On Pluralism in Philosophy Departments, Once Again (Leiter)

Jason’s provocative post has, as usual, stimulated a quite interesting discussion. Here are a few thoughts of my own, partly in reaction to Jason’s thread and the comments that ensued.

It seems to me that three things are or have been meant by the label “pluralism”:

1. A department might be pluralistic in virtue of having many different views on philosophical questions represented. Jason’s original posting makes it clear that “analytic” philosophers (whoever they are, obviously not folks who share a view!), like philosophers historically, hold many different views on substantive philosophical questions. In other contexts, this is what might just be called “diversity of viewpoints.” I don’t think there could be any serious worry that, say, the top 25 or so departments in the PGR tend to be “pluralistic” in this sense, with some allowance for departments that are strongly pro- or strongly anti- the Wittgensteinian/quietistic/Drebenized view of philosophy. 

2. A department might be pluralistic in virtue of the breadth of its coverage of the field of philosophy, both in its contemporary manifestations and historically. Small departments can not be faulted for not being “pluralistic” in this sense, since it is hard to cover everything with a small faculty. More deserving of being faulted on this score are bigger departments who repeatedly hire in a narrow range of areas, with a resulting paucity of coverage of important subfields. Sometimes I think those who champion the banner of “pluralism” have something like this in mind: they will point out that, e.g., very few of the top 25 or so departments have anyone covering 20^th-century French philosophy or American pragmatism. This charge doesn’t strike me as hugely compelling, standing on its own, since very few of the top 25 or so departments have faculty covering medieval philosophy or Chinese philosophy either. The charge has more force against very large departments that could, in principle, be “pluralistic” in this sense, though the demand for this kind of pluralism has to be balanced against the value of having philosophers with shared interests as a stimulus to their work and in providing a broad and deep graduate program in particular areas of philosophical research.

3. Those, often associated with the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), who have most often championed “pluralism,” have often meant something different than either (1) or (2): they have championed pluralism about philosophical methods. Jason’s original posting is wholly unresponsive to this way of understanding the call for pluralism: indeed, Jason seems to confirm the worry about lack of pluralism by referring repeatedly to “mainstream analytic philosophy.” The objection would be that that is only one method for doing philosophy. 

But this then puts front and center the questions (1) what is the method of “analytic” philosophy? and (2) what other methods of doing philosophy are there? 

We’ve tackled (1) before on this blog, and each time it seems to me we confirm that there is no “method” of analytic philosophy anymore. (The discussion with Jerry Fodor seems to me especially illuminating on this score.) “Methods” of contemporary philosophers—who often self-identify as “analytic”—run the gamut from shameless intuition-pumping and armchair speculation, to work that could easily (and often is) part of the scholarly discourse in cognate fields, from physics to linguistics to cognitive science to law. If all of these methods are well-represented in the top 25-or-so PGR departments, then what other methods of philosophy are missing?

One obvious candidate is phenomenology, which really is a distinctive method, though one that, as a philosophical program, is as moribund as logical positivism.  (Is it a failure of "pluralism" not to have defenders of the logicial positivist program circa 1935 on one's faculty?)  It is true that those who employ the methods of phenomenologists are not hired at leading graduate programs (though some very good scholars of the history of phenomenology do teach in such programs). To show that this is an objectionable failure of pluralism, though, someone has to make the case for what phenomenological practice would add to philosophical inquiry, given the failure of the original Husserlian project. 

Are there other “methods” of philosophy slighted at the leading departments? Pragmatism is not a method of philosophy, as far as I can see; nor is “postmodernism.” “Deconstruction” is a method not represented in philosophy departments, and it is increasingly out of favor in departments of literature; it also isn’t clear that it is a “method” that has anything to commend it. Nietzsche’s “method” of doing philosophy is sui generis, and neither teachable nor replicable—and his method has more to do with his rhetorical aims than with the absence of, in many ways, quite familiar philosophical claims and arguments. From the Frankfurt School and perhaps Foucault come “methods” that integrate recognizable philosophical concerns with history and cultural criticism of a kind that is, unfortunately, underrepresented in leading philosophy departments, but it also has very few competent practitioners any longer, notwithstanding large numbers of acolytes. 

In any event, the case for pluralism of methods requires specifying methods and making the case for their value or significance. I invite philosophers to comment on this reformulated version of the issue about "pluralism" in philosophy departments.

Comments

[jon kvanvig]

Brian, one thing I note that hasn't been brought up here perhaps ought to be mentioned. I don't quite understand it, but what I hear from pluralists is often a complaint about the focus in mainstream department on arguments and positions. A remark of Keith Lehrer's fits the complaint: he said something like "analytic philosophers do the history of philosophy for plunder, and non-analytics to relive the experience." If I could say better what the idea of reliving the experience amounts to, maybe it would turn out to involve a method of a kind different from what goes on in mainstream departments. I'm skeptical about appeals to methods to understand the difference, but Keith is onto something here, even if it is hard to characterize.

I'm not defending pluralism of the sort that eschews connecting such reliving with the evaluative dimension involved in assessing arguments and positions, but the complaint that there is not enough reliving prior to evaluation may have a point. What's left on my evaluative scheme is doing history in terms of reliving the experience for its own sake, but I don't see any compelling or even promising argument to show that building a department that is pluralistic along these lines is somehow essential to excellence in a philosophy department.

[Josh Glasgow]

I think it's probably correct that there are no methods (or doctrines) distinctive to analytic and continental philosophy. But what about construing the difference as one of style? Here I have in mind purely literary style: analytic and continental philosophers (in this sense) have different criteria for what style of writing goes into making a good paper/book/presentation. No doubt we'd like some specification of these criteria. I'm not sure that I could provide such a specification. It would probably include something like argumentative transparency, for analytic philosophers, and something like rhetorical flourish, for continental philosophers. But while I don't know how far such a specification can get us, I do think that analytic and continental philosophy, understood in terms of style, are pretty distinguishable on the "I know it when I see (hear/read) it" test: I can know whether I'm at a SPEP-style or an analytic-style meeting just by hearing a couple of papers, even though I have trouble laying out demarcation criteria for the two styles.

That allows that some philosophers can do (admittedly convoluted-sounding) analytic-style continental philosophy. That is, "continental" has (at least) two meanings on this account: in some uses it refers to a style, while in others it refers to historical figures (like Nietzsche, Husserl, etc.). Such an ambiguity would, at least, conveniently explain why it makes sense to say that some people in non-SPEP departments focus on continental philosophy (understood historically) with an analytic style (clarity, rigor, whatever), and to charitably also say that people in SPEP-inclusive departments (including the ones that consider themselves pluralist in this sense) see themselves not as doing a bad version of what those others with a focus on continental philosophy (historically understood) are doing, but as doing continental philosophy in an entirely different sense (one of style). It does, though, have the clunky-sounding implication that we have to distinguish between analytic-style and SPEP-style continental philosophy, when "continental" is understood historically.

This also makes sense of how there could be both good and bad SPEP-style philosophy, whereas if one says that those doing SPEP-style philosophy are simply doing bad (analytic-style) philosophy, one cannot say that. (I confess, though, that I have little familiarity with both SPEP-style and analytic-style continental philosophy.) It also would allow us to say that each style has, in addition to its own criteria for what counts as a good article/book, it's own jargon, which can make one style fairly impenetrable to those on the other side who are unintiated. The ability to say these things seems like a virtue of the stylistic demarcation.

Of course, one might not like one or the other style, just as one might not like topical areas, such as ancient philosophy or ethics. But, for better or worse, a pluralist department would, on this account, contain people who do both analytic-style philosophy and SPEP-style philosophy.

[Felix Sadeli]

Perhaps there really are two different kinds of "methods" that we are talking about here, the method of presentation and the underlying method of doing philosophy itself. Examples of the first kind would be the geometrical method of Spinoza's "Ethics" and the method used by Wittgenstein to present his "Tractatus". Since this method is about presentation, it is naturally the more easily recognizable or taken as something entirely different or unique. But beneath the geometrical form of Spinoza's "Ethics" one can without too much effort detect a method of doing philosophy not very much unlike the method used by the medieval philosophers, for once; or perhaps beneath Nietzsche's "'sui generis' method" - as Prof. Leiter put it, I suppose one would detect a method of doing philosophy that is traceable to Schopenhauer or even traceable to the method of philosophy used in Plato's "Republic." (Am I wrong?)

My points are that perhaps in works of philosophy, 1) the much more visible and diverse items that belong to the method of presentation render it more likely to obscure the second, less visible and sometimes more elusive method that is the way of doing philosophy itself; but once this second method is finally discerned in works of philosophy, I suspect that 2) there are not really that many items that actually belong to this second category, the point that I think Prof. Leiter is also alluding to in his post above.

Just an opinion from an amateur philosopher.

[Aidan McGlynn]

The distinction between those who approach the history of philosophy Viking-style, looking to plunder ideas and arguments, and those who have more of a 'battle-reenactment' approach seems genuine enough, but it doesn't seem to map at all cleanly onto any kind of analytic/non-analytic divide. Jason mentions Jamie Tappenden's work on Frege and others in other thread on this topic, and that feels much closer to the supposedly 'non-analytic approach'; he's engaged in a detailed examination of the concerns and motivations of figures of a particular period, how they saw the significance of the projects they were engaged in, how their historical context shaped their respective approaches to certain questions, etc. It hardly needs saying that other such examples could easily be found. I'm sure such scholars think there is much of worth to contemporary philosophy to be gained by such an undertaking, but it feels very distant from Viking-style history of philosophy. Yet Prof. Tappenden's work doesn't seem liable to strike us as non-analytic in any significant sense. So I wonder if this distinction doesn't apply much more comfortably at the level of individual philosophers, rather than carving an analytic/non-analytic distinction at the joints.

[Toby]

Questions of content or style or method seem difficult to handle, but maybe we could make sense of this use of "pluralism" while abstracting away from such questions. Someone who says that department X is more pluralistic than department Y could just mean that: I perceive this division between group A and group B in the philosophical community; in department X I can talk about group A philosophers, but it's hard to find someone who will spend much time (non-polemically) discussing the ideas of group B philosophers; meanwhile, in department Y I can easily have a satisfying conversation about both.

Someone who makes this statement might (far from thinking that groups A and B are deeply divided by differences in content or style or method) be coming from the conviction that the separation between groups A and B can't be rationalized as the result of deep differences in content or style or method; that it's a historical accident that can and should be undone.

Depending on how you divvy things up, there could be any number of ways in which a department could be, or fail to be, pluralistic. As per the original post, it's hard to imagine how, say, the PGR top 25, as a group, could be described as lacking in any kind of pluralism worth wanting. But maybe a case could be made for particular departments.

[Roman Altshuler]

I am a bit unclear about the claim that phenomenology is "moribund" or dead (as a previous post suggested). I suppose that could be true if we (1) narrowly associate phenomenology with Husserl's "project", and (2) declare that project a failure (though recent work on Husserl's unpublished writings has brought out a rather wide area of inquiry, which seems to significantly extend the project, and which earlier critiques of Husserl had not always taken into account). But there are two difficulties with taking that approach. First, phenomenology certainly goes far beyond Husserl. Second, identifying phenomenology with the Husserlian "project" seems to miss the entire point about phenomenology as a method--Husserl may use the method in his project, but this doesn't imply that the method has no application beyond that project(otherwise, we could analogously claim that symbolic logic is moribund or dead, given the failure of the original Fregean project). There are still plenty of quite active phenomenologists, so the claim that phenomenology has gone the way of logical positivism seems, at least on the face of it, simply false.

Of course it might still be true that, although it retains some adherents, phenomenology as a method no longer has anything of value to contribute, but I think that claim would involve dismissing a wide range of excellent recent work. Professor Leiter suggests that "someone has to make the case for what phenomenological practice would add to philosophical inquiry". But what form should the presentation of this "case" take? Or, rather, why isn't it reasonable to say that the case has already been made, repeatedly, precisely by those people who use the phenomenological method in contemporary philosophical contexts to produce increasingly interesting results? The proof is in the pudding, and it is there for anyone who cares to look at (or taste) it. (I am thinking here, off the top of my head, about work by Shaun Gallagher, Donn Welton, John Drummond, and Dan Zahavi, to name just a few.) I don't see how else the case for the value of any philosophical approach can be made. Was the question merely rhetorical, with the implication that no such case can be made in the case of phenomenology? Or is it to be taken seriously as a call for phenomenologists to defend the very legitimacy of their published work on a blog? I am not a phenomenologist, and so cannot oblige with the serious question. But if it was meant rhetorically, there seem to be some clear problems with the rhetoric.

[Jason Stanley]

Brian,

This is an excellent point. I concentrated in my post about diversity in conclusions. But precisely the same point could be made about contemporary philosophy with diversity in *method*. My department is a good example. We are one of the bastions of naturalistic approaches to the mind. We are also one of the bastions of a priori metaphysics and philosophy of religion. Even within a single area such as epistemology, there is a wide diversity of approaches and methodologies in my department.

[Steve Hales]

Does it strike anyone else that the calls for increased "pluralism" in philosophy are analogous to calls for medicine to be more "holistic"? The advocates of medical holism aren't really mounting a serious argument that there are scientific approaches underexplored in research labs, or that physicians are ignoring important maladies, but instead promoting radically different understandings of health--chiropractic, homeopathy, etc.

[anon]

I wonder if Don Garett's distinction between antiquarian and collegiate approaches to history of philosophy is relevant here. I'm not completely clear on what "method" might mean in philosophy, but it seems to me Garett captures two genuinely distinct approaches to philosophy with these labels. And I get the sense that the number of collegiates really varies among top departments.

Also, while somebody working on a contemporary problem via collegiate engagement with a historical figure will in many senses be using the same "methodology" as anyone else addressing the problem, I think there are differences in each one's "approach" that exclusive focus on what question they're answering, what position they adopt, and how they argue for it would miss.

Where I did my undergrad, there was no one doing history of philosophy in a collegiate manner. Though it's irrelevant to the question of overall pluralism, it's worth mentionning that this lead to a complete three-way divide among faculty along "contemporary analytic", "antiquarian historian", and "continental" lines, to the point where there was no real interaction between the three groups; where I study now, there are many collegiate historians and much more interaction between antiquarians and everyone else. Of course, I don't want to imply that any other places without collegiates is like the place I did my undergrad.

[Rebecca Copenhaver]

My sense is that doing philosophy from an historical perspective is a distinct method from the various methods employed by most contemporary analytic philosophers, though not exclusive of it. It also seems to me that doing philosophy from an historical point of view admits of various methods internal to it, from the very historical (Popkin) to the very analytic (Strawson). This call to examine philosophical methods is important in part because it allows people to be more clear with themselves and their readers about what method they are using. So long as an "analytic" historian is clear about what method she is using and why this is an effective method for her purposes, she shouldn't be regarded as a plunderer. Making the various methods deployed in contemporary philosophy more clear would be beneficial for much the same reason.

[Michael Rosen]

The discussion of pluralism has become (as one might have expected) a discussion of methodological differences in the practice of philosophy and, in particular, of the place of history in philosophy in analytical and Continental philosophy. Here are some thoughts on that.

The idea that there are two different approaches to the history of philosophy – archaeologists and grave-robbers, is the way that Derek Parfit has put it – is a common one. The assumption (made in this discussion as well) is that the latter is characteristic of analytical philosophy, the former of “Continental Philosophy”.

But there is something funny about this since the “archaeologists” would appear to practise the history of philosophy for its own sake (for the sake of historical, not philosophical, understanding) yet, if you think about it, it is the “Continental” philosophers who have consistently emphasized the intrinsic importance of the history of philosophy for the practice of philosophy.

Take Heidegger, for example. In one sense, it’s hard to imagine a clearer example of a “grave-robber”. Heidegger’s approach to the history of philosophy is to interrogate his subjects (targets?) in terms of the question of the meaning of Being for their philosophy – a question which, to put it mildly, those philosophers would have been quite surprised to find themselves as addressing.

But there is also something right about the association of analytical philosophy with grave-robbing. The gung-ho reconstructive approach to the history of philosophy has been characteristic of analytical philosophy. I’m thinking of Strawson’s The Bounds of Sense, Nozick’s appropriation of Locke’s arguments on appropriation, Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: a Defense. All of these authors consciously abandon elements that, they don’t deny, were dear to the philosophers they were writing about (transcendental psychology in Kant’s case, God’s purposes for Locke, the dialectic for Marx). I suppose that to write the history of philosophy in this way one has to see philosophical texts as decomposable – made up of arguments that are either independent of each other or, if mutually dependent, not so intimately so that they can’t be supported by alternative, more congenial, arguments where the original ones are found wanting. I guess that analytical philosophy (as its name suggests) is more inclined to believe this than are Continental philosophers who tend to see philosophy – at least, philosophy at its best – less as a collection of independent arguments than as the thorough-going and necessary working out of some fundamental, often poorly articulated, commitment or insight.

The emphasis on the integrity of historical texts (that they can’t be easily detached from elements that we now find strange, embarrassing or just absurd) goes together with a general view about philosophy that worries that if we take bits and pieces from past philosophers because we find them congenial to us and our current concerns we are losing the opportunity to use those philosophers to help us call our current assumptions into question.

This is a view that can be held in a stronger or weaker form. In its weaker form, it simply says that calling our current assumptions into question is a Good Thing and I find it expressed in the preface of pretty much every good book in the history of philosophy that I have read recently. In its stronger form, however, it goes with a scepticism about whether there is such a thing as philosophical progress at all: the idea that all philosophy is just the consistent working out of some premises that are found appealing at the time, that what the idea of the world as an expression of Divine benevolence was for Locke, so the idea of naturalism is to us, and that the point of the history of philosophy is to bring home to us when we reach the point at which “the spade turns”. You don’t have to be a Continental philosopher to believe this (on one way of looking at it, you couldn’t be more of an “analytical” philosopher than Burton Dreben) and you don't have to believe it if you are a Continental philosopher but there is no doubt that the worry that one is taking a passing historical prejudice for granted is characteristic of Continental philosophy, while the sanguine belief that one is either standing at the end of history as far as philosophical method goes or (this is also common) that one is employing no special methodological assumptions at all is more common among analytical philosophers.

But, in the end, I think that the alternative “archaeologist or grave-robber” doesn’t fit how I understand Continental philosophy. To the extent that Continental philosophers see history as important for the practice of philosophy – and they do – it isn’t because they think that there is this or that element that can be lifted out and transplanted into current debates.

I would like to suggest an alternative division: between what I would call reactionaries and iconoclasts. For the first group, the point of doing the history of philosophy is to bring out the contrast between the fundamental assumptions made by authors of the past and ourselves – in general, to the disadvantage of the latter. Thus Heidegger, and his less obscure followers like Gadamer, Taylor and Rorty, have, in their different ways, tried to contrast a past conception of self-hood with the impoverished conception of self and subjectivity that underlies modern philosophy (and the project of epistemology associated with it). Or there is MacIntyre with his contrast between a lost world in which morality was open to rational dispute and the modern one, oscillating between radical subjectivism and hopeless, scientistic rationalism. For these people, you do the history of philosophy to persuade your readers to return to a better age (or, at least, in MacIntyre’s case, to register what they have lost).

On the other hand, there are those who do the history of philosophy in a Nietzschean spirit – to try to bring it home how far the “shadow of God” still hangs over Western culture, even if the Deity himself has, by and large, passed out of sight. From this point of view, it’s what we have in common with the past (but don’t recognize ourselves as having) that is important. An obvious example would be Bernard Williams’ famous endorsement of Miss Anscombe’s claim about the close connection between the idea of moral obligation and religious commitment. Instead of being an argument for God, of course, in Williams’ hands it becomes an argument against moral obligation. In form at least, much of French post-structuralism is similar (think of Derrida’s claim that we are all simply repeating Platonic “logocentrism”).

Neither of these groups are easily characterized as either grave-robbers or archaeologists.

[david barnett]

The call for "pluralism"--whether taken as a call for greater diversity of views or for a greater diversity of methodologies--seems to me misdirected. There certainly are many views/methodologies which are less widely represented than others in contemporary "mainstream" Anglophone philosophy. And of course philosophers who are sympathetic to, say, early American pragmatism, or Husserlian phenomenology, are going to see the current lack of pragmatists or phenomenologists as bad thing. But it's one thing to claim that the neglect of pragmatism and phenomenology is undeserved, and quite another to say that it is due to the dominance of a myopic philosophical "clique." As Jason Stanley points out, there is a great variety of views and methodologies within the current philosophical mainstream.

Based on initial impressions, it seems to me that many of the self-identified "pluralists" actually have a very narrow conception of what amounts to worthwhile philosophy. What they really want is for the particular approaches which *they* favor to enjoy greater influence. Whether they're wrong or right in wanting this, it seems a bit odd to blame the situation on a general lack of pluralism.

[Manyul Im]

David Barnett is right in an important respect. The call for pluralism should be a call against narrowness of intellectual interest in philosophy where that narrowness is determined not only by method or content, but also by clique-ish tendencies. Formation of philosophical cliques is most likely not confined to method and content; social determinants such as research lineages, both at individual and institutional levels, must play some role. Also, what might be pejoratively termed "intellectual laziness" could more neutrally and accurately be described as only having so many hours in a day and years in a career to pursue one's intellectual interests.

It seems to me like "analytic philosophy" best describes a social formation built up from research lineages that come out of early to middle 20th century figures from Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard. That's, I think, why Pragmatism though critical of much else in "analytic" philosophy isn't really what anyone would uncontroversially call "continental," despite having symphathies of interest with 19th and 20th century German and French thought. In fact, following one strand of Harvard lineage, Pragmatists are usually very analytically trained.

On a slightly tangential note, the extent to which the perceived analytic and continental divide actually cuts across content differences is pretty evident in my own ghetto-ed field of Chinese philosophy, where there are clearly those who speak and write comfortably about Chinese texts using terminology and references well within analytic lineages, while there are clearly others who fall within either Pragmatist or German and French research lineages. You can't run to the ghetto to avoid cliques. Similar things can be said for those working in Feminist philosophy and other non-traditional subfields. Increasing interest or representation of such fields in philosophy departments might not change much in terms of clique representation within each department, if the hiring goes pretty much as expected: we'll hire those whose research we understand more readily and with whom we are more comfortable discussing our own work.

[Heath White]

I'll put in a plug for an article by John Haldane, "Has Philosophy Made a Difference, and Could It Be Expected to?" in _Philosophy at the New Millenium_ ed. Anthony O'Hear, CUP 2001. Toward the end of the piece, he takes a page from Anthony Kenny, dividing mid-century Western philosophy into four types: existentialism, analytic, marxism, scholasticism. Kenny notes that existentialism and analytic philosophy "share a concern for intellectual and moral autonomy" while marxism and scholasticism "are associated with doctrinal ideologies"; analytic philosophy and scholasticism "are interested in abstract theory and logic" while existentialism and marxism "are characterized by practical commitments to the basic features of human experience."

But Haldane goes on to say that these are better classed by their ends or values; by what one takes oneself to be doing or pursuing in doing philosophy. He characterizes existentialism as "philosophy as art" with an end of beauty; analytic philosophy is "philosophy as science" with an end of nature (I think 'truth' might have been better); marxism is "philosophy as politics" with an end of justice; scholasticism is "philosophy as religion" with an end of god. He notes that there are many different varieties of each, and goes on to note how the different conceptions make for different assumptions and practices in doing philosophy.

The essay was helpful to me. And I think the best answer to the original question, "What is pluralism in philosophy?" is: "A variety of answers to the question, 'What am I trying to accomplish, when I am doing philosophy?'"