Digressions&Impressions

On Finding a Home

‘we are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom…’--Otto Neurath

[Aristotle’s ghost] freely acknowledged his own mistakes in natural philosophy, because he proceeded in many things upon conjecture, as all men must do; and he found that Gassendi, who had made the doctrine of Epicurus as palatable as he could, and the vortices of Descartes, were equally exploded. He predicted the same fate to ATTRACTION, whereof the present learned are such zealous asserters. He said, that new systems of nature were but new fashions, which would vary in every age; even those who pretend to demonstrate them from mathematical principles would flourish but a short period of time, and be out of vogue when that was determined.--Gulliver's Travels, Chapter VIII of Voyage III.

Today starts the bi-annual HOPOS conference (HOPOS = History of the Philosophy of Science) that my department is hosting in Ghent. Attending this meeting is a kind of intellectual home-coming because it is the only conference where I don't feel I need to justify my academic specialization to fellow philosophers. Even among early modernists, I felt like an outsider as long as I understood myself, and perceived others to look at me, as 'one of those weird Adam Smith guys.'

HOPOS, which has been around a few decades or so, is an anomaly in the profession: unlike other historical-philosophical topics it is not organized around a central figure -- although I often joke it is a coalition of folk that like Carnap and folk that like Newton -- nor characterized by a historical epoch. I am unfamiliar with professional societies devoted to HOM (History of Metaphysics), HOPOL (History of the Philosophy  of Language), HOE (History of Ethics), HOA (History of Aesthetics), etc. It is prima facie odd that a sub-specialization of philosophy, philosophy of science, would merit a society devoted to its history as an area of research (with even its own journal). The oddity of HOPOS (I have been a proud steer at one point) is deepened by the fact that there is a general sense that GPOS (General Philosophy of Science) is being displaced by more specialized sub-disciplines (PoX, that is philosophy of biology, philosophy of economics, philosophy of physics, etc., and even sub-disciplines of these: space/time, QM, etc.). Perhaps, the gradual demise of GPOS is a necessary pre-condition for the rise of HoPoS (history as burying the dead?), but I have never heard anybody say that.

In principle, HoPoS is a way of doing philosophy of science. So, after philosophy of science turned historical, say, with Kuhn, it is natural, albeit not necessary, to become reflexive about this turn and understand one's own activity historically. It's not clear that one could really go meta from HoPoS to, say, HoHoPoS, so it seems the potential infinite regress is blocked at HoPoS. To be concrete: I have long been puzzled and fascinated by the fact that some of the most significant features of Kuhn's Structure, were anticipated in Adam Smith's "The History of Astronomy" (written in the first half of the eighteenth century). Apparently thinking of science as an open-ended succession of revolutions between systems of thought that are in some sense incommensurable with each other is a kind of permanent open possibility in philosophical-logical space. That idea has a history, too (see the quote from Gulliver); it is, in fact, somewhat of a skeptical trope (while researching my dissertation I found a version of it in Montaigne).

Can an Atheist be Virtuous? (On Smith on Hume with echoes of Bayle and Spinoza)

Thus died out most excellent, and never to be forgotten friend [David Hume--ES]; concerning whose philosophical opinions men will, no doubt, judge variously, every one approving or condemning them, according as they happen to coincide or disagree with his own; but concerning whose character and conduct there can scarce be a difference of opinion."—Adam Smith on David Hume, "Letter to Strahan," 9 November 1776.

After portraying Hume's magnanimity and cheerfulness on his deathbed reading Lucian's Dialogues with the Dead, Smith ads the sentence above. It links Hume's life to worthy ("excellent"), posthumous fame ("never to be forgotten"). In doing so, Smith distinguishes sharply between Hume's "character" and Hume's "philosophical opinions." Apparently consensus is possible in judgments of character—this fits Smith's moral theory more generally --, while according to Smith (enduring) consensus it is not possible in judgments of philosophical doctrine.

The primary, enduring significance of Smith's claim is not so much his unwillingness to condemn Hume's philosophical doctrines – many of which were inimical to the natural religion and physico-theology of even the moderate religious establishment of their time, but rather that in Smith's presentation an irreligious (reading Lucian not the Bible), mitigated skeptic can lead a moral life; in Smith's hand, Hume's life, then, vindicates Bayle's scandalous idea (modeled on Spinoza's life) that unbelievers could be moral and, thus, form a political union. By contrast, Hume, too, thought that individuals were capable of virtue without religion, but one need not rely on this; one simply ought to design institutions in the right way: "It is…a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave:" He added that "at the same time, it appears somewhat strange, that a maxim should be true in politics, which is false in fact." (Of the Independency of Parliament).

Guest post by Joel Katzav: Philosophical Competence

[Below is a guest post by Joel Katzav, who inspired my post, which elicited this response by Jon Cogburn (and some discussion) at NewAPPS. It seems only fair to let him explain his position, after I hijacked his idea. The usual caveats apply.--ES]

Eric recently characterized my view that philosophical competence should be taken to include the ability constructively to participate in multiple philosophical traditions. I mostly like his formulation of the view, so I do not want to clarify it further here. I do, however, present some of the reasons I have for preferring it. One reason is pragmatic. The requirement would help to inculcate, in individual philosophers, a better appreciation of the epistemic limitations of philosophy and thus make it harder to maintain the view that philosophy is a science.  Another motivation is more principled. Philosophy, in my view, should be pervaded by forms of inquiry that aim to make no ultimate assumptions in answering its questions, including no ultimate methodological assumptions. Moreover, if it should be thus pervaded, many philosophers should strive not to belong to any philosophical tradition. And all philosophers should generally be able constructively to participate in a variety of philosophical traditions.

The idea that a field of research is a science tends to bring with it the idea that the field has a privileged methodology for addressing its fundamental questions. In the social sciences, for example, the claim that sociology is a science includes a commitment to the view that its questions are best answered by using a certain, so-called ‘positivist’, methodology, one attributed, rightly or wrongly, to the natural sciences and especially to physics. Similarly, when philosophy has been said to be a science, it has often been said to be a science by virtue of its having a privileged method. Russell, for example, told us that

[m]odern analytical empiricism [...] differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy [History of Western Philosophy, chapter XXXI].

Philosophical History, Terror and "Grim, Skeptical Possibility"

If there is no principled way to proceed, then we face the real possibility and prospect that philosophical inquiry itself cannot be coherently pursued. I think that this, perhaps grim, skeptical possibility is one that we philosophers must, if we are to be honest, take seriously. The very possibility of philosophical inquiry is thus, I believe, something that should always be in question for philosophers.--Michael Della Rocca "The Taming of Philosophy."

The original impulse toward a philosophical turn to history is a certain unease, perhaps bewilderment, at the 'live' options thought/taught available in the present.* These all must seem 'off' in such a way that constructive disagreement seems like a trap that will only make matters, well, worse. When one has a sense that one cannot explore the existing 'issues' or 'options' with conviction, one may then be moved to retrace one's teachers' (including one's temporally prior self) steps back to a moment where the older, live options become, as it were, alive again. This impulse once nourished and cultivated by study is, thus, accompanied by a certain wariness of the victors's tales official and informal), especially -- one realizes, when these are told not as partial accounts attentive to the effaced options, but as the unfolding and articulation of the (progressing) truth. 

The previous paragraph is stylized autobiography. But it understates the terror of stumbling on the thought that the alternative to believing that one's teachers and so-called epistemic peers are in a non-trivial sense mistaken -- not just about the facts and what is intellectually promising, but -- in all their most important commitments, is the live possibility of one's own madness. (Let's call this the 'haunted thought.')