Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

UK Philosophers Tackle the "Business Model" Being Forced on British Universities

Their blog is here.  It deserves a wide readership; the issues it raises are not peculiar to the UK, though, ironically, because there is no meaningful private sector in higher education in Britain it is proving far easier for the government there to enforce the 'business model' on all universities.  In the U.S., at least, the elite private universities can actually exploit their market position (in the market for prestige and certification) to uphold non-business models of learning, and by doing so they create some pressures for the elite public sector of higher education to do the same.

Geuss on Rorty (and on Geuss)

Raymond Geuss (Cambridge University) and the late Richard Rorty were colleagues in the Princeton Department in the late 1970s.  Geuss has some characteristically interesting, amusing and iconoclastic remarks about Rorty here, which illuminate both Rorty and Geuss.  (Thanks to Rob Sica for the pointer.)  An excerpt:

[One day] Dick happened to mention that he had just finished reading Gadamer's Truth and Method.  My heart sank at this news because the way he reported it seemed to me to indicate, correctly as it turned out, that he had been positively impressed by this book. I had a premonition, which also turned out to be correct, that it would not be possible for me to disabuse him of his admiration for the work of a man, whom I knew rather well as a former colleague at Heidelberg and whom I held to be a reactionary, distended wind-bag. Over the years, I did my best to set Dick right about Gadamer, even resorting to the rather low blow of describing to him the talk Gadamer had given at the German Embassy in occupied Paris in 1942, in which Gadamer discussed the positive role Herder could play in sweeping away the remnants of such corrupt and degenerate phenomena as individualism, liberalism, and democracy from the New Europe arising under National Socialism.  All this had no effect on Dick. His response to this story was that Gadamer had probably wanted to finance a trip to Paris—a perfectly understandable, indeed self-evidently laudable aspiration—and, under the circumstances, getting himself invited to the German Embassy was the only way to do this. As I persisted in pointing out that this in itself might “under the circumstances” not exactly constitute an exculpation, I came up against that familiar shrug of the shoulders which could look as if it meant that Dick had turned his receiving apparatus off. In this case, the shrug also made me feel that I was being hysterically aggressive in pursuing a harmless old gent for what was, after all, no more than a youthful indiscretion. In retrospect, I am not sure but that I don't now think Dick was right about this last point, but that was not my reaction at the time....

On another [occasion]...Dick described to me a new undergraduate course he wanted to give. It was to be called “An Alternative History of Modern Philosophy” and would sketch a continuous conversation from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the twentieth century without once naming any of the standard canonical figures. This would be a history of philosophy without any reference to Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, or J. S. Mill. I don't recall in all detail how the alternative story was to run, but I do remember very vividly that it was to start from Petrus Ramus. Dick had an extremely low opinion of Descartes as a philosopher, thinking of him as no more than a minor disciple of Petrus Ramus. I also remember that some of the high points were to be Paracelsus, the Cambridge Platonists, Thomas Reid, Fichte, and Hegel. I think the course was to end with Dewey, although I may be making that up.... [BL comment:  Rorty, in fact, taught a course, which I had with him in the Spring of 1982, called "From Kant to 1900," which covered Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and William James; when Geuss re-joined the Princeton faculty, he had the course eliminated from the books saying [I still recall this], "This course can not be taught."  Of course, Rorty had a message to convey, which is why he could get away with it--it was an excellent course for undergraduates, but I can see why Geuss, who did not share Rorty's agenda, would not think it teachable.]

Dick had two different worries about his planned new course. The first was that, if the Committee on Instruction knew what he was up to, “They” would never permit it. Dick spoke of the Committee on Instruction as if it was a kind of academic Thought Police. One must, as it were, he said, consider the University as a complex machine with two interlocking parts, a Generator that was devoted to producing excellence in relatively abstract areas of research, primarily scientific research, and then a Transformer which turned the prestige acquired through this excellence into a force of repression, directed at legitimizing the deepest possible cultural and political conservatism. The combination of excellence and a strictly-enforced, backward-looking cultural ethos made the University an almost irresistible magnet for the extensive funding from the alumni, large corporations, and the government that fuelled the Generator. The Committee on Instruction was the transmission belt between the two parts of the machine. “That is the way a great university protects itself from change,” Dick would say to me, as a kind of refrain during the late 1970s, meaning by “change,” I presume, in the first instance, cultural change. I naïvely objected that Dick's description couldn't possibly be correct because such a structure couldn't possibly maintain itself: it was like a confidence trick or a perpetual motion machine; reality would eventually break through at some point. Dick, however, was, at that time, significantly more disillusioned, or perhaps more realistic, than I was....

Dick's second worry about this planned course was that he did not quite see how he could tell his story without mentioning Kant at all, and even to mention Kant would be to violate the rationale of the enterprise. Since I had at least as negative an opinion of Kant as Dick had of Descartes, I encouraged him to move directly from Jacobi to Fichte, bypassing Kant altogether. He didn't seem very taken with this idea, although it was not clear to me why not. I suppose anyone who knew Dick knew his sometimes uncanny capacity simply to allow a train of thought that was moving in a direction he found uncongenial to peter out without it ever being completely clear why no further step in the conversation was made. This was not merely a gift or skill he had, but a personality trait that was integral to an aspect of Dick's philosophical make-up which I have already mentioned: his deeply rooted anti-Cartesianism.  Once one has set the origin of a system of Cartesian coordinates, and specified the axes, one can continue to count off in any direction ad libitum....

Dick was deeply tolerant and amazingly generous both in action and in spirit. When I was appointed at Princeton, he had, I think, some hopes of acquiring a colleague with whom he could discuss the more metaphysical parts of the German philosophical tradition that were near the center of his attention at that time. It must have been at least a mild disappointment to him that I had little interest in any kind of metaphysics and spent my time studying philosophers like Adorno who were of no interest to him and thinking about “social theory”—at that time a purported academic discipline that has now disappeared as completely as Davidson's [a now defunct market in Princeton, mentioned earlier in a part of the essay not excerpted here]. Characteristically, Dick used to say to people that my first book, The Idea of a Critical Theory, showed the uselessness of the concept of “ideology,” whereas I thought it showed the reverse. We could also find no common ground in aesthetics because of my own obsession with the philosophy of music. Dick seemed not only, as I have mentioned, to be deeply unmusical, like Freud, but he sometimes seemed even slightly irritated by the very existence of music and certainly by the thought that someone could take it sufficiently seriously to try to think about it in a sustained and systematic way. Finally, I think it puzzled him that I cleverly avoided ever giving any instruction in the university on Heidegger. None of this in the least diminished the unstinting intellectual and academic support he gave me in the most diverse contexts over decades, which went far beyond anything I can have been thought to deserve.

As the years went by, and we both left Princeton, I am afraid the incipient intellectual and emotional gulf between us got wider, especially after what I saw as Dick's turn toward ultra-nationalism with the publication of Achieving Our Country. Dick had always been and remained to the end of his life a “liberal” (in the American sense, i.e., a “Social-Democrat”): a defender of civil liberties and of the extension of a full set of civic rights to all, a vocal supporter of the labor unions and of programs to improve the conditions of the poor, an enemy of racism, arbitrary authority, and social exclusion. On the other hand, I found that he also enjoyed a spot of jokey leftist-baiting when he thought I was adopting knee-jerk positions which he held to be ill-founded. That was all fair enough. I tried not to rise to the bait, and usually succeeded, but this did not contribute to making our relations easier or more comfortable for me. The high (or low, depending on one's perspective) point of this sort of thing occurred some time in the 1980s when Dick sent me a postcard from Israel telling me he had just been talking with the Israeli official responsible for organizing assassinations of Arab mayors on the West Bank. He closed by saying he thought this was just what the situation required....

Achieving Our Country, though, represented a step too far for me. The very idea that the United States was “special” has always seemed to me patently absurd, and the idea that in its present, any of its past, or any of its likely future configurations it was in any way exemplary, a form of gross narcissistic self-deception which was not transformed into something laudable by virtue of being embedded in a highly sophisticated theory which purported to show that ethnocentrism was in a philosophically deep sense unavoidable. I remain very grateful to my Catholic upbringing and education for giving me relative immunity to nationalism. In the 1950s, the nuns who taught me from age five to twelve were virtually all Irish or Irish-American with sentimental attachment to certain elements of Celtic folklore, but they made sure to inculcate into us that the only serious human society was the Church which was an explicitly international organization. The mass, in the international language, Latin, was the same everywhere; the religious orders were international. This absence of national limitation was something very much to be cherished. “Catholica” in the phrase “[credo in] unam, sanctam, catholicam, et apostolicam ecclesiam” should, we were told, be written with a lower-case, not an upper-case, initial because it was not in the first instance part of the proper name of the church, but an adjective meaning “universal,” and this universality was one of the most important “marks of the true Church.” The Head of the Church, to be sure, and Vicar of Christ on earth, was in fact (at that time) always an Italian, but that was for contingent and insignificant reasons. The reason most commonly cited by these nuns was that, as Bishop of Rome, the Pope had to live in the “Eternal City,” but only an Italian could stand to live in Rome: it was hot, noisy, and overcrowded, and the people there ate spaghetti for dinner everyday rather than proper food, i.e., potatoes, so it would be too great a sacrifice to expect someone who had not grown up in Italy to tolerate life there. I clearly remember being unconvinced by this argument, thinking it set inappropriately low standards of self-sacrifice for the higher clergy; a genuinely saintly character should be able to put up even with pasta for lunch and dinner every day. I have since myself adopted this diet for long periods of time without thinking it gave me any claim on the Papacy. In any case, it was obvious even to a child of six or seven that none of these sisters had ever been within a thousand kilometers of Rome....

Hegel says at some point that a great man causes others to write commentaries about him and his work. I have probably spent more time thinking about Dick than about anyone else outside my narrow circle of intimates. His philosophical position contains much of great interest and importance, along with, as one would expect, some things I cannot bring myself to agree with, but that position is clearly and plausibly put. His writings have a human richness and substance which are not present in most contemporary philosophy. As a person, however, he remained a complete mystery to me. I rarely had the sense I understood why he did anything he did. I don't usually find most people that unfathomable. Perhaps it is simply that I cared enough to want genuinely to understand him, because I admired him, more than I cared about understanding other people, and so was not satisfied in his case with the superficial “explanations” of people's behavior which we normally accept.

As a person, Dick was thoroughly lovable, and as a philosopher both extraordinarily perceptive, and, at times, intensely irritating. The one thing he was not—not ever—was predictable or boring. I won't see his like again in my lifetime. I hope he would have been pleased to know that he would be remembered as this kind of person and this kind of philosopher.

A Second Call to Sign the Petition in Support of the Graduate Program in Philosophy at the University of Florida

In just the first 24 hours, there have been more than 650 signatures to the petition calling on the University of Florida President to reconsider the decision to close the PhD program in philosophy at the University of Florida.  It would be wonderful if there were 650 more in the next 24 hours!  Please take a moment to sign (and include some identifying info as you do so, e.g., Prof of Philosophy at .... or undergraduate at....).  (I hope some of the journalists who cover higher education and read this blog will run a story about the effort to save the PhD program at Florida.  650 signatures in support of the Florida program in just one day is, I hope, newsworthy!)

Many signatories have posted excellent comments as well.  Here are a few samples. 

From John Protevi, Associate Professor of French Studies at Lousiana State University:

Philosophy is the oldest and most rigorous of all the humanities disciplines, stretching back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Philosophy has been taught in European universities since at least the 13th century in the schools at Paris and Oxford. It is today a lively and important discipline in its own right, and also as a pivot, linking many of the sciences. Because of its positive effects on the intellectual growth of students, it is increasingly popular as an undergraduate major. The University of Florida can only damage its reputation if it follows through on this shortsighted proposal.

From Stephen Darwall, John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (who is moving next year to Yale University):

Dear President Machen, Years ago (I like to think not so many), you and I worked on some projects together when you were Provost at Michigan. Since you left Michigan, you have devoted your life to the effort to make good universities great. Do you really think a university can be great without a good philosophy department? And do you think a philosophy department at a research university can be good without a Ph.D. program? Florida faces great exigency and must cut its budget. While you were at Michigan, the University also faced great exigency, as it has again recently. Was cutting the Philosophy Ph.D. program something you would have long contemplated as Provost of Michigan? I doubt it. I like to think that the proposed cut to Florida's Philosophy Ph.D. program has yet to come before your attention with sufficient vividness, since the document with the proposed cuts is large and complex. And I like to think that when it does you will see the wisdom of retaining the program.

From C. Kenneth Waters, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities:

Great universities across the world have first rate philosophy departments, and that is no accident. I am sorry to see that the flagship public university of one of America's most prominent states does not recognize the value of philosophy.

From Daniel Garber, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at Princeton University:

This is a short-sighted move, one that sets back the cause of liberal education in one of the country's important state universities.

From Otavio Bueno, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami:

UF has an excellent philosophy department. Keeping the department's Ph.D program will be an asset for the university -- and for the profession.

From David McNaughton, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University:

Even though I am on the faculty at FSU, and thus likely to benefit from this extraordinary decision, as a Past President of the Florida Philosophical Association, and as someone who cares about the profession, I am appalled.

From Peter Carruthers, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at the University of Maryland, College Park

The University of Florida cannot possibly aspire to be a serious research university without a PhD Program in Philosophy.

From Craig Duncan, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ithaca College:

Others have spoken of the importance of philosophy to the humanities. Let me emphasize its practical importance too. In today's dynamic economy, career changes are the norm. Given this fact, it is important that students be trained in highly portable skills such as critical thinking, lucid writing, and accurate reading. Philosophy is a first-rate opportunity to hone these skills. Harming the quality of your philosophy department harms your undergraduates' education.

From Janice Dowell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln:

I have taught philosophy at state universities for over ten years. I have served as an undergraduate advisor for five of those years. I urge you to reconsider the termination of Florida's graduate program in philosphy. Good philosphy departments, such as Florida's, make a contribution to undergraduate education that far exceeds their size. Philosophy departments tend to be small and their faculty relatively low-paid. In short, good philosophy departements are relatively cheap. Yet philosophy majors consistently far out-perform just about any other major--in engineering, the sciences, or the humanities--on standardized tests for graduate programs, an excellent neutral measure of undergraduate learning. (Just check any source of information for the comparative scores of undergraduate majors on the GREs or LSATs. Year after year, philosophy majors dominate these lists.) The emphasis here, though, is GOOD philosophy departments. A university's ability to attract strong philosophers depends in part on the strength of their graduate program. Florida currently has a strong program and a strong department. It would be a real blow to undergraduate education at Florida to decimate the philosophy department by terminating its philosophy program. If this action is taken, I predict that the best faculty leave for better positions within a few years. It would be very difficult for a department to recover from this. And the reinstatement of the graduate program will be a necessary condition on recovery.

From Radu Bogdan, a philosophy professor at Tulane University and Bilkent University in Turkey:

Some time ago, I was considering applying for a job at UF, given the strength of the philosophy graduate program and its prestige. Philosophers make a great difference to a university, being the most interdisciplinary and connecting various fields. Both at Tulane and now visiting in Turkey, I set up and run cognitive science programs -- one of the most exciting developments in recent education -- and it is my experience that philosophers are the best link across disciplines in cognitive science. In eliminating the PhD at your university, you would weaken not only philosophy but also future developments in cognitive science, also various areas of applied ethics (business, ecology, medical, etc.) where philosophers are also essential. I hope you would reconsider.

From Alistair Norcross, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder:

Eliminating the Ph.D program in Philosophy at the University of Florida would be a terrible move. If that happens, the "flag" would have to be transferred to FSU

From Barry Loewer, Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick:

It is a grave error for the University of Florida to close its PhD program in pilosophy. Over the years it has been an excellent program. A vibrant philosophy PhD program is needed for vibrant undergraduate programs in philosophy and the humanities and sciences in general. Closing the program will make the university much less appealing to undergraduates. It will lead to many of the faculty leaving. It will be embarrassing to Florida that its flagship university doesn't have a doctoral program in Philosophy and re-instituting the program will be enormously more expensive than maintaining the current program.

From Joel Anderson, Research Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands:

This strikes me as very poor judgment. Sometimes, sacrifices have to be made to make certain savings. But in this case, the savings are likely to be small, and the cost in loss of prestige and academic standing will be extremely high. For, what talented person is going to want to be hired or pursue an advanced degree at UF -- in any field of the humanities -- with this as the track record of the University? As a faculty member at one of the UF's international partner universities, I would add that this is the sort of move that will likely raise questions about whether to continue that partnership.

From Kevin Fink in Ohio:

This decision comes just weeks after I was admitted to the PhD program in philosophy. I am extremely disappointed. This is something I never would have expected from such a highly respected research institution. Further, I can hardly imagine that the cost to the reputation of the university is worth what little money can be saved by this cut.

From Elizabeth Palmer:

I completed an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the Univeristy of Florida and am now attending Indiana University's PhD program in philosophy. I cannot express how disgusted and disappointed I am with your decision to end the PhD program in philosophy at UF. The UF department is quite strong - they are ranked in the top 50 of all graduate philosophy programs. Although I understand the budget constraints Florida is facing, it is ludicrous to eliminate a program clearly performing so well. At this moment, I'm ashamed to be a UF alumna. I hope you reconsider your decision.

From Jennifer Arellano, an undergraduate majoring in philosophy at Florida:

As a philosophy undergrad at UF, I am outraged that [President] Bernie Machen would cut such a vital discipline from UF's PhD. curriculum. I have firsthand witnessed the proficiency of UF's philosophy department, the growing student interest, and the passion and drive of its philosophy students and professors. I came specifically to UF with one goal in mind - to earn my undergraduate degree in philosophy. If this department suffers any more setbacks due to Machen's insensitivity, inconsideration, and general insolence towards a first-class undergraduate education, I will hold him personally responsible for disrupting the quality of my education. The department is already small in size, and with some professors already leaving, how can we afford to lose any more faculty? At the expense of increasing student interest in the major? At the expense of the respectability of Florida's supposed flagship institution? I'm pretty sure Berkeley still offers PhD's in philosophy.

From Jason Braswell in Illinois:

As a former philosophy major at the University of Florida, I strongly disagree with the decision to cut the PhD program. Studying philosophy was one of the best decisions I've ever made, and it's sad that such an important subject is being marginalized.

From Charles Wolvertron in Virginia:

As someone who "discovered" philosophy late in life after a career in engineering, I think a claim of being relatively unbiased is justifiable. It is now my opinion that a course in philosophy should be a graduation requirement for every student. Eliminating a key part of your philosophy program is a step in the wrong direction and sends a message opposite to the one that needs sending.

From David Holt in Florida:

As a tax paying resident of Florida, who understands the skills in critical thinking that the study of philosophy provides, I urge you not to eliminate the Ph.D program at the University of Florida. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and graduate student some 30 years ago and know the sound foundation it provided for earning a living in business.

From Alice Allen in Florida:

Dear Dr. Machen, From a fellow Vanderbilt alumnus... Please reconsider and keep the PhD program in Philosophy. I know several of their students and have known others over the years. These young scholars are EXCEPTIONAL. I know times are tight and understand your need to cut somewhere. But a top Liberal Arts university needs a Philosophy Ph.D. program. Respectfully submitted, Alice Allen B.A., Vanderbilt, 1965 M.A, M.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1967, 1969 Mother of a 2006 Summa Cum Laude graduate of the University of Florida with double major in English and Philosophy.

Here, finally, is an article from a Gainesville paper about the initial response to the proposed cuts.

Funny--On Academic Bad Manners

A young philosopher at a top research university writes: "The thing that always astonishes me is that they [bloggers, journalists etc.] put on this air of pained affront if an academic gets short with them - 'I don't expect this tone from an educator' and all that jazz. Jesus, they should have been in a room with Jerry 'I just have one question; was your paper a joke?' Fodor, or Kim 'but there's no fucking evidence for that!' Sterelny. Or most of the economists I know. Where do so many people get this idea that academic discourse is conducted by people wondering if they could regretfully venture to take issue with distinguished colleagues who are respectfully suggesting an emendation?"

Where, indeed?

UPDATE:  Philosopher Tad Brennan at Cornell writes with an explanation:

Journalists are surprised that academics can be short with them because they last met academics in the classroom, and most professors are kind and generous when dealing with students.  Serious academics save their scathing put-downs for colleagues and equals--I doubt that those quotes from Fodor and Sterelny document interactions with students.

Instead of feeling pained and affronted, the bloggers and journalists should take it as a compliment: 'hey, those academics are treating me like an equal!'  That can help to salve the bruises, anyhow. And it also shows why a sharp-tongued critique directed at a non-student is no betrayal of the "tone" appropriate to an "educator". If you are my student, then I have an obligation to be your educator; if not, not.

That certainly describes my own sentiments (and practices) exactly.

ONE MORE: This is also amusingly apt (and timely), referring as it does both to Professor Sterelny and Professor Sarkar's latest takedown of the creationists.  As the author notes:  "anyone who thinks...bloggers should be treated with respect by academics, simply doesn't know shit about academe, and particularly philosophy."

Reading Philosophy

A reader writes:

I enjoy your blog at leiterreports. This sounds strange, but would you consider doing a blog on 'reading philosophy'? Reading philosophy isn't like reading done in other fields. The big issue that would be interesting, I think, to get feedback from others on is: how long does it typically take you to read a philosophy journal article, and what kinds of philosophers take the most time to understand. It would be interesting to have some kind of crude scale.

In a general sense, I just often find it frustrating, being a philosopher, to be able to speed-read other literature, only to have to spend hours upon hours to make my way through philosophical literature.

What is philosophy?

The Department at Victoria University at Wellington compiles a quite interesting set of reflections by contemporary and 20th-century figures in answer to this question.  My favorite is the one from John Campbell, now at Berkeley:

Philosophy is thinking in slow motion. It breaks down, describes and assesses moves we ordinarily make at great speed - to do with our natural motivations and beliefs. It then becomes evident that alternatives are possible.       

My least favorite, since it makes philosophy out to be hopelessly conservative in its ambitions, is from David Lewis:

One comes to philosophy already endowed with a stock of opinions. It is not the business of philosophy either to undermine or to justify these pre-existing opinions, to any great extent, but only to try to discover ways of expanding them into an orderly system. It      succeeds to the extent that (1) it is systematic, and (2) it respects those of our pre-philosophical opinions to which we are firmly attached.  In so far as it does both better than any alternative we have thought of, we give it credence.   

Thomas Nagel's account is bound to be highly contentious in certain circles:

Philosophy is different from science and from mathematics.  Unlike science it doesnÍt rely on experiments or observation, but only on thought. And unlike mathematics it has no formal methods of proof.   It is done just by asking questions, arguing, trying out ideas and thinking of possible arguments against them, and wondering how our concepts really  work.

Those unhappy with Nagel, will be happier, I suspect, with Quine's take:

I see philosophy not as f groundwork for science, but as continuous with science. I see philosophy and science as in the same boat - a boat which f we can rebuild only at sea while staying afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy. All scientific      findings, all scientific conjectures that are at present plausible, are therefore in my view as welcome for use in philosophy as elsewhere.

Sources, and more quotes, are at the Victoria site.

Rouse on Two Kinds of Naturalism

I thought this was a provocative way of demarcating two naturalistic tendencies in philosophy, from a review by Joseph Rouse (Wesleyan):

Within the broadly secular practice of contemporary philosophy, two alternative oppositional stances have replaced anti-supernaturalism in defining a naturalistic orientation, leading to at least two divergent strands of philosophical naturalism.  One approach, sometimes characterized as "scientific naturalism" (De Caro and MacArthur 2004), and more often described as "ontological naturalism" in this volume, now might be said to define itself in opposition to humanism rather than theism.  Here lies the motivation for some naturalists' hostility to folk psychology, freedom, transcendental reason, the irreducibility of consciousness or first-person standpoints, and above all, any conception of normativity as sui generis.  Human beings live in a world indifferent or even hostile to our interests, desires, values, or perspectival priorities, and the sciences provide our primary access to this anthropo-peripheral world to which we must accommodate ourselves.  This anti-humanist strain of naturalism aspires to a hard-headed, resolute commitment to a thoroughly scientific self-understanding that can free us from the residual strands of self-aggrandizing illusion or wishful thinking that still confer disproportionate significance upon our all-too-human preoccupations.

A different, more inclusive conception of naturalism emphasizes a tolerant continuity of philosophy with the natural sciences.  Naturalism has long defined itself in opposition to conceptions of philosophy as autonomous from the natural sciences.  Yet here there has been considerable evolution.  When Frege and Husserl inveighed against psychologism in logic and naturalism in philosophy at the turn of the 20th Century, the naturalists they had in mind often sought to dispense with philosophy altogether; in Germany, the stakes were heightened by the struggles between philosophers and experimental psychologists for university chairs in philosophy.  A century later, naturalism has become an unequivocally philosophical stance toward philosophical issues, which appropriates the resources and/or the authority of natural science for philosophical ends.  If you want to find out about naturalism, you still need to read philosophy journals rather than just the scientific literature.  Within anglophone philosophy, naturalism has thus succeeded empiricism as the primary expression of a scientific orientation within philosophy, by loosening empiricist opposition to metaphysics, causality, and alethic modalities, and replacing formal logic and a priori analysis with cognitive science or evolutionary biology as the preferred basis for philosophical understanding of thought and action.

Differences between these two ways of defining a naturalistic orientation can be expressed in multiple ways.  The anti-humanist strain of naturalism is often radically revisionist, confining philosophical inquiry within the austere constraints of a physicalist ontology, a third-person standpoint, or the domains governed by natural laws.  Many familiar ways of thinking and talking must be reduced, revised, or eliminated to fit these constraints.  More inclusive versions of naturalism are not broadly revisionist in this way, while still providing considerable resources for criticism of specific positions and arguments.  Another way to distinguish the two strains is by considering where the naturalist looks for philosophical guidance.  For many anti-humanist conceptions, nature (as represented in scientific theories) provides the touchstone for philosophical work; for the more tolerant approaches, scientific practices in all their diversity provide the relevant philosophical resources, with no prior commitment to hierarchies among the sciences in their ontological commitments or explanatory resources. 

Hot Topics in Ethics?

A follow-up to the successful thread on epistemology awhile back:  what are the hot topics in ethics these days?   Moral psychology, both empirical and from the armchair, seems especially lively.  The nature of reasons too.  What else?  The more detail the better, and feel free to post links to on-line resources (papers, blog discussions, etc.).  Signed comments strongly preferred, and, as always, post only once, comments may take awhile to appear.

Where to start LEMMings Reading?

A reader writes:

I'm currently a graduate student in political theory (in a political science department) but I've become very interested in a much wider range of philosophical areas.  Not too long ago I stumbled onto your blog, of which I've become a regular reader, and I noticed you recently gave some advice to someone regarding where to begin with Nietzsche.  I was wondering if you know of, and could recommend, several good places to begin regarding the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, and to a lesser degree epistemology and metaphysics.  Ideally I'd like to find some books that give a good overview of the history, as well as the contemporary debates (although I don't know if my ideal is unrealistic).  Any direction, advice, or recommendations you could provide would be much appreciated.

I thought it better to let some of the many experts who are readers offer suggestions, which would no doubt benefit this student as well as others.  Non-anonymous comments strongly preferred, as usual; please post only once, comments may take awhile to appear. 

"As a profession, is philosophy in a better or worse state than it was in 1997?"

That was the question put to ten philosophers in the 10th anniversary issue of The Philosophers' Magazine (which, alas, is not on-line).  Here are some of the answers that struck me as most interesting.

Simon Blackburn (Cambridge University & University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill):

The return of a highly scholastic metaphysics means it's worse:  there is a return of "intuition" masquerading as the a priori and a highly suspect self-image that metaphysics is just like science, except without the need toleave the armchair, which is about parallel to entering Formula 1 races without an engine.  I suspect that political and moral philosophy are better.

While Professor Blackburn thinks the glass is half empty, Jerry Fodor (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) thinks it half full:

It's better in one respect:  Philosophical inquiry is increasingly informed by discussion with adjacent subjects (psychology, biology, cognitive science, physics, and so forth).  In consequence, a priorism is less widely prevalent than it was at the height of the "analytical" philosophy movement.  That's surely a good thing.

Jaakko Hintikka (Boston University), by contrast, seems to be looking at a wholly different glass:

Intellectually, philosophy is now in the same or worse state of stagnation as in 1997.  With a few exceptions, the paradigm of philosophical thinking and writing is no longer like that of a scientist inquiring into the deepest secrets of nature or of the human mind, but an interpreter of the great works of literature or perhaps of a religious teacher interpreting the sacred texts.  The truth of what is commented on is either irrelevant or taken for granted.  For instance, in the immense secondary literature on Wittgenstein, I have never found anything that would help me to understand better the subject matter Wittgenstein was inquiring into.  The main reason for the Byzantine state of affairs is the lack of fresh new ideas that would open up specific problems for philosophers--especially young philosophers--to tackle.

Alasdair MacIntyre (University of Notre Dame), meanwhile, presumably plans to stop writing:

If the philosophy published between 1907 and 1967 were to vanish without a trace, it would be an intellectual catastrophe.  If the philosophy published between 1967 and 1997 were to vanish without trace, it would be a very serious loss.  If the philosophy published between 1997 and 2007 were to vanish similarly, it would matter a little, but not that much.

Colin McGinn (University of Miami) is less gloomy than Professor MacIntyre, but still a bit nostalgic:

Better in some respects, worse in others.  It seems more democratic now, less centralised; but philosophy is not as exciting these days as it used to be.  I'd even say that a kind of graduate student mentality has taken over:  being an expert in "the literature" is too highly prized, while originality is looked on with suspicion.  Also, it's just got more nerdy.  The people are less amusing, shallower, more one-dimensional (I'm speaking generally).

Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago) starts by noting (she is alone among respondents to mention this) that "the job market for young philosophers is considerably worse," meaning that "talented young people are increasingly deterred from choosing philosophy as a career."  She continues:

As for the people who are still in the profession, I think that the basic quality of work in moral and political philosophy is pretty high, but I wonder where the people of large insight and imagination are in the younger generation, people with the sort of humanistic breadth exemplified by [Bernard] Williams.  I sometimes think that we are becoming smaller, and that it would be a good thing if people who wrote on moral and political philosophy read more novels and poems, and spent more time encountering real human beings in different parts of the world.

John Searle (University of California, Berkeley) sounds a note of optimism, pointing to "the increasing 'globalisation' of philosophy," noting that one can "go to just about any major university in the world and lecture in English to audiences who are sophisticated, informed, and enthusiastic about philosophy."  Peter Singer (Princeton University & University of Melbourne) is similarly upbeat (and even more succinct):

In better shape.  At least so it seems to me--there appear to be more philosophers being widely read, beyond the profession, and a broader public interest in philosophy than there was 10 years ago.

So what do philosophers think?  Do you share the diagnoses of the philosophers quoted above?  It would be especially interesting to know whether younger philosophers are as gloomy as many of those senior scholars quoted above (McGinn, at 57, and Nussbaum, at 60 are the youngest philosophers quoted).

Post only once; signed comments are more likely to appear; as always, comments are reviewed for substance and relevance.

Kant's Critique of Pomobabble

Thom Brooks (Newcastle) has the details.

On Intuitions in Philosophy

From the illuminating review by Michael Liston (Wisconsin/Milwaukee) of the new book by Penelope Maddy (UC Irvine) Second Philosophy:  A Naturalistic Method (OUP, 2007):

[This book] presents the best exploration and defense of naturalism I know of. A primary lesson is that we ought not to build philosophical theories on anything as shaky as intuitions that things must be thus-and-so. Too often our intuitions -- whether inherited from our academic training, the workings of our language, or our natural make-up -- are no more than virtually irresistible impulses to think in certain ways. Liberal doses of concrete case studies are probably our best strategy of resistance.

Longuenesse on "Analytic" and "Continental" Philosophy

From an interview conducted by Stanford faculty and students with Beatrice Longuenesse, the scholar of Kant and German Idealism, who now teaches at NYU:

I have never been all that convinced by the so-called division between “two” traditions.  As a student, one of my first ground-breaking experiences was reading Kant and becoming interested in Kant’s philosophy of science and transcendental philosophy. This experience was probably a major factor in my skepticism about the relevance of such a division: Kant is obviously a common ancestor to both “traditions.”

But of course your question does not concern the Kantian legacy, but more broadly the different styles of philosophy and what they might have to bring to one another.  I think the strong point of the “continental” tradition is a greater attention to history: both to the ways in which philosophy itself has a tradition, and to the ways in which philosophical arguments can be influenced by factors beyond the philosopher’s rational control or even awareness.  The strong point of the “analytic” tradition is its attention to logic, conceptual clarity, and argument. I suppose one could name many philosophical issues about which the two approaches could learn from one another. The area in which they most strikingly converge today, I think, is precisely the one I am currently interested in (so maybe I am being partial here!): problems concerning consciousness and self-consciousness, self-reference, personal identity.

I'm curious what people, especially philosophers of mind, think about this, especially the last claim about where "analytic" and "Continental" traditions converge.  (What Longuenesse has in mind presumably has more to do with German Idealism, and perhaps some of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, than with Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Habermas, Foucault, etc.)

Experimental Philosophy Makes the New York Times

Deservedly so!

Jeff McMahan on the State of Normative Ethics

Once again, an excerpt from an interview in Normative Ethics:  5 Questions, this time with Jeff McMahan (Rutgers):

I am highly optimistic about the prospects for progress in normative ethics.  It is evident to me that great progress has already been made since I entered the field in the early 1980s.  Unlike many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which in recent years were seduced by bad French philosophy into a lot of silly "post-modern" theorizing that hs exposed them to derision and reduced them to irrelevance, analytic philosophy is flourishing.  Part of the reason why analytic philosophy generally is in such a healthy state is that, as Jerry Fodor observed in a recent book review, philosophers no longer tend to have philosophies.  We no longer devote our lives to developing comprehensive philosophical or ethical systems.  We are individually narrower and more specialized, which enables us to focus more carefully and minutely on the problems we study, and as a consequence to produce work that is more rigorous and detailed.  The result is that philosophy has become more of a collective endeavor than it was in the past, in the sense that different people are focusing selectively on problems that are elements or aspects of larger problems.  When the results of individual efforts are combined, we may achieve a collective product that exceeds in depth, intricacy, and sophistication what any individual could have produced by working on the larger problem in isolation.

I agree that some parts of the humanities have been "seduced by bad French philosophy" that has "exposed them to derision and reduced them to irrelevance"; I agree that "philosophers no longer tend to have philosophies"; and I agree that "philosophy has become more of a collective endeavor."  But I disagree with everything else here, especially in the case of normative ethics (what would be the evidence, e.g., for its "relevance"?).  I am curious, though, what other philosophers think about McMahan's assessment.  (I would also be happy to hear from those who disagree with the claims of McMahan with which I agree as well.)  Signed comments are preferred; post only once; comments may take awhile to appear.

Peter Singer on "neglected topics and/or contributions" in Normative Ethics

I've been reading around in the latest in the fascinating 5 Questions series, this one on Normative Ethics.  Here is Peter Singer (Princeton/Melbourne) on "neglected topics and/or contributions":

As for neglected contributions, while the work of R.M. Hare is not entirely neglected, it is not now paid the attention it deserves.  Compare the attention Rawls has received over the last 30 years – and yet Hare is, to my mind, a more rigorous philosopher.  Mind you, I wouldn’t want to see as much written about Hare as has been written about Rawls during those decades.  That’s excessive by any standards.  So much discussion of any one philosopher becomes boring. 

Going back further, I regret the fact that Mill’s Utilitarianism is much more widely read than Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics, despite the fact that Utilitarianism is a hastily-written work, full of doubtful arguments.  The Methods of Ethics, which Sidgwick painstakingly revised 7 times over a thirty year period, is simply the best book on ethics ever written.  It’s difficult to think of any major issues in normative ethics that are not already touched upon there, and often it is hard to improve on what Sidgwick says.  If students find it too long to read, then they should at least be referred to the last two chapters of Book III, all of Book IV, and the Concluding Chapter.  But more people read Mill, no doubt in large part because Mill was the more concise and elegant writer.

I wonder what philosophers think about Professor Singer's answer?

Ted Honderich Does Not Think Much of Colin McGinn's Review of His Book...

...and he argues that what I called McGinn's prima facie plausible criticisms of Honderich's book do not, in fact, survive scrutiny.  He also documents, towards the end of the rejoinder (and in a separate page of excerpts), some of the personal history that might explain the fierce tone of the review, the subject of our earlier discussion.  Now that this whole matter has migrated into cyberspace, will Professor McGinn, himself now a blogger, issue a rejoinder to the rejoinder to what may now be the most famous or infamous review of a philosophical book in recent memory?

Hot Topics in Epistemology?

So what are the "hot" topics/problems in epistemology these days?  Contextualism?  Disagreement?  What else?  The more detail the better, and feel free to post links to on-line resources (papers, blog discussions, etc.).  If this generates a good response, I'll probably run similar threads on other areas of philosophy in the coming weeks and months.  Remember to post only once; comments may take awhile to appear.

Do Philosophers Use Google for Research?

In the current issue of The New Yorker, the historian Anthony Grafton (Princeton) writes about the history of the effects of technological developments on books, concentrating, in particular, on the present.  The following passage caught my attention in particular:

Now even the most traditional-minded scholar generally begins by consulting a search engine. As a cheerful editor at Cambridge University Press recently told me, “Conservatively, ninety-five per cent of all scholarly inquiries start at Google.” Google’s famous search algorithm emulates the principle of scholarly citation—counting up and evaluating earlier links in order to steer users toward the sources that others have already found helpful. In a sense, the system resembles nothing more than trillions of old-fashioned footnotes.

Putting aside Grafton's slightly Panglossian view of how Google works, I'm wondering whether the point about research is true of philosophers?  Do you, philosophical readers, generally "begin[] by consulting a search engine"?  And if it is true, what does that mean for the dissemination of scholarship?  For example, if you google "Nietzsche's moral philosophy," the first entry is my essay on "Nietzsche's Moral and Political Philosophy" from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and if you google "legal realism," the first entry is from Wikipedia, the second my SSRN paper on "American Legal Realism."  Someone searching for "Donald Davidson" gets the SEP entry first, followed by the Wikipedia entry.  The SEP essay also comes up first in a search for "mental causation."

To the extent, then, that philosophers, or philosophy students, start their research with Google, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is going to play a quite big role in shaping the reception of ideas and also, one suspects, in determining what secondary literature becomes part of the "canon" on a particular topic.  Fortunately, SEP is generally of high quality.  The same can not be said of Wikipedia, of course, as we have had occasion to note previously.

But the real question is this, and I'd be interested to hear from undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty:  are philosophers using Google for research?  are you?  if you're using it, how do you use it? 
I can report my own practice.  I don't use Google for research, though I do often start research on a topic I know little about using the search engine at the SEP page.  What I do use Google for a fair bit is if I have a quote, but don't have the precise cite for it:  Googling a distinctive quote almost invariably turns up sites with the full reference (of course, it is advisable to double-check the reference!).

Are Moral Philosophers Ethical?

At last, the truth:

The majority of philosophers expressed the view that ethicists do not behave better than non-ethicists.  Ethicists themselves were about evenly divided between saying ethicists behave better and saying they behave the same.  Non-ethicists were about evenly divided between saying that ethicists behave better, the same, and worse.

More useful would be to know about the differences between Kantians, utilitarians, and virtue ethicists.  Based on my utterly non-scientific, anecdotal method, my conclusion is that you're safest with utilitarians and virtue theorists, and in mortal danger around Kantians (it's that combination of dogmatic rectitude and lack of judgment, I guess--or to quote Geuss again, "The Kantian philosophy is no more than at best a half-secularized version of...a theocratic ethics with 'Reason' in the place of God" [Outside Ethics, p. 20]).  I assume some Experimental Philosophers will tackle this weighty matter next.

UPDATE:  Professor Schwitzgebel (UC Riverside) observes:

I have noticed that everyone I've spoken to so far who thinks there are differences in ethical character between Kantians, utilitarians, and virtue ethicists thinks the Kantians are the worst of the lot. I'd be interested to hear readers' thoughts about this.

Colin McGinn Did Not Like Ted Honderich's Book

So many people have been calling my attention to Colin McGinn's review of Ted Honderich's On Consciousness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004) from Philosophical Review, vol. 116, no. 3 (2007), that I thought I should comment on it.  Here is how the review opens:

This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad.  It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed.  It is also radically inconsistent....The second half [of the book] tries to develop a new theory of consciousness, according to which the positive theses of the first half of the book are all wrong (not that this was signposted while the first half was assertively in progress) and the fact is only slyly acknowledged toward the end of the discussion--hence the radical inconsistency I mentioned.  Throughout, the book is woefully uninformed about the work of others and at best amateurish.  Honderich's understanding of positions he criticizes is often weak to nonexistent, though not lacking in chutzpah.  And the view he ends up defending is preposterous in the extreme and easily refuted.

That's just from the first paragraph.  The review makes good (i.e., offers prima facia plausible evidence) on most of these charges.  It concludes:

Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness?  Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark.  His instincts, at least, are not always wrong.  It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others).

Perhaps most remarkable of all, the review begins with a footnote that says:  "The review that appears here is not as I originally wrote it.  The editors asked me to 'soften the tone' of the original; I have done so, though against my better judgment."  What did the original review look like, one wonders?

Disputes about "tone" almost always mask, of course, disputes about "substance," which is probably why McGinn was disinclined to "soften the tone" since he presumably thought it properly matched to the substance.  Assuming the substance of the criticisms are sound, what do readers think about the "tone" of the review?  Are the two separable?  It seems to me that there are too few honest book reviews out there, and too many puff pieces.  But even if one agrees with me about that one might still think McGinn's approach to this is wrong.  I find McGinn's approach refreshing, but I wonder what others think?  As usual, non-anonymous postings are far more likely to appear (and they will have to be signed if you plan on criticizing McGinn or Honderich).  Post only once!  Comments may take awhile to appear.

Wright on McDowell...and the Nature of "Analytic" Philosophy Yet Again

I had occasion recently to re-read one of the best review essays I have ever read:  Crispin Wright's essay on John McDowell's Mind and World, which appeared under the title "Human Nature?" in European Journal of Philosophy 4 (1996):  235-253.  The essay itself is a densely argued critique of the two central theses of McDowell's book ("that experience must be conceived as conceptual, and that one should look to a conception of Second Nature for a reconciliation of the normative and the natural" as Wright puts it), but the concluding passages of the review turn to questions of style, which resonate with a discussion we have had here more than once about the nature of "analytic" philosophy.  Here is Wright (p. 252):

If analytical philosophy demands self-consciousness about unexplained or only partially explained terms of art, formality and explicitness in setting out of argument, and the clearest possible sign-posting and formulation of assumptions, targets, and goals, etc., then this is not a work of analytical philosophy....At its worst, indeed, McDowell's prose puts barriers of jargon, convolution and metaphor before the reader hardly less formidable than those characteristically erected by his German luminaries.....[T]he stylistic extravagance of McDowell's book--more extreme than in any of his other writings to date--will unquestionably color the influence it will exert...[T]he fear must be that the book will encourage too many of the susceptible to swim out of their depth in seas of rhetorical metaphysics.  Wittgenstein complained that, "The seed I am most likely to sow is a certain jargon."  One feels that, if so, he had only himself to blame.  McDowell is a strong swimmer, but his stroke is not to be imitated.

Is what Wright describes as characteristic of "analytical philosophy" not characteristic of, e.g., Hume and Descartes and, in many ways, Aristotle as well?  If so, then what conclusions should be drawn about McDowell or, for that matter, Hegel?  I am curious what readers make of Wright's remarks.  No anonymous postings, and post only once.  Comments may take awhile to appear.

Geuss's Skepticism about Rawls

I have been reading around in Raymond Geuss's quite interesting and iconoclastic set of papers, Outside Ethics (Princeton University Press, 2005), and found the essay on Rawls, "Neither History nor Praxis" especially striking.  Responding to Rawls's autobiographic statement that his service in World War II stimulated his interested in the theory of justice, Geuss comments (p. 31):

One can easily imagine a person confronted with the events of the Second World War being motivated to ask various questions, for instance about European history, about the dynamics of political systems under stress, about the economics of competitive international markets, about human social psychology and the structure of collective action.  What, however, would one have to believe about the world to think that "What is the correct conception of justice?" is the appropriate question to ask in the face of concentration camps, secret police, and the firebombing of cities?  Are reflections about the correct distirbution of goods and services in a "well-ordered society" the right kind of intellectual response to slavery, torture, and mass murder?  Was the problem in the Third Reich that people in extermination camps didn't get the slice of the economic pie that they ought to have had, if everyone had discussed the matter freely and under the right conditions?  Should political philosophy really be essentially about questions of fairness of distribution of resources?  Aren't security and the control of violence far more important?  How about the coordination of action, the sharing of information, the cultivation of trust, the development and deployment of human individual and social capacities, the management of relations of power and authority, the balancing of the demands of stability and reform, the provision for a viable social future?

Geuss, to be sure, has specific, substantive doubts about the resulting Theory of Justice.  Why, he asks, think that there would be any agreement in an "original position":  "No matter how long they discussed matters, there might remain at the end different groups with different views" (p. 32).  And even if there were an agreement, why should it "have any relevance whatever to us, who do have concrete 'identities,' parts of which sometimes can be of importance to us, and who live in a concrete situation in a complex real world" (p. 32)?  The "difference principle," Geuss suggests, both (1) helps explain why the theory's "political effects..has been close to zero" (p. 33), since it "turns out to be extremely difficult to assess in practice whether or not a certain existing inequality is or is not allowed by the difference principle" (p. 33), and (2) is itself "morally very repellent" since "increases in the absolute standard of living of the poor can, in principle, justify very great inequalities" (p. 33).

Geuss is no fonder of the argument of the later Law of Peoples, noting that Rawls believes that,

Outlaw states may not be exterminated ad libitum, but "liberal" states have a right to keep and deploy nuclear weapons for deterrent purposes, and may attack outlaw states with military force under certain circumstances if that is necessary to prevent violation of human rights.  This does not even purport to be a view from an anonymous universal "original position," but is, even on the most superficial inspection, a specifically American political position--more enlightened, perhaps, than that of George W. Bush or Condoleeza Rice, but generically the same kind of thing.  Of course, no one can object in principle to citizens helping to elaborate the national ideology (provided it is not actively vicious), but philosophy has in the past often aspired to something more than this.  (p. 34)

Noting that the huge growth of the academic industry surrounding Rawls's A Theory of Justice coincided with increasing inequality and a rightward turn of the Western industrial democracies, Geuss asks (p. 38):

Is it,...or should it be, of any significance that the "normative" moral and political theory of the Rawlsian type has nothing, literally nothing, to say about the real increase in inequality, except perhaps "so much the worse for the facts"?  This is not a criticism to the effect that theoreticians should act rather than merely thinking, but a criticism to the effect that they are not thinking about relevant issues in a serious way.

Geuss favors an approach to political philosophy in which one studies,

history, social and economic institutions, and the real world of politics in a reflective way.  This is not incompatible with "doing philosophy"; rather, in this area, it is the only sensible way to proceed.  After all, a major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one's own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason.  The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias....

One of the great uses of history is to show us what, because it has in the past been real, is a fortiori possible.  This can give rise to various illusions.  Something can be thought to be politically possible now because it actually existed in the past, but it may have been possible in the past because of circumstances that have meanwhile changed.  This is a case in which further development of the very historical consciousness that gave rise to the problem will contribute to clearing it away.  (pp. 38-39)

From the preceding reflections about how to approach political philosophy, Geuss concludes:

For those of us with views like these, Rawls is not a major moral and political theorist, whose work self-evidently deserves and repays the most careful scrutiny.  Rather, he was a parochial figure who not only failed to advance the subject but also pointed political philosophy firmly in the wrong direction.  (p. 39)

I'm curious what philosophers think.  I have given, of course, only excerpts from the Geuss essay, and it is obvious enough how Rawlsians might respond to some of the particulars of Geuss's doubts about the theory of justice.  But what about the more general criticisms of this approach to political philosophy and its relevance and value?  Post only once; posts may take awhile to appear.  Non-anonymous postings preferred, though, anonymous or otherwise, only substantive contributions will be approved.

Is Natural Language Philosophically Relevant? (J. Stanley)

I regularly encounter philosophers who are puzzled about how language could be relevant in shedding light on philosophical problems that are not primarily about language. But I have genuine problems understanding their befuddlement. I don’t think of appealing to facts about language as a special kind of methodology. Rather, I think of it as a source of evidence that is not subject to many of the familiar worries that arise with (say) the methodology of intuitions. Language allows us insight into distinctions to which our explicit theories may blind us. As Austin writes in Sense and Sensibilia, “…the distinctions embodied in our vast and, for the most part, relatively ancient stock of ordinary words are neither few or always very obvious, and almost never just arbitrary.” Hannah Arendt begins her argument that there is a distinction between labor and work in The Human Condition by appeal to the fact that “every European language, ancient and modern, contains two etymologically unrelated words for what we have to come to think of as the same activity, and retains them in the face of their persistent synonymous usage.” And later in the same chapter, she writes “It is language, and the fundamental human experiences underlying it, rather than theory, that teaches us that the things of the world, among which the vita activa spends itself, are of a very different nature and produced by quite different kinds of activities.” I don’t see anything objectionable about these sorts of appeals to language; they can provide legitimate sources of evidence. Furthermore, though philosophers nowadays are more likely to appeal to grammar than to etymology, I also don’t see anything in contemporary philosophy that appeals in language in anything other than this kind of way.

Carlin Romano: Total Ignorance of Philosophy is No Obstacle to Opining about Richard Rorty

That might have been the more apt title for this embarrassing display of sophomoric confusions and outright fabrications by journalist Carlin Romano.  Let's go through them step by step.  Mr. Romano begins:

When Richard Rorty turned 75 last October, no symposia, conferences, or Festschriften marked the occasion.

That's surely because Festschriften are more common when someone turns 65 or 70; I'm not aware of any case of marking someone turning 75.  Unnoted by Mr. Romano, of course, is that a Library of Living Philosophers volume on Rorty was in the works at the time of his death, a far more dramatic "marking of the occasion" than the typical Festschrift.

Such academic nods require true-believing disciples. Philosophy as a discipline spawns them like trout — middle-aged professors with the souls of eternal teaching assistants — but great originals like Rorty don't attract them.

There is simply no evidence that in philosophy there are more Festschriften than in other fields and, more to the point, Festschriften for philosophers rarely include disciples as distinct from former students, most of whom (being philosophers after all) have gone off in very different directions.  (Quine's two most eminent students, let us recall, were the very unQuinean Saul Kripke and David Lewis.  Such examples can, of course, be multiplied).  Because Rorty stopped working with top-flight PhD students around 1982, it is hardly surprising that there are not lots of former students willing to put together Festschriften.  But more to the point, the Rorty and His Critics volume that appeared in 2000 (right before Rorty turned 70), and looks rather like a Festschrift to anyone actually familiar with the content, did include some of Rorty's former students from his Princeton days, such as Robert Brandom (the editor), Barry Allen, and Michael Williams, among others.  I guess, for Mr. Romano's sake, they should have waited till Rorty was 75.

As to whether Rorty is a "great original," that is a matter to which we will return.  Mr. Romano continues:

For the most high-impact American philosopher of the past 30 years, the silence at 75 confirmed a hoary truth: You can love philosophy, but it will never love you back — not if you piss off the professional philosophers or, worse, endanger them. Even his death this June from pancreatic cancer attracted more notice and encomia from outside the field than within.

We've already noted that "silence at 75" is meaningless, since 75 has never been a milestone calling forth conferences and celebrations.  There is no doubt that Rorty had a greater impact in certain parts of the humanities (especially English and History) than other philosophers, but has his cross-disciplinary impact really been greater than, say, Jerry Fodor's or John Rawls's?  The problem with this kind of gushing is that it assumes that impact in a field like English exhausts scholarly impact.

The big chill began with his 1970s apostasy from positivistic analytic philosophy.

What in the world is "positivistic analyic philosophy"?  Logical positivism was moribund by the 1970s, and Princeton in the 1970s was the fertile ground for new metaphysical theorizing, launched by Kripke and Lewis, which would have been anathema to positivists.  The make-believe label "positivistic analytic philosophy" is the first clear giveaway that Mr. Romano has no idea what he is talking about.

We Princeton University philosophy majors, hatching into the field at the time, watched it happen....Princeton philosophy professors and grad students at that time liked to act as if any work not mimeographed within the past three years, and circulated exclusively in the department, was probably too passé to be worth studying.

Really?  This would certainly come as news to Gregory Vlastos, the great scholar of ancient philosophy in the Department at that time, as well as to Michael Frede who succeeded him in the late 1970s.  It would also be surprising to George Pitcher and Margaret Wilson, distinguished historians of early modern philosophy, as well as to all those teaching Continental philosophy at Princeton in the 1970s, like Raymond Geuss and David Hoy.  And what of all the scholars of the history of philosophy trained at Princeton in the 1970s, such as Janet Broughton, Paul Woodruff, Terence Irwin, Catherine Wilson, Eileen O'Neill, among others:  were they too only studying three-year-old mimeographs?

Rorty, by contrast, stood for reading widely in both historical and analytic philosophy, for not dissing a thinker before you'd read her or him.

As opposed to Vlastos, Wilson, Pitcher, Geuss, and Frede, among Rorty's other Princeton colleagues?  What is unfortunate about Mr. Romano's mindless polemic is that there is a real point that could be made here, namely, that some Anglophone philosophers really were (and are) indifferent to the history of philosophy, and that includes some of those at Princeton:  but it is just a falsfication of the history to saddle the Princeton Department in toto with that attitude.

Rorty's most crucial deviation from colleagues came in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979). In the shrinking Fach of academic philosophy — its territory truncated by psychology, invaded by literature, long ago reduced by natural science — Rorty challenged the theory of knowledge, the last remaining crop philosophy professors could sell to overlord deans and presidents, and declared it practically carcinogenic.

"Academic philosophy" didn't really exist until the late 18th and early 19th-century, when the academy really came into its own as a place where people did philosophy.  By that point, philosophy's field had, indeed, been "reduced by natural science"--indeed, it was arguably so reduced a couple of hundred years before that.  One wonders whether that is what Mr. Romano had in mind?  The idea that "academic philosophy" was truncated by psychology is a curious one.  Certainly many in the late 19th-century thought that, but two rather significant figures in the development of 20th-century philosophy, Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl, resisted that idea, and at least Frege's descendants carry the anti-psychologistic torch today in many departments.  At the same time, the (arguably) dominant tendency has been for philosophers to work in tandem with psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, legal scholars, and biologists, such that the disciplinary boundaries are blurred, not that philosophers have little to do.

Even stranger is the implication that all philosophers were doing in the 1970s was "theory of knowledge."  The 1970s saw the flourishing of moral and political philosophy (including at Princeton, of course, with Thomas Nagel and T.M. Scanlon, among others), as well as seminal work in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of physics, and philosophy of mathematics, among other areas.  Theory of knowledge was a rather small part of the picture.

Perhaps more important, theory of knowledge--and contemporary Anglophone philosophy--was also a rather small part of the target in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (did Mr. Romano actually read the book, one wonders?). As Jaegwon Kim correctly pointed out in an illuminating 1980 essay, the argument of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is directed against three very general doctrines, none of which are peculiar to (or even distinctive of) English-speaking philosophy in the 20th-century.  Kim identified them (again, correctly) as:

(1)  The Platonic doctrine concerning truth and knowledge, according to which truth is correspondence with nature, and knowledge is a matter of possessing accurate representations.

(2)  The Cartesian doctrine of the mind as the private inner stage, "the Inner Mirror," in which cognitive action takes place.  The Platonic doctrine of knowledge as representation was transformed into the idea of knowledge as inner representation of outer reality.  The Cartesian contribution was to mentalize the Platonic doctrine.

(3)  The conception of Philosophy according to which it is the business of philosophy to investigate the "foundations" of the sciences, the arts, culture and morality, and adjudicate the cognitive claims of these areas.  Philosophy, as epistemology, must set universal standards of rationality and objectivity for all actual and possible claims of knowledge. 

As Kim notes, there are many philosophers who would be identified as "analytic" who reject all of these views; but more importantly, there are plenty of philosophers whom no one would dub "analytic" who embrace one or more of these.  (Kant, Hegel, and Husserl, for example, are far more committed to versions of (3) than, say, Quine or Kim or Jerry Fodor, among recent and contemporary philosophers usually deemed to be "analytic.")  Rorty's attack on these three doctrines, then, was not an attack on the now defunct "analytic" philosophy of the mid-20th-century; it was an attack on the central concerns of philosophy going back to antiquity.  Romano's polemic gives the wholly false impression that Rorty was simply overcoming a "recent" blip in the history of philosophy ("analytic" philosophy) in order to return the discipline to its "traditional" concerns.  In fact, the opposite is the case:  Rorty, like Marx (though for different reasons), would have us give up two thousand years of philosophical inquiry in order to do something else.  He pitched part of that case as being against "analytic" philosophy, though the latter was far more continuous with the philosophical tradition than Rorty's (hard to pin down) alternative. 

Romano, however, has no actual interest in or knowledge of philosophy, even of Rorty's critique of it, so he moves right along:

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, followed quickly by Consequences of Pragmatism (University of Minnesota Press, 1982), signaled Rorty's midlife break with his past as a quasi-scientific philosopher who believed that "philosophy makes progress." As if exiting a phone booth, he'd emerged as a red-white-and-blue Nietzsche, philosophizing with a hammer meant to bring down Western philosophy's 2,500-year-old essentialist, ahistorical tradition of dissecting capitalized abstractions such as "Truth," "Knowledge," and "Meaning." One explanation couldn't fit all cultures, times, and languages, he argued, and 20th-century positivistic philosophy's hope that it could be a handmaiden to science had proved an illusion.

One of the pernicious aspects of Rorty's influence is that he led legions of the undereducated to think that capitalization signals a philosophical thesis.  Notice, in particular, the non-sequitur in Mr. Romano's last sentence:  from skepticism about ahistorical accounts (a skepticism many philosophers, of course, share) to skepticism about positivism.  What in the world does one have to do with the other?  Mr. Romano, of course, has no idea.

Rorty further outraged the analytic philosophical establishment by drawing on the work of its most prestigious senior figures, notably W.V.O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and Donald Davidson, to construct a tale about modern philosophy meant to stop epistemology in its tracks.

"Outraged"?  Many philosophers, including Quine, Sellars, and Davidson, were a bit puzzled as to the use to which Rorty put their work in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, since Rorty drew conclusions that neither Quine nor Sellars nor Davidson necessarily thought followed.  So, for example, Quine would quite agree with Rorty that we need to give up Kim's (3), above:  philosophy is not, contra Kant, "the Queen of the sciences."  For Quine, we might say, "science is the Queen of what is true and knowable," and so philosophy is, at best, the "handmaiden" of the empirical sciences.  What Rorty needed to explain was why that was not the right alternative to (3)--as opposed to Rortian epistemic promiscuity?

As final salt in the wound, Rorty, true to his syncretic ambitions, suggested that such still-controversial figures in modern philosophy as Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, the latter notorious as the opaque German philosopher analysts loved to hate, might possess philosophical wisdom they needed to hear.

Wittgenstein is, of course, part of the philosophical canon throughout the Anglophone world, even if opinion is divided about the import and sometimes the meaning of his ideas.  Heidegger is viewed with much greater skepticism in Anglophone philosophy, though to the extent that is less true now, it is not because of Rorty, but because of those (like Hubert Dreyfus, John Haugeland, Robert Brandom, William Blattner, and John Richardson) who wrote philosophically about his work.

Rorty's new views started off unconventional, and grew more so over the 1980s and 90s. He insisted that the theory of knowledge as mirrorlike representation of the world in language had imploded from within; that scientific method in philosophy amounted to a myth; that we should see philosophy and science as forms of literature; that one could avoid realism without adopting relativism; that philosophy might best be understood as conversation, not a tribunal for judging other types of knowledge.

Several of these ideas were, of course, present (indeed, most systematically developed) in Rorty's work of the 1970s, suggesting, yet again, that Mr. Romano may not really have read the work of the philosopher he purports to be celebrating.  And, of course, in real philosophy (as opposed to Mr. Romano's voyeurism), the question is what can be said on behalf of these ideas.  Can one "avoid realism without adopting relativism"?  That is a topic of great interest to many philosophers, and it is not clear that Rorty had an interesting contribution to make to this question.  But to know that, one would have to actually know something about philosophy.

As a result, his slow distancing from professional philosophers began. He left the Princeton philosophy department in 1982 for a broader humanities professorship at the University of Virginia, then headed to the Stanford comparative-literature department in 1998 for his final years.

But the discipline's attempted marginalization of him didn't work, or, at be