My introduction to the blogosphere came as a result of my May 5th posting to the Update Service, commenting on the tiresome fact that the media continue to portray Leo Strauss and his acolytes as though they're serious thinkers, when, as philosophers know, they're just the right-wing versions of Judith Butler: intellectual poseurs and frauds, purveyors of shoddy scholarship and arguments (when there are arguments at all). (There's an interesting question why, with the exception of places like Princeton and a couple of others, U.S. Political Science departments should have become the repository for so much bad philosophy? But that's a subject for a different day.)
Thanks to attentive readers, I was soon alerted to my vilification in the blogosphere for dissing the master. I discovered, for example, that members of the Strauss cult have their own on-line group therapy blogs (such as here), where they can reaffirm all their prejudices and reassure each other that they're really OK.
I commented on this phenomenon previously, where I took the opportunity to reply to one juvenile blogger, whose whole site illustrates the dangers of the blog medium ("the less they know, the less they know it").
Straussians, alas, are a bit testier than the usual victims of my pugnacious polemics. They also appear to be much creepier, as this charming bit of correspondence from Robert Light, a recent graduate of Middlebury College, illustrates.
Mr. Light writes to me as follows:
Dear Professor Leiter,
Just thought I'd apprise you of some thoughts by one Alexander Gorelik.
And, since you've demonstrated such a distinct preference for "arguing from authority" -- at least as it suits you and your petty "project," especially regarding the "status" of, say, Leo Strauss's thought -- Mr. Gorelik is a graduate of the University of Chicago (BA -- where he also took his MBA).
(Of course this latter point counts for very little -- only it might give his remarks at least a veneer of "respectability" for little pricks such as yourself).
Hugs and kisses,
Robert Light
[Gorelik comments:]
I've always found Leiter an rather appalling personage. His lists of the "best" graduate schools for doctoral work in philosophy have always reminded me of those books which tell you which business school or law school to apply to. Which is, in fact, how Leiter views philosophy (and it is evidenced in how he criticizes Strauss).
For Leiter, being a philosopher is a matter of following the right forms - you attend the right undergraduate school (he has a list of the ones to go to), impress your professors sufficiently (by essentially writing the truly awful nonsense that passes for academic philosophy) and then attend the right doctoral program (of which he has innumerable lists of). If you're getting the impression that this is a bit like the old "Groton-Harvard-Harvard Law" men Louis Auchincloss writes about, it's not coincedental.
Obviously, to be a lawyer, you actually have to be employed as one. There's no doubt that a St. Paul's/Yale/Harvard Law partner at Cra vath is very likely a damn fine lawyer. Unfortunately for Leiter, he thinks philosophy is the same thing. Of course, the problem is that very few of the great philosophers were solely academic philosophy professors (Kant is the one who sticks out).
Let's not nitpick and point out that Leiter himself is not really a philosophy professor himself, but teaches at the Law School at UT Austin. Leiter, under his own definition, is no more a philosopher than Strauss - and certainly less than Stan Rosen, who actually did occupy an actual philosophy chair. Or Benardete, for that matter, who actually did occupy a chair of classics.
This is where all this Burnyeat worship comes from. As others here have pointed out, Leiter simply takes as revealed truth that because Burnyeat disputes Strauss' interpretations, that Burnyeat is right. Just as our definition of what a true lawyer is would be defined by what we observe the partner at Cravath do, Leiter applies the same to philosophers: whatever pro fessors of philosophy do at Cambridge or Harvard, is simply philosophy. There is no debate because Leiter defines philosophy as a career or function exactly the same as law or business - again, why he spends so much time on these inane lists (just as the WSJ or Barrons spend so much time on which business schools are best).
I'm not going to take apart Burnyeat's criticism of Strauss. Suffice it to say that Leiter would have you believe that Burnyeat's writing about Strauss is some deep, infinitely scholarly thinking. It's not. Burnyeat's criticism of Strauss is only somewhat less shallow than Leiter's own.
Besides the fact that Burnyeat is a boring writer, and not particularly original (but then, who wants to be original when you can go to all the right schools instead?), he's just another one of the whole Vlastos, Nehamas, Terry Irwin, Santas and Kraut gang. They're certainly not bad scholars, but they're not particularly great either.
[end of Gorelik comments]
====================================
It is dismaying, of course, not to be loved by young MBAs from the University of Chicago, and I wouldn’t want to nitpick about facts either (like where I’m actually appointed and so on). But it does seem to me that, as sociological artifacts, there are some interesting things to be learned from the comments of Mr. Light and Mr. Gorelick.
First, there is the question about “arguments from authority.” I had pointed out that Straussians (like postmodernists) are never appointed in good philosophy departments, and I offered this as one kind of evidence that Straussians are mediocre philosophers. This is an argument from authority, but it is none the worse for that. We recognize, in all domains, the need for divisions of epistemic labor—let the philosophers figure out who the good philosophers are, let the chemists figure out who the good chemists are, etc.—and it is hard to see how an argument based on appeal to an epistemic authority is objectionable. (It would be impossible for anyone to learn, say, physics or biology without a division of epistemic labor and without extensive reliance on arguments from authority.)
The real objection, as soon becomes apparent, is to the claim of “authority” and not the fact of arguing from authority. The Straussians do not believe that philosophy departments as presently constituted are, in fact, epistemic authorities. No surprise, there, of course. Gorelik thinks that I think that “whatever professors of philosophy do at Cambridge or Harvard is simply philosophy.” (Students of the Heckling campaign will appreciate the irony here!) This is tricky, since I’m not sure most of what Stanley Cavell (emeritus, Harvard) does is philosophy—or, in any case, maybe it’s just bad, pretentious philosophy—but my idiosyncratic likes and dislikes don’t matter. Defining philosophy is always tricky, but surely we can all agree that any conception of philosophy which excluded Plato or Aristotle or Descartes or Hume or Kant or Hegel or Husserl would be suspect. And if we take those individuals as paradigm instances of philosophers, then the reason why what philosophy professors do at Harvard and Cambridge (and Oxford and Pittsburgh and Rutgers and Yale and Texas and on and on) “is philosophy” is because it turns out to be most like what the paradigmatic figures do.
Second, there is the rather odd agitation about the fact—it is a fact, by the way—that philosophy is now a “career.” Students earn a degree, many get a lifetime job teaching and writing about philosophy, and they get a salary, health care, pension, etc., for doing so. That sounds like a career to me. The PGR helps students maximize their chance for a good one. I guess I’m just a softy, but I feel like it’s a good thing to give students a lot of information to help them make a sound decision about where to go for five to ten years of additional schooling.
Gorelik is especially agitated though because “very few of the great philosophers were solely academic philosophy professors (Kant is the one who sticks out).” Well, not just Kant: also Hegel, and Russell for much of his career, and Wittgenstein for much of his, and Carnap, and Rawls, and Quine. (Yes, yes, I know Straussians don’t think Carnap, Quine et al. are “great philosophers”: after all, they’re hard, and you have to think carefully, maybe even know a little formal logic, in order to read them.)
What is quite absurd, though, about the Gorelik complaint is that most philosophers could not have possibly been “academic philosophy professors” because academic philosophy professors didn’t exist much before the 18th-century! Indeed, if you allow for the fact that the modern academy is a 19th-century German invention, and that “schooling” in philosophy took place in rather different settings for much of history, then there is an important sense in which, e.g., Plato was indeed an “academic philosophy professor” in the only sense in which you could be one in Athens at the time. (And Straussians worship Plato, even if they don’t understand him too well.)
Third, there is the amazing, and not atypical I fear, hostility to contemporary philosophy. “Academic philosophy” is denounced for being “truly awful nonsense.” “Burnyeat’s criticism of Strauss is only somewhat less shallow” than mine (Professor Burnyeat must be greatly relieved to be pronounced a bit deeper than me)—but (Burnyeat isn’t out of the woods yet!) he is still “a boring writer, and not particularly original.” Indeed, it gets worse: Burnyeat is “just another one of the whole Vlastos, Nehamas, Terry Irwin, Santas and Kraut gang. They’re certainly not bad scholars, but they’re not particularly great either.” [Hey, why not pick on Owen’s students too, the Annas-Cooper-White gang!]
Well, I shall not be inviting Mr. Gorelik to fill out the reputational surveys for the PGR any time soon (unless, of course, an Advisory Board member nominates him). Philosophers do need to worry, though, that their field inspires this kind of mindless hostility. Philosophy, I fear, has one perhaps insurmountable problem in terms of its public relations: it’s hard, and you have to be reasonably smart and reasonably patient to “get it.” Most people—even most people with humanities PhDs, not to mention MBAs—aren’t especially smart and aren’t very patient. One result: the missives from Messrs. Light and Gorelik, above.
I’m presently finishing up an edited volume on The Future for Philosophy (OUP, forthcoming fall 2004), and in the introduction I address an aspect of this problem (with the help of a splendid remark by Timothy Williamson). I note that today’s philosophers,
“take up precisely the kinds of questions that have occupied the major historical figures, in many cases back to antiquity: the objectivity of moral judgment; the nature of reality; the relationship between mind and body; the character of the just society and the good life; and so on. It is true, to be sure, that philosophy is now a ‘profession’—just like psychology, linguistics, sociology, physics, and mathematics—and it is also true that the discipline is often technical and unintelligible to the lay person. But only a complete ignorance of the history of philosophy could lead anyone to think that this supports a special complaint about contemporary philosophy: Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, among many other ‘greats,’ are also technical and obscure to the lay person. Yet no one, other than teenagers and anti-intellectuals, considers this an objection to their philosophy. As Timothy Williamson trenchantly puts it in his contribution: ‘Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans.’”
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