Digressions&Impressions

On Teaching (and Meeting Former Students)

I do not blog as much about my teaching experiences in relation to their significance in my life (but see here), in part, because I want to protect the privacy and, more subtly, the intimacy of my experiences with my students (recall). But the main reason I tend to avoid it is that I am alert to some of the romanticizing dangers inherent to the self-actualization (or self-fashioning) of these Digressions; I find teaching a difficult craft, and it is tempting to craft an image of how I prefer to see myself as a teacher. While authenticity is overrated, such an image would merely reveal my desires and insecurities.

Yesterday evening I was a solitary walker in Ghent, debating internally to catch a bite at a place with free wifi, so I could write yesterday’s post and get to bed early, or go to a place with better and more slowly served food. I was mildly concerned about a guest-speaker, who had to cancel a talk due to illness. I stopped in front of an Indian place with an excellent buffet; they had no wifi, but I could be done fairly quickly while not sacrificing quality. Yet, I hesitated; through the window I saw an empty restaurant except for a familiar face talking animatedly with her table-partner. I knew if I went in I would have to make some small talk. At first, I thought it was a fellow coffee-aficionado from Amsterdam who had moved to Ghent, but as I decided to step into the place, I realized it was a former student who greeted me with great enthusiasm and warmth, including (as Dutch adults greet each other) three pecks on my astonished cheeks, immediately invited me to join them for dinner, and launched into a narrative of her exciting projects as a street-artist, magazine editor, play-wright, and cultivator of poets and other noble souls. I was introduced to part of the magazine's editorial team, and was enthusiastically inducted into their secret plans to transform Dutch letters and aesthetics (and, in turn, I revealed some of the trade secrets I have learned from Nabokov); the evening left me little spare time for my daily Digression.

My first taste of academic teaching occurred when I was asked to lead a section of Professor Eichenberg’s ‘Introduction to International Relations’ at my Alma Mater a year after graduation.  After a few weeks I realized I wanted to do this with the rest of my life. Now, ‘Ike’ was a very gifted teacher—he had an amazing capacity to remember students’ names and faces, and could make a capacity filled, giant lecture hall seem like an intimate seminar. He was also very smooth; when I brought my dad to the lecture during my first semester of college, he called on me by name (to my dad’s delight and my astonishment) and made sure to have himself introduced to my dad after class.

Yet, as I started to develop my inchoate, personal ‘philosophy of education’ in graduate school – my head filled with reflections on many noble, but contradictory exemplars (in addition to the portraits of Socrates and Thoreau, the stories about Anscombe and Wittgenstein, as well as my teachers of flesh-and-blood ) --, I grew suspicious of teachers that want to be loved and adored by their students. I rejected, especially, the professors that loved to hear themselves talk (an occupational hazard) to rapt, admiring audiences. Our calling as educators should not be about full-filling our own needs even if we, thereby, meet some of the revealed preferences of our students, I decided, and thereby exhibiting the Protestant roots of my Dutch childhood.

To be clear, then, as now, I do not reject the image of ‘professor as performance-artist.’ I forget who taught me this (if you are reading this: sorry!), but all great philosophical teaching is about taking some features of one’s character, magnifying and using them to generate interactions that serve one’s varied (and variable) pedagogical aims (which may also include generating space for surprise, of course), but which, for me, always includes the idea that if teaching fills any of the teacher’s needs then it should be in virtue of learning from my students (recall my remarks above about dangers of self-fashioning). One reason I am so fruitfully frustrated and fascinated by Seneca's style of teaching in his Letters, is that he seems not very interested in learning from his official protégé.

After a professional decade in the class-room, I know I am not uniformly loved by my students; the evaluations are always polarized with a group of students always strongly disliking my class-room persona. (I am against using evaluations in promotions/pay, but I find them very informative in lots of ways.) While I would behave differently if I could have stayed at Wesleyan – where teachers often really are in loco parentis --, these days if I socialize with students at all then only after I have turned in my grades.

Former students keep in touch with unsolicited letters and, more recently facebook updates: some of the more academically interested of these have become, or are struggling to be, professional academics in turn. Quite a few of my undergraduate teachers were -- and continue to be -- mentors (recall), and I very much enjoy passing on, when possible, the good karma (or is it dharma?), comradery, and the joys of shared intellectual inquiry to the youngsters.

But I am more touched when former students give me their, as it were, postmortem perspective years later and, thereby, reveal that they were inspired by their interactions with my class-room persona and, by that mysterious creative alchemy, transform these into unanticipated sparks that help animate their activities. While it may be a necessary act of vain self-deception, I tell myself that this is what my calling is about.

On the Laws of Identity and the Writing Life

Sometimes the better you knew somebody, the more impossible any real talk became.--Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer (124)

Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself. (127)

[W]riting showed his own failings to him. The struggle that was involved was a demeaning and dutiful one, a matter of grinding craft rather than lofty art. Not that he was a fake; his interest had always been real. But he saw in others a hunger, a voracious need to comprehend or capture life by transforming it into a language, which he didn't share. (320)

In “What is a Classic?,” the novelist and critic, J.M. Coetzee insists, while flirting with the idea of the survival of the literary fittest, that classics sustain and survive ongoing scrutiny in the long run from a variety of perspectives, which may include – judging by Coetzee’s practice -- their creative re-writing. Such ongoing scrutiny is certainly a necessary condition on the being of a philosophical classic; one may suspect it is a kind of performative requirement for a classic.

In his essay, Coetzee identifies four features that enable a work to become a classic. While in context, he does not speak of philosophy the features carry over to a considerable degree (and, in general, philosophy is often on Coetzee’s agenda): (1) the work needs to be studied and discussed in small circles, relatively untouched by the general public’s fashion; (2) one can become an advanced student in a discipline based on some kind of competent engagement with canonical works; (3) there needs to be ongoing learned commentary or criticism; (4) the existence of a form of advanced emulation through creative imitation or reworking. In addition, Coetzee implies (5) that a work only counts as a classic if it can, eventually, catch the interest of a wider audience beyond the most advanced professionals.

As an aside, one may doubt that (4) occurs in philosophy. It’s probably not a good strategy to try to get a monograph published, following Kant’s architectonic in the first Critique. Even so, here’s an instance of (4) within recent professional philosophy: an important essay in the recent revival of analytical metaphysics is, O'Leary-Hawthorne & Cortens (1995), “Towards ontological nihilism.”[1] Given its provenance in Syracuse’s philosophy department it is no surprise that it generously mentions the dominant figure of that department, Jonathan Bennett, of the last third of the twentieth century. But as it turns out, the rhetorical and argumentative-methodology is deeply indebted to Bennett's Rationality—a work familiar to Hawthorne and Cortens (recall here and here). This fact could go unnoticed because Bennett’s Rationality is not mentioned in their piece.[2]

A classic instance of (4) is Zadie Smith's homage to Howards End [sic], On Beauty. In fact, while I had seen images of the Merchant Ivory film, I only read Forster's novel after being inspired to do so by reading Smith's novel first. A more complex case of (4) is Damon Galgut's Arctic Summer, which tells the post-Howards End-life of E.M. Forster (primarily the events surrounding the writing of Maurice, published posthumously 1971 and A Passage to India (1924), but also Alexandria:  A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon) as a novel. To complicate matters, Arctic Summer is also the title of an unfinished work by Forster, and another writer, Cavafy, has more than a walk-on presence. One could grow dizzy fast if one tried to map the relationships amongst original and copy in this novel--words and lived experience strain at the law of identity.

It would be misleading to treat Galgut's novel only philosophically, but we should also guard against the other risk -- facilitated by its sensual craft -- of ignoring its philosophical profondity entirely. Under "cover of Plato," (39) -- caves, shadows, homo-erotic love, and all that  -- we can take a second look at the second quote; the nature of identity is at the heart of matter. Self-identity is paradigmatic identity (A=A), of course, but in memory the second A is also not quite the first A because -- to adopt Humean terms -- force and vivacity fade away in echoes. If the second A is epistemically indistinguishable from the first, feel free to generate a Sorites-style series of As, in which the the dividing line between the force and vivacy of the first and last A is insensible at any given moment in the series. To assert A=A even in its shadowy-nth-iteration, is to falsify experience; to embrace fakery, that is, the inability to recognize the significant difference between original and copy. (The previous is not an argument to leave logic behind in one's aesthetics; logic is a necessary pre-condition to aesthetic judgment!)

To capture life by words, when the desire of comprehension is a consequence of need, is doomed to failure. One might object that if lived experience is already linguistic then there is no gap. Undoubtedly some people inhabit a fully linguistic world. But Galgut's novel shows that there is another, more childlike immersion in life, fully sensual and -- miraculously -- intuitive (in Spinoza's sense) that is not opposed to knowledge, but more knowing than the falsifications afforded by language.

One might think, then, that Galgut indicts the writing lives of novelists and philosophers alike; all these can exhibit are the shortcomings of authors (most keenly to the author). For, we try capture by words and in doing so always transform the matter (even if we maintain form). In Arctic Summer there are more than a few hints that knowledge is an obstacle (see first quote above) not a goal.

Even so, the novel is also a defense of the "grinding craft" against the "lofty" visions of genius imposed on us by society and our own endlessly recycled images, popular among false philosophers. It is a rejecton of "smallness of soul, a narrowness of the heart," which undermines even the loftiest "ideals" (295; the context is the British racialized, colonial/imperial project). Such spirited craft may also be a consequence of need, of course, but it is not guided by such hunger, but by the internal demands of craftsmanship. Craft is easily devalued by knowing types (craftiness is not a term of praise), but even Plato defends its nobility and necessity at times.  That philosophy is a daily grind is, of course, one of the core commitments of these near-daily digressions.

In reflecting on the nature of a classic, I was reminded of Prospects & Presumptions, Julia Neugarten's homage to Jane Austen. (Neugarten is a bold young Dutch novelist writing in English.) The slender novella has a preface by the author. She writes, "Writing, I discovered, was one half discipline and one half lack of self-consciousness." Craft and immersion indeed make up the writer's life, but if the laws of arithmetic would allow it, I would add another "half:" the embrace of fate.

 

On Ignorance

My favorite feature of Daily Nous is the link to non-academic hires; it's not very active, but I return to it every few weeks and I love getting a new impulse to daydream about how trained academic philosophers spread wisdom, positive affect, and conceptual acumen outside the academy serving their newfound companies and communities with integrity. I imagine that those liberated from the academy, spread their wings and flourish. This fantasy is undoubtedly a consequence of my sense that professional philosophy is inhospitable to wisdom and, perhaps, my sense that, despite the presence of collossal brainpower (and astounding resources), it has deeply entrenched means to preserve a status quo bias (perhaps that's related to those very resources).

Sometimes I wonder if I would have recognized the significance of Leibniz if I were an eighteenth century philosophy professor, or Boole in the middle of the nineteenth, or Nietzsche at the end of the nineteenth. (To this day Boole's greatness is unrecognized.) I wonder if I would have been receptive to Mary Wollstonecraft or if my heart would have been stone-cold to her call to humanity. Some of these names were obscure in their life time or their best writings unfamiliar to others. And it is not impossible that I would have ignored not just the more radical authors, but also the best-sellers among them with a confident self-assurance that popular philosophy is incompatible with profundity, skill, and insight. How likely would it have been that I would familiarize myself with, say, a Danish religious curmudgeon?

As an expert on west European philosophy between 1600-1800, I recognize that the vast majority of authors from that period that are still of interest today, the ones that shaped the ideas that guide our common sense or that challenged it, when first articulated, were not university professors (yes, I have heard of Hutcheson, Kant, and Adam Smith). This is not just true of the brilliant women of the time who were denied access to universities. And, yes, I know that some of the enduring figures aspired to be university professors (Hume) or wanted to be required reading in universities (Descartes, Hobbes), or entertained offers for university positions (Spinoza). Even so, recognized expertise, based on a dissertation or a track-record of journal publication, is not the only road to philosophy; specialization within the intellectual division of labor is just one way to acquire philosophical craft--it's not a necessary consequence of historical development.  

I often suspect that I am so immersed in my scholarly activities (refereeing, grant-writing, journal publication, giving lectures, PhD supervision etc.), and so consumed by ongoing scholarly discussions, that I miss the most important philosophical insights and developments of our times even if, miraculous enough, these would occur within (English language) professional philosophy. (This is not to deny that relative to the period that preceded it between, say, 1514-1781, academic philosophy has had an excellent run since Kant and Dugald Stewart.) I expect that future scholars -- my kind of people -- will scan my D&I contributions and will use it as evidence that, in fact, not even those cosmopolitan analytical philosophers that indulged themselves, and were so indulged, in reading outside the tribe were aware of the great instauration of philosophy started in 2004 in the vast metroplis of...

There is a popular genre of historical writing that is about witnesses to history, that is, people like you and me that just happen to be present at events that become part of historical memory and left a record of their observations. Yet, many of us, almost certainly the vast majority inside and outside the academy, are writing about and contributing to non-history's rapid impressions that disappear without a trace.  

Of Fleeting Impressions, or an author's frailty

The Circumstance which gives Authors an Advantage above all these great Masters, is this, that they can multiply their Originals; or rather can make Copies of their Works, to what Number they please, which shall be as valuable as the Originals themselves. This gives a great Author something like a Prospect of Eternity, but at the same time deprives him of those other Advantages which Artists meet with. The Artist finds greater Returns in Profit, as the Author in Fame. What an Inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be confined only in one Place and made the Property of a single Person?--The Spectator, No. 166. Monday, September 10, 1711. Addison.

At a conference, I recently caught Menachem Fisch engrossed in Dror Wahrman's fascinating Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, which Menachem warmly recommended. The passage from Addison is partially quoted on p. 51; Wahrman cuts it off at "Eternity." In context, Wahrman is not interested in the trade-off between profit for unique works and enduring fame that Addison posits (although fleetingness of life, of print, of identity (etc.) is a major theme of the book). Because duplication undermines scarcity -- it even risks effacing property --, it generates too much supply, and lowers what one might call "exchange value." (As Addison recognizes, the intrinsic or use value remains, and may, in fact, be increased because more folk can enjoy the fruits of one's labor.)* Addison imagines counterfactually, "What an Inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be confined only in one Place and made the Property of a single Person?" Yet, unique properties, which have a huge upside in exchange value, are vulnerable to the destruction wrought by time: statue, buildings, even pictures are fragile--and  even when they survive they may -- despite the necessity of the logicians -- be disassociated from the name that ought to be associated with it.

That is to say, one can be rewarded in money and approbation. If one scribbles in the right sort of medium, one can even hope to rewarded with posthumous applause. Addison's little counterfactual implies, in fact, that the truly talented (Virgil, Homer, Cicero, Aristotle) correctly favor the possibility of extraordinary posthumous fame over extraordinary riches in one's life. As Hume insisted, while subtly correcting Addison's implicit axiology, that there was such a thing as a "most durable, as well as justest fame," and offered as examples:

On Searle on Williams

Yes. Well, Bernard was a very good friend of mine. He had an enormous influence on me of the kind that would be hard to describe because it was mostly just admiration for his sheer intellectual abilities. I think Bernard was as intelligent as any human being I’ve ever met. He had a kind of quickness which was stunning. Now one consequence of that is there’s a sense in which people who knew him well, or at least in my case, we always feel the published work is not up to the level of the Bernard we remember. Yes, it’s wonderful and admirable, the published work, but the particular fire and light that came from discussions with Bernard are lost on the printed page. Now whether that’s inevitable, or whether or not he had actually been more patient about sitting down and doing a hard slog necessary to write a great book, I don’t know. I know that in the last years of his life he suddenly became very productive. I think -- I mean now since we’re talking about somebody I admire -- that in some ways his career was a disappointment to his admirers because he never produced a work of the calibre of his highest ability. And one of the reasons for that is he had all this other stuff going on. He was always on some Royal Commission, or dining in Buckingham Palace...

He could see instantly the flaws in arguments, including his own. This was the fatal element: that Bernard could see the limitations of philosophical theories, but they led to him seeing the limitations of his own theories, and that was partly debilitating.--John Searle interviewed by Tim Crane [HT Dailynous]

Searle's recent interviews have been making a splash (recall). I am a bit sad that in these interviews, nobody knowledgeable interrogates his exchanges with Derrida.

Anyway, Searle's comment on Williams has escaped, I think, scrutiny. Williams's career was not a professional failure; he was at one point Knightsbridge Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge and Deutsch Professor at Berkeley. His books are widely cited (I blogged about his truth book once), and some of his thought experiments have become evergreens in moral philosophy. I read Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy before I went to graduate school and it assured me that analytical philosophy need not be forfeited to the technicians. (Recently, I wrote a paper on moral luck in which I offer a correction to his account from the vantage point of Adam Smith's treatment.)

Searle's comments remind us of two non-trivial facts: (i) it's very hard to capture in print "the particular fire and light that came from discussions;" (ii) even the most talented and best situated amongst us (e.g. Williams) are unlikely to write "a great book." The two facts are connected, although not by logical entailment. The known professional ways of communicating philosophy -- the journal article, the book -- are both designed to prevent 'fire and light.' Some such affect, "quickness," and "insight" (a key word in the interview with Searle) are not the product of journal articles and books, specially written in the registers of analytical philosophy, in particular; it embraces the ideals of responsible speech in its self-image opposed to purported Heideggerrian nonsense.

Big-shot Ivy League professors, Pretty Young Women, and Institutional Norms

When economists are bought directly by Wall Street interests (cf. Inside Job) or -- more subtly -- indirectly by lucrative private and government contracts, astute observers recognize that even when there are very transparent conflict of interest disclosures (which is not the norm in professional economics) that the discipline as a whole may well have lots of structural and tacit biases in which it handles evidence and what questions it considers worth asking. Ideology functions most slyly when presented in the language of science. We philosophers think we are better than this (and some of us even specialize in teasing out the methodological and normative commitments that make the ideology of economics hidden from many of its own practitioners).   

Yet, the dirty secret of professional philosophy is that one can make a fine career promoting justice. That may seem swell. Yet, in practice this amounts to the fact that one can make stellar careers promoting changes in others. There is now an established discourse, which crosses over from the seminar room to the public media, in which one can speak empty words of condemnation about rich people’s lifestyles in the name of global justice, while knowing that the only real world consequences of one’s moralizing will be felt by folk in countries far away. One can do so while (a) being a distasteful character; we philosophers have accepted a methodological stance in which arguments are evaluated, disembodied from a person’s moral worth. Moreover, (b) many philosophers allow on similar methodological grounds that global justice can be promoted while ignoring ‘private sphere’ justice and ‘justice within the profession.’ [Obviously, there are also people that apply concerns over global justice reflexively to themselves.]

That is to say, one can become a “hero” to others by being a “moral philosopher.” One’s career can become so cherished by others because they discern in you “political” causes worth promoting, even if you turn out to be scumbag in your personal life. I am quoting from an anonymous essay -- [HT Feministphilosophers; after first linking, Leiterreports removed the link] -- that has, human nature being what it is, inspired speculation into the author's identity and the "big-shot Ivy League professor" described in it. I have no idea who the author is;* her account rings true to my experience of what goes on in the profession and I have some suspicions about the identity of the big shot. Even so, here I want to focus on a feature of the essay that may well be ignored because of the all-too-human ways in which sexual politics get played out (especially in online fora). The essayist writes:

On Sebald, and Self-Perpetuating Compulsions

Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable.… How difficult it is in general to bring the machinery of thought to a standstill.…What I found most surprising in the course of these observations is the awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing. There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it, even at that crucial age when, as Keller remarks, one every day runs the risk of becoming simpleminded and longs for nothing more than to put a halt to the wheels ceaselessly turning in one's head.… Evidently the business of writing is one from whose clutches it is by no means easy to extricate oneself, even when the activity itself has come to seem loathsome or even impossible. From the writer's point of view, there is almost nothing to be said in its defense, so little does it have to offer by way of gratification.--W.G. Sebald, quoted in Troy Jollimore's stimulating review. [HT L.A. Paul]

Alone in my circle of bourgeois scholars, I often find Sebald mildly irritating because he sells an intoxicating mixture of learnedness, nostalgia, and suggestions of depth to be found in imaginative engagement with the details of living --all irresistible to folk like us. I always struggled to express my irritation, but Jollimore helpfully quotes Sebald's preference for "something that is small and self-contained," which is for him "a moral and aesthetic ideal." While I instinctively admire Sebald's aversion against "large-scale things...in architecture or evolutionary leaps," his ideal leaves little room for expansiveness, natural and moral and systematically partakes in the humanistic project of self-domestication (recall). Sebald's moral and aesthetic preferences are a thinly disguised longing for control, even in the face of genuine self-knowledge that such control remains elusive. His is intrinsically a conservative aesthetic that offers a spirited consolation (by withholding ordinary forms of consolation) to those, I fear, that recoil the inevitable excesses in living. Of course, I wouldn't find Sebald irritating if I didn't recognize myself in these longings.

Please give us new human beings

Today I received a call for papers in my email inbox. At first I thought it was satire. But in following the links, I ended up on the EU funded European Network for Social Intelligence.  As we know, European bureaucrats would not risk the ire of the increasingly skeptical public and openly fund satire (of itself). So, what to make of this call for papers? (As an aside, I note that parts of the call are plagiarized from this paper's abstract; I don't mean to suggest that this is anyway an ethical lapse; it's just amusing given the high minded tone.) I quote first, then comment:

Argument and debate form cornerstones of civilized society and of intellectual life. As online interaction usurps many traditional forms of interaction and communication, we would hope to see these processes alive and well on the web. But we do not. In spite of the ever-growing volume of online interaction,  its current mechanisms hamper and discourage serious debate; they facilitate poor quality argument; and they allow fuzzy thinking to go unchecked. Meanwhile, these same online resources are increasingly being trusted and adopted with little critical reflection. The problem needs to be addressed from two different but converging perspectives:

• We need better understanding and widespread awareness in the use of current and future ICT, to enable people to profit from new opportunities for argumentative interaction, instead of being mislead and thwarted by lack of familiarity with the emerging socio-technical systems. Several research areas are critical to this purpose, but their contributions need to be integrated in a concerted effort: among others, philosophy of information, critical thinking, digital literacy, e-inclusion, persuasive technologies, CMC.
• We need new tools, new systems and new standards engineered into the heart of the internet to encourage debate, to facilitate good argument, and to promote a new online critical literacy. This is the vision of the Argument Web, a web platform that brings together different domains and interaction styles (e.g. argument analysis, real-time debate, blogging) by combining linked argument data with software tools that make online debate intuitive for various audiences, including mediators, students, academics, broadcasters and bloggers.

Forgotten Addison, founder of Philosophy of Science, and the patron of bloggers

It gives me much Despair in the Design of reforming the World by my Speculations, when I find there always arise, from one Generation to another, successive Cheats and Bubbles, as naturally as Beasts of Prey, and those which are to be their Food.--Steele (6/30/1712), #444, The Spectator.

Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure, when Locke shall be entirely forgotten.--Hume.

Addison is forgotten.

Hume wrote before the revival of professional philosophy, and so assumed an 'equitable posterity' that was not to be. Professional philosophy has not been kind to the very best essayists--Montaigne, Bacon, and Seneca are familiar names vaguely associated with doctrines or moments (history of skepticism, fideism, crucial experiment, inductions, Stoic suicide, etc.), but they  have not attracted philosophical scholarly industries. Even Hume's great essays tend to be read mostly for supporting evidence--the exception, 'Of Miracles,' the least artful or profound of the lot.

Addison gets passing, sometimes respectable mention in works devoted to eighteenth-century aesthetics (sublime, taste, etc.). Yet, together with Steele, Addison is the patron-saint of today's philosophical bloggers. He wrote (near) daily essays with a lively comments section (including trolls), and found a proper mix of familiarity and surprise in keeping readers engaged over extended period. Steel and Addison were also, despite Hume's deflationary representation of Addison in the full paragraph from which I quote above, subtle thinkers, who -- as Steele notes above -- use reflection to reform their world. They are not mere spectators.

For present purposes, I define 'philosophy of science' as the disinterested study of science with the aim of making generalizations about the nature and methods of the science(s) and scientists. Thus defined scientists can engage in philosophy of science as a kind of second-order practice within the science(s), and they have done so even before the category 'science' took on its present (post 19th century) meaning. If we except scholastic text-books and their authors,  until the eighteenth century nearly all 'philosophy of science' was done by practicing scientists or natural philosophers. This changed in the eighteenth century in response to three non-trivial developments: