Digressions&Impressions

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.

 

Modern Indian Philosophy in the *Journal of Philosophy*: Appearance and Disappearance--Guest Post by Joel Katzav

[This is a another, invited Guest Post by Joel Katzav.--ES]

I previously documented (see here) how modern Indian philosophy disappeared from the pages of Mind around about 1925 and from the pages of the Philosophical Review (PR) around about 1948. The disappearances, I observed, can be attributed to the takeover of these journals by analytic philosophers (For the story of the takeover at PR see here)[and recall here--ES]. I now document and partially explain the vicissitudes of modern Indian philosophy in the Journal of Philosophy (JoP) during the years 1940-1970. I conclude with a more general observation about the nature of 1950s and 1960s analytic philosophy.

Interestingly, modern Indian philosophy is published in JoP between 1940 and 1970. Puzzlingly, it is only in the 1950s that its presence in the journal is substantial. JoP includes no (full-length) papers by Indian philosophers working on the Indian Subcontinent during the 1940s. The same is true of the journal in the 1960s. However, JoP publishes five papers by modern Indian philosophers in the 1950s. R. Mukerjee publishes a paper in 1950, D. Krishna in 1956, P. Sen in 1958, P. T. Raju in 1958 and N. K. Devaraja in 1959. In addition, the journal includes an extensive 1956 review by the American philosopher R. McKeon (1956) of round-table discussions held in India and America, discussions attended by American and Indian philosophers, among others.

Importantly, the modern Indian philosophy appearing in JoP in the 1950s was Indian in that it was written by academics writing in India at the time. It did not, however, engage with the millennia old tradition of philosophy that had its origins on the Indian Subcontinent. The papers were, in content, indistinguishable from other papers that appeared in the journal, and addressed, while engaging with Western authors, topics such as the relation of identity, the nature of actuality and the nature of philosophy. This contrasts with the work by Modern Indian philosophers in PR (prior to the 1950s) and in Mind (prior to the second half of the 1920s). The earlier work in PR and Mind did include substantial engagement with traditional Indian philosophy. Those interested might, for example, compare the work Raju publishes in PR in 1941 and 1947 with the paper he publishes in JoP in the late 1950s.

The emergence of modern Indian philosophy in JoP and its later disappearance from JoP thus leaves us with at least three puzzles. First, why did this philosophy only start appearing in JoP in the 1950s? Second, why did it no longer appear in the journal in the 1960s? Third, why did none of the work in JoP in the 1950s engage with the tradition of Indian philosophy? I will briefly, and partially, consider the first two of these questions here, beginning with the question of why modern Indian philosophy did not make it into the journal in the 1960s.

The disappearance of modern Indian philosophy from JoP in the 1960s coincides with the period when the journal became, more or less, an analytic philosophy only journal and, more or less, ceased to publish classical pragmatism, process philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology and more. The changes occur quickly and occur in the early 1960s. The immediate causes of the changes in JoP’s content are plausibly changes in its editorial board, including the appointment of R. D. Cumming to the role of editor-in-chief in the late 1950s and, later on, the appointment of S. Morgenbesser, A. Danto, and J. J. Walsh to editorial roles (All of this is in itself an interesting story that remains to be told in detail). The timing of the disappearance of modern Indian philosophy from JoP suggests that these editorial changes were also what brought about the persistent absence of modern Indian philosophy from JoP in the 1960s. Note, however, that a full explanation cannot just be that the new editors excluded non-analytic philosophy from the journal for they also excluded second-generation modern Indian philosophers and these philosophers were, as I pointed out here, not unsympathetic to analytic philosophy. A more complete explanation notes that the changes in JoP, like the changes in PR before it, included a shift within analytic philosophy, including a shift in views about which prominent Western philosophers are to be taken seriously and a shift in which topics might be engaged with. Modern Indian philosophers did not partake in this shift.

Why, then, did modern Indian philosophers only start making their presence felt in JoP in the 1950s? I can only sketch an answer here. JoP was, in the 1950s, the last of the three most prominent philosophy journals in the English speaking World (Mind, JoP and PR) that reflected a pluralist attitude to philosophy, that is, that published a diversity of approaches to philosophy. It was thus a natural place for modern Indian philosophers to try publishing in when they realized that PR, like Mind before it, was no longer willing to publish their work. At the same time, the recognition, by the 1950s editors of JoP (or, at least, by its pluralist editors H. W. Schneider and J. H. Randall, Jr.), that PR was closed to modern Indian philosophy may have facilitated the transition; perhaps this made the relevant editors a bit more open to work by Indian philosophers. As for why PR had always been that much more open to modern Indian philosophy than JoP, at least part of the explanation for this is the Absolute idealist heritage of PR, a heritage that included longstanding ties to modern Indian philosophy and that lay at the source of the pluralism that developed in the journal’s pages (one figure who had a notable role in facilitating the publication of modern Indian philosophy in Western journals was the British Absolute idealist J. H. Muirhead).

I cannot resist a final observation. The changes in the two most prominent philosophy journals in America, PR and JoP, could hardly have gone unnoticed by the philosophical community. If there is doubt about this, the publishing behaviour of modern Indian philosophers shows that what was happening was clear to philosophers well beyond American shores. And yet, my stories here are not widely known. Thus, in addition to being characterized by its use of marginalization as a way of gaining advantage over other approaches to philosophy, 1950s and 1960s analytic philosophy was characterized by its persistent silence about how it went about its business.

The Rise of (American) Analytical Philosophy and Journal Capture

Our reconstruction of the developments in PR [Philosophical Review]...suggests that analytic philosophy emerged in America at a time characterized by philosophical pluralism and a widespread commitment to addressing meta-philosophical issues related to such pluralism. It also suggests that analytic philosophy came to dominate American philosophy partly by analytical philosophers taking control of key institutions within academic philosophy and using these to promote analytic philosophy, and that crucial steps in the direction of such control occurred before 1950. The reason for the growing dominance of analytic philosophy appears to have been, at least in part, the suppression, by institutional means, of existing diversity and, possibly, the exploitation of American pluralism. The dominance of analytic philosophy was not just a matter of an inherent affinity of American philosophy for analytic philosophy, good arguments, more cogently stated doctrines or the lack of alternatives. Nor, at least in its initial stages, is the emergence of analytic philosophy in America a matter of political climate. Finally, the centrality of the exclusion, at an institutional level, of alternatives to mid-century analytic philosophy suggests that the latter might partly be defined by such exclusion....

Mid-century analytic philosophy represented itself as the champion of clear thinking and rigorous argumentation (Soames 2008). It is interesting that such an approach to philosophy should turn out to be characterized, at an institutional level and even if only in its control of PR, by a form of control over its rivals that bypasses discussion. It is no less interesting that, at the same time, mid-century American, speculative philosophy is trying to get to grips with the apparently irreconcilable differences between different approaches to philosophy and to do so with the help of reasoning. This attempt was not only one carried out at the theoretical level within the pages of PR and elsewhere, but one that was to some extent realized in the running of PR and, perhaps, in the tolerance with which analytic philosophy was treated.--Joel Katzav & Krist Vaesen (2017) "On the emergence of American analytic philosophy British Journal for the History of Philosophy [quoted from Academia.edu].*

As a philosopher of science, I had encountered the sociological lingo about 'journal capture.' I assume the terminology traces back to Merton, but to be honest I am unsure (and welcome leads). The first time I fully, consciously registered the phenomenon within analytical philosophy, was about half a decade ago both in the (gendered, racialized, and intellectual) patterns of exclusion to be found in the Healy-4 data and in some of the more shameless responses to it (recall my post at NewAPPS.) Since, I am more alert and I am familiar with a few more attempts at journal capture. To be sure, journal capture need not be all bad: in circumstances of intellectual homogeneity that fill the content of many journals,  it may well be a necessary condition for a particular (less popular) viewpoint to get any scholarly hearing at all. [I would just start a blog, but I can see the attraction to others of 'owning' a journal.]

Prior to the breakthrough of analytical philosophy in the Philosophical Review, which can be dated to 1948 (about which more below), philosophy Stateside was dominated by a distinction between speculative and critical philosophy. "The distinction is...roughly as follows: Speculative philosophy tends to focus on the provision of substantial, broad claims about the natures of the universe and humanity. Critical philosophy, by contrast, tends to try to limit its substantive, philosophical commitments and spends much of its time criticizing speculative philosophy or making explicit/reconstructing existing scientific or common-sense knowledge." (Katzav & Vaesen.) What we would now -- as heirs to Ernest Nagel 1936 -- would call ''analytical philosophy" is to be found in the "critical" camp. In their article, Katzav and Vaesen give a hint of the broad range of approaches and themes published in PR before 1948, including (surprising me) material on early experimental philosophy  (George W. Hartmann (1944)) and also the fact that "In 1948 the journal publishes...a symposium on Oriental philosophy where authors from India, China and America discuss the relationship between Western, Indian and Chinese philosophy." They add that "Indian philosophers writing in India publish full-length papers in PR throughout the period we have been discussing (see, e.g. Sircar (1933), Srinivasa Iyengar (1939) and Raju (1947))." We may say, then, that before the rise of analytical philosophy, philosophy was more cosmopolitan (in at least some dimensions) than it has been since Stasteide.

In the analysis of Katzav & Vaesen, Philosophical Review decisively and rather suddenly changes the tenor of its pages after 1948, when the work appearing there is largely restricted to analytical philosophy and the scientific wing of pragmatism. (The exceptions to the rule are often -- surprise -- people working at Cornell.) This is, as Katzav & Vaesen, show connected to broader changes in Cornell's department. (They also point to similar kind of journal capture at Mind under Ryle's stewardship.)**

Analytical philosophy displaced many rivals, in part, by ensuring that these would not appear in the leading journals (accompanied by a still familiar rhetoric of 'rigor,' 'clarity' and 'quality'). It did so by behaving like a faction with tough minded enforcers, bullies, who could be counted on never to recognize what is best in other approaches (Geach comes to mind), but only to find fault as well as the existence of strategic operators who did the hard drudgery of editing journals (but with cronyist, review practices which lasted through several generations--things have only just started to improve in the profession) and build institutions (Ryle, Black, etc.). This factional nature is often unintentionally, amply demonstrated in the memories of the participants who fondly recount how a mere phone-call would be sufficient to place a student in a top department. Eventually the process becomes self-reinforcing, when talent flocks to where the opportunities are. (To be sure, the story Katzav & Vaesen is partially compatible with other,  more familiar narratives that emphasize the Cold War and other changes in higher education Stateside.)

So far (very rough!) summary (read the paper). I offer three further observations: 1. What is most striking about the Katzav & Vaesen narrative is that the factionalism of analytical philosophy occurred not in an environment when jobs/positions were scarce and, where, one might expect battles to exclude alternatives, but in the golden age of growth in American higher education. Analytical philosophy could still easily have flourished without keeping its rivals from the pages of leading journals (and later pushing them out from leading departments). 2. There was no American, local tradition of irrationalism (later associated with Heidegger and the Nietzscheanism of Continental philosophy).  In a weird way, the later arrival of American 'continental' philosophy was a gift to analytical philosophy because it allowed the Carnapian narrative against it to flower (and displace all memory of alternative traditions). As Katzav & Vaesen note, only seventy years ago, the philosophical landscape Stateside was more diverse and stranger than we currently imagine.

3. Katzav & Vaesen are self-consciously externalist in spirit. But they don't explore what philosophical commitments about the nature of the philosophical enterprise drove the factionalist behavior they identify. Historians of analytical philosophy have just started to reflect on the meta-philosophical commitments that drove the professional success of analytical philosophy. These involve (self-serving) ideas about what counts as legitimate and intelligible philosophical speech. They also involve endlessly recycled narratives that reinforce(d) certain prestige hierarchies.

But about these facts and the obligations on us, who have inherited this state of affairs, some other time more.

 

A Common Historiographic Mistake By Students About Their Professionally Successful Teachers

Serious intellectual history and intellectual biography consist in more than presenting a chronological set of textual summaries, even if some of those texts are parts of debates. Any number of serious historical narratives cum explanations of, say, the emergence of SSR, might be grounded on such a chronological archive as Marcum provides, but they would have to go quite a bit further, in terms of interpretation and analysis of the agendas, resources in play, problems and struggles of Kuhn and his key interlocutors.

For example, Marcum's treatment of Alexandre Koyré is peremptory, consisting of several brief mentions at different chronological points (11, 26, 38, 75, 112). We learn little about what Koyré was trying to do, and how Kuhn struggled within and beyond Koyré's dispensation. It is perhaps not well known that in the late 1960s and early 1970s Kuhn would summon his first year Princeton HPS graduate students to a meeting with him on their first day. To this gathering he would bring his tattered copy of Koyré's Études Galiléennes, the 1939 edition. (Of course there was no English translation until 1978.) He would hold it up and pronounce, "Nobody is getting out of here until they have read this." Kuhn meant nobody would graduate who did not come to understand Koyré (and Kuhn himself) as practitioners of textual analysis and internalist history of science writing.

Kuhn was devoted to Koyré: He took up and pluralized Koyré's notion of the centrality of metaphysics -- the metaphysics of any given real science need not be Galileo and Copernicus's watered down neo-Platonism. Kuhn searched for what Koyré's notion of ruptural revolution lacked, to wit, an explanation of what it was about science dynamics that led to and shaped revolutions (enter eventually normal science). Kuhn shared and disseminated Koyré's disdain for doctrines of scientific method as keys to scientific practice and the shape of the history of the sciences. He also less fortuitously was led by Koyré's catastrophism to downplay the creativity of normal science, the role of small but significant discoveries in science, and to miss the dynamics of what we might call the politics of experiment. Koyré is not just one amongst many items in a chronology; he was the single most important resource and constraint (I do not use the language of 'influences') in the making of the younger Kuhn's practice as an historian and in setting his problematic, for better and worse as it turned out.

...

I was a graduate student of Kuhn at Princeton 1969-73, followed by a year as his colleague in the HPS Program there. Like almost all the Program's graduate students I was in the 'history side' of the Program and formally a member of the Princeton History Department. In addition I was a participant, from the late 1970s in the evolution of 'post-Kuhnian' history of science (and sociology of scientific knowledge). What happened in these domains, say in the generation after about 1980, gets almost no mention.--John A. Schuster reviewing James A. Marcum, Thomas Kuhn's Revolutions: A Historical and an Evolutionary Philosophy of Science?, Bloomsbury, 2015, at NDPR.

John Schuster is (even when wrong) an interesting and sophisticated Descartes scholar. His fascinating review of Marcum's book on Kuhn provides many insights into both Kuhn's teaching at Princeton and Kuhn's impact on the development of the distinct American disciplinary contours of late twentieth century history of science (and work on HPS and sociology of knowledge more generally). But it also exhibits a common historiographic fallacy. Because he writes from the vantage point of "Serious intellectual history and intellectual biography," it is especially important the fallacy. The fallacy I am about to describe also shows up in philosophy (especially in students of Rawls, Strauss, Cavell, Wittgenstein, etc.). It has two distinct, but connected elements.

1. A PhD student mistakenly takes how his (revered) teacher (Y) teaches his own work X as (trumping) evidence for (a) how Y arrived at X or (b) what Y thinks important about X while writing X or, more surprisingly, what (c) Y thinks really important about X.
2. The teacher (Y) is a founder of a school of thought (and often the student does not even recognize it as such) or a key agent in discipline formation.

On (1): there are many aims in graduate teaching of philosophy. But it would be really surprising if (a) or (b) are part of them. Even if a teacher were sincerely interested in sharing his/her biographical details, it does not follow that such post facto comments are reliable. Memory is a tricky faculty, especially when there is an audience around; it is simply not to be trusted. It is very odd that a trained historian would fail to recognize this point. (To be clear Schuster explicitly denies an interest in "influence" (that is (a), but he does think he can discern something like (b).)

It is admittedly more plausible that the teaching reflects what X thinks is important about Y. But even here one cannot assume this. The art of teaching consists, in part, of guiding another toward the truth (Good, etc.). What is emphasized in teaching, and here I'll add a rhetorical 'significant tecahing,' is emphasized for pedagogic purposes not for revealing one's estimation of significance. This is especially so when we consider (2).

On (2) a teacher who founds a school or the players in a discipline, always submerges something of significance in order to allow for puzzles, problems, the sense of achievable aims. Such a teacher also tends to create a tacit hierarchy within the school, but about that some other time more. Such a teacher creates shared bits of background knowledge (say Rawls on the history of philosophy) that are not just hoops to jump through ("Nobody is getting out of here until they have read this,") but ways to see the project. That is to say, we can assume that such a teacher did not teach all of the most significant bits of his own achievement.

This is not to deny that Koyré is a non-trivial figure in contextualizing and understanding Kuhn. But from Kuhn's teaching we cannot infer that he is the "single most important" such figure. There are other reasons to doubt this claim, but that's for another occasion. 

After Virtue After the Rant

Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead...What then sustains and strengthens traditions? What weakens and destroys them?

The answer in key part is: the exercise or the lack of exercise of the relevant virtues...Lack of justice, lack of truthfulness, lack of courage, lack of the relevant intellectual virtues--these corrupt traditions, just they do those institutions and practices which derive their life from the traditions of which they are the contemporary embodiment...Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) After Virtue, 222-223.

I often think that analytical philosophy is tainted beyond hope; our complicity in cultures of sexual harassment; our unwillingness to reflect on the patterns of exclusion, intellectual, racial, and personal; our repeated willingness to champion and be championed by intellectual bullies who have offered the world little of permanent value -- love, joy, beauty, etc.; our insistence that we're the party of truth and justice, while being unable to address in a forthright matter all the petty compromises with power and privilege we've made, etc. Of course, these are the predictable by-products of professional advancement. I recognize in myself the despair of a former-idealist; I should be a reactionary by now, but with age I turn the cliche up-side down: I am more critical of, and less comfortable with, the ways of the world than when I was a younger man.

But my heart is softened when I learned from MacIntyre this week that Gilbert Ryle wrote sensibly on Jane Austen's moral philosophizing; Ryle linked it, after distinguishing between a Calvinist and Aristotelian ethic, firmly with the "secular and aesthetic Aristotelianism of Shaftesbury." (No scholar would probably describe Shaftesbury like that now, but, when one reflects on it, Ryle is being insightful.) Not for the first time, I am struck by the fact that the more I learn about the history of analytical philosophy the quirkier -- in a good sense -- our tradition becomes.

Last week, after my rant went viral, with a guilty conscience, I found my copy of After Virtue and I decided to bring it on a conference trip to Austria and read it at earliest possible moment. I had been meaning to re-read it since I wrote this post (on MacIntyre's penetrating criticism of Rorty). Much to my surprise, the book had been clearly unread since I bought it second-hand in Red Lodge, Wyoming, during the Summer of 1992. (A stamp of The Broadway Bookstore is still clearly visible.)

I don't remember buying After Virtue. Judging by google.maps, the book-store is gone, although several others that look familiar are still in Red Lodge--a charming (undoubtedly quite touristy now) Western town that always stuck in my mind as the ideal quiet spot to write novels while having access to some of the comforts of civilization. Perhaps it's also a good place to await the fall of our civilization. (I have not been back.)

Even so, I don't share in After Virtue's narrative of decline -- it closes with the thought that we have entered  'new dark ages' -- and dreams of a new philosophical prophet to point the way out of our 'barbarism' (MacIntyre uses St. Benedict as exemplar (p. 263)). It's not that I am more optimistic than MacIntyre about our situation since the early 1980s, but rather because I have come to think that all ages, even the relatively prosperous and peaceful ones, are barbarous. That ours is an age of demagoguery and racialized nationalism -- identity politics is not limited to college campuses -- , and of demographic and environmental fears does not distinguish us from others. Even the sincerity of our religious fundamentalists is a recurring possibility. All ages call "men and women of good will" (263) to join in the endless task of minimizing the evils others inflict on each other. History teaches that more often than not those of good will are not up to the task. 

Despite the gloom, or perhaps because of it, After Virtue is a book for adults; I found it exhilarating reading. It offers many complex, interwoven arguments and, despite its relentless earnestness and argumentative and historical short-cuts, each page contains a sentence or two that will stop you in your tracks. Long before academics invented a scholarly industry around neoliberalism as the vice of our times, MacIntyre sets his sights on the bureaucrat's disguise as a technocrat (and the odd alliance with the therapist as exemplars of our times). In chapter 8, MacIntyre defends so-called epistemic versions of Knightian uncertainty in order to undermine claims to managerial expertise. (He seems to be unaware of Knight; I return to that some other time.) Some of the best lines in the book are its critical treatment of the performative theory of self, now associated with Judith Butler, but apparently articulated  by Erving Goffman in the 1950s and 60s.*

Indeed, I discerned I was right to feel guilty for not having mentioned MacIntyre in my rant because my distinction between the practice and the philosophical politics of philosophy that is presupposed in my rant, resonates with MacIntyre's use of a distinction between practice and institutions. And throughout the book he anticipates my own impatience with overblown and self-congratulatory claims of philosophical progress. More important, and much to my surprise, he articulates the ways in which taints from the past cannot be ignored for those that inherit tradition (country, practice, religion, etc.). Despite, or perhaps, because of his fondness for Aristotle, an unmistakable point of his argument is the diagnosis of what we would now call white privilege as a consequence of American slavery (220); he leaves no doubt that history generates obligations to latecomers.

I close with an observation on MacIntyre on Austen. At key junctures in his argument, MacIntyre tacitly corrects Ryle's claim that Austen's outlook is secular, by repeatedly insisting she is "a Christian." Evidently, classifying the past correctly is an urgent task if we fight the corrosion of intellectual narratives.

The Letter against Derrida's Honorary Degree, re-examined.

The Times (London). Saturday, May 9, 1992

Sir, The University of Cambridge is to ballot on May 16 on whether M. Jacques Derrida should be allowed to go forward to receive an honorary degree. As philosophers and others who have taken a scholarly and professional interest in M. Derrida's remarkable career over the years, we believe the following might throw some needed light on the public debate that has arisen over this issue.

Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some of the marks of writings in that discipline. Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree almost entirely in fields outside philosophy – in departments of film studies, for example, or of French and English literature.

In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida's work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.

We submit that, if the works of a physicist (say) were similarly taken to be of merit primarily by those working in other disciplines, this would in itself be sufficient grounds for casting doubt upon the idea that the physicist in question was a suitable candidate for an honorary degree.

Derrida's career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period. Many of them seem to consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns (‘logical phallusies’ and the like), and M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets.

Certainly he has shown considerable originality in this respect. But again, we submit, such originality does not lend credence to the idea that he is a suitable candidate for an honorary degree.

Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.

Derrida's voluminous writings in our view stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition. Above all – as every reader can very easily establish for himself (and for this purpose any page will do) – his works employ a written style that defies comprehension.

Many have been willing to give M. Derrida the benefit of the doubt, insisting that language of such depth and difficulty of interpretation must hide deep and subtle thoughts indeed.

When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that, where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial.

Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.

Yours sincerely,

Barry Smith
(Editor, The Monist)

Hans Albert (University of Mannheim)
David Armstrong (Sydney)
Ruth Barcan Marcus (Yale)
Keith Campbell (Sydney)
Richard Glauser (Neuchâtel)
Rudolf Haller (Graz)
Massimo Mugnai (Florence)
Kevin Mulligan (Geneva)
Lorenzo Peña (Madrid)
Willard van Orman Quine (Harvard)
Wolfgang Röd (Innsbruck)
Karl Schuhmann (Utrecht)
Daniel Schulthess (Neuchâtel)
Peter Simons (Salzburg)
René Thom (Burs-sur-Yvette)
Dallas Willard (Los Angeles)
Jan Wolenski (Cracow)

Internationale Akademie für Philosophie, Obergass 75, 9494S Schaan, Liechtenstein. [Quoted from here.]

Today, I presented a guest-lecture in which I mentioned my transformative experience, qua philosopher of economics, with a distinguished, mathematical economist who used themes from Derrida (and innovated with them) in order to explain and articulate a philosophy of mathematical economics and, thereby, also made feel what the, as it were, life-world of a mathematical economist qua theorist is like. This encounter -- in the years when I was an untenured professor -- made me revisit my conviction that Derrida is bullshit, and made me realize that my acquaintance with Derrida's writings could be charitably described as very indirect. I had accepted the epistemic authority of others (on Derrida) without much thought, and it made me examine how much of my intellectual self-understanding was handed down by others without my conscious mediation. In preparing the lecture I looked up the famous letter protesting the intention to award a honorary degree to Derrida by Cambridge University.

It is sometimes noted that it is extremely unlikely that most of the signers had read much more of Derrida than I had by the time I left graduate school. What is not noted is that it is extremely unlikely that these signers had read much of each other. (Obviously there are exceptions! [No need to remind me that Quine and Barcus Marcus were pretty familiar with each other's work.]) They are an eclectic mix of anglo-phone analytical philosophers, anglo-phone 'analytical' historians of 19th and 20th century philosophy, european and anglophone Husserlians, European 'Austrian' philosophers, European analytical philosophers, and a few whom I wouldn't know how to characterize. Moreover, the use of 'European' is in some sense an anachronism because in the early 1990s there was no shared philosophical space (of the technocratic sort familiar from ERC grant proposals and journal rankings). As it happens, according to Barry Smith's own testimony, the future of European philosophy in the years after the fall of the Berlin wall is one of the main issues at stake; Smith was worried that after the collapse of political Marxism there would be an embrace of Derrida style "nihilism" at the expense of other pre-Marxist (local) "traditions." Smith's letter failed to prevent the awarding of the honorary degree to Derrida. But from the vantage point of two decades, we can say that the take-over of European philosophy by Deconstruction did not happen. As philosophical politics go that's a victory for Smith.

What's striking about the letter is that it tacitly appeals to canons of normal science (hence the analogy with physics): the disciplinary experts drawn from "leading departments" decide merit based on "accepted standards." (Accepted by who? Well, of course, by the members of the leading departments at "distinguished" universities.) The self-serving and self-reinforcing, conservative nature of such reasoning -- and let's stipulate that the letter only expresses uncontroversial truth --  is by now obvious. Known "influence" outside leading departments counts for nothing. We have to remind ourselves that it is not too difficult to construe narratives in light of these norms of "merit," that Descartes, Locke, Hume, Thoreau, Nietzsche would have also fallen obviously short. Given that  professional philosophers operate in a zero-sum institutional environment (for jobs, status, time, appointments, funding, etc.) it is by no means obvious that they even have incentives to collect the kind of evidence that would allow them to offer such utterances in an epistemically reliable matter.

Even if one allows that "clarity and rigour" are the true touchstone of quality in the "eyes of philosophers" (and one ignores my reservations), it is, in fact, somewhat amusing that it's only very recent affair -- with the rise of meta-philosophy -- that the methods of at least some of the signers are being scrutinized with care and attention. Even the friend of clarity and rigour can recognize other criteria (truth, fruitfulness, social/moral utility, etc.) that may trump "clarity and rigour."

Another striking feature of the letter is the utter contempt for the "Dadaists or of the concrete poets" as contributions to philosophy. (What philosophy, if not nihilism? Well, I am no expert, of course, but it be useful to see these as a contribution to the experimental art of living.) Evidently, philosophy is a serious enterprise. Now one need not be friend of Žižek (who makes Derrida seem highminded), to recognize that one, thereby, is in no position to recognize that sometimes -- maybe all the time in our fallen world in which our hands are sullied with innocent blood everywhere -- the stance of the jokester is the only morally responsible stance; undoubtedly there are other more earnest stances that are worth exploring, too.  I am not claiming this is so, but ruling this out a priori is, well, a philosophical mistake.

As an aside, the important point -- lost on the signers -- is that since Socrates we know that all genuine (and ersatz) philosophy always runs the risk of "ridicule" and that such ridicule is unavoidable absent philosophers-kings.

Finally, it is a bit odd (even if indirectly very clear) to see in a letter devoted to defending the standards of clarity and rigour, the same writing characterized as defying "comprehension" -- there is universal consensus ("every reader") assumed over this --, yet also being, somehow, "semi-intelligible" and being "either false or trivial." (Yes, I am sure, that with considerable effort, you -- you are well-trained, after all -- can turn this into a consistent triplet with the help of elegant distinctions.)

Undoubtedly, the infelicities I have noted in the letter to the editor are the consequence of haste, consensus formation among an eclectic group of professional philosophers, and editorial interventions. The letter got polemical work done, and, I am open to the argument that Derrida's philosophical politics merited this kind of response. But in so far as I have had this letter and effort praised to me when I was a student (and heard claims like these marshaled against other philosophers that needed to be rejected), I note that it is more revealing about the commitments of the signers than either about Derrida or the politics of honorary award granting.

 

 

 

How Analytical Philosophy is Displacing 'Continental' on the Continent

In Gespenst geht um an Deutschlands philosophischen Seminaren: das Gespenst eines Weltsiegs der analytischen Philosophie und eines Massenexodus der geschlagenen kontinentalen Philosophie. Wohin zieht sie? Vorwiegend in andere Erdteile: nach Ostasien, Australien, Brasilien oder, ausgerechnet, in die Vereinigten Staaten, von denen der entscheidende Schlag gegen die kontinentaleuropäische Philosophietradition geführt wurde. Manfred Frank, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [HT Ivan Boldyrev]

As Manfred Frank recently noted in FAZ, analytical philosophy is slowly but surely displacing continental philosophy in many European countries. (Frank has a good eye for the historical ironies involved in this.) Because analytical philosophy has always accepted the intellectual division of labor (recall), it focuses on (what it takes to be) well-defined puzzles and problems, and because its ‘output’ is published in international, high citation journals – sometimes crossing over with various sciences --, it does much better than any competitor (local or foreign) in a grant-driven environment.* Given that in our times of scarcity, the grants are sources of PhD funding and career advancement this process is hard to combat even if there were the will to do so. Frank (who is a bit dismissive of interdisciplinary work in, say, philosophy of mind) claims that the Bologna process -- which both standardized European degrees, but also shortened many students’ educations --, facilitated the process.

The revived fortunes of European Analytical philosophy are not merely sociological. As I have noted before, formal philosophy was nurtured in Europe long after many of the best students of the Vienna and Berlin refugees had lost interest in it Stateside. Formal philosophy in Europe is not just logic or decision theory, but also philosophical linguistics, pragmatics, and social choice. In addition, the vitality of European analytical philosophy is also to be found in a number of applied areas (technology, social risk, etc.) and philosophy of science, especially the special sciences.

Not all European analytical philosophy is home-grown; quite a bit of it -- including well-funded stuff -- echoes or copies work done in North-America, the UK, and Australia (often with a half-decade delay). The very forces that encourage the growth of analytical philosophy in Europe, also encourage such (what I call) me-too-research. When I was still a professional philosopher I benefited from these trends, but I also lament the homogenization of the local intellectual landscape. For, even the best European analytical philosophers tend to be narrower philosophically on average than their North American counterparts due to differences in graduate education and specialization.

In addition to European continental philosophy having a hard time fitting into the grant structure mechanisms that will determine the future of 'research' around here, continental philosophy has some self-inflicted wounds. As an outsider to that tradition, I want to single out tentatively two such wounds: first, there is a kind of internal exhaustion of continental philosophy that has relied, a bit too much perhaps, on the great man inventing the next great thing in Paris (often with a stint Stateside along the way). The next great thing in Paris is still ongoing, but it is noticeable that many of the men being touted these days are the aged whose main claim to fame is primarily that they have managed to outlive the more interesting and energetic folk that have died.

Yes, I have heard of Quentin Meillassoux. I like reading him (and some of the other speculative realists most of whom are not European); he is the real deal. But his work also exhibits some of the self-inflicted wounds; for example, a near-total ignorance of, say, half a century work in philosophy of science and analytical metaphysics (which matters if you write about modality and science--this is why I prefer Graham Harman who reads widely in science studies).+ The exception to my generalizations -- phenomenological and enactive philosophy of mind is thriving -- also prove my claims: recent Phenomenology has made its peace with the division of labor, engages with the sciences (often more subtly than the analytical counterparts), and is willing to draw on different traditions. It also has domesticated itself by going naturalistic.

The second self-inflicted wound is the mutual ignorance among European continental philosophers. It's true that Habermas and Derrida started to agree about European politics near the end of Derrida's life, but their schools tend to ignore each other. Frank's piece is essentially an angry elegy on the passing of the great German Idealist tradition (in Europe; he notes it is more vital outside of Europe). But while not all of the folk working in that tradition were primarily oriented toward the past, few would engage seriously and critically with the other post-Kantian (non-Analytical) European philosophical movements. Relatively insular schools can remain vital philosophically with effort, but unless there are technical improvements that drive internal development, the champions of the school need to engage with other schools. But too few of the German Idealist tradition -- Frank is a notable exception -- bothered to engage seriously with the challenges emanating from, say, Deleuze or Derrida; more often than not they would recycle boringly familiar pseudo-historical narratives neatly summarized in ten points in overlong lectures.

If you read my blog for the first time, you may mistake the previous paragraph for the condescending stance typical of analytical philosophers toward historical philosophers. It's  not intended in that spirit. Rather, it's written by somebody that can appreciate Frank's bitter irony; I would welcome a more diverse philosophical local landscape. And so, I'll leave him with the last word which contains an apt description of the tacit theodicy presupposed by many analytical philosophers:

Viele Analytiker aber glauben fest, alle alten Irrtümer der philosophischen Tradition seien im neuen (wohlgemerkt: analytischen) Schulwissen korrigiert, Fortschritte an Einsichten stillschweigend berücksichtigt. Das ist eine Form des Hegelianismus, der jeden nachhaltigen Gedanken als Meilenstein auf dem Weg zum „absoluten Wissen“ aufhob und mitnahm.

 

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 Useless Philosophy; or Philosophical Betrayal

PHILOSOPHERS conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they wish to seem unusually pious. And so they think they are doing something wonderful, and reaching the pinnacle of learning, when they are clever enough to bestow manifold praise on such human nature, as is nowhere to be found, and to make verbal attacks on that which, in fact, exists. For they conceive of men, not as they are, but as they themselves would like them to be. Whence it has come to pass that, instead of ethics, they have generally written satire, and that they have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use, but such as might be taken for a chimera, or might have been formed in Utopia, or in that golden age of the poets when, to be sure, there was least need of it. Accordingly, as in all sciences, which have a useful application, so especially in that of politics, theory is supposed to be at variance with practice; and no men are esteemed less fit to direct public affairs than theorists or philosophers.---Spinoza, Political Treatise.

All plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary. Of this nature, are the Republic of Plato, and the Utopia of Sir Thomas More. The Oceana is the only valuable model of a commonwealth, that has yet been offered to the public.--David Hume, Idea of a Perfect Common Wealth.

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely restored in Great Britain is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it.--Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations.

Spinoza, Hume, and Smith, all three treat More's Utopia as a species of useless and inapplicable philosophy because it (purportedly) relies on, shall we say, wishful thinking about human nature (and social reality). In doing so they echo a Machiavellian trope (who may not have known Utopia, and is probably referring to Plato's Republic):

it being my intention to write a thing which shall be useful to him who apprehends it, it appears to me more appropriate to follow up the real truth of a matter than the imagination of it; for many have pictured republics and principalities which in fact have never been known or seen, because how one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done, sooner effects his ruin than his preservation. Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 15.

Undoubtedly some readers would not mind having their vain efforts being lumped together with Plato's Republic.

What's notable about Spinoza's criticism of Utopia is that he treats it as the exemplar of what philosophers do. (Presumably, Spinoza thinks of his own work as true philosophy, and the to be rejected style of philosophy as false [in the  manner of philosophical prophecy].) And even in Hume's criticism, it is still mentioned alongside that classical, paradigmatic text (The Republic). It's hard to imagine recent philosophical authors to accord Utopia such high status--even as the to-be-rejected other.* Undoubtedly, this has something to do with the fact that for recent political philosophers, our story starts with Hobbes and his way of framing matters has endured (so far).

As I have noted before (here and, especially, here), Utopia prefigures quite a bit of Spinozism. More important, the Machiavellian three (Spinoza, Hume, Smith) treat the Utopia as if it does not contain part 1, where the utility of a realistic philosophy in less-than-perfect-circumstances is heavily debated by the characters. In fact, we may say that the Machiavellian three ignore not just More's explicit distinction between the academic and civilized philosophy (and the third prophetic kind, which I claim More adopts), but unfairly typecast Utopia as (in his terminology) a species of naive academic philosopher (despite the self-presentation of More in Utopia as a man of practical affairs, that is, a lawyer and diplomat). Undoubtedly, More's work exhibits limitations, but it is not the one that is commonly attributed to him.

Unlike Machiavelli, Spinoza and Hume (Le Bon David) have managed to acquire a reputation of almost saintly philosophical integrity and nobility. One does not reduce their genuine greatness by noting their inability to give More his due. I mention this not to score-keep the history of philosophy, but to remind ourselves of a homely truth that even when it is said by the highest authorities that some other philosophy is useless, it need not be so.

 

academic and civilized philosophy,

 

Poetic Philosophers; (or on Harman on Aristotle and Fodor)

By far the greatest thing is the use of metaphor. That alone cannot be learnt; it is the token of genius [εὐφυΐας]. For the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances.--Aristotle, Poetics 1459a (translated by W.H. Fyfe.)

 Warum ich so weise bin.
 Warum ich so klug bin.
 Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe.--F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

I was reflecting on Graham Harman's and Jon Cogburn's responses to my earlier post on Harman, when I caught another point by Harman:

There is a reason why Aristotle calls metaphor the greatest gift of genius, the one that cannot be taught. He doesn’t say “being able to eliminate fuzziness and speak in clear propositional terms is the greatest gift of genius,” because it isn’t. Fuzziness and lack of precision are relatively minor intellectual problems in comparison with premature or hasty literalization of the world. (Editorial comment: analytic philosophy, for all its achievements, still doesn’t grasp this point, and that’s why it does not produce many impressive writers even though it produces industrial-scale numbers of clear ones. Jerry Fodor once called himself and his friends better writers than Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which just proves how much the point is being missed.)--Graham Harman.

I understand the temptation felt by Harman (and W.H. Fyfe) to translate Aristotle's εὐφυΐας as 'genius;' context makes clear that Aristotle is trying to convey the idea that being good at coining metaphors is a skill that cannot be taught, but somehow a natural talent, that is, it exhibits having fine natural dispositions. One reason to resist the (Romantic sounding) use of 'genius' here is that only a few pages before (1455a), Aristotle had written [διὸ εὐφυοῦς ἡ ποιητική ἐστιν ἢ μανικοῦ:] that is why poetry needs either a naturally well disposed nature or being a manic, and here the inspired ‘manic’ [μανικοῦ] evokes our genius. For somebody with a good disposition may still need a lot of endurance or practice to get good at the skill.

One might think that Harman is just wrong to channel Aristotle on metaphor and apply it to philosophers because, in this context of the Poetics,  Aristotle is discussing tragedy, not philosophy. But, as it happens Aristotle is generalizing about a skill. In fact, the ability to see sameness within difference is, indeed, also a philosophical one.* So, one way to read Aristotle is to suggest that to be a very good philosopher means to have an important skill in common with a very good poet.

As an aside, in context of his post, Harman is engaging with B.P. Morton (a blogger at the new group blog, Philpercs), and it's not quite clear to me what prompts Harman's aside about analytical philosophers and the bon mot put-down Fodor (who, like many not quite great analytical philosophers is a great, entertaining polemicist, but whose stock has been plummeting since his ill-advised, anti-Darwin book not to mention ordinary developments in cognitive psychology).

Perhaps it's because of my analytical training that my first quiet thought in response to Harman’s ‘’ analytic philosophy…does not produce many impressive writers even though it produces industrial-scale numbers of clear ones,” was it's better to produce industrial-scale numbers of clear writers than to produce considerable number of bad poets.+ But I caught myself, because I know that in our time, re-activating  the polemic between analytic and continental philosophy prevents genuine thought. By now we ought to judge these philosophical traditions not by the many, but either by the best or by the potentially enduring contributions they produced (about which some other time more).

Yet, analytical philosophy does not weed out truly great writers: Russell (who won the 1950 Nobel in Literature), Quine, Iris Murdoch, Dennett (go re-read Elbow Room), and Jody Azzouni are all excellent examples.** Even Fodor has quite a few memorable lines when he is not being a polemicist. (I leave aside her the good polemical writing at which we analytical philosophers excel.) This is not to deny that the joy one can find in reading them is different in character from the joy, if it is joy, one experiences in reading Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.

Even if one agrees, as I am inclined to do, that "Fuzziness and lack of precision are relatively minor intellectual problems in comparison with premature or hasty literalization of the world," it does not follow (even if I, upon considerable reflection, agree that the 'literalization of the world' should not be undertaken in haste—it took me a while to understand this phrase) that we should praise or promote fuzziness and lack of precision for their own sakes (although I note that one can deploy fuzziness in precise and skillful ways).

Anyway, I close with this observation (which echoes Benardete on Quinean poetics): while clarity is a core virtue in the self-understanding of analytical philosophers (recall this), the dirty secret of our poetic genius is that we have an enduring love for well-chosen metaphors: for example, content (as in mental content); grounding (as in metaphysical grounding); stance (as in the intentional stance), and, more controversially, analysis (as in analysis is the method of analytic philosophy), etc. That is, like all great philosophical movements, analytic philosophy, too, combines clarity and poetry.