the main argument of the essays I have read so far involves the ways in which imperialism corrupts and infects all of social life, including language, which takes on militaristic tropes and metaphors.** For, Spencer "regimentation is another aspect of that general retrogression shown in growing imperialism and accompanying re-barbarization. "

And like a contemporary cultural critic, Spencer notes that the widespread use of 'regimentation,' and not just it,  indicates the "graduated subordination which we see in an army, characterizes a militant society at large more and more as militancy increases." One of the subtexts of the essay is the co-constitution of imperialism, militancy, and social planning. And echoing Mill, Spencer deplores the way homogeneous society is the product of nation-building at home: "we see that even in a single generation great strides have been taken towards a regimental organization for moulding children after an approved pattern." In particular, regimentation involves the subordination of spiritual ends toward society's directed use of our bodies.++ One of Spencer most striking claims is that such regimentation is directed and developed by city governments in their provision of public goods and services: "each of these is, as we see, like a military administration is having ranks subordinate one to another."

As an aside, the broader thrust of Spencer's essays serve as a record of the retreat of liberalism even in Victorian England at the end of the nineteenth century. This was echoed by a later generation of liberals confronted by its near collapse in the 1930s. I think Spencer's essays can also help explain why liberalisms' ideas lost their vitality in this period. But that's for another occasion.

Let me tie the two threads together. First, Quine's use of 'regimentation' is associated with concepts like purification, clarification, and distillation. These, we may say, chemical metaphors of refinement tend to avoid the militant network of associations that Spencer had diagnosed. This alone is peculiar. 

Here's a speculative thought. There had been a brief, polemical debate about the tendency of the tropes and metaphors used within (let's call it) scientific philosophy. Neurath, when (in 1946) explaining his fondness for, and responding to Kallen's criticism of, his "pet word," 'orchestration,' had gone out of the way to distance it from various totalitarian and programmatic connotations. Instead, for Neurath, orchestration should be understood as a "democracy of cooperation." Kallen had charged the unity of science movement with "imperialistic" designs. The whole exchange is worth reading.*** My present point is that there was self-conscious reflection on the way the network of words used for specialized terminology within scientific philosophy may be associated with wider political trends. 

I have already reflected with the help of Greg Frost-Arnold on Quine's understanding of clarity. So, let me leave that aside here. Regimentation is a form of disciplining (a word notably absent from Quine's idiolect). And, it is worth asking who is, thereby, disciplined. It turns out both science and philosophy. The main benefit of regimentation is more disciplined metaphysics which can take place, as it were, in the regimented language. So, regimentation is a kind of self-disciplining of philosophical activity.

But Quine-ian regimentation is also, a species of disciplining of science; not, I hasten to add, to pursue "practical language reform," (as a Marxist might) or to tell scientists how to do science. Quine thinks, however, that no language is fully "neutral" and that language shapes scientific activity. And a purified language may well improve actual science, indirectly, by avoiding ambiguity and other sources of interferences within science. One important effect of this is that scientists do not have (ahh) the last word on their own output. (Quine here echoes Toland, Berkeley, Hume, in response to Newton.) Their authority is, thus, partially subordinated to philosophy.+++ And, while I would hesitate to call this an 'imperial philosophy,' in this sense, 'regimentation,' seems an apt choice.

On Summer Remarks by Influential Philosophers

It’s a good moment, then, to point out how bogus and counter-productive the demand for ‘coverage’ in the reviewing process has become and how it lends itself to just these sorts of abuses. The area of Tuvel’s work is at the intersection of many different styles of philosophy and other kinds of commentary and much of it is just plain awful. In this it is no different from most if not all other areas of philosophy. It’s the nature of creative work, especially when institutionalized and produced at great volume. Tuvel had every right to ignore work, even whole areas of work, that did not seem to her to be worth discussing or seemed outside the concerns of her article.

The sheer quantity of scholarly work is an unmanageable burden for everyone in the academy today. The ideology of ‘coverage’ as a scholarly responsibility takes this growing volume and inscribes it in the production of new work added to the pile. This is especially destructive for new scholars trying to break in to publication in journals. The laziest and most automatic response for any overburdened journal reviewer to give to a submission is to say something of the form ‘Well, what about Professor X, or journal article Y and Z? What do you say to that?’--Richard Moran (July 24) @Leiterreports

While I was on holiday, enjoying Animal Farm on a pleasant French vineyard not far from Narbonne-- Orwell has become bourgeois consumption --, my friends in the philosophical blogosphere were enthusiastically sharing Richard Moran's remarks. A week later, the remarks by another influential moral psychologist, David Velleman, were greeted with derision.* Before I comment on this juxtaposition. I quote the gist of Velleman's remarks:

First, philosophy journals should adopt a policy of refusing to publish work by graduate students. Second, philosophy departments should adopt a policy of discounting graduate student work in tenure and promotion reviews. These policies would be designed to halt the arms race in graduate-student publication.--David J. Velleman (July 31) @Dailynous

As Velleman notes, there are costs that follow from the arms race in publication among  PhD students alongside the (now successful) efforts to limit the length in graduate school. Here are four: (i) late-bloomers (like my former self) become systematically disadvantaged; (ii) intellectual risk-taking is systematically discouraged; (iii) time consuming literature reviews are disappearing; (iv) peer review is being overwhelmed. (Velleman notes (ii & iv)). Even so, regular readers will recognize that I am no fan of Velleman's proposal because (as many others noted) it obviously would benefit PhD students in more prestigious departments like his. (As regular readers now, I am inclined to change our review/editorial process.) But the derision was peculiar. For, if Moran is right, that most publications in all areas of philosophy are "plain awful,"** then, all other things being equal, somebody should try to limit publication. I am not endorsing Velleman's proposal because I am no friend of limiting expression. 

More seriously, we should be a bit suspicious of remarks like Moran's for three reasons: first, we should not be giving people excuses and cover to ignore others.  For the best way to entrench status quo bias in philosophy -- and, thus, to promote the interests of the sociologically influential -- is to promote outlooks that allow objections, and would be objections, to be dismissed without hearing. This is one reason why I am always so critical of attempts to insert Kuhnian ideas (about paradigms, normal science, consensus, etc.) into the self-conception of professional philosophy. To put it simply: the dismissal of other scholarly work has to be earned through careful engagement. Our abiding vice, in analytic philosophy (we're just like humans sometimes), is that we allow both the dismissive gesture and the unfair (albeit funny!) take-down (by the young wolf) to replace such care.

Second, and connected, philosophy is a difficult topic. Our training -- I mean the analytic kind -- is especially good at finding what's wrong in (other people's) arguments. It's not especially well-calibrated in recognizing what's potentially interesting and insightful in other people's work, especially contributions we deem unclear (and, sorry to say, not promoted by a high status figure in the field).+ A generation ago, leading analytic philosophers were nearly unanimous that Judith Butler's work was, unworthy of attention, merely verbal garbage (as late as 2012 Brian Leiter could be construed as suggesting she was a charlatan.) But now we know that her views have been very fruitful in order to articulate and make visible all kinds of social phenomena well beyond the ones she addressed in Gender Trouble. (The whole thing is also ironic because one -- perhaps overly simplistic -- way to understand Butler is to see that she took analytic ideas and applied them to new phenomena with a sensibility inspired by Derrida.) 

Because original contributions to our collective enterprise can come from many areas we do ourselves a disservice by discouraging engagement with work of others. (One reason why I am a relatively loyal reader of Velleman's work is that he engages with non-analytic work.) Especially in fields where lots of disciplines and academic practices come together, one should read widely. (It would also slow down publication!) Not just because there are plenty of opportunities for arbitrage, but also because the fertility of such an area lies precisely in the possibility of recombining existing concepts and methods in promising new ways. (I leave aside my usual focus on responsible speech [recall] and the ethics of displacing of scholarly perspectives that originate in lived experience of vulnerable peoples [I found Kyle Powys Whyte at Dailynous insightful on this point.]) Now that analytic philosophy has no viable institutional competitors in professional philosophy, I sometimes wonder if our leading lights worry that our students and, thus, the whole enterprise, will be contaminated by the lack of clarity and muddled thought they will find in works we should ignore.

Third, I found Moran's comments on the critics of Tuvel peculiar. Here's one of the most prestigious and established people in the field, interpreting the behavior of others largely in political terms. I quote (selectively):

among the signers ... were various philosophers and others who were furious that their own work on transgenderism and related issues was not given respectful attention in Tuvel’s article. This created an unholy mixture of academic status consciousness and political self-righteousness, as well as the unedifying spectacle of tenured professors protecting their turf against a younger colleague. Among the later defenders of the original statement denouncing Tuvel’s article the tone often moved back and forth between criticizing Tuvel for violating a professional scholarly responsibility to respond to the existing literature on a subject, and an insistence on a kind of political representation in scholarly work. The invocation of the supposed scholarly responsibility of ‘coverage’ acted as a cover for the insistence on political representation, which in turn, for some of the original signers, served as a cover for a demand that their own work be given a kind of attention that Tuvel may not have thought it merited.

Now, regular readers know I try not to be naive about even the most principled and majestic politics of philosophy (recall my piece on David Lewis). Incentives, status, and a whole variety of politics matter in professional philosophy and many of our speech acts could, in principle, be reduced to them. As it happens, I thought the petition and its demands foolish (and, yes, unprofessional), and I went against the desire of some of the signers of a policy of principled non-engagement with Tuvel's piece (recall). Moran may well have discerned some of the ugly motives in play. Yet, not for the last time, I conclude (inspired by Ruth Chang) that too much time in the social hierarchy of professional philosophy warps our reactive attitudes. For, when confronted by the demand for recognition (for the worth of one's lived experience, scholarly work, attention, etc.) one ought not refuse to grant even minimal good faith to the supplicant's speech act.

Let's toast the prosperity of The Manor Farm!

On the absence of Method(s) in analytic (Political) Philosophy

1. People like me, who have been trying to do philosophy for more than forty years, do in due course learn, if they’re lucky, how to do what they’ve been trying to do: that is, they do learn how to do philosophy. But although I’ve learned how to do philosophy, nobody ever told me how do it, and, so far as I would guess, nobody will have told you how to do it, or is likely to tell you how to do it in the future. The most charitable explanation of that fact, the fact, that is, that nobody tells philosophy students how to do philosophy, is that it is impossible to explain to anybody how philosophy is to be done. The only way to teach people how to do it is by letting them watch, and listen, and imitate. The least charitable explanation of the self-same fact, the fact that we don’t teach you how to do philosophy, is that those of us who have learned how to do it struggled so hard to get where we now are that we’re now selfishly reluctant to give you some of the fruit of our struggle for free: we think you, too, should suffer. Probably there’s some truth in each explanation.--G.A. Cohen "How to Do Political Philosophy" 225. [Edited by Mike Otsuka]

I am unsure if Cohen would have wished for these remarks to appear in print, but I am pleased Mike Otsuka included them in his edition. There is much in this short essay to ruminate on, and I hope to return to it again before long.

Once upon a time, Cohen teaches, professional (analytic) philosophers* were not trained in method. These days there are handbooks to philosophical method (edited by leading philosophers), even one on the methods (note the plural) in analytical political theory (which I am toying with buying). So, it may become hard to imagine to some readers what analytic philosophy was like in the days when its methods were not articulated yet. The previous sentence is deliberately equivocal between the scandalous thought that in earlier times [A] analytic philosophy was free of methods and the equally scandalous thought (the one G.A. Cohen entertains and considers plausibly true) that [B] the methods were kept quiet. Cohen adds to B the further rationalization/explanation [B*] that people may have thought -- perhaps because they repeatedly read the Meno or Protagoras -- the methods of philosophy cannot be explicitly taught/said, but have to be shown via example/exemplars. 

Before I say more about [A-B-B*] and [C] the more sadistic-survivor-syndrom interpretation [recall "those of us who have learned how to do it struggled so hard to get where we now are that...we think you, too, should suffer"] as well as its close cousin [C*] the ungenerous interpretation ["we’re now selfishly reluctant to give you some of the fruit of our struggle for free"], it is worth marking three features of Cohen's position (and again, for all I know he may well have not wished to publish this). First he is surprisingly immodest in his willingness to assert that he is now a proper exemplar who has "learned how to do philosophy." (I am not suggesting he is wrong.) Second, in the paper, he associates philosophy primarily with arguments. Much of his initial, primary advice is about how to think of one's arguments and what to aim for in them. In fact, these two features of Cohen are connected, in a sense, because what Cohen wishes to promote, it seems, is an understanding of philosophy as a kind of hyper-self-consciousness about the nature, aims, targets, and status of one's argument. (That is, the connection is not one of entailment; but Cohen seems to suggest that because he is in control of argument he can have  a proper estimation of his own status.)**

And, third, it is a bit odd that if Cohen thinks philosophical method is about argument that (a) it was not taught and (b) that it would be all that difficult to teach. (That's compatible with few getting good at it.) I actually think this shows that the focus on argument is a bit of a red herring. For, Cohen also allows that

Sometimes one senses that a consideration has some sort of bearing on a controversy...and it is nevertheless worthwhile bringing the consideration forward, if only because it may provoke a discussion that leads to a clearer idea of the polemical significance of the consideration, that is, into which box(es) in our matrix it falls. One should aspire to clarity, but one should not avoid possible insight for the sake of avoiding unclarity. A bad way never to make a mistake is to shut up and say nothing. (226)

I am not suggesting  Cohen is defending here the worth of argument-free insight, but he does seem to think that acquiring a certain amount of clarity and insight may be worth the price of argumentative muddle. I think Cohen is, in fact, rather skeptical about what arguments can achieve because he is extremely aware that what grounds (forgive the property metaphors) the occupation of philosophical territory is the commitment to a "point of view" (232) as "obvious." (It's not that arguments for these point of views don't exist; they do exist and can be refined and clarified greatly.) In this essay, Cohen does not say much more, I think, about how one comes to find oneself to occupy a philosophical territory, so we'll leave it at that. (One senses it's not so much Carnapian voluntarism as it is to be explained, if there is one, in an emotional commitment to certain values as non-relinquish-able.)

I do want to close with two alternative suggestions. I think the most charitable explanation of that fact that the methods of philosophy were not taught is that, to restate, [A] analytic philosophy was free of methods. (This is different from the claim that [D] the methods of (early to middle) analytical philosophy were not unified.) Now, I am aware that, at various point early analytic philosophers certainly discussed the methods of sciences; they also often claimed to be following a "method of analysis" or a methodized "logical analysis" or a "method of rational reconstruction."++ And their writings are full of proposals (for others) to follow some method or another, but it's by no means obvious that there was a method. (There are, rather, lots of attempts at articulating some method or another; recall my exchange with Dennett and his response on analysis; and also this post on the Strawson-Carnap exchange) .) To say that there was no method is not a criticism. 

But it does lead me to the most uncharitable explanation of the silence over method: (recall) [E] it is a form of boundary policing. Under such a regime, outsiders are permanently mystified about the rules of the game because they don't know what move to make to acquire standing. [To put this in terms of a bad joke: insiders have Wittgenstein to explain the game to them; outsiders get bullied.] Obviously, the least charitable explanation need not be true. But there are plenty of incentives that are compatible with the truth.

If the least charitable explanation has some truth then it's a good thing that philosophy is being methodized. Of course, it need not follow that following philosophical method teaches you how to do philosophy.

 

 

On the role of Systematicity in an Impure Theory of a (Pluralistic) Liberalism worth Having

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.--Adam Smith (1790) The Theory of Moral Sentiments

The quoted passage from TMS is one of the epigraphs to Jacob T. Levy's (2015) Rationalism, Pluralism & Freedom (RPF). The other is to a passage from Mill's (1862) Centralization, in which Mill warns against local despotism. Levy's inspiring book, which is both a mitigated defense of the significance of intermediaries to a liberalism worth having as well as a fascinating re-visionary history of liberalism* in which the tradition of reflection on the so-called 'ancient constitution' is an independent stream, is framed by the often competing dangers and aspirations emanating from the so-called 'man of system' and the 'bussybodies.' The man of system represents the rationalistic impulse that in the name of justice and efficiency tends toward homogenization, (Weberian) rationalization, and a controlling, strong central government suspicious of local powers. Levy's discussion is useful to the scholar because he nicely brings out the ways in which Smith is clearly indebted to Montesquieu (and joins him in defending the significance of intermediaries) and especially astute about the ways Smith diagnoses the dangers of both central power(s) and local elites. Levy's book is so good that I regret not reading it before I completed my own, while  recognizing that if I had down so (it appeared when mine was under review) it would have caused lengthy delay.+

Before I get to a critical digression, I want to make two preliminary comments. One personal pleasure in reading Levy's book is that it provides a nice background to Levy's more general views familiar to regular readers of his essays (which often inspire me to figure out what I think); Levy has that rare capacity to speak to the political moment in an intellectual fashion with a distinctive, moral compass without falling victim to partisanship. While reading the book I felt I was visiting a friend in his home environment showing me his study and, thereby, allowing me to connect some dots about him. Second, Levy's book is self-consciously a contribution to impure political philosophy (a term borrowed from Williams). It is, thus, worth reflecting on RPF as an exemplar in that genre (not unlike Sabl's Hume's Politics). Some other time, I'll say more about Levy's contribution to the nature of such impure theory. What follows is a kind of indirect comment on that topic, too.

As noted above, Levy draws generous inspiration from Smith's critique of systematicity. He returns (66) to the passage from TMS quoted at the top of this post, and quotes it (alongside Montesquieu) more fully:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. 

Levy rightly resists the hungry temptation (familiar from those inspired by Hayek) to turn Smith into a mere critic of social planning. Smith here is defending not just gradualism, but also the political dangers in trying to eliminate intermediaries, that is, "the great interests." In the paragraphs just before the one that Levy quotes, Smith discusses these in terms of "the great orders;" the core upshot of that discussion can be summarized as follows, "The man whose public spirit is prompted altogether by humanity and benevolence, will respect the established powers and privileges even of individuals, and still more those of the great orders and societies, into which the state is divided" (emphasis added). As Levy correctly notes Smith's political theory is both a great critique of the moral abuses of intermediaries (including guilds, imperialistic monopolies, state religions, etc.) and aims at defending the rights of these. Social intermediaries are worth preserving and are, in fact, not simply reducible to the the desires and interests of those that compose them (recall)--they have a principle of motion of their their own (that is also resistant to outside imposition).** While I would emphasize more (than Levy does) the significance of aesthetics (apparent "beauty") to the "madness" of fanaticism that is a danger in Smith's "man of system," so far so good.

But Levy's analysis of Smith and the nature of systems is also partial. I say this not to deny that for Smith "love of system" tends to generate not just fanaticism or expert-overconfidence. But that Levy omits something important starts to become clear if we also quote the closing sentence of the paragraph, which Levy fails omits:

If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Here we see that what Smith is after, and this is something that Levy explicitly recognizes  (when discussing Montesquieu): that social reformers are more likely to succeed, and less likely to generate dangerous, political "disorder," if their reforms work with the "grain" of society, that is, the interests and commitments of intermediaries (and individuals). Social reform is not left to the market or only to bottom up processes; it can be influenced and guided by the center if it (the center) is capable of understanding its own limitations and taking into account the interests and aims of social actors.

In addition, the center must be guided by a system. For Smith claims, in the first sentence of the next paragraph, that “some general, and even systematical, idea of the perfection of policy and law, may no doubt be necessary for directing the views of the statesman.” Such a system allows it to avoid acting in ad hoc fashion and also be able to grasp which compromises are worth accepting and which undermine its moral and political aims. That is, a system is required to guide (not control) long-term planning and to allow trade-offs to be modeled and foreseen. For, while “the judgments of mankind [can be] perverted by wrong systems,” Smith actually explicitly defends systematicity--this should come as no surprise because throughout his life, Smith called attention to (a) the systematicity of his own works (say, here and here) and (b) he refers to his own project as a "system of natural liberty." More important, Smith thought that (c) a proper, (aestheticized) “love of system” can activate the most “noble and magnificent” political and philanthropic projects and the right sort of “public spirit.” In particular, a system-inspired public spirit can even compensate for an absence of the love of humanity or “pure sympathy” in a political agent.++ (Smith is often treated as a sentimentalist, but throughout his writings rules and the reflections of reason can compensate for lack of feeling.) For the a system that can or does generate such “public welfare” is a system worth having. (An important element in a right sort of system is Smith's concern to address inductive risk, but about that another time more.)

Let me wrap up. Levy's book attunes the reader to the the frequent dissonances between the "freedom to associate"" and the "freedom within (or from) group life."  (I write "frequent" because Levy is is equally astute about the ways such freedoms can reinforce each other.) Levy is, however, a skeptic about the ability of a normative and impure system that can do full justice to such dissonances. I think this is due to the fact that the most influential systems we have either rationalize these away (toward one side, often favoring the state or justice at the expense of other important liberal commitments) or contain non-trivial (Rawlsian) "wobbles" from  the point of view of coherence and reason. But what makes Smith especially notable today, or so I argue in my book, is that he is an exemplar in offering such a system without the (one-sided) rationalization or the wobble. That's not because Smith squares a theoretical circle (overlooked by Levy and the tradition), but because he embraces deviations from reason and coherence as an endemic feature of social life and internalizes it in his system (or so I argue). This generates its own tensions, of course, but about these another time.

When will the progress of analytical philosophy be defended without propaganda?

Frege’s article had a galvanizing effect on such philosophers as Bertrand Russell. When the young Russell arrived as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1890, philosophy was dominated by the ponderous metaphysics of German idealism, which pounded out propositions purporting to delve into the murky and nebulous features of “the Absolute.” An older Russell once reminisced that he had thought of language as transparent, the medium of thought that could simply be taken for granted. Frege demonstrated otherwise. Instead of trusting language to transport one into intimacy with the Absolute, it might be good to first discover how language manages to do more basic things, in the manner of Frege. Modern philosophy of language and analytic philosophy were both born in this same technical turn taken by philosophy. "What Philosophers Really Know" by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (October 8, 2015, New York Times), reviewing Philosophy of Language: The Classics Explained by Colin McGinn. {HT Liam Kofi Bright & Jason Stanley}

After the string of (self-inflicted) bad press received by Colin McGinn's teaching style and recent academic publications, it's nice to be reminded of some of his academic virtues in Goldsteins review ("McGinn has succeeded brilliantly in demonstrating the substantive progress made in philosophy of language.") The review itself is a pleasure to read and makes useful distinctions among, "philosophy of language," "the linguistic turn," and "ordinary language philosophy," that should help the public better understand analytical philosophy's practices and history. Yet the review is framed as a robust defense of the "cumulative progress of" analytical philosophy. And here the review manages, despite astute observations (as regular readers know, I like her resistance to the idea that consensus is constitutive of expertise), to turn into clownish propaganda.

There are four sure ways of recognizing one is in the realm of analytical propaganda: (i) the origin myths of the rebellion against British Idealism contain obvious blunders: (ii) analytical philosophy's progress contains neither Kuhn loss nor other problems; (iii) obligatory mention of Heidegger as bad guy; (iv) the role of ethics in analytical philosophy's birth is systematically effaced.

On (i): above, I quoted the treatment of British Idealism and Russell. Russell did not attribute to the British Idealists the idea that language could be transparent; it was the view that the youthful Russell entertained himself while writing one of the masterpieces of early analytical philosophy, The Principles of Mathematics. ( Peter Hylton has made the point in print.) His later self, perhaps influenced by the encounter with Wittgenstein's writing, saw the error of his earlier analytical ways! I am no specialist of British Idealism, but I would be amazed if they held something like the transparency of language thesis. They held, rather, (in Bradley's hands) that language was something to be left behind in (the ascent toward) the Absolute (a view shared with folk like Plato and Spinoza and several other early modernists).

Goldstein's treatment of the origin of analytical philosophy, which was undoubtedly common when she was a PhD student, is especially cringe-worthy because it provides a dated view of what's going on in (ahh) the best analytical departments. Here I don't just mean the work by historians of analytical philosophy, but rather the work by metaphysicians like Jonathan Schaffer (in a famous paper) and Michael Della Rocca (in one of my favorite papers), who have returned with a confident and self-critical eye toward the origin myths of analytical philosophy. They show that today we can reflect on the history of analytical philosophy without anxiety.

On (iv): at one point Goldstein writes, "Analytic philosophy originated with philosophers who also did seminal work in mathematical logic, most notably Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, and the alliances with both formal logic and science are among its defining features." She then goes on to offer the gratuitous and obligatory dismissal of Heidegger ((indeed he is coupled, en passant, with "Slavoj Žižek") thus covering (ii)). Goldstein's position makes sense of the self-conception of analytical philosophy as advanced during the early Cold War by influential disciples of the first generation of logical positivism and culminated in Dummett's efforts to turn Frege into the true founder of analytical philosophy. This story effaces the role of one of the founders, G.E. Moore, whose reputation rested and rests, in part, on his work in ethics not logic.

There are two further problems in this narrative: first, by joining analytical philosophy into an "alliance" with science, Goldstein quietly glides over Wittgenstein's philosophical hostility to natural science. It also misses, say, the role of analytical philosophy's practice as friendly critic to science's public roles as manifested in the wonderful work by the second generation analytical philosopher, Stebbing, who is generating more interest both among those who care about analytical philosophy as public philosophy and the nature of responsible speech/propaganda as well as those who wish to recover the roots of metaphysical analysis.

But, more subtly, second, Goldstein's picture completely leaves Sidgwick's role in the origins of analytical philosophy out of the story.* By this I do not merely mean that Rawls, Parfit, Singer (et al) are in (ongoing) conversation with Sidgwick; rather, I also mean that the Cambridge side of analytical philosophy originates in the circle around Sidgwick and students who were preoccupied with a whole range of problems (besides ethics, logic, and linguistic philosophy), including, political economy, philosophy of science, probability, etc. In my view this story has not been fully told yet, but would include, in addition to the names already mentioned, also Ramsey, W.E. Johnson, Broad, and Keynes father and son.

Finally, all change, even the progressive, "technical" ones, can entail losses ("progress" and "technical" are repeated like a mantra in the review). Goldstein wisely (and correctly) places analytical philosophy's progress "more in the discovery of questions, which often includes the discovery of the largeness lurking within seemingly small questions." But she does not reflect on the fact that during this progress some questions may have become harder to ask+ and other worthy questions were regularly overlooked (if not mocked); in closing her review, Goldstein recognizes that there remain questions of enduring interest "not limited to philosophers," but fails to reflect on our tradition's repeated willingness to pretend that the most profound are not really philosophy.
 

 

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.