Digressions&Impressions

On The Historian of Philosophy as a Kuhnian Revolutionary

Thomas Kuhn opens The Structure 0f Scientific Revolutions with the following statement: 'History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.'  I hope that it isn't too pretentious to end my polemic with a paraphrase of that statement: History of philosophy, if viewed as a repository for more than assorted arguments and errors, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of philosophy by which we are now possessed.--Daniel Garber (2005) "What's Philosophical about the History of Philosophy?" (146) in Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy.

The quoted passage is the final one of Garber's essay, which proudly defends so-called 'antiquarian' history of philosophy. It does not ask to what degree Kuhn's Structure produced a decisive transformation in the image of science. Nor does Garber explore to what degree a changed image of science leads to a change in the practice, evaluation or funding of science(s). But leaving aside Kuhn's self-presentation, there is no doubt that Kuhn's image of science -- hegemonic paradigms/consensus, revolutions, puzzle-solving, etc. -- changed the philosophers's image of philosophy often by way of contrast or emulation of an image of science--recall, for example, here and here on Williamson). Garber does not note the irony that to this day, Kuhn's status as a philosopher is controversial even long after his ideas have become conventional wisdom.

Garber's essay, thus, presupposes that there is an image of philosophy and that this image matters in some sense to the practice of philosophy. Even Timothy Williamson agrees with this much: "This book [The Philosophy of Philosophy--ES] grew out of a sense that contemporary philosophy lacks a self-image that does it justice." (ix) Williamson constructs an image that can do justice to what he claims is an existing practice and one that he favors; his image, we may add, is especially suited to his skills and interests--justice is convenient, that way. Garber proposes that history of philosophy can prepare, either indirectly by those that practice a disinterested history of philosophy, or more directly by those with a plan, the future of philosophy. He claims that,

[A]ntiquarian history of philosophy can help us to look at philosophy itself and its relations with other disciplines and with the larger world in a fresh new way. It is often taken for granted that the discipline of philosophy that we practise today is substantially the same as it was in past times. It is this assumption that underlies the way in which philosophers have generally used the history of philosophy as a source of arguments and problems for their current work. But a careful and genuinely historical study of early modern philosophy gives us a rather different conception of the subject, something from which we as philosophers in the twenty-first century can learn." (138)

One might think that the main message here is the denial that philosophy is essentially a stable kind with an eternal essence (recall Bolton). But while non-trivial, the key point is that this entails that there is always a possible alternative to the status-quo image of philosophy, or that the ruling self-image can be adapted to the new ends. Garber is explicit about this:

On Parochial Philosophy

Our 2,200 articles and 34,000 citations works out to an average of about 15 citations per paper. To academics outside of philosophy this will seem like a very low number.--K. Healy

[T]he young Parsons began a run of intellectual luck that would carry him over the course of the next decade--and with relatively little design on his own part--to some of the great academic centers of the interwar period...it stamped his thinking with a peculiarly self-referential quality, or tendency to regard the ideas he personally encountered in local surroundings as those ideas most worth engaging and vesting with epochal import."--Charles Camic on Talcott Parsons.*

We philosophers tend to claim that we work on eternal problems with topic neutral tools that allow us to capture the most fundamental features of reality. Yet because it appears that most of us prefer thinking over reading, the range of influences we expose ourselves to is, by necessity, going to be fairly limited. (Time is scarce, after all.) This entails that we will tend to engage with those ideas which we have encountered locally in our teachers (and their assignments) as well as our friends, colleagues, and those we meet at conferences. Undoubtedly we will take note of folk we suspect may be prospective referees of our work or those we imagine highly valued by such referees. It's possible, of course, that scholar.google encourages us sometimes to cast our net more widely, but given that our discipline has a tendency to discourage citation, in practice this probably does not happen much.

It also happens to be the case that a very large proportion of the English language philosophy professoriate is trained in a fairly limited number of PhD programs (for evidence see here).+ Most such programs are, in fact, in great academic centers populated with distinguished and eminent thinkers. These have, in fact, incentives to encourage the idea that it's folk like them that are worth taking seriously. So, it's very likely that lots of us share in this peculiarly self-referential quality that Camic ascribed to Parsons above. 

I had never before noticed such peculiarly self-referential quality in the professional philosophers that I admire until I was struck in a short sequence of events by: the exceedingly narrow range of privileged interlocutors that Thomas Nagel engages with in his Mind and Cosmos;  the oddity to me that Elliott Sober was one of OUP's referees of Nagel's book in light of his subsequent review;** the generous reviewing of Nagel by Plantinga and Plantinga by Nagel (recall and here).