Philosopher Kieran Setiya wrote a fairly critical review of Philip Kitcher's recent book, What's the Use of Philosophy. A few excerpts:
What Kitcher finds in philosophy today is arid technicality, produced for an audience of insiders. He complains about the fetish for clarity and the needless use of formalism; he objects to a methodology that splices intuitions about fanciful cases with assertions of a priori knowledge (‘sprinkling fairy dust’); he accuses philosophers of not knowing enough about the sciences that pertain to their work and of failing to question whether their projects are worthwhile. What he wants is a philosophy of use to scientists, or which can be applied to social problems. He also wants new synthetic visions, ways of seeing the world that bring together different disciplines with an eye to human flourishing.
Scientists are useful people, but there is more to philosophy than being useful to science or solving "social problems," although I do think philosophy could do a lot more of the former, and has done almost none of the latter. Genuine philosophers are legislators of value, as one 19th-century German observed (Kant and Hegel were not genuine philosophers on this view, merely "philosophical laborers" who "pressed into formulas" existing values: see Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 211). Perhaps that latter conception of philosophy falls under Kitcher's idea of producing "ways of seeing the world...with an eye to human flourishing." Setiya continues:
Kitcher pleads for a ‘reconstruction in philosophy.'
That's a Deweyan phrase (a title of a 1920 book of his), and Kitcher was the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University for many years before his retirement. His is one of the few cases of a philosopher (who, as Setiya notes, spent 20+ years making major, technical contributions to philosophy of science, biology and mathematics) whose views appear to have evolved in the direction of the namesake of his chair! Setiya continues:
But is his representation accurate? Doubts creep in as early as the second page of the preface: ‘Once,’ he claims, ‘philosophers were avidly read by excited members of the public.’ He doesn’t tell us when, but it can’t have been when Socrates, who wrote nothing, was prosecuted for impiety, or when Spinoza was excommunicated, or when David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature ‘fell dead-born from the press’. Kitcher’s ‘growing conviction that contemporary Anglophone philosophy has lost its audience’ suggests that he is thinking instead of the recent past. ‘Indeed, as I look back to the 1970s and early 1980s,’ he writes, ‘it seems to me that the divergence of “core philosophy” from issues of broader concern was less pronounced. Professional Anglophone philosophy then was closer to other academic disciplines. It was easier to love.’ That isn’t the way things looked to attentive outsiders. At a time when the other humanities were being transformed by feminism and postcolonial studies, philosophy was by and large an isolated, inward-looking discipline. Kitcher seems to be conjuring a time that never was.
This criticism seems to me mostly right, with one significant caveat: there was a lot of philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s that was read by linguists, psychologists, and even sometimes biologists (including Kitcher himself!). That does seem to be less true now. Dewey, of course, was very much a "public" philosopher, but whether he was a good one is another question: like Rorty, he seems to me to have mostly been a fairly predictable bourgeois liberal. Setiya continues:
Maybe that doesn’t matter if he is right about the present. It’s true that academic philosophy is in a state of some confusion. One would struggle to say what unifies the array of topics and methodologies that philosophers explore. This isn’t regrettable in itself: philosophy is the refuge of questions that we don’t know how to answer, and eclecticism is an apt response.
Maybe, or maybe "eclecticism" simply confirms Kitcher's diagnosis about the disarray and trivia of the discipline? Setiya continues:
In my own department at MIT, PhD theses have recently been submitted on sexual consent, values in science, the ethics of killing, the nature of language and the metaphysics of events. The methodology might be feminist, interdisciplinary, a priori, a combination of all three or something else altogether. The most recent dissertation in epistemology, a subfield for which MIT is well known, was a formal model of uncertainty about evidence, using tools from probability theory.
This sample provides a fair picture of what philosophers are up to these days. It is necessarily partial, since it omits the history of philosophy, which gives increased attention to neglected figures.
That's a remarkable understatement. MIT is surely the most narrow "top ten" department that is also excellent in the "core" areas of contemporary analytic philosophy that are Kitcher's target. Setiya allows:
There is some evidence of the ‘pathologies’ Kitcher cites: needless technicality, neglect of the sciences, the inertia of degenerating research programmes. But this is just to say that the pursuit of philosophy, like every discipline, is imperfect. Kitcher’s diagnosis is more pointed: he believes the pathologies have a common source: ‘Philosophy’s central task is seen as one of providing analyses of concepts, analyses exact enough to make the concept completely clear.’ Conceptual analysts try to explicate a concept – ‘knowledge’, ‘reason’, ‘person’ – in a way that settles its application in every possible case. Since this project is both useless and hopeless, Kitcher concludes that the work of most philosophers is too.
If Kitcher were right, we would have to either pull the plug on philosophy or administer CPR. But his account of the discipline is anachronistic. Conceptual analysis may have been central to analytic philosophy in the mid-20th century, and there are doubtless still a few diehards. But, at least since Kripke, most philosophers have turned away from the analysis of concepts and towards the metaphysical investigation of things themselves: their subject isn’t words or what they mean, but the world they represent. Contemporary philosophers of mind, for instance, investigate the nature of consciousness and its relation to physics, not the meaning of the word ‘conscious’. Conceptual distinctions help to clarify their questions, but don’t answer them; to make distinctions is not, in any case, to aim for perfect clarity.
Philosophers may present themselves as interested not in "concepts" but "the world," but their method is still heavily reliant on the same devices of their predecessors: armchair appeals to intuitions. Or as philosopher Daniel Drucker at UT Austin put a related point on Twitter: "Huge, huge amounts of philosophy still involve investigating what various claims amount to, etc. And it's not all explication; counterexamples are taken seriously as though the notions being clarified are ordinary." Setiya, in any case, concludes with his most provocative claim:
My principal objection to Kitcher’s critique, though, isn’t that he is wrong about the history or sociology of the discipline, but that there is something philistine in his demand that philosophy always answer to practical needs. Kitcher is inspired here by the pragmatist John Dewey, whom he calls ‘the most important philosopher of the 20th century’. (I suspect that Kitcher’s nostalgia for philosophers as public intellectuals is largely for Dewey himself, a singular figure in the history of American philosophy.) Dewey ‘claimed that intellectual work should conform to a social division of labour, in which the inquiries conducted should serve others outside the tiny coterie of those who undertake them’. To the charge of philistinism, Dewey and Kitcher would reply that philosophy, for them, involves more than applied ethics and contributions to active science, valuable as those are. They want a synthetic philosophy that provides ‘world-formulas’ – questions, concepts, analogies, ideals – that help us take a wider view of human life.
What they don’t want is philosophy without practical worth, the philosophical equivalent of pure science. Kitcher begins his book with an allegory in which musicians begin to concentrate on technical proficiency for its own sake: ‘Compared to the recent competition in which one pianist had delivered Multi-Scale 937 in under 7’10” and another had ornamented Quadruple Tremolo 41 with an extra trill,’ they reassure themselves, ‘an applauded performance of the Hammerklavier was truly small potatoes.’ What Kitcher takes to be the relevance of this ‘sorry tale’ to the current state of philosophy is clear enough. Yet it seems to me that the value of music doesn’t lie in its power to satisfy non-musical needs: it is valuable in itself. And the same is true of pure philosophy. It satisfies a need, but that need is philosophical and issues from a curiosity about fundamental questions that the natural and social sciences cannot answer. Pure philosophy isn’t for everyone, but neither is Philip Glass, and some will be intrigued by the titles Multi-Scale 937 and Quadruple Tremolo 41 – compositions I would love to hear. It’s a mistake to demand that music be of use to those who are indifferent to it.
Enter philosopher of biology Michael Ruse, who invited me to share the letter he sent to the editor of LRB:
Kiera Setiya’s review of Philip Kitcher’s What’s the Use of Philosophy? – asking academic philosophers to lighten up a bit -- complains that there is “something philistine in his demand that philosophy always answer to practical needs.” One wonders where this reviewer has been for the past fifty years. Academic philosophy has become ever-more technical, inwardly turned, speaking only to a small group of like-minded specialists. Someone like John Stuart Mill, who wrote openly for a more general public, would have trouble today getting tenure.
Which fact gives the clue to the reason why philosophy in the past decades has gone the way it has. Too many people chasing too few tenured jobs. A new entrant simply dare not write for a more popular audience. The chair of the philosophy department of a major university had an ordered list of the “top journals” pinned to his door. Woe betides the young tenure-track professor who ignored this. As the author, says he proudly, of an article on science and religion in Playboy, I know what I would not be doing next year. The fatal words would have been spoken: NOT REAL PHILOSOPHY.
Thank goodness established, respected, senior philosophers like Philip Kitcher are taking note of this and trying to steer us into more fruitful channels. The review of his book in the LRB shows that they have their work cut out.
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