Digressions&Impressions

On Tyranny and Method: Vlastos vs Strauss

I noted a few weeks ago that near the end of his career, in (1991) Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, Vlastos praises "Irwin's brilliant review of Leo Strauss." (I noted, too, that Irwin's review is nothing of the sort--it's a non-review, and would be thought scandalous if professional philosophy weren't also, at times, political in character.) Vlastos makes this claim in note 71, which is about the "shortcomings of Xenophon's perceptions of Socrates as a philosopher." Note 71 is attached to the following passage.

One could hardly imagine a man who in taste, temperament, and critical equipment (or lack of it) would differ as much as did Xenophon from leading members of the inner Socratic circle. The most important difference, of course, is that people like Plato, Aristippus, Antisthenes, Euclid, Phaedo were philosophers with aggressively original doctrines of their own, one of them a very great philosopher, while Xenophon, versatile and innovative litterateur, creator of whole new literary genres, does not seem versed nearly as well as they in philosophy or as talented in this area.'71 This is the first thing we need to understand about him, if we are to use his witness about Socrates, as we must, for we cannot afford to neglect a single scrap of first-hand testimony, as Xenophon's no doubt is.--"The evidence of Aristotle and Xenophon," p. 99.

The reason, then, that Vlastos needs note 71, is to block the idea that [a] Xenophon was a very good or able philosopher in order support Vlastos' claim that [b] Xenophon is the odd man out of the leading people in the inner Socratic circle. Vlastos (1907-1991) goes on to claim in the note that "For what can be said on Xenophon's behalf by a spirited, intelligently non-Straussian defender, see Morrison, 1987: 9-22." What follows from this, then, is that Vlastos recognizes that the Straussian (and Strauss) accepts something like [a] and denies [b].*

This post originates in my interest in finding critical engagements with Leo Strauss within analytic philosophy in Strauss' lifetime during the post-WWII era (triggered by (recall here; here; here; especially this one; here; and here; here) an invite by Sander Verhaegh). And it's clear that by the time of Irwin's (1974) review of Strauss' Xenophon's Socrates in The Philosophical Review which appeared within a year after Strauss' death (1973), the convention within analytic circles of disparaging Strauss and Straussians in print was established.

It is worth noting that Vlastos didn't need to appeal to Irwin for the denial of [a]. He always thought that Xenophon had a "pedestrian mind" who probably couldn't "rise to such [platonic/philosophical] refinements." (Vlastos reviewing On Tyranny by Leo Strauss with a preface by Alvin Johnson (1951) The Philosophical Review, 60(4): 593.)+ I am quoting a bit out of context, but the point stands. In fact, Vlastos' 1951 review of Strauss' (1948) treatment of Xenophon's Hiero is a much better review qua the platonic form of a review than Irwin's (although that low bar turns out not to be cleared by much). Vlastos' (1951) review starts as follows:

Xenophon's Hiero turns to the much debated question whether the tyrant can be happy and answers it with an emphatic affirmative. The tyrant Hiero concedes that what ruins his chances of happiness is mainly the distrust and hostility of his subjects. The poet Simonides replies that this is just what can be fixed; he offers a recipe of skillful and generous statesmanship which will make him loved and, therefore, happy.

Professor Strauss cannot bring himself to believe that a pupil of Socrates could have condoned tyranny to the extent of assuring tyrants that they can be happy and showing them how. So he argues, against the general view, that the "tyrannical" teaching of Simonides in this dialogue is not Xenophon's own; to get at the latter one must "add to, and subtract from Hiero's and Simonides' speeches" (p. 50). The plusses and minuses to the text with which he seeks to redeem Xenophon's Socratic virtue would have astonished the retired colonel who was nothing if not plain spoken and straightforward. Short of its subtleties, the argument boils down to the question: Are the views of Simonides here demonstrably at variance with those we can certainly ascribe to Xenophon on the strength of his other writings. (592)

This passage does not assert the denial of [a], but the way Xenophon is described [c] "the retired colonel who was nothing if not plain spoken and straightforward" contributes to it. The problem with [c] is that Vlastos should have known better. As he notes in 1991 (quoted above), whatever else he was, Xenophon, was a [d] "versatile and innovative litterateur." And while it's possible to reconcile [c] with [d] in all kinds of ways that preserve Vlastos' position (and make it coherent in the technical sense), the much more natural interpretation of Xenophon is, once one recognizes him for the "versatile and innovative litterateur" that he is acknowledged to be, that [e] Xenophon sometimes presents himself as plain spoken and straightforward, but that this is part of his larger literary skill. Notice that strictly speaking [e] is completely agnostic on [a] and even on the right interpretation of the Hiero.

Now, at this point it would be natural to evaluate Vlastos' criticism of Strauss' reading of the Hiero on its merits. But it is worth noting that here Vlastos does not object to Strauss' methodology (with its willingness to engage in esoteric readings) as such. Rather he thinks it badly suited to Xenophon, who is simply claimed to be not that kind of thinker. In fact, it would be wrong to treat Vlastos in 1951 as an anti-Straussian (avant la lettre) or even a fierce critic of Strauss. Here is an excerpt from the final paragraph of the review:

Those who have read and admired Professor Strauss's earlier book on Hobbes will be disappointed in this monograph. The author's learning is still considerable, the agility of his mind exceptional; the weak ness of this work can be traced directly to his present addiction to the strange notion that a historical understanding of a historical thinker is somehow a philosophical liability. If the author had used, instead of spurning, the historical method (surely not to be confused with "historicism"), he would have seen two clues out of the problem raised by the Hiero's lessons in happy and virtuous tyranny. For one thing, the historical Xenophon was not just a shadow of Socrates. He was an upper-class Athenian, an ardent admirer of Sparta, and most of all a successful military commander, bent on generalizing the art of efficient man-management from the army camp to all areas of human relation ships, political, domestic, and economic. (593)

Vlastos' admiration of Strauss' (1936) The Political Philosophy of Hobbes is, I suspect, sincere. (In it, Strauss had put Hobbes in context with great detail to Hobbes' development.) And, in fact, Vlastos treats Strauss as having switched methodology between 1936 and 1948 from the 'historical method' to the method of 'plusses and minuses to the text.' In order to avoid confusion (with historicism), let's call the historical method which aims at historical understanding, 'contextualism.' 

However, it is pretty clear that whatever Strauss is up to in On Tyranny, it's not merely historical understanding. This becomes obvious from the 1954 (French) and 1963 (English) editions expanded with the material of the Strauss Kojève debate (recall my post on Pippin's three essays). The correspondence between Strauss and Kojève  makes clear that Strauss actively sought out Kojève's review.** And in light of the debate, it's quite impossible to ignore the fact that On Tyranny is also an intervention in contemporary philosophy (and, perhaps even, the political atmosphere). [I am not alone in noticing this; see the then contemporary review by Robert D. Cumming in JPhil.]

To be sure, one may  well argue that contextualism and its output, historical understanding, are capable of preparing the way for an intervention in contemporary philosophy. But they are not the same thing. 

And, in fact, I am not guilty of prolepsis here. Because Strauss is quite explicit about of his official intentions for the book on the first page of his analysis: "tyranny is a danger coeval with political life" and this is why he submits it to "political scientists." He goes on to claim:

The analysis of tyranny that was made by the first political scientists was so dear, so comprehensive, and so unforgettably expressed that it was remembered and understood by generations which did not have any direct experience of actual tyranny. On the other hand, when we were brought face to face with tyranny-with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past-our political science failed to recognize it. (Expanded and Revised (2002) edition, pp. 22-23--all my quotes of Strauss are from this edition.)

So, Strauss is clearly trying to instruct and correct a manifest failure of contemporary political science, and by retrieving Xenophon (who seems to be treated as a 'political scientist') to (and to be cheeky) correct for a Kuhn-loss. And, in fact, Strauss immediately makes an important categorical distinction between two kinds of tyranny: (i) the 'elementary natural form of tyranny' of classical periods; and (ii) the (what we might call) 'monstrous' (or totalitarian) tyranny of our age which can draw on a "science applied to "the conquest of nature" [and] ...popularized and diffused," (23) that is the Enlightenment project. What they have in common is that they are an "essentially...faulty political order." (66)

Vlastos' reading of Strauss' work is, thus, actually quite puzzling. (Also in light of Strauss' motto from Macaulay.) It completely and rather comically misses the stated point of Strauss' book. To anticipate my conclusion: it fails as a book-review. Again, to assert this is not to take sides in the debate over [a].

What is, curious, however, is that Vlastos explicitly recognizes that Xenophon was a kind of expert in 'man-management' and so may well have something to teach in what one may call the art of government even if it is limited by the fact that his art primarily is derived from the army camp. That is, even if one were to grant that one shouldn't read Xenophon in order to understand (say) liberal democracy, I think it's pretty obvious that Vlastos himself should have been able to grasp that from his own commitments about Xenophon, he might well be worth reading on tyranny (if this is understood, say, as the art of efficient 'man-management' on the plan of an army camp.)

Let me wrap up. According to Vlastos, Strauss is wrong to claim [f] "that the "tyrannical" teaching of Simonides in [Hiero] is not Xenophon's own." (592) Most of Vlastos' review is really about contesting this claim (and the denial of [a] is in support of [f].) However, what is most peculiar about Vlastos' presentation of Strauss' position is that Strauss actually explicitly denies that Simonides fully endorses tyranny: "to see the broad outline of Simonides' criticism of tyranny at its best, one has only to consider the result of his suggested correction of tyranny..." (68)

It gets stranger; recall that Vlastos claims that "Professor Strauss cannot bring himself to believe that a pupil of Socrates could have condoned tyranny." But this, in fact, is what Strauss explicitly does allow. He assert that "While Xenophon seems to have believed that beneficent tyranny or the rule of a tyrant who listens to the counsels of the wise is, as a matter of principle, preferable to the rule of laws or to the rule of elected magistrates as such, he seems to have thought that tyranny at its best could hardly, if ever, be realized." (75, emphasis added)

To put this in anachronistic terms: Strauss explicitly diagnoses in Xenophon a preference for what we might call the ideal type of benevolent dictatorship as an ideal worth having. (To say that is not to claim that such benevolent dictatorship is the best kind of rule for Xenophon, or that absent the influence of the wise, tyranny has anything to say for it.)  So, it is a mistake to claim that Strauss deviates from the "general view" of the interpretation of the Hiero as such.

To sum up: Vlastos's review fails to convey accurately what Strauss' book is about, and fails to convey properly Strauss' views. What Vlastos does properly convey is that Strauss' interpretation of Xenophon deviates from contextualism and relies on a method of interpretation that would be a source of ongoing controversy about Strauss. And eventually this controversy of his method, in turn, has functioned as a mechanism (for the allocation of scarce jobs and) not to engage with the underlying ideas of Strauss. (That's compatible with these being false or worse.) But, as we have seen in this series of posts, Vlastos' (1951) stance was still the outlier. Through the 1950s and early 1960s Strauss was debated on the merits of his arguments by analalytic types. And in my next post I turn to Yolton's (1955) reflection on Strauss' Natural Right and History, which in many ways is the most serious 'analytic' response to Strauss on record that I have been able to locate. To be continued.

 

On Being a Boring/Bored Academic (Via Huemer and Ernest Nagel)

It wasn’t until much later that I started to get annoyed with the field of philosophy. We give the good stuff to undergraduates — free will, the existence of God, the objectivity of morality, etc. The boring, unimportant material is saved for the academic journals, meant to be read by professors — arguments about whether professor x’s objection to y’s version of such-and-such argument shows that that version of the argument fails to establish its conclusion, etc. The issue of free will, for example, is super-interesting, but the free will literature is some of the boringest stuff you’ll ever encounter. I feel drowsy just thinking about it.--Michael Huemer (Colorado) "What's good and bad about philosophy" [HT DAILYNOUS]

During the past year Huemer wrote a number of blog posts that inspired much buzz (approval and scoffing) in the philo-blogosphere. But while they were on topics of interest to me and known to provoke me into digressions, I did not feel much urge to chime in. In part, my reticence was due because it seemed that his underlying sensibility was one of misery. And I was imaging Yoda telling me to stay away from the dark side. But because I have been miserable during the pandemic, and to the best of my knowledge I had never met Huemer, I also worried that I was projecting my state of mind on to his blog persona. I don't mean to suggest I thought it was merely projection: my virtual diagnosis of him was prompted by his post on the terrible nature of academic writing, in which he writes (inter alia) "academic style isn’t fun to read, and it isn’t fun to write. So who is making us do this?" That reads like an authentic expression of misery to me (perhaps -- now I am glancing over the details of his argument -- prompted by justified rage at referee 2).

Now, continental philosophers have fine theories about the role of boredom in late, or very late, capitalism, say, as a species of alienation for a parasitic class. One can find such theories ending up being marketed in the spectacle of the art world. And it is also easy to become satirical about self-help books that tell us that boredom is the condition of creativity and that letting kids not be bored at all stunts their development. It is also easy to be belittle the sad reality that the very conditions of philosophy are undermined by the dread and nihilist despair of reading the literature. 

For some of you Huemer's diagnoses may not resonate. I have had colleagues for whom digesting and writing for Analysis is sufficient condition for flourishing,--bless their soul. If that's like you, nothing I say is intended to make you feel unhappy about this.

But Huemer's remarks quoted above and his conclusion -- "what we we get is discussions of niggling details, which make no sense and have no interest to you if you haven’t read the specific academic literature from the last 10 years; discussions focused on the literature rather than the issues, filled with qualifications and digressions into potential misunderstandings and errors that you probably would never have been tempted toward in the first place – and all to get to some anodyne, highly qualified claims about incredibly circumscribed questions" -- resonated with me. By contrast, I adore my undergraduate teaching in large part because the material we explore together is so glorious and I love where the students take me as their minds expand. I rarely feel anything like this in reading even the scholarly papers I admire most.* 

As it happens, yesterday I read the following passage in Ernest Nagel back in 1935:

Santayana remarks in one of his books that he would be ashamed to hold views in philosophy which he did not believe in daily life, and that he would deem it dishonest and cowardly to sail under colors in an argument which were not those under which he habitually lived. The precept implied by these comments can serve as a criterion for evaluating the quality of integration which a thinker achieves in his own life but more significantly, it helps to fix the subject matter and task of philosophy, and so to disclose the relevance of the philosophic pursuit to the society which nourishes it. It is a precept which I take for my own wholeheartedly, and one which I wish were taken as a guide in all philosophic inquiry. "Notes Toward a Naturalistic Conception of Logic, republished in Logic Without Metaphysics (1956), p. 39.

Now, 1935 was in the midst of the great depression. And so the question of nourishment was not merely a metaphor. Nagel himself was about to embark on a funded tour of Europe where he would discover and partially help, as I have argued, legislate a very different philosophical scene. 

Even so, it is pretty clear that the conception of philosophy inspired by Santayana, fairly or not, is less likely to be boring than the pointless and dull activity memorably described by Huemer in his post. Nagel discerns a way in which existential concerns with integrity between thought and deed (recall here) are connected to the social purposes of one's society. I recognize that Nagel has anticipated an idea that I have digressed on (and distinguished from other notions in the neighborhood), that a philosopher's philosophical integrity involve the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere. 

I do not mean to deny that there are tensions in Nagel's position. His views are (recall here; here) resolutely pluralist, and, if his "all philosophic inquiry" is not meant to refer to his own, he may be thought inconsistent with his other views here. And he is a bit quick, too quick, to assume that the disclosure to society of the relevance of one's philosophical pursuit will be met by approval of that society. Even a democratic philosophy may irritate, even bore, the masses, after all. 

Now, Nagel is relevant here because there is a sense in which he gave up, in practice, on the commitment he just described. And, there is a further sense that, together with Carnap, as Abe Stone has emphasized (here; here), he helped inaugurate the professional turn of philosophy so familiar to us now and that drives the Huemers among us to existential despair (okay, that was over the top; sorry). Nagel himself recognized all of this, and he discusses it un-sparingly, and appropriately, at the start of a presidential address to the APA in December 1954, where he discuss this feature of "recent analytical literare":

The past quarter century has been for philosophy in many parts of the world a period of acute self-questioning, engendered in no small measure by developments in scientific and logical thought, and in part no doubt by fundamental changes in the social order. In any event, there has come about a general loss of confidence in the competence of philosophy to provide by way of a distinctive intellectual method a basic ground-plan of the cosmos, or for that matter to contribute to knowledge of any primary subject-matter except by becoming a specialized positive science and subjecting itself to the discipline of empirical inquiry. Although the abysses of human ignorance are undeniably profound, it has also become apparent that ignorance, like actual knowledge, is of many special and heterogeneous things; and we have come to think, like the fox and unlike the hedgehog of whom Mr. Isaiah Berlin has recently reminded us, that there are a great many things which are already known or remain to be discovered, but that there is no one "big thing" which, if known, would make everything else coherent and unlock the mystery of creation. In consequence, many of us have ceased to emulate the great system-builders in the history of philosophy. In partial imitation of the strategy of modern science, and in the hope of achieving responsibly held conclusions about matters concerning which we could acquire genuine competence, we have tended to become specialists in our professional activities. We have come to direct our best energies to the resolution of limited problems and puzzles that emerge in the analysis of scientific and ordinary discourse, in the evaluation of claims to knowledge, in the interpretation and validation of ethical and esthetic judgments, and in the assessment of types of human experience. I hope I shall not be regarded as offensive in stating my impression that the majority of the best minds among us have turned away from the conception of the philosopher as the spectator of all time and existence, and have concentrated on restricted but manageable questions, with almost deliberate unconcern for the bearing of their often minute investigations upon an inclusive view of nature and man.
Some of us, I know, are distressed by the widespread scepticism of the traditional claims for a philosophia perennis, and have dismissed as utterly trivial most if not all the products of various current forms of analytical philosophy. I do not share this distress, nor do I think the dismissal is uniformly perspicacious and warranted. For in my judgment, the scepticism which many deplore is well-founded. Even though a fair-sized portion of recent analytical literature seems inconsequential also to me, analytical philosophy in our own day is the continuation of a major philosophic tradition, and can count substantial feats of clarification among its assets. Concentration on limited and determinate problems has yielded valuable fruits, not least in the form of an increased and refreshing sensitivity to the demands of responsible discourse.

Nagel reminds us that the very best criticisms of analytic philosophy have been stated within the tradition. More subtly, his idea that ignorance is not univocal strikes me as worthy of ongoing rediscovery. More pertinent here, Nagel grants de facto that philosophical professionalization and specialization necessarily involves generating the conditions of mental mutilation. Huemer's spleen was foreseen by the legislators/prophets of our tradition and - oh amor fati --  willed eternally in the name of the greater good and responsibility. 

Nagel thinks the bitter medicine worth our pain. He does offer some remedy: "a philosopher...owes it to himself to articulate, if only occasionally, what sort of world he thinks he inhabits, and to make clear to himself where approximately lies the center of his convictions." Allowing for the unfortunately gendered language, this is salutary advice. I suspect the readability of many philosophy papers would be helped, and the sanity of their authors enhanced, if it were normal to add a paragraph, say at the end of the introduction, that linked the minute arguments to follow to the geography and significance of their philosophical convictions. While this would be undoubtedly comical too, I hope referee 2 can get behind this as an innocent convention. With online publishing the political economy of this modest proposal should be not too constraining.

On the Demise of Feministphilosophers

Many of us, myself included, have become increasingly pessimistic about the potential for internet-based discussions of difficult issues to help us make philosophical and real-world progress. And if I don’t think blogs are a good place to discuss stuff, it becomes a little odd to keep a blog going. Not all of us agree with this, and there may be spin-off blogs by some of our more optimistic members, which we’ll link to. But this site will soon no longer be hosting blog posts. I feel OK about this, and really good about what we’ve accomplished, but I think the time for this blog is now past and we’ve all got other projects underway.--Jennifer Saul, "Closing down FP" Feministphilosophers.

I dislike mono-causal explanations for social affairs, but it would be no exaggeration to say that the portfolio of websites hosted  by or associated with Feministphilosophers (see also the genderedconferencecampaign or 'what is it like being a women in philosophy?) transformed public perceptions of professional philosophy. They didn't just create a whole range of #metoo moments (before the term was invented) in professional philosophy, but they generated a discipline wide discussions (activism, conferences, etc.) about a whole range of professional and philosophical issues that percolated through the profession and made headlines in the international press. What seemed like a culture of silence (recall) frozen eternally, suddenly became an avalanche of bricks in the wall crumbling to dust. As this process unfolded it generated an intense set of public and more subterranean reactions many of which unsympathetic to the (diverse) aims of feministphilosophers, which changed the incentive structure for public speech. (Recall this post.) Philosophy generated its own dark web and with the frisson associated with dangerous thoughts it became a permanent, dissonant even intimidating counterpoint  to feministphilosophers.

Before i comment on Saul's remarks (see also Yap), I turn to Brian Leiter's post which quoted remarks by one of my favorite scholars, Paul Russell:*

There is, in any case, little or nothing about the debate concerning Lenin/Bukharin/Gramsci et al in the SEP. What this shows is that there are significant movements and developments in philosophy (e.g. Marxism) that are still sorely neglected in the SEP. Despite its considerable merits and achievements, the SEP has a rather narrow and contentious conception of what 'philosophy' is. It is arguable that this reflects a deeper problem, with what could be called the "APA outlook". This is an outlook that includes a rather crude understanding of how philosophy can and should be politically "active". It is heavily focused on “professional” issues (and interests) and it is largely disconnected from real world politics and history - lacking any credible understanding of the role that philosophy has had and that it might play outside its narrow academic/professional concerns. 

It is notable that a perfectly sensible point -- that SEP's coverage of the Marxist tradition is rather thin and unbalanced  -- got submerged into a broader polemic. One could have made that point by noting that G.A. Cohen is discussed more frequently than Lenin or Luxemburg (who is curiously missing in Russell's remarks) in the pages of SEP. The SEP is a public treasure, but this kind of thing is not uncommon--there are huge path dependencies and the effects of idiosyncratic views that have shaped its development. (Just recently I noticed that a student or professional interested in the godfather of formal philosophy, and himself a pioneering feminist, Condorcet was badly served by SEP.) The nice thing about SEP is that they welcome corrective feedback and encourage new entries. It is an unfolding encyclopedia not a monument to a fixed view. So Profs. Russell and Leiter could have simply made their point and helped the editors of SEP coordinate a robust number of invitations to  develop entries that provide a better coverage of Marxism and its complex development and history.

But this perfectly sensible criticism is presented by way of contrast with the rich coverage of feminist themes in SEP and not, say, Bayes (which is discussed in huge number of entries many more than feminism). If I had followed Russell's (and Leiter's) style of argument, I would have said (in line with my priors), that the SEP's fondness for Bayes represent an APA outlook (they even use "APA appratichiks"--this gave me the giggles) that favors technocratic (or scientistic) governance, etc. (Sadly no entry on Feminist Bayesianism yet.)

Don't misunderstand me, Russell and Leiter are right to ask us to reflect on the ways (recall) the steep economic and prestige hierarchies of professional philosophy, as other academic enterprises, reflect, reinforce, and help recycle (ahh) the superstructure of society. But it is a bit peculiar that they do so in the name of encouraging more focus on "real world politics and history" by complaining about encyclopedia entries about another philosophical movement. It's especially odd because feminism has been a means to advance and develop many marxist projects. (That's actually pretty clear from quite a few entries in SEP! Standpoint epistemology, say, is indebted to marxism.)

It's not that they don't have a point: I checked the number of entries on "social activism" and "political activism" (both negligible. By contrast the number of entries that mentions 'politics' is huge). No to put a fine point on it, and I am pretty bourgeois myself, it strikes me that the interests of capital are served just fine by marxist-feminist infighting over crumbs of online space. Why, if one wishes to advance the demise of capital, one would encourage such zero-sum infighting is one of the mysteries of life that elude me. Anyway, as I have argued, with the shift of global capital toward Asia, philosophical fashions and trends, even identity, will shift, too.

Be that as it may, it's possible that the brief effervescent age of the group philosophy blog is over. Quite a few group blogs have folded, and few new ones, it seems, are breaking out. There are three challenges to such blogs: (i) a lot of coordination time is lost to maintain minimal unity of the group; (ii) it is really difficult to remain fresh (and not to keep returning to same issues over and over again); (iii) because of the prevalence of online harassment and the relative slowness of blog discussions (compared to twitter), folk are increasingly unwilling to leave comments at blogs. 

Plato says somewhere that all created things must perish. So, c'ést la vie. Even so, I worry that Saul's point -- she is "increasingly pessimistic about the potential for internet-based discussions of difficult issues" -- may reflect the success of the war of attrition against feministphilosophers waged by (what above I jokingly called) the dark web. But perhaps her new projects, and those of her collaborators , will prove to be as influential and stimulating to philosophical self-awareness. 

 

 

 

 

On Academic Giants and Reputation

Prominent legal and political theorists, including Jeremy Waldron, Cass Sunstein and John Tasioulas, have called Finnis a ‘legal giant’, invoked his right to academic freedom, and insisted that the best thing for students to do is engage with his views. ‘It’s only respectful, and they may even learn something,’ Tasioulas said.--Sophie Smith (january 2019) 'academic freedom' in LRB.

We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation.  If she were to be terminated or relieved of her duties, the injustice would be widely recognized and opposed.--Judith Butler (et al!) May 2018, [HT Leiterreports.]  

President Charles de Gaulle is reputed to have said you don't arrest Voltaire.'  It's a revealing anecdote about onetime French elite attitudes toward intellectuals -- Sartre was to be arrested for civil disobedience-- and, more important, the (unequal) rule of law. There is a more subtle point lurking here: Voltaire had, in fact, been imprisoned in his life (when he satirized the regent)--he took the name 'Voltaire' after his release from the Bastille. He also experienced exile. But over time he became useful to various political authorities and he found being close to power not altogether uncongenial.

I was reminded of the anecdote in reflecting on the curious spectacle of academics stressing the purported greatness of disciplinary and professional colleagues in the midst of controversy. I don't mean to be naive; of course the institutional standing and prestige of Professors Finnis and Ronell have clearly played a role in the public interest in their actions and views as well as the university responses to them. And, we see the same currency of prestige, even modest celebrity, at work in those other academics coming to their defense.

For those of us who participate in the prestige hierarchies (recall) of academia this raises uncomfortable questions. This is so, I think, regardless of one's views on the merits of each situation.* When I see the articulation of and doubling down on such prestige, I ask myself, perhaps narcissisticly, is this what would be expected from me in such circumstances? Is that the price one pays to enter into 'elite' echelons of professions, even -- in the case of some law professors -- political society?

Even if the intentions behind signals of solidarity may be unequivocally high minded, such closing of ranks with an appeal to prestige and greatness also invites others to perceive these, perhaps even involuntarily, as in some sense self-vindicating; as worth rallying to. In the context of public controversy, appeals to greatness rely on the equivocation between institutional status and intellectual worth such that they can justify a kind of (dazzling) state of exception for those that inhabit the role.**

What this shows, I fear, is that rather than being elevated by the credit economy of academia, we end up polluted by it. 

 

 

RIP Jerry Fodor (1935-2017)

With his New York accent, Jerry Fodor, was the first professional philosopher I met -- it was the first year of my PhD in the mid 1990s -- who sounded and acted like people in my family: he was combative, quick-minded, razor-sharp, brutally funny, inexhaustible in debate, and his wit was cutting. When I took my first graduate seminar at Chicago it was with a genuine, albeit critical, admirer (Murat Aydede) on Fodor's theory of concepts (we read, I think, many of his classic books and I believe the manuscript of the book that came out of his Locke Lectures). The seminar itself prepared us for his visit.  Fodor did not disappoint: he outlasted everybody in debate and stared down many incredulous stares. In those days the department talks at Chicago could be brutal affairs, but while Fodor did receive some criticism on a point of physics from Howard Stein (obliquely acknowledged), at all times he was in command of the discussion. It had never seen anything like it and I would rarely again.

During his visit I did not spend very much time with him. But I did get a chance to engage with his work. After I had exhausted my methodological objections  (mostly dealing with his claims and appeals to scientific method) to his argument -- and I would have appreciated more of his help in strengthening my objections --, I asked him what he thought of Millikan's approach to semantics (related to the PhD-in-progress by my  friend Marshall Abrams), he seemed decidedly lukewarm. So, I changed the subject and asked him a different question. Given how fast developing cognitive science and linguistics were becoming, how did he keep up with the literature? Wasn't he worrying he would miss something important? As an undergraduate I had come to know Dan Dennett,+ who was always a sprawling fount of information about new scientific discoveries in biology, unusual insights gleaned from robotics, and seemed ferociously consuming empirical psychology and at Chicago Bill Wimsatt seemed even more enmeshed in the sciences. At the time, Jesse Prinz was the 'senior graduate student' and we all were in awe of his work collaborating with world class cognitive scientist (Barsalou). By contrast, the citations and arguments in Fodor's works had a kind elegant sparseness. Fodor's answer stunned me in its simplicity and stuck with me all these years: I rely on my friends and students to call attention to work I should be familiar with. (I did not put quote-marks around that answer because I do not pretend to find my memory reliable after two decades.)

Later I realized that his answer made sense, of course, given that he was at the center of (and collaborating with leading figures in) so many exciting scientific and linguistic developments at MIT, CUNY, and Rutgers. His MIT seminar was legendary, and remembered exchanges in it would still be discussed a decade later at Tufts. But I wondered how he could be so confident of the attentiveness of his circle to his theoretical needs. I kind of expected him to ask me what I was working on (and I was  excited to name-drop George Smith with whom I was writing a paper and who, I knew, had co-authored with Jerry Katz (who in turn had co-authored with Fodor)), but there was an awkward moment of silence (I later learned from others that he could be very shy) and then somebody else lodged an objection to his account of DOORKNOB.

It should be clear from the previous paragraph that I encountered Fodor at the moment that I was most impressionable about what my future research trajectory would be, but that I was not drawn into his research project. At Chicago, there was not much fondness for modularity. I admired the work on the language of thought (and happily trotted it out against the local Wittgenstein maffia) and I genuinely admired his influential critique of overzealous and uninformative reductionism.* I happen to think his book on Hume's philosophy of mind is among the best books written by any analytically minded philosopher on Hume (historian and not historian), and we corresponded a bit about it. (Later I regretted not reviewing it because a lot of the scholarly criticism he received on it was silly.) I read it and then used it in one of my graduate seminars. In re-reading our exchange for this post, I am struck, again, by how well he understood Hume without having (and I paraphrase) any sympathy whatsoever for Hume's associationism.** Our exchange hit an impasse (and eventually ended) over his claim that for Hume "X can get associated with Y only if token Xs and token Ys actually co-occur in experience." (oct 7, 2005; in response, I claimed that this prevented Hume from explaining cases of false belief, and so that Hume also allowed other sources of association.)

Others will speak about Fodor as a colleague, teacher, and friend (family-member, etc.) There is no doubt that he was clearly the dominant philosopher of mind and one of the sharpest minds in analytic philosophy for an extended period in the last third of the twentieth century. I think it will be interesting to see how much of his views will survive now that these do not have the force of his personality behind them. (Of course, some of his contributions involve the fatal undermining of other people's views--I am thinking, in particular of his criticism of Carnap's approach to objects of belief.) Others should be better able to comment on his ongoing relevance. He also helped shape the ways in which we conduct our professional affairs. At conferences he always managed to draw a crowd and I have to admit that long after I had lost interest in his substantive views, I would attend his sessions for the blood-sport. All his writings are a joy to read, of course, but his polemical ones are the most fun, even if (as Granny may admit in an unguarded moment) they are sometimes also a guilty pleasure.

 

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 Taboos & Polarization in Politics & Philosophy

[T]he logical empiricists can be interpreted as engaged in a project of voluntarist racial eliminativism. They did not take themselves to have an in principle argument against racial categorisation of human beings. Their frequent references to biological racial categorisation make it clear that they thought this was something you could coherently do, and it would be inconsistent with their version of conventionalism to argue that one is cognitively mistaken to use an empirically meaningful categorisation scheme. Hence, while the position I am attributing to them is similar to the position that racial taxonomic terms are simply meaningless, it is not quite that – it is not that they thought there was no empirically meaningful way that one could make sense of human racial taxonomy. Rather, it was that they thought one ought not use these terms....As such they adopted a policy of refusing to endorse any instances of racial categories being used as part of empirical explanations, and discouraging racial explanation by rhetorical means.--Liam Kofi Bright (2017) "Logical empiricists on race" Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Liam Kofi Bright reminded me of his paper in response to my post on the method of composite portraiture (which traces back to Galton). [I leave aside here to what degree Bright's paper fits that method.] In his paper he diagnoses a taboo within logical empiricism against (biological) racial explanations of social affairs. The taboo is maintained by an act of self-legislation in the adoption of certain conceptual frameworks (and methods) and a rhetorical-polemical attitude against those that used alternative conceptual frameworks (that included racial explanations). What makes taboos interesting is that, in order to be effective, they require self-command and group discipline/loyalty, that is, esprit des corps. This is possible when a group is reasonably small, shares an important aim, and has a way of controlling entry. Bright does not address the maintenance of the taboo, but in the sentences I skipped, Bright suggests that it is their (i.e., the logical empiricists') shared "political projects" and moral commitments, which are 'external' or 'optative' to the adopted framework that sustains the taboo (a word he does not use), undoubtedly facilitated by informal communication (when they were in the same place) and small numbers. Because Bright reads the logical empiricists in a Kantianizing fashion (with relativized a priori), we may remind ourselves that they are not the first to legislate a taboo within philosophy: in Kant's Die Metaphysik der Sitten, Kant (recall) limits -- as (ahh) Slavoj Žižek point out -- the possible philosophical role of history (as a form of inquiry) into the origin of a legitimate authority on practical grounds.

In his essay, Bright explicitly recognizes that the taboo (racial explanation) is maintained not because using it is meaningless. That is to say, the logical empiricists have not shown that using racial explanation is false. One need not be Freud to recognize one does not need taboos on the evidently false. But it also does not follow that the logical empiricists thought the taboo was hiding the truth. (If anything, using a taboo to hide the truth is self-defeating because one will generate contradictions, internal tensions, etc.) Rather, it's clear that they thought that regardless of the scientific status of racial explanation, there is always a non-trivial risk these get mingled with immoral/inhumane political aims. That is, the members of the Vienna Circle are (recall) engaged in responsible speech because they recognize what we call the inductive risks of legitimizing racial explanations. The polemic with Heidegger centers, in part, on their recognition that his way of philosophizing has noxious consequences (recall Glymour). Taboos can be efficient in preventing the predictable downstream costs and energy of combating the pernicious effects of the damage done by racial explanation (in the service of racial hierarchy, social exclusion, eugenic programs, etc.).

Bright is clear that the logical empiricists engaged in polemical rhetoric against those that violated their taboo. This is significant for two reasons: first, they attempted to impose their internal compact on others (who had not contracted into their program). That is, there is something imperialist to demand from others that they abide by your self-imposed taboo. Second, we can discern here strategies that became all too familiar in their students and heirs in later generations of analytical philosophy; an excessive willingness to use rhetorical means in combating opposing schools.

Given the political moment -- with racial subordination and elimination a live possibility -- it is easy to forgive the logical empiricists willingness to aim to impose their taboo with rhetorical means on others. They were were part of a struggle in which the racialist explanation loving sides were quite willing to support racial hierarchy, and worse. But most of the subsequent academic struggles their students engaged in are not like this; being wrong about when to discusses semantic composition or modal metaphysics does not lead to racial elimination.*

As an extensive aside, Bright recognizes a problematic exception to his argument: Neurath's translation (in 1910 with his first wife Anna Schapire-Neurath) of Galton's work on eugenics, Hereditary genius.** (Speaking of taboos, Neurath's translation goes unmentioned in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Neurath!) Now, Bright could have said that in 1910 logical empiricism did not exist yet and that circumstances between 1910 and, say, the 1930s were different (the founding of the Vienna Circle can be dated to 1928 or so). This would also explain Neurath's apparent change of heart later. This is not Bright's strategy (perhaps because he also quotes from the relatively early (1921) Anti-Spengler.) With a nod to Thomas Uebel's contextual analysis and, more important, the writings of W.E. Du Bois, Bright remarks that a defense of racial breeding need not be a defense of white supremacy. And, undoubtedly, there is logical space between the can wish to breed for all kinds of characteristic without wishing for a racialized polity. And, in fact, in 1910 eugenics was part of a progressive, scientific gospel that influenced all kinds of policies and scientific projects not all of them pertaining to race (see Tim Leonard's book).

Even so, it is worth noting that by 1910, Galton's Heriditary Genius, was an old book (first published in 1869); it draws on Darwin's ideas, but by 1910 was certainly not cutting edge in its science. It has, in fact, a chapter, "The Comparative Worth of Different Races" which is as bad as it sounds.*** Galton, who was the leading statistician of his age, concludes "that the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own [Anglo-Saxon]." (In the hierarchy, the negro is still a grade above the "Australian type.") A satirist may note that Galton is, in fact, willing to acknowledge that there were better races than his own, for he remarks that "the average ability of the [long vanished!] Athenian race is, on the lowest possible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own." But Galton takes this to be an argument for racial purity because the Athenians allowed too much interbreeding!+ So, Galton's Heriditary Genius clearly embraces the existence of racial hierarchies (and these are not incidentally connected to British empire). But, interestingly enough (and I suspect this may have had some appeal to young Neurath), unlike many German eugenic tracts, Heriditary Genius is not antisemitic. While the Jews are not formerly classified in the racial hierarchy (due to lack of statistical evidence), most of the references to Jews in it are favorable.

Let me return to Bright's article. He establishes the existence of a philosophical taboo in (what I'll call) a highly polarized political context. Bright does not take a stance on the strategy he describes. But I am inclined to think that sometimes such taboos are necessary and useful and that the logical empiricists are in this, and in so many other ways, worth emulating. The opposing camps were part of a larger Kulturkampf where there was a genuine risk that bullets (and worse) would settle the true about racial hierarchy [to be precise: bullets can't settle the truth]. In the context of such high degree of polarization, the voluntary enforcement of taboos can serve a valuable function. They save and harness intellectual resources, they prevent unnecessary mingling of meaningful ideas with awful political and ethical policies, and they prevent the ambitious young from being tempted down unwise and immoral paths.

Of course, the rhetorical and professional enforcement of a taboo comes with a two-fold cost. First, as we have  seen, the very success of the strategy may encourage imitation of certain, imperialist behaviors (involving less dangerous topics) in less existentially polarized contexts. Second, the existence of a taboo is also a temptation for the unscrupulous and ambitious young who find themselves born in later times. They may well think that there are low-hanging fruits which will advance the cause of knowledge (and their career). Sometimes these unwise are lucky and they live in quiet times and their greedy, rashness has no downside.

 

On Being A Particular Scholar's Gate-Keeper

About a decade ago I refereed a paper which seemed familiar. I decided to check my archive (that is my email account), and I found a rather lengthy and what seemed (to me) generous referee report on an earlier version of the same, barely changed paper. I filed a second, somewhat more curmudgeonly report (mostly cut and paste from the first one), but alerted the editor of the (second) journal that I had seen this paper before (with apologies I had not alerted him to it earlier in the stage). A few months later I was sent the same paper by a third journal. The paper was essentially unchanged from the earlier versions. I told the editor that it was pointless for me to referee it again because I had refereed the paper twice before and that in my opinion the author was not responsive to my criticism. The editor decided to send the paper to another referee.

At the time I had no idea who the author of the paper was, although I have to admit that I had developed a certain amount of irritation about him. In my imagination the author was a stubborn scholar immune to my helpful attempts to call attention to detailed evidence that undermined his position. I also thought of him as ungrateful because I had put in a lot of work to offer (splendid!) advice on the paper--work that would go unrewarded professionally and, now, unnoticed, too.

The case I describe occurred in history of philosophy--where most journals practice so-called double-blind or (in deference to my wife--an eye surgeon) double-masked review. By contrast, in some fields, say, economics and history of economics, when one is refereeing one nearly always knows the author's identity (so-called single-blind, etc.). This is pretty problematic, and perhaps I should stop reviewing for such journals. But here I ignore that it is problematic and what I can do about it. (Mea culpa: I have been pretty lethargic in protesting this state of affairs.) A while ago, I noticed that during the last half decade I was often being asked to review the work of particular young scholars, who were otherwise unknown to me. None of the cases involved anything like the situation described in the previous two paragraphs. (That is, I read the papers, write reports, and then the experience merges into the mush that is my professional life.) In some cases I hope I'll meet the young scholar in person one day because I was excited about their work.

Even so, I have started to wonder what it means that for some junior scholars (I can think of at least four), I am literally one of the referees on the vast majority of the refereed papers they have published. (That's an easy thing to check given that most young scholars have updated versions of their CV online.) Part of me thinks this can't be healthy for them (and the field). I am happy to be gate-keeper, but now I worry that my scholarly niches and complete strangers (whose careers are on the line) have been shaped by the idiosyncratic nature of my intellectual sensibilities. (Yes, I recognize that the self-image may be a delusion, but it's a better delusion than those that think of their own work as un-problematic mainstream or cutting edge.)

Now, journals have lots of ways of preventing over-reliance on particular referees. But they are somewhat powerless to prevent different editors of different journals of over-using the same referee for particular papers (absent a data-base which would likely undermine anonymity).* [In fact, some scholarly conglomerates now find ways to ensure that you review a paper again (by having their software ask you if you would be willing to review for a sister journal).] For, while it is not a coincidence that I get asked to review these papers, the particular journal editors may call on me rather rarely.

My current inclination is to decline requests to referee when I notice that I am a frequent referee for a particular, junior person. This stance, if it is more widely shared, may also encourage editors to think outside the box and draw on a wider range of referees. Having just written the previous two sentences, it occurs to me that such a stance may also make it harder for journals to find (willing) referees and, thereby, undermine the opportunities for professional advancement of the younger scholars and the wider circulation of their ideas (which hurts the cause of truth). So, now I am  unsure about what to do. I welcome hearing what readers think.

Before I close this Digression, one final remark: I learned the identity of the stubborn and ungrateful author years later after the paper was published pretty much unchanged in the third journal. (I didn't look for the paper, but scholar.google brought it to my attention.) As it happens, by then I had many pleasant and stimulating interactions with the person at various conferences. Even so, I harbor a modest resentment and suspicion toward this person (now happily tenured) and I will not review any other papers by him if I can avoid it.

On McMahan on Parfit (A Pet Peeve)

Over the twelve years following the publication of this landmark paper, Parfit worked relentlessly on the manuscripts that were to become Reasons and Persons (1984). This book has often been described as comprising four distinct but closely connected books: one on the ways in which moral theories can be self-defeating, a second on rationality and time, a third that defends his view of personal identity, and a fourth on the ethics of causing people to exist and duties concerning future generations. While each of the four parts has been enormously influential, Part Four effectively created a new, difficult, highly important, and now flourishing area of philosophy known as ‘population ethics’. Peter Singer has described Reasons and Persons as the best work of moral philosophy since Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics, which was published in 1874.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, material that would, after much rewriting, eventually coalesce into Reasons and Persons began to circulate in photocopies of Parfit’s typescripts. It is perhaps difficult for those who have entered the field of philosophy since that book was published to appreciate how exciting and exhilarating those early formulations of his ideas were. Over the intervening decades, much of moral philosophy has been shaped by the forms of argument, including the imaginative use of hypothetical examples, and even the style of writing that are characteristic of Reasons and Persons. But at the time they were radically different from what philosophers were familiar with. For many of those working in philosophy then, and perhaps especially for graduate students who were able to read some of Parfit’s manuscripts, the novelty, brilliance, and practical significance of his arguments were intoxicating. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, at least for some of us, that era seemed rather as the French Revolution seemed to the young Wordsworth: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!’

Parfit had a native genius for philosophy. But he also devoted more time and concentrated effort to the development of his ideas than any other philosopher I have known. He once mentioned a passage in a book of economic history that noted that the concept of work had sometimes been understood in such a way that work was necessarily unpleasant. On this understanding, Parfit almost never worked.-Jeff McMahan Obituary of Derek Parfit. [HT Don Ainslie]

First, I was moved by McMahan's obituary of Parfit. And I warmly recommend it.* It offers a portrait of a life fully and somewhat lopsidedly immersed in philosophy. Those of us who think that a good-life must be more rounded do well to reflect critically on our own attitudes in light of the exemplar Parfit. And while the genius (I tend to wince at this word [recall my treatment of boy-wonders] when discussing professional philosophers and population ethics, but let's allow McMahan the use) may have been native it was clearly cultivated by considerable effort and focus. In addition, what also shines through in McMahan's obituary is that Parfit's genius was also, in a sense, social. After all, he put tremendous effort into improving others around him:

Parfit’s kindness and generosity, not only to his students and friends but to others as well, are legendary. The comments he gave to people on their manuscripts were sometimes longer than the manuscripts themselves, and the comments were invariably articulated in the gentlest, most tactful, encouraging, and constructive way possible. (3-4)

It is no criticism to remark that such kindness and generosity are rewarding in multiple ways not just to the community but also to the person Parfit in a credit economy in which giving of intellectual gifts -- and attention is the greatest (and scarcest) gift of all -- is one of the main, status enhancing currency. (The previous sentence is compatible with the absence of this insight as a psychological motive in Parfit; one cannot see well in the recesses of other people's hearts when is also simultaneously dazzled by their genius.)

The previous paragraph is misleading in one respect. Another scarce good in the political economy of the profession is time. And it is clear that the circumstances of Parfit's appointment gave him considerable freedom to develop his views without the demands of publication that are nearly inconceivable to the rest of us. That's no criticism of Parfit. In fact, one may say he understood his circumstances and made the best of them (again, this is not a remark about his psychology).

Even so, I also want to articulate a pet-peeve. I do so, in part, because I encounter some such inflationary claims more often in the self-understanding of my fellow analytical philosophers. The pet-peeve is not prompted by Singer's remark (quoted by McMahan) that 'Reasons and Persons as the best work of moral philosophy since Sidgwick’s Methods of Ethics,' although I will allow that I find something peculiar about the very practice of ranking works in moral philosophy (unless one is parceling out scarce goods like jobs, then rankings may be a necessary evil). For the person judging places himself as an arbiter of taste or value. Yet, the value of works of philosophy, and especially works of moral philosophy, is their impact on the lived experiences, including as theoretical reasoners about moral value, on not just specialized, cognitive communities, but also many readers that will be unknown to such a judge. What we do with other people's works is hard to judge in advance.

Rather, the pet-peeve is McMahan's claim that 'Part Four effectively created a new, difficult, highly important, and now flourishing area of philosophy known as ‘population ethics’. Now, it's true that recent population ethics (in style of argument and in its presuppositions) owes much to Parfit (and I think McMahan captures this very nicely in the passage I quoted above). But that's not what McMahan writes. He turns Parfit into the inventor of population ethics. Yet, population ethics has been an integral part of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle in all kinds of guises during the long history of normatively discussing various intellectual practices that mixed eugenics, political economy, political demography, and political philosophy (Sidgwick's fellow victorians were not unfamiliar with population ethics). {One may say, in short-hand that this is the pre-history to what Foucault calls biopolitics.} That it's not always recognized as philosophy by us or in the past is a different question. I'd like to think, for example, that Parfit-style population ethics was inaugurated by Swift in a Modest Proposal [recall].** (I am not claiming that treating A Modest Proposal from the perspective of population ethics does full justice to its (ahhh) genius.)

There are, of course, non-trivial issue about the reasons why population ethics fell out of favor in the early post-world-war-II years. But that's for another occasion. Rather, when Parfit is treated as the founder and originator of population ethics, he is essentially being inscribed into a familiar narrative: as a Kuhnian legislator of a paradigm in which others can develop professional careers working out the implications. It generates a sociologically powerful excuse to ignore alternative approaches and to be ignorant of the prior history of philosophy (including sordid bits); it nudges the young -- who increasingly lack time to read around uselessly -- to stay focused on the puzzles at hand. I recognize that for some this is, in fact, a fine justification for McMahan's narrative, but I am less confident that this is good for philosophy.