Digressions&Impressions

On Russell's History of Western Philosophy (I); Russell on responsible Speech and his Criticism of Pragmatism

MANY histories of philosophy exist, and it has not been my purpose merely to add one to their number. My purpose is to exhibit philosophy as an integral part of social and political life: not as the isolated speculations of remarkable individuals, but as both an effect and a cause of the character of the various communities in which different systems flourished. This purpose demands more account of general history than is usually given by historians of philosophy. I have found this particularly necessary as regards periods with which the general reader cannot be assumed to be familiar. The great age of the scholastic philosophy was an outcome of the reforms of the eleventh century, and these, in turn, were a reaction against previous corruption. Without some knowledge of the centuries between the fall of Rome and the rise of the medieval Papacy, the intellectual atmosphere of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries can hardly be understood. In dealing with this period, as with others, I have aimed at giving only so much general history as I thought necessary for the sympathetic comprehension of philosophers in relation to the times that formed them and the times that they helped to form.

One consequence of this point of view is that the importance which it gives to a philosopher is often not that which he deserves on account of his philosophic merit. For my part, for example, I consider Spinoza a greater philosopher than Locke, but he was far less influential; I have therefore treated him much more briefly than Locke. Some men--for example, Rousseau and Byron-though not philosophers at all in the academic sense, have so profoundly affected the prevailing philosophic temper that the development of philosophy cannot be understood if they are ignored. Even pure men of action are sometimes of great importance in this respect; very few philosophers have influenced philosophy as much as Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, or Napoleon. Lycurgus, if only be had existed, would have been a still more notable example.--Bertrand Russell (1945) The History of Western Philosophy. "Preface"

This is the first of a series of posts on Russell's The History of Western Philosophy (hereafter History), including one, shortly, on why it focuses on "Western Philosophy." The passage quoted above are the first few lines of the History. The first thing to note is the somewhat surprising nod to Verstehen. Russell proposes to offer a contextual philosophy, in which the aim is sympathetic comprehension of philosophers in context. (There are echoes of Collinwood here. Collingwood's The Idea of History was published in 1946, but Russell could have known of Collingwood's lectures in the 1930s.) It is surprising because (recall) Russell's criticism of Bergson are connected to Russell's suspicion of reliance on sympathy. Russell even embraces the stance of "unsympathetic spectatorship!"

Now, the point is not just sympathetic comprehension of philosophers as shaped by their times. The real point of the book, which is explained more fully in the second paragraph, is to offer an account of how philosophy has shaped history. So, right from the start Russell offers a distinction between two sources of evaluation of philosophy:

• (i) an intrinsic one that studies a philosopher/philosophy on its merits;
• (ii) an extrinsic one that is consequentialist in character and studies philosophy on its effects on (a) philosophy and (b) its (social and political) environment. 

Russell does not explain what he means by "merit." (Something But it is clear that this is in some sense connected to the why philosophy is practiced in the "academic sense." So, peculiarly, intrinsic merit is given a sociological understanding. I put it like that not because I think this is what Russell intends, but rather because he accepts that under a certain guise or certain normative understanding of philosophy, Rousseau and Burke, are not philosophers at all because they can't be classified as academic philosophers in any sense. By this he does not mean they lacked academic appointments because Spinoza -- who has very high intrinsic value -- also was not an academic (nor was Locke). But rather that they exhibit, I suspect, the kind of virtues associated with academic philosophy in some sense.

What those virtues are I leave aside now, because Russell is working with a distinction between (say) men of letters and proper philosophers while simultaneously deliberately blurring it because he is going to treat men of letters as key to the history in the History. As he puts in the "introduction" (xiv) the topic of the book is the tracing of "a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men's lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances."

That still leaves open what Russell means by 'philosophy' and the intrinsic sense of merit  as well as how he establishes the causal interaction among ideas and circumstances. I wish to return to that in this series. But here I want to focus on the fact that the consequentialist evaluation is not merely neutral. Russell is as interested in the positive and the negative consequences of doctrine. In particular, and this is the theme for today's post, Russell embraces a doctrine of what I have called responsible speech. That it is legitimate to evaluate philosophers in terms of how they will foreseeable shape the environment or even have (surprisingly and unintentionally) shaped the circumstances. To show this I go to the closing set piece of the whole book.* While summing up his criticism of the pragmatist conception of truth, Russell writes,

In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of "truth" as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness--the intoxication of power which invaded philosophy with Fichte, and to which modern men, whether philosophers or not, are prone. I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time, and that any philosophy which, however unintentionally, contributes to it is increasing the danger of vast social disaster.

The submission to facts is characteristic of Russell's conception of scientific philosophy. It is connected to his criticism of Bergson and his rejection of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), which has low tolerance for arbitrary facts {[recall my discussion with Jeff Bell}.  Notice that (to echo Tarski) the classical conception of truth that Russell accepts itself is defended in consequentialist terms: it produces the right sort of humility, even sanity. That is to say, Russell thinks we can evaluate a regime of truth in terms of its social consequences on the effects of individuals (pride, humility, intoxication, madness, etc.) and society (social disaster, social peace, etc.) 

And when Russell evaluates the classical regime of truth alongside the possible pragmatist regime of truth,** he rejects the pragmatist on consequentialist grounds. And while such evaluation may not be fair or thought lacking in merit, a pragmatist is in no position to object since she embraces the consequentialist method of evaluation is a feature not a bug of her system. For the pragmatist conception of truth is "instrumentalist" because truth is going to be the product of inquiry. In particular, it will be the thing to be agreed upon "ultimately" by "all those who investigate." This idea has had an important afterlife in the Kuhnian focus on consensus in science. But what matters here that the grounds on which all those who investigate cannot itself be truth (that would be circular as Russell notes), but rather, is, in part, informed by the purposes, including practical ones, of investigation.  It's this feature that makes the instrumentalist conception of truth consequentialist. So, Russell's criticism of Dewey/pragmatist is ad hominem, it is not itself unfair. (To say that is not to say it goes through.)

Russell is careful to say that his rejection of the pragmatist regime of truth on consequentialist grounds is, in part, a judgment about circumstance.  Throughout the book,he lets the reader know he is writing at a particular time, namely one that has been shaped by ideas that lead to intoxication and vast social disaster. In such an environment a pragmatist embrace of truth slides us further down the slippery slope. Pragmatism enhances the road to serfdom. To be sure, Russell could well allow that pragmatist conception of truth is worth pursuing in other contexts. Not all contexts, because -- and I will return to this -- Russell insists that in modernity (the "industrial state") fascism is one of the permanent live possibilities (785; note again the soft historicism of Russell).+ So, while he is writing this at a time, the criticism of pragmatism is indexed to a particular kind of epoch.

Let me close, I don't write this to endorse Russell's criticism of pragmatism. Rather, it is notable how important the consequentialist criticism is. Russell is basically claiming that pragmatism is an irresponsible philosophical doctrine when the state is capable of totalitarian powers and itself the object of a romantic (and worse) attachments. In Russell then we see a treatment of inductive risk in earnest: Russell invites us to consider how our philosophical practice can abused.

 

 

On The Scruton vs Williamson exchange in TLS

Although a good semantic account of “I” is not sufficient for understanding the nature of self-consciousness, it may still be necessary. To take one of Scruton’s examples, brilliantly suggestive though Hegel’s discussion of the first person in The Phenomenology of Spirit is, it is plausible that it involves a confusion between what Kaplan distinguished as char­acter and content, as Alberto Voltolini has argued forcefully. Roughly, the character of “I” is the general rule that, as used in a given context with its standard meaning in English, “I” refers to its user in that context. That rule is constant across contexts. By contrast, the content of “I” varies across contexts; as used in a given context, it is the referent of “I” in that context, the very person who uses it. You and I use the word “I” with the same character but different contents. The distinction may seem elementary once made, yet numerous discussions go wrong because they neglect it. In particular, abstract talk of “the I” tends to muddle just that point.--Timothy Williamson, November 3, TLS, p. 18. [HT Leiterreports]

Tim Crane introduces a somewhat dour and dispiriting exchange between Roger Scruton and Tim Williamson on the nature of philosophy with the (vaguely Sellarsian) claims that [A] "Philosophy aims to outline the most general nature of things -- and if you understand "things" in the most general possible sense to, then philosophy is one of the "things" that philosophy aims to outline. " He then adds that this "inevitably means that philosophers will tend to disagree about the nature of philosophy." Crane thinks that philosophical disagreement is always a possible consequence of this understanding of philosophy in light of the genuine possibility that even the "best method" is open to challenge.*

 

It is a dispiriting exchange because very little is said in it that could not have been said at most moments during the twentieth century by some articulate protagonist writing in the aftermath of some version of the parting of ways. A different kind of spirit than me, would, perhaps, be dispirited because the previous sentence entails a lack of progress. Because I am mostly indifferent to the very idea of philosophical progress (although excited by technical innovation), that's not the source of my response. Let me explain a bit more fully before I return to the passage quoted at the top of this post.

 

Most of the exchange, Williamson refuses to show his hand. Rather, he has great fun at poking holes in the presuppositions and lack of clarity of Scruton's position (on the nature of the meaning of 'empirical world;' 'humanities' and 'science'); Scruton's sloppy terminology and the absurdities it commits him to (about various disciplinary practices inside and outside the humanities and science) are effectively ridiculed by Williamson throughout. I find witnessing such expert demolition dispiriting, too.

 

In fact, in his first response to Scruton, Williamson's makes no assertion about the nature of philosophy at all! He hints that he agrees with "making distinctions;" that one should focus on "easier cases and analyse them more deeply before building up to harder cases later;" and that philosophers (like Grice, Reichenbach, and Kaplan) have contributed to "science" and "scientific theorizing." In fact, in his third response, Williamson is careful to avoid conflating philosophy's contribution to science from philosophy itself. There such "contributions" are treated not as intrinsic to philosophy, but as one of the (extrinsic) things that "also" happens.

 

As an aside, against the textual evidence, in his introduction, Crane insists -- by quoting Williamson's "easier cases and analyse them more deeply before building up to harder cases later;" -- that Williamson here "epitomizes" the approach of "what is generally known as analytic philosophy." That may well be so for Williamson (and analytic philosophy), but in context Williamson is defending the fact that "mathematical decision theory" is an example of the possibility of "scientific study of points of view." That's not a claim about the nature of philosophy, but a method. Of course, it's possible that philosophy could be reduced to method, but that's not Williamson's position.

 

Rather, in his exchange with Scrution, Williamson seems to understand philosophy as a "discipline" (without telling us here what that is) with its "own questions" and "theories" with its "own ways of answering its questions" (including "thought experiments" and "mathematically rigorous formal models")** that "concern all possible instances of their subject matter, not just those that happen to have evolved in our species or on our planet." So, Williamson's understanding of philosophy is intrinsically about a species of generality not far removed from Crane's claim [A] about the nature of philosophy. (This is further evidence that Williamson does not treat contributing to science as really central to philosophy because some of the contributions he praises are really specific to our planet.) It would have been useful if Williamson had been asked to show his hand earlier in the exchange because then Scruton could have used the evident lacunae in Williamson's approach to articulate his own stance.

 

It's not that Scruton does not deserve being made fun of -- he does write [in the  context of explaining that melodies are musical objects that belong to purely intentional realm and so could never be studied scientifically], 'no sounds could arise from the depths as the E-flat major arpeggio rises from the depths at the start of the Das Rheingold' --; the problem here is not just the dated example (and the logical triviality of the claim), but rather that he fails to notice that he is using it as example of "sounds...we as self-conscious beings hear them, under [particular, intentional] concepts" while simply assuming that his readers share his concepts; these days the prelude sounds like something you may hear as background noise while getting a deep tissue massage.*

Williamson's potshots at Scruton are a shame because Scruton also says some important things worth reflecting on.+ But I want to leave those aside (including a curious criticism of Foucault), and close with a reflection on the central philosophical disagreement between Scruton and Williamson that Williamson purports to settle in the passage quoted above. Throughout the exchange, Scruton tries to defend philosophy's role in articulating (what he at one point calls) the "standpoint from which self-conscious beings address the world, what Hegel called the Fursichsein....philosophy as the seamstress of the Lebenswelt" For, somewhat surprisingly, nothing Williamson says really undermines the viability of such a project. If anything, he can be taken to be saying that such a project requires, first, the long and proper development of the careful tools and distinctions of analytic philosophy: "Although a good semantic account of “I” is not sufficient for understanding the nature of self-consciousness, it may still be necessary." (Here, one may well suspect that Williamson himself is close to Carnap's position in the Aufbau.) So, somewhat peculiarly, while Williamson destroys Scruton in the exchange, he leaves his project standing (without, of course, drawing attention to this fact).

 

Now, one may object to the judgment at the end of the preceding paragraph and point to the paragraph quoted above. In it, strikingly, Williamson's appeals to authority. What's peculiar of Williamson's strategy in the quoted passage is (a) beside the fact that he refers to an otherwise obscure paper [although Voltolini deserves wider readership], that here, seemingly en passant, Williamson calls us back (b) to one of the central debates between Russell and Bradley that go into the founding myths of analytic philosophy in which the technically superior Russell philosophically destroys the out of date Hegelians. Given that legend, it is worth nothing (c) that while Voltolini is clearly on Russell's side, he actually shows that Russell's philosophy could not do the job it set out -- destroy Hegelian metaphysics -- because even on the limited question of the thesis of indexical reference to discrete objects, Russell's philosophy lacked the proper resources. [It had to await Kaplan.]

 

But Voltolini's argument is peculiar because (d) the very distinction between character and content [which  is used by Kaplan to offer a good semantic account of "I"] is, to use a Kaplan style phrase, foreshadowed by Bradley himself in defense of the (neo-)Hegelian position (Voltolini himself quotes a passage from Bradley's Logic; I could also point to several passages in Appearance and Reality), although one may grant that it is not exactly Kaplan's version of it. I call this 'peculiar' because, again as (e) Voltolini correctly notes, Voltolini's Kaplan-style-rational-reconstruction of Hegel is not theoretically neutral. [In fact, and this is an aside, (f) Voltolini acknowledges -- but then fails to develop! -- that Bradley has further resources [cough, cough, his famous regress argument] to defend his Hegelian theory against the metaphysical thesis of discrete individuals.]

 

This lack of neutrality matters (if we return to the debate between early analytic and the neo Hegelians), because Kaplan's semantic approach, with its commitment to content presupposing context, actually requires the intelligibility of discrete individuals (in some sense or another) when applied to the Russell-Bradley debate by Voltolini. [For Kaplan assumes our ability to manipulate the conceptual apparatus of direct reference.] So, while one can admire Kaplan's achievement, even hold it up as an exemplar of the kind of contribution one may wish to aspire to, it is peculiar to trot it out as somehow providing useful evidence of muddled thinking in Hegel or Bradley (or Scruton).+

 

My dispiriting suspicion, and this gets me to the point today, is that Williamson probably knows that his appeals to Voltolini and Kaplan and the excursion into muddled confusions -- are a non-sequitur; he will get away with it because why would anybody who cares about the technical issues and, more important, cares for the health of philosophy be willing to come to Scruton's defense?****

 

 

 

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 Publishing in Times of Turmoil (or worse)

This morning I was reading a draft chapter by one of my talented PhD students, Laura Georgescu. Her (fascinating!) work is on the edge of my own expertise and so the bibliographic notes are (to me!) not standard, that is, they also involve citations to works that I sometimes would not have encountered before. As it happens one of these involved a reference to a paper published in 1943. This caught my attention because one rarely encounters citations to works published in the midst of war when would be researchers are drafted, rationing is in place, and censorship slows things down; not to mention that some of the stuff that gets published is no better than propaganda (or extremely discrete criticism).

Trained up as we are on the opposing trajectories of Heidegger (Nazi) (recall, but also here, and here) and, say, Russell (pacifist sent to jail), we tend to think of war and dictatorship as offering us stark choices. But, I am enough of a historian to know, that in practice many academics find a way to make their peace and muddle on the best they can. While there is little honor, and even some cowardice (sold as prudence or realism) in such a stance, I can't simply reject it because, as I noted yesterday in a different context, one of the great purposes of politics is to make the life of philosophy, the arts, sciences and all the other joyful activities that ennoble our existence possible.

Because the chapter was still in draft (and did not include the dissertation's full bibliography), "Chapman 1943" was all I got in notes 21 & 28. Some googling led me  to Sydney Chapman's "Edmund Halley and Geomagnetism," published in Nature. According to the fine-print it was delivered at Oxford University on 28 may 1943 as the "annual lecture, commemorating Edmond Halley, a great son of Oxford, is devoted to astronomy and terrestrial magnetism." I was pleased to note that Halley (who was a graduate from Oxford) was being honored at Oxford, despite the fact that  he failed to get an appointment there because of his (rather non-Christian Epicurean) religious views. Halley's heretical views are in evidence in the poem he attached to the front of Newton's Principia (see Albury's very fine paper, or my own work on the topic). I was even more pleased to see Chapman start his lecture with his own translation of Halley's poem.*

The lecture itself, which has not received the attention it deserves, is methodologically highly interesting because it is based on original research and mixes contextual, counterfactual, and retrospective analysis (especially, but not only, of Halley's magnetic theories). Some other time I hope  to return to it (but first Laura needs to defend and get her own work on these matters in print.). I was a bit baffled that Chapman had such a subtle interest in the history of magnetism. (I was only familiar with his work on stochastic processes.) But a quick on-line search revealed that by 1940 he was one of the world's leading scholars of geomagnetism and one of the leading scientists of his age.

Much to  my surprise, Chapman allows the war to intrude in his 1943 lecture in his closing lines, which I quote:

For two centuries Halley had no comparable successor in this field, and the magnetic survey of the globe was not renewed with his astounding zeal until in 1905 the young American, Louis Bauer, with the backing of a prince of industry, the one-time poor Scots lad Andrew Carnegie,** resumed the Sisyphean task.

A non-magnetic ship was built for the ocean magnetic survey: unfortunately this was lost by fire in 1929. Later the British Admiralty built another non-magnetic ship,  the Research, which should by now have completed its first voyage had war not intervened. We may hope that when peace returns the great work with which Halley so well began will be taken up again with his own vigour.

These words give evidence of (what we may call) a spirit of scientific progress, (a modestly expressed) faith in victory of the Allies ("when peace returns"),  as well as a subtle reminder of the opportunity costs of war (science is halted, etc.).

I could have stopped here. But I had a nagging feeling that I had seen Chapman's name before in a different context (see here). In WWI, Chapman was, like Russell, a pacifist (although unlike Russell, he was so on religious grounds). He had, in fact, been one of the signatures on the (rather mild) letter of protest sent to Trinity, Cambridge, to protest Russell's dismissal. After the war, Chapman was made to feel unwelcome at Cambridge for his stance and left. Eventually he succeeded Whitehead as the chair in mathematics at Imperial. Interestingly enough, by the time of WWII came around, Chapman gave up on his pacifism in order to combat fascism.***

 

 

On Secular Priests & Technocrats; the Reluctance of Issueing Normative Pronouncements

When I read people from the early 20th century...discussing their reluctance to issue normative pronouncements I frequently get something like the following impression....Our forbearers were very keen to avoid any suggestion that others should defer to their pronouncements on moral matters, they really did not think they should be deferred to as if they were some kind of intelligentsia secular-priesthood. They wanted to avoid it being possible to illegitimately translate the epistemic authority and bully-pulpit one gains as a professor into an ability to command or sway others with especial [sic] authority, since they thought that we have not earned that or for other reasons should not be granted it. Of course one gets involved in moral and political life as a private citizen; but one does so there as an equal, one voice among many. Where one is in some sense speaking or acting with professional authority one must avoid treating one's lectern as a bully pulpit, since one has no right to that bully pulpit.

Standing behind this... is some kind of egalitarian ideal of non-imposition, and a vision of the proper role of intellectuals in public life. I find that people launching the Berlin-esque critique frequently just brush this aside, and treat these people like they are shallow technocrats with no interest in public life....But it seems to me that it's at least plausible that the early analytics were on to something important here, that is worthy of serious reflection in metaphilosophy, and it wasn't just a refusal to engage but a bit of principled egalitarian politics that guided their decisions. As it stands I don't think this non-imposition ideal is quite viable in our present social circumstances --  this because I think that if we none of us say explicitly say ``I think you should adopt these ends'' but it just so happens that all of the professoriate only treat certain goals as worth taking seriously, we have collectively violated the spirit of this egalitarian ideal of non-imposition, even if no-one of us did individually. But those social circumstances are potentially subject to change, and in any case perhaps the ideal could be refined to account for that.

Plenty of my colleagues in philosophy are responding to recent events by saying that we should, as a profession, be more involved in public life. I quite agree, and as noted I think Berlin was on to something in his critique of the more limited or technocratic mode of political engagement. But I also do sometimes get the impression that some ... of those who launch critiques of technocratic political philosophy really do have designs on operating as a kind secular-priesthood, and have authoritarian ideas of how `layfolk' should relate to the moral-expert professoriate. The early analytic reluctance, when under the guise of a moral professor, to issue normative pronouncements about the proper ends of social life can start to seem very sympathetic to me when I am struck by this. So I hope that not only do we start to engage more with the world of practical affairs, but that as we do so we are self-conscious and reflective about the way in which we relate to our fellow citizens.--Liam Kofi Bright "Defending Technocrats" @The Sooty Empiric.

Liam's very interesting remarks are a response to one of my older post that I recently recirculated again. For the record: I edited his remarks a bit, and so removed some of his careful hedging/clarifications. For the purpose of clarification, let me offer some working definitions of different kinds of philosophers:

• the philosopher as secular-priest: somebody that deploys publicly the epistemic authority and normative bully-pulpit one gains from being a professor in order to pronounce in normative fashion on current affairs from a superior-in-some-sense perspective
• the philosopher as technocrat: somebody that takes (shared) normative ends as given and works out the implications of these akin to an engineer.

The first thing to recognize is that the philosopher qua secular-priest and qua technocrat need not be in tension with each other. One can be a secular-priest philosopher in one's public utterances and be a technocrat in one's (more esoteric) professional publications. The philosopher qua secular-priest and qua technocrat only may seem to oppose each other if the technocrat wishes to pursue her craft in public. These comments do not exhaust the possibilities, of course. But here I shall remain focused on public philosophy (which recall I distinguish conceptually from punditry and advocacy). I distinguish among three kinds of public philosophy (recall). I associate the 'public' in public philosophy with a shared life or common good. That is, public philosophy so understood is committed to a form of minimal political unity--a unity that is constituted by (educational) practices, narratives, and public understandings that facilitate some dispositions conducive to minimal, political union. (In a community of angels or philosophers there would be no need of public philosophy.)

First I list two species of direct public philosophy, which can draw on the results/insights or distinctions of professional philosophy, but need not do so. Then I mention a third indirect species:

1. Normative interventions or participation in public debates by professional philosophers and those trained in professional philosophy.
2. A genre of writing and speaking by intellectuals, who are not professional philosophers -- and do not engage in the debates/discussions among professionals --, yet engage public(s) on philosophical topics. (Sometimes these are topics that are not much discussed by recent professional philosophy.) 
3. Facilitating or enhancing social norms, public practices, and political institutions conducive to a common good is an indirect form of public philosophy. For such practices can instantiate rational arrangements that make possible, perhaps, constitute a common good which I will provisionally define (recall) as mutual accommodation and modest forms of mutual receptivity such that public conversation -- not war or domination -- can be continued.

Now, let's return to Liam Kofi Bright's analysis of the philosopher qua secular-priest and qua technocrat; it should be immediately clear that these two modes of being do not exhaust the way one can be a public philosopher. His account of the practice(s) of early analytical philosophers on these matters is evocative of a species of Weberianism, whose influence of analytical philosophy is not sufficiently appreciated (recall Weber's (1917) Science as Vocation, "the true teacher will beware of imposing from the platform any political position upon the student, whether it is expressed or suggested." By contrast: "When speaking in a political meeting about democracy, one does not hide one's personal standpoint; indeed, to come out clearly and take a stand is one's damned duty. The words one uses in such a meeting are not means of scientific analysis but means of canvassing votes and winning over others." (10)) As an aside, Weber is clear that public philosophy is the realm of opinion not truth.

Bright's early analytical philosopher primarily practices indirect public philosophy. Even her most public interventions tend to be aimed at facilitating more rational public practices and discussions rather than articulating a normative position as such. Often these interventions have firm ground in normative commitments (in early analytical philosophy these are often treated as optative choices beyond rational scrutinity/grounding--a point Bright ignores), but these are, as it were, withheld with great self-command in order to facilitate a better operation of public reason (recall this post on Stebbing; and this one). Surprisingly enough, here early analytical philosophers anticipate the practices of contemporary students of Foucault (and Deleuze)--who often unmask away this or that public practice and offer us maps of local terrains/practices while intimating their own normative stances, but without defending them.

So, there are at least three kinds of philosophers:

• the philosopher as secular-priest: somebody that deploys publicly the epistemic authority and normative bully-pulpit one gains from being a professor in order to pronounce in normative fashion on current affairs from a superior-in-some-sense perspective
• the philosopher as technocrat: somebody that takes (shared) normative ends as given and works out the implications of these akin to an engineer.
• the philosopher as social facilitator: somebody that engages in public philosophy in order to help stabilize or promote social norms, public practices, and political institutions conducive to a common good

Of course, there are more species of philosophy, some of them highly relevant to our practices of public philosophy. (I have written on the philosopher-prophet (recall); the philosopher-quietist, the Socratic political philosopher, the puzzle-solver, etc.) My modest point here today is that one can reject being a philosopher qua secular-priest as much as being a philosopher qua technocrat. While there were secular priests among the early analytical philosophers (Russell comes to mind), they tended to understand these priestly practices as distinct from philosophy as such. In fact, I would suggest that the truly striking fact about the recent public turn in analytical philosophy, is that many of its best practitioners combine elements of the secular-priest and the technocrat, that is, they become priestly technocrats. Our friends combine an unquestionable commitment to a robust species of moral realism, and they assume they have access to the normative implications that follow from it. (I take this to be saying pretty much the same as Bright's they "do have designs on operating as a kind secular-priesthood, and have authoritarian ideas of how `layfolk' should relate to the moral-expert professoriate.")

Bright expressed his reservations about priestly  technocrats by appealing to a kind of sympathetic norm of respect toward our "fellow citizens." Unfortunately, Bright here assumes a shared egalitarian ideal. But it is by no means obvious that the (let's stipulate meritocratic) priestly type embraces this ideal in their hearts. More often than not the priestly type pontificates on the cognitive biases of the lay-folk, which undermine their capacities. Even if they do recognize the ideal as binding on  themsleves, it is by no means obvious that the incentives under which our priestly-technocrats flourish promote such an ideal of egalitarianism. Rather, our institutional incentives tend to promote imprudent, expert over-confidence and lack of attention to the cognitive biases on the experts' themselves. I am not suggesting here that these facts explain the reticence of some of our forefathers and foremothers (which may have multiple, overlapping sources), although I would not be surprised if they did.

How Gopnik offered me a Decisive Clue; Hume, Newton, the Jesuits, and the Buddha

We discovered the entries in the Jesuit catalogs that listed everyone who lived at the Royal College in 1726, 1734, and 1737: some 100 teachers, students, and servants in all. Twelve Jesuit fathers had been at La Flèche when Desideri visited and were still there when Hume arrived. So Hume had lots of opportunities to learn about Desideri.

One name stood out: P. Charles François Dolu, a missionary in the Indies. This had to be the Père Tolu I had been looking for; the “Tolu” in Petech’s book was a transcription error. Dolu not only had been particularly interested in Desideri; he was also there for all of Hume’s stay. And he had spent time in the East. Could he be the missing link?

...

We discovered that in the 1730s not one but two Europeans had experienced Buddhism firsthand, and both of them had been at the Royal College. Desideri was the first, and the second was Dolu. He had been part of another fascinating voyage to the East: the French embassy to Buddhist Siam.

In the 1680s, King Narai of Siam became interested in Christianity, and even more interested in European science, especially astronomy. Louis XIV dispatched two embassies to Siam, in 1685 and 1687, including a strong contingent of Jesuit scientists. Dolu was part of the 1687 group.

...

The Jesuits in the 1687 embassy, including Dolu, stayed in Siam for a year and spent a great deal of time with the talapoins—the European word for the Siamese Buddhist monks. Three of them even lived in the Buddhist monastery and followed its rules.

Like Desideri’s mission, the Siamese embassy ended in bloodshed and chaos. In 1688 the local courtiers and priests revolted against the liberal king and his arrogant foreign advisers. They assassinated King Narai, the new bridge between the two cultures crumbled, and the Jesuits fled for their lives. Several of them died. Dolu and a few others escaped to Pondicherry, in India, where they set up a Jesuit church.

In 1723, after his extraordinarily eventful and exotic career, Dolu retired to peaceful La Flèche for the rest of his long life. He was 80 when Hume arrived, the last surviving member of the embassies, and a relic of the great age of Jesuit science.

...

And I discovered something else. Hume had said that Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary was an important influence on the Treatise—particularly the entry on Spinoza. So I looked up that entry in the dictionary, which is a brilliant, encyclopedic, 6 million–word mess of footnotes, footnotes to footnotes, references, and cross-references. One of the footnotes in the Spinoza entry was about “oriental philosophers” who, like Spinoza, denied the existence of God and argued for “emptiness.” And it cross-referenced another entry about the monks of Siam, as described by the Jesuit ambassadors. Hume must have been reading about Buddhism, and Dolu’s journey, in the very building where Dolu lived.--Alison Gopnik "How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis: David Hume, the Buddha, and a search for the Eastern roots of the Western Enlightenment" in The Atlantic.

[This post is in honor of a conference on Hume's Science of Human Nature in Prague--ES.]

 

Alison Gopnik's interest in the connection between Hume and Buddhism (see also this scholarly piece), alongside Dario Perinetti's research on the library at the College of La Flèche (known to Descartes and Hume scholars), is leading to a revolution in Hume scholarship. Here I want to offer a glimpse of the significance of their work.

 

After professional philosophers (influenced by Ted McGuire, Howard Stein, Bill Harper, Mary Hesse, George Smith, etc.) renewed the interest in the historical Newton, it became pretty obvious that Book 1 of Hume's Treatise is, despite the relentless coupling of Hume & Newton in post-Kantian philosophy, not very Newtonian. This pushed an unpleasant choice on Hume scholars: either Hume did not understand Newton or he is an informed critic of Newton.

 

During the last decade, the anti-Newtonian reading has gained prominence (in the hands of Yoram Hazony, Miren Boehm, and Tamas Demeter). Hume is clearly a critic of Newton in at least three direct ways: he is critical of the application of geometry ( 1.2.4.17-29, 1.3.1.6,  and especially 1.4.4.1-6), and his treatments of space & time are clearly undermining Newton's understanding of his own achievement. In addition, Hume insists that his own science is more foundational than Newton's. In many ways, Hume's Treatise reflects the influence of neo-Cartesian views. If people pay attention to this they point to Malebranche (an acknowledged source of Hume's Treatise.)

 

Reservations about Newton are hard to find in Scotland in the 1730s, but what's key is that opposition to Newton in France only died down from 1739 onwards after Maupertuis showed that the figure of the earth was pretty much as Newton predicted it based on the law of gravitation. (This has been discussed by Kofi Maglo, Mary Terrall, and JB Shank).

 

Now, philosophers, influenced by Kant and  Koyré, like to suggest that the opposition to Newton was primarily methodological and metaphysical (muttering things about un-intelligibility of action at a distance). Undoubtedly such issues played a role. But as George Smith and I have shown, in his (1690) Discourse on Gravity, Huygens had also offered an extremely influential empirical argument against Newton's theory. There are many steps that go into Huygens's argument, but, crucially, Huygens's argument relies on (i) measurements with pendulums, especially the second pendulum going back to Tachard, Varin, and others; (ii) measurements of longitude on land, including, crucially one by Tachard. In 1685 Father Guy Tachard, a Jesuit, on his way to Siam, had es­tab­lished the longitude of the Cape of Good Hope, relative to Paris, by comparing the time of an eclipse of the innermost moon of Jupiter with the time predicted by Gian Domenico Cassini's tables; (iii) measurements of longitude at sea with Huygens's pendulum clock.

 

The key for present purposes is this. When Hume came to La Flèche, the last living astronomer  personally familiar with Tachard's measurements and what they entailed about the empirical arguments against Newton's theory was was Father Dolu (who, presumably, had a hand in some of these measurements). That is to say, when Hume came to La Flèche he encountered worldly Jesuits who had been at the cutting edge of empirical science -- even big science --, doing measurements and research that spanned the globe. Dolu could have given him a new scene of thought that liberated him from the narrow and insular confines of Scotland and given him confidence to shake the authority of Newtonian natural philosophy (and the Newtonian natural religion it supported). 

 

As it happens, as Hume was writing the Treatise, new expeditions to Peru and Lapland (even bigger science) were producing results that would undermine the status of these late 17th century measurements. Hume will not be the last philosopher who bases his philosophy on an empirical science that is out of date (as Russell recognized) by the time his/her book is appreciated by discerning readers.

 

On Philosophical Integrity; Scruton, Pogge, and The Evaluation of the Quality of The Arguments

ROGER SCRUTON, the conservative philosopher, academic and journalist, has been dropped as a Financial Times columnist following the disclosure that he is being paid £54,000 a year as a consultant to the tobacco industry.

Professor Scruton received a letter from the newspaper's editor Andrew Gowers on Friday telling him that his weekly countryside column, This Land, would no longer being required.

He has written for the paper for three years but fell into disfavour after it was disclosed that he was a paid adviser to Japan Tobacco.

In a leaked e-mail, he was shown to have suggested that the cigarette company extend his two-year-old contract by a further £12,000 a year in return for his placing of articles in the media defending smokers' rights. 27 Jan 2002 The Telegraph.

 

Louise Antony, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, pointed out the difference between the moral views of an individual and their ethical behavior: “The evaluation of the philosophical work — the quality of the arguments — is one thing, and the evaluation of the philosopher’s behavior is something else.

She added, “We take our job to be giving students the tools to make good ethical decisions. But of course, a philosopher can know what the tools are, and still be bad at using them.”--Louise Antony May 20, 2016, in Buzzfeed commenting on the Thomas Pogge scandal.

The idea that the quality of the arguments is essential to the evaluation of the philosophical work goes, within analytical philosophy, back to Russell, who (recall) made a sharp distinction between argumentative "philosophy" as "theory," which aims at "understanding" of the world and intellectual reflections that orient practice and, thereby, generate "some new way of feeling towards life and the world, some way of feeling by which our own existence can acquire more of the characteristics which we must deeply desire." For Russell it was obvious, then, that whatever merit Spinoza's writing have it is not as philosophy.* (I have suggested that Russell, in turn, was inspired by Boole's evaluation of the Spinoza-Clarke debate.)

One consequence of Russell's distinction is that it facilitates the evaluation of arguments as disembodied entities decoupled from the living subject and their functional role in the practices that generated them. Arguments, then, are about the world and the evaluation of them is done with reference to their quality as arguments and the facts they are about. On this view the work of philosophy can, in principle, be left  to machines once they are capable of generating and evaluating interesting arguments. The source of argument is irrelevant, if not an outright (genetic) fallacy, in judgments of quality.

Of course, in practice, the source of the argument is not wholly irrelevant because one can obtain credit, status, and (indirectly, perhaps) a professional livelihood by them. Moreover, credit and status can be leveraged to produce influence (by way of letters of recommendation, editorial-ships, grant-agency-influence, dispensing PhD/Post-doc positions, conferences, etc.) in the profession and, if one wishes, to generate authority in the world at large (editorials, summits, UN conference circuit, policy-advice, bigger grant agencies, etc.). Even if one stipulates, for the sake of argument, that professional credit/status is obtained on strictly epistemic grounds (and ignores the role of, say, trust), a philosopher's credit is deployed to reinforce public utterances in sometimes zero-sum contexts that are not strictly epistemic.

Integrity is derived from the Latin integer--a whole (number) or something untouched/unblemished. Let's consider a philosopher's philosophical integrity as the way(s) in which one's professional arguments, professional credit, and public utterances and comportment cohere. The idea behind is simple: it is meant to capture the thought that there is an intimate relationship (perhaps one of partial identity or accountability) between our words and our character; that there is some relationship between our lived experience and 'our' disembodied arguments. The nature and content of philosophical integrity is different for different kinds of philosophers--not all of us have a non-professional, public profile; not all of us theorize about (the possible) world(s) we inhabit. One important fact about philosophical integrity is that it is context sensitive. It also accommodates those who wish to keep their distance from or frown on a moralized conception of professional life--their philosophical integrity will be constituted by practices that can deviate significantly from such mores.

Philosophical integrity should not be confused with (i) professional integrity as such. Professional integrity is a narrower category which only governs one's professional behavior. In addition, (ii) Philosophical integrity does not encompass a whole person's (adult) life; after all, many of us philosophize about extremely narrow slivers of the world. Finally, (iii) the idea of philosophical integrity thus understood should not be confused with what the Ancients called (the path toward) 'wisdom' or (more expansive) philosophical emendation such as the Stoics or Spinoza practiced/preached.

Some such notion of philosophical integrity can help account for the unease one  may feel about, say, the way (according to a Buzzfeed article) Thomas Pogge seems to have leveraged his professional influence by treating (potential) letters of recommendation as a form of currency to elicit more favorable behavior from young women that shared with him a desire to improve the world. As I noted, in the way we treat plagiarists, we recognize the significance of something like professional integrity (perhaps in order to secure the better functioning of the profession) and Pogge's behavior seems to be in violation of a mix of professional and philosophical integrity. 

I was reminded of the idea of philosophical integrity because Rugor Scruton was knighted this week. I admire Scruton's writings and wit. But I can never wholly give myself over to his arguments because in the back of my mind I have a kind of perennial mistrust of his words. Not because I disagree with his politics (I do disagree with them, but I do tend to agree with his criticisms of our contemporary pieties), but because his dealings with Japan Tobacco violate not just the public trust but also philosophical integrity (Scruton is known, in part, to insist that there should be limitations on market behavior).

If there is such a thing as philosophical integrity and it helps us define what is to be a philosopher then -- pace Louise Antony -- part of what it is to be a philosopher is to have some practical know-how in using the tools of philosophy wisely or virtuously.

 

 

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 the Significance of the Revival of Christian Philosophy

One way to understand the revival, even increasing flourishing, of a robust Christian philosophy -- one that is unabashedly, metaphysically realist about many of the traditional claims of revelation -- is that it can be taken to expose the secret truth of the Enlightenment: the traditional anti-theological arguments against revealed religion and its miracles are weaker than commonly thought.

Before I get to develop that thought, I need to address one prejudice. It is common to see the (non-trivial) progress of science as vindicating the (radical) Enlightenment's anti-revelation position. This relies on a stark opposition between science and revealed religion. While undoubtedly the epistemic status of some revealed religions and some of their doctrines have been undermined by scientific developments (especially those that hitched their wagons on now outdated scientific claims about, say, species), not all revealed religions are in the same boat. (I leave it to others to explore the exact details.) More important, some traditional philosophical doctrines that were kind of taken for granted by the party of the Enlightenment were undermined in the progress of science. Here's one example: the eternity of the world was, at least since Aristotle, a common commitment among those that doubted revealed religion with its embrace of a doctrine of creation. While the Bing Bang can be made compatible with the eternity of he world, the creationist-line stopped being silly scientifically. In fact, the rigorous modern debate over fine-tuning is made possible by science, but it has a theological character.

Analytic Christian Philosophy (ACP) was not supposed to happen if the progressive (soft-teleological), self-understanding of Enlightenment thought and its self-styled followers within early analytic philosophy were right (I am not canvassing quotes, but one can find such thoughts expressed in the Vienna Circle and Russell). Upon reflection this confidence is puzzling because in so far as analytical philosophical has any common commitments at all, the movement was not developed along doctrinal lines (and many of its early founders rejected doctrinal commitments). So, the progressive self-understanding bags, as it were, earlier (say, Pre-Fregean or Pre-Boolean) thought (e.g., Spinoza, Hume, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, etc.),  while simultaneously insisting its own discontinuity from most of it.

While undoubtedly, due to increased specialization, some commitments of ACP have not received full scrutiny by disinterested expert-outsiders, there is no evidence that ACP is conducted in massive bad faith.* Rather, ACP's ongoing ability to attract well-trained and talented young philosophers attests to the intellectual promise of the approach undoubtedly  inspired by a whole number of more senior, fierce intellects. No widely known arguments decisively refute the ACP enterprise as such. (The previous sentence is compatible with thinking that claims inspired by revelation are less secure epistemically than alternative commitments.) The only program that could provide such an argument -- one committed to the Principle of Sufficient Reason -- was itself taken to be a casualty of Enlightenment thought.

The absence of such decisive refutations reminds us that once Fideism was properly understood, the Enlightenment victory over revelation was, at bottom, a change of heart (and perhaps revulsion at the way politically powerful religions promoted cruelty and hypocrisy) accompanied by effective satire and ridicule now associated with names like Bayle, Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume (and their nineteenth century, more confident heirs). 

 

 

 

Garber vs Della Rocca, reviewed (I)

The present issue of the Journal for the History of Philosophy (JHP) has a two-tiered debate between Daniel Garber (Princeton) and Michael Della Rocca (Yale) over (i) the status of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) in Spinoza and (ii) the methodology of the history of philosophy. Both (i-ii) are connected to (iii) a more inchoate debate over what philosophy is. That Spinoza and the PSR would be the occasion of such a debate is no surprise; ever since Russell embraced brute facts (and rejected the PSR) and treated Spinoza as an exemplar of non-philosophy (recall), the place of Spinoza within analytical philosophy is not merely a historical question, but also a means at discerning the contested limits of philosophy and an open path toward renewing philosophy. The previous sentence is to side a bit with Della Rocca, who is very clear that "Spinoza’s philosophy can help us to learn or re-learn how to do philosophy in a more productive vein" (533ff) than the analytical status quo. (It is no surprise that much of the most influential Anglo scholarship on Spinoza (from Curley, Bennett, etc.) has been akin to rehabilitation projects in part by reinterpreting Spinoza into fashionable categories and problematics (and to downplay the mystical and therapeutic elements discerned by Russell)).

As an aside, the very same issue of JHP in which the Garber/Della Rocca exchange appears, also has two papers on Kant, one on Aristotle, one on Descartes--all on topics that reflect ongoing debates in scholarship (with undoubtedly fresh and important angles--I know several of the authors and they are all terrific). By contrast, the book-review section includes topics that are a bit more off-the-beaten-track. Obviously the sample size is small (N=1), and Jasper Reid's piece does not fit my claim, but (a quick glance at the other two issues of the present volume also confirm that) the pages of JHP represent a very conservative orientation toward the relevant subject matters of the history of philosophy. This orientation is a key feature of the PGR ecology in the field (recall this post). 

The core interpretive issue between Garber and Della Rocca is, at the surface, the status and content of the PSR in Spinoza. (I say "surface" because below it, they agree that rationalism vs empiricism has to be discarded as an organizing principle in the history of philosophy--about that deepy some other time more.) In Della Rocca's hands the PSR is both (i) the master-principle (hereafter MP) and (ii) has a very broad metaphysical scope--Garber denies both that there are any such MPs to be found in the text of Spinoza (and, thus ruling out the PSR's role as a MP) and that in so far as Spinoza embraces commitments akin to the PSR his texts support readings that are thinner in scope than Della Rocca allows. It is worth noting three features of their exchange: (A) that even if Della Rocca's view on (i) are wrong -- say because there is an alternative, perhaps even more fundamental MP, in Spinoza [say, that truth = existence (recall), or truth = being] from which the PSR follows, his reading of (ii) could still be defended. (B) That upon closer inspection, the debate between Garber and Della Rocca over (ii) really turns into a debate over the explanatory resources available to Spinoza in being able to account for the relationship between what follows from the essence/nature of Substance/God and particular infinite series of modes (and the concomitant metaphysical ruling out of some alternative series). (C) That both offer their readings in terms of fairly traditional textual hermeneutics (despite some of their self-presentation).*

On (B) in Garber's hands the problem is that the way God's nature is (and, thus, the way things follow from it) becomes a "brute fact" that violates the PSR. Della Rocca is right, I think, that there is a response to this complaint from within Spinoza's philosophy to be found in E1p33d (and also 1p16, which goes unmentioned by our protagonists, even though Garber (p. 515) quotes a passage in which Spinoza flags its significance for the debate). Della Rocca admits in a footnote that Spinoza's response is not very satisfying philosophically, but does not elaborate. As textual exegesis I am inclined to agree with Della Rocca, but see the next paragraph. (It is to my supervisor's credit that his students do not form a doctrinal or magisterial school.)

The judgment of the previous paragraph is the consequence of my study of Samuel Clarke's (1705) response to Spinoza (in his Demonstration); Clarke's philosophical views on the relationship between God's nature and God's existence puts him very close to Spinoza's position in E1p33 (about which another time more [recall]), but Clarke also noted that E1p33 generates  two important tensions with other features of the Ethics. First, Clarke discerned that Spinoza stipulates that the ratio of motion to rest in the universe remains the same, where the universe is taken as an infinite individual that keeps its nature or form (see E2p13L4 and E2p13L7). Keeping this ratio fixed is entirely compatible with variation in the actual motion of the universe. All the same, given that we are dealing with a ratio here, Clarke is right that at any given time there is an intelligible sense in which “there might possibly have been originally more or less motion in the universe than there actually was.” That is, if God's fixed nature is expressed in a fixed ratio, then very same substantial nature is compatible with different motions and this variation violates the PSR. So, Garber has discerned a genuine problem, but misplaces the location.

Second, Clarke (and all the Newtonians) can note that the PSR is too granular (and, again, this echoes the spirit of Garber's objection and, perhaps, explains why Della Rocca has to concede that Spinoza's position isn't so impressive); Spinoza is committed to there being sufficient reason for infinite variety in the modes (E1p16 and E1p28). But Spinoza's metaphysics lacks resources to explain the particular (confused though it may be) characteristics of the variety we observe--here Spinoza inherits some of the problems of Cartesian physics (despite his severe criticisms of Descartes) [for more careful account]; Newtonian physics can help explain observed accelerations and the evolution of (relatively) closed systems of bodies (in terms of abstract quantities) over time. Even if Spinoza is right to express caution about overconfidence here, Newtonian physics did put us on the road to a truer philosophy. 

Clearly, Clarke is a hostile critic, and he is reading Spinoza through his engagement with Toland. I would not claim that Clarke gets us (to quote Garber) "the historical Spinoza who lived and worked in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic." (As a historical aside, Spinoza also lived and worked in a the seventeenth-century Dutch Stadhouderschap!) But the proto-reading I have offered here is in some sense more historically grounded than either the one on offer from Della Rocca or, ironically, Garber! For, Della Rocca notes that his interpretation revives a historically important interpretation (associated with Jacobi and British Idealism). As it happens, I have considerable sympathy with that interpretation as a means toward articulating an important, enduring philosophical position (in the way that Garber allows (521)), but the jury is out if it is compatible with seventeenth century views available to Spinoza. (My quick and dirty judgment: no; Spinoza is closer to Averroes and a variety of neo-Platonism!)

One might think that I am being unfair to Garber here because he is very concerned with avoiding terms that are not actor's categories (511ff). But as Dan Schneider has pointed out, when one deploys terms from the past in describing the past, then one is often unwillingly (or unwittingly) siding with one side or another in a past debate. Schneider's observation is important because in philosophy often the key concepts are especially -- if not essentially -- contested. (Recall; see also here.) So, even if we are only trying to understand the past in terms of the actor's intentions (certainly not my program), we have every right, and sometimes a duty if we wish to understand the past, to introduce vocabulary unavailable to the historical actors. As Della Rocca notes, if we wish just to avoid (being a Borges's Pierre Menard and) merely replicate the past in the same words as itself, the business of historians of philosophy starts with going beyond the surface text in some way or another.

While we have made some progress on (i-iii), I have also made some promissory notes (about (A) among other things). So, to be continued...