New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Ray Brassier on Sellars (hat tip Leon Niemoczynski)

In the discussion yesterday either of this post or this one, I noted that no less than three sessions at SPEP that I went to last year involved non-trivial discussion of Sellars and McDowell.  I also linked to this cool talk about Sellars by Ray Brassier.  

Ray Brassier - Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism from The Matter of Contradiction on Vimeo.

I should have noted that Graham Priest, David Lewis, Bertrand Russell, and Kurt Goedel were discussed in other sessions that I attended.

Though the topic yesterday was Zabala's penchant for making weird essentialist claims about analytic philosophy, one should realize that what he's doing is just the flip side of making weird essentialist claims about continental philosophy. If Zabala's dismissal of analytic philosophy were widely held by continental philosophers, then Brian Leiter's incessant polemic about "SPEP style continental philosophy" would have at least some point other than justifying the selection of rankers for the PGR.*

Speculations IV is. . .

HERE (and HERE in PDF)!

Really exciting things are going on in continental metaphysics. Consider the lineup in this issue: Lee Braver, Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, Eileen A. Joy, Adam Kotsko, Christopher Norris, Jon Roffe, Daniel Sacileto, (fellow newappser) Jeffery A. Bell, Manuel Delanda, Markus Gabriel, Peter Gratton, Adrian Johnston, Paul Livingston, John Mullarky, and Dylan Trigg. 

I saw Adrian Johnston present his eleven theses at Notre Dame a few weeks ago, and the two hour presentation/discussion felt like it went by in fifteen minutes. I"ll be enthusiastically reading and teaching his work for years to come. Here he is at right on Lacan and John McDowell. It's dynamite stuff. 

Policing meaning and eavesdropping on being...

Note: technical problems resulted in this duplication, but as Eric's additions are in fact very funny, we'll leave both versions up.

[Posting on behalf of Protevi; the title of this post is Schliesser's--ES.]

Deleuze gives a technical sense of "stupid" (bête) in Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition: the inability to distinguish the ordinary and trivial from the singular and important. But that's not the only sense of stupid this column displays: the everyday sense of "not very smart" also works. 

Beyond the absurdly anachronistic attempted reduction of AP ['AP' = Analytical Philosophy--ES] to language analysis -- thus missing the singular moment of the revival of analytic metaphysics -- there is this head scratcher:

"In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant posited ideas such as "categories of the mind" and "transcendental apperception" that were themselves beyond philosophical interrogation..."

To use some netspeak: Rlly? Srsly? WTF? 

Read for yourself, there's plenty more like that. 

Let me just take this occasion to formally disavow any alignment with these jokers [not to be confused with the supervillian in the Batman series--] and to say that this proud CP person ['CP' = Continental Philosophy] does not take them to be representative of any movement to which I belong.

Or to return to my beloved snark idiom, to put it in the immortal words of Elaine Benes: "That stuff is weak. I'm not buying it and you shouldn't be selling it."

The two senses of "stupid"

Deleuze gives a technical sense of "stupid" (bête) in Chapter 3 of Difference and Repetition: the inability to distinguish the ordinary and trivial from the singular and important. But that's not the only sense of stupid this column displays: the everyday sense of "not very smart" also works.

Beyond the absurdly anachronistic attempted reduction of AP to language analysis -- thus missing the singular moment of the revival of analytic metaphysics -- there is this head scratcher:

"In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant posited ideas such as "categories of the mind" and "transcendental apperception" that were themselves beyond philosophical interrogation..."

To use some netspeak: Rlly? Srsly? WTF?

Read for yourself, there's plenty more like that.

Let me be serious for a minute -- though actually I'm always serious when I snark -- I just want to take this occasion to formally disavow any alignment with these jokers and to say that this proud CP person does not take them to be representative of any movement to which I belong.

Now to return to my beloved snark idiom, to put it in the immortal words of Elaine Benes: "That stuff is weak. I'm not buying it and you shouldn't be selling it."

Update: A senior philosopher elsewhere writes in to say that Eric's suggested title is much funnier: "Policing meaning and eavesdropping on being"

Weekly Philo Economics: metaphysical indeterminacy and the road not taken by Analytic Philosophy (and Political Economy)

"I believe that [W.E.] Johnson, like McTaggart and Aristotle, deserves commentators." A.N. Prior (1949) MIND.

"Mesmerized by Homo economicus, who acts solely on egoism, economists shy away from altruism almost comically. Caught in a shameful act of heroism, they aver: "Shucks, it was only enlightened self interest." Sometimes it is. At other times it may be only rationalization (spurious for card-carrying atheists): "If I rescue somebody's son, someone will rescue mine.

I will not waste ink on face-saving tautologies. When the governess of infants caught in a burning building reenters it unobserved in a hopeless mission of rescue, casuists may argue; "She did it only to get the good feeling of doing it. Because other-wise she wouldn't have done it." Such argumentation (in Wolfgang Pauli's scathing phrase) is not even wrong. It is just boring, irrelevant, and in the technical sense of old-fashioned logical positivism "meaning-less." You do not understand the logic and history of consumer demand theory — Pareto, W. E. Johnson, Slutsky, Allen-Hicks, Hotelling, Samuelson, Houthakker,... — if you think that is its content."--P. Samuelson (1993), The American Economic Review.

There is a school of thought that locates the origins of analytical philosophy in the Cambridge of the philosopher-economist, Sidgwick and his students. After all, in Sidgwick's writings we find all the analytical virtues, and it is, thus, no surprise that Rawls and Parfit treat him as our vital interlocuter. Those (that is, the circle around Sidwick) recognized in Boole's work -- to quote W.E. Johnson -- "the first great revolution in the study of formal logic...comparable in importance with that of the algebraical symbolists in the sixteenth century." (2.6, p. 136) While it is not the story I tend to tell (say, here and here), I like this approach because it reminds us of the non-trivial overlap between logicians and economists so distinctive of Cambridge between 1870-1940, and thus, puts Keynes (father and son) and Ramsey back into the origin of analytical philosophy.

Now, the logician-economist, W.E. Johnson (1858 – 1931), is a test-case for this school of thought.  (Recall the significance of Johnson to of our very own Mohan [and here].) For, while Johnson does not belong to the British Idealists, he does not figure in the stories we tell about our origins at all (selective evidence: Landini's Russell nor Candlish's The Russel/Bradley Dispute do not even mention Johnson). Even Wikipidia claims that his "Logic was dated at the time of its publication, and Johnson can be seen as a member of the British logic "old guard" pushed aside" by Russell and Whitehead. Wikipedia fits our narrative of progress; yet what to make of Prior's judgment? 

Wittgenstein's neglect

This refreshingly honest cfp caught my attention: "Wittgenstein research has come to maintain a position disconnected from philosophical research generally, and often seems neglected both by analytic and continental philosophy." Let's stipulate that the conference hosts are right about this claim (outside, say, Harvard, Pittsburgh, and Chicago). The conference hosts immediately offer a hypothesis for this neglect: "The first is to identify the unique character, that is, the distinctive method and style of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which has struck so many as highly revolutionary, yet which also appears to be one of the main reasons for its recalcitrance to being employed in contemporary philosophy." Now, the question of what consists of a philosophical "style" is not an easy one, but Wittgenstein's "style and method" has a family resemblance to the ones deployed by, say, Nietzsche and Spinoza and these authors are increasingly not neglected by 'analytic and continental' philosophy.  So, let me offer three alternative hypotheses:

1. Wittgenstein's quietist aims are intrinsically unappealing, and (more contingently) they do not fare well in professional philosophy, which  (to echo Heidegger) thrives on productivity and the invention of novelty.

Tristan Garcia's First English Language Philosophy Essay

Pretty cool articles from the most recent issue of Parrhesia. See Garcia's Crossing Ways of Thinking: On Graham Harman's System and My Own, and also Harman's response - Tristan Garcia and the Thing in Itself. 

Joe Bob says to check it out.

Translating French Realism conference schedule up

Full schedule HERE (conference web page HERE). Man, I'm going to learn a lot at this conference.

To the extent that American and British metaphysics is historically informed it tends just to be because of the labors of a few crossover medievalists and a general awareness of the agonies of logical positivism. It's just so exciting to see the emergence in Europe a new generation of metaphysicians aware of the agonies of phenomenology as well as the other essential aspects of our post-Kantian inheritance.

I'd love to see an era where Anglo metaphysicians as a rule also live in the space opened up when one takes seriously the period from Kant to Hegel, 19th century anti-metaphysics, the (related) rise and fall of phenomenology (and the Spiders from Mars), as well as the great French philosophers of the 60s and their philosophical offspring.

Given the quality of work being done at places like the University of New Mexico (especially when combined with the limitations of post-Quinean analytical metaphysics), I think that this kind of metaphysical ecumenicalism really could happen in our lifetime. 

thoughts on the "scumbag analytic philosopher" meme generator?

Meme generator HERE.

I honestly can't tell how funny most of these are. I think in general it's hard when you are the target of something to be a good judge in this manner. Some (e.g. "Point unclear? Better change some words to italic." as well as the one about using "she" but citing no women) do strike me as hilarious, but many are too unfair and misleading.

Nonetheless, I'm impressed that one (or people) this knowledgeable of analytic philosophy can hate it so much. I mean with most paradigm type issues understanding usually breeds respect.

I think I'd appreciate it more if the meme was academic philosophy instead of "analytic philosophy," and if the dehumanizing "scumbag" wasn't used, but perhaps that is just me being defensive. I don't know. Any thoughts? Which ones work and which ones don't? Why and why not?

Lost in translation

 Peter Gordon’s excellent book (Continental Divide) on the 1929 Davos encounter between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger is an insightful and historically informed account of the complex interplay of issues that were brought to the table. The central hinge or fold of Gordon’s book is the full translation of and commentary to the encounter itself, the Arbeitsgemeinschaft, which was transcribed by students of both Cassirer and Heidegger (Otto Bollnow for Heidegger, and Joachim Ritter for Cassirer). A central fold of the encounter itself occurs, I would argue, when the Dutch linguist Hendrik J. Pos intervenes into the discussion and suggests that what separates Cassirer from Heidegger is that, as Pos puts it, “Both men speak a completely different language,” and moreover there are several terms in each of these distinct languages that he doubts can be translated into the other’s language. For Heidegger, he nominates the terms “Dasein, Being, the ontic,” and for Cassirer “the functional in spirit and the transformation of primordial space into one another.” (CD 189)

Heidegger’s response to Pos’s claims brings to light a number of interesting points about the nature of philosophical problems and the role of philosophical discussions and disputations in addressing such problems. I’ll just highlight some of the implications of these points as they relate to the analytic-continental divide (working off some of the nice points made in Jon's post).

Weekly Philo of Economics: Of Picturing Something that we Cannot See (I) [Milton Friedman, Alfred Marshall, and Khan]

Random variables and elementary particles have neither values nor intentions; they may constitute a system but surely do not make a society.--An Economic Theorist (2004).

Whenever we get a glipse of economic man he is not selfish. On the contrary he is generally hard at work saving capital chiefly for the benefit of others. (Marshall 1885: 28)

Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz gave A Monetary History of the Unites States an epigraph from Alfred Marshall. Friedman's engagement with Marshall was not superficial; his one serious contribution to the history of economic theory was on the Marshallian Demand Curve (1949). Friedman's famous (1953) methodology essay, "The Methodology of Positive Economics," is sprinkled with references to and quotes from Marshall. One role for Marshall in Friedman's hands was against the 'Walrasian' general equilibrium analysis associated now with names such as Arrow, Debreu, and McKenzie, among others. 

One such a name, Frank Hahn, once remarked (1984) in print:

Some friends [of economic theory] in what might be called roughly, and a bit unfairly, 'Chicago' economics -- have taken the theory in practical applications a good deal more seriously than at present there is any justification for doing. Paradoxically, they are rather hostile to its abstract foundations, yet are happy to put a great deal of weight on them. (75)

The "paradox" of [A] friendship to economic theory when applied accompanied with hostility to its "abstract foundation," is said  to be the "primary interest" of MA Khan's essay (2004) "Self-Interest, Self-Deception and the Ethics of Commerce." (I would give it the subtitle: "a Wittgensteinian reading of Four "False Prophets" of Cambridge Economics.") Of course, the mathematical economists, Hahn and Kahn, know that there is no formal paradox in [A]--as long as the abstract foundations (associated by Friedman with Walras) are treated as dispensable in practice. Khan also owns up to a form of [B] "self-interest," that is, [B*] "the ethics of commerce," one that somehow requires Khan [C] to "understand" himself, that is, to be philosophical. (I write "that is, to be philosophical" not because of the occurrence of the word "ethics," but rather in recognition that within theoretical economics there is no place for self-understanding, while we philosophers still pay lip-service to Socratic wisdom.) Initially, Khan leaves the relationship between [A]-[C] ambiguous; his way of self-examination passes through Marshall's (1885) Inaugural Lecture The Present Position of Economics.

very rough draft of (long form version) paper developing an object-oriented hermeneutics

A severely truncated version of THIS PAPER by Mark Ohm and me will be presented in a few days at the Subverting the Norm II postmodern theology conference.

What was supposed to be a two-page introduction ballooned into the first twenty pages. For the final version we'll have to take most of that out, but it was worth working through, and I think worth reading for anyone interested in the hoopla surrounding speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, and the recent explosion of continental metaphysics generally.

The general upshot of the paper is also nice; building on work by me and Mark Silcox, Ohm and I further develop an account of what the actual truth of fictional texts amounts to. The key insight is that narrative texts are thought experiments in the same manner as natural science thought experiments. On our account the only difference between physics and fiction is that the discursive norms surrounding the texts treat the form-content distinction in characteristically different ways. Fun stuff.

An appreciative Remark on Derrida

Thus in order to be an original, he is obliged to contribute to the ruin of a language, which a century sooner he would have helped to improve. Though such writers may be criticised, their superior abilities must still command success. The ease there is in copying their defects, soon persuades men of indifferent capacities, that they shall acquire the same degree of reputation. Then begins the reign of subtil and strained conceits, of affected antitheses, of specious paradoxes, of frivolous turns, of far-fetched expressions, of new-fangled words, and in short of the jargon of persons whose understandings have been debauched by bad metaphysics. The public applauds: frivolous and ridiculous writings, the beings of the day, are surprisingly multiplied." --Condillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 

In Condillac the "frivolous" is that "which seems worthless" (Commerce and Government. {Condillac is one of the great eighteenth century economists.})

Let's grant his enemies that Derrida's writings and social consequences instantiate such a reign of "subtil and strained conceits, of affected antitheses, of specious paradoxes, of frivolous turns, of far-fetched expressions, of new-fangled words, and in short of the jargon." According to Condillac, "bad metaphysics" is a science that enters into the "nature and causes" of things. (2) We can make the analogy work if we allow that Derrida's followers are the product  of a scientific age (or Husserlian phenomenology). Yet, the passage from Condillac would also exonerate Derrida in a certain sense; he would be the product of a historical circumstance--he would be born too late to contribute to the improvement of his language.

Sider's "Knee-Jerk Realism"

Imagine that a philosophically and psycho-analytically literate, Martian philosophical score-keeper descends down to earth and after being told that Theodore Sider is one of our most important contemporary metaphysicians, encounters this confession, which takes up most of section 2.5 "against subjectivity," in Writing the Book of the World:

But this is autobiography not argument. The argument here, such as it is, is that any subjectivity in the notion of structure would infect all the domains in which structure is applied. If structure is just a reflection of our language (or whatever) then so are the facts about similarity, intrinsicicality, laws of nature, the intrinsic structure of space and time...And this is incredible.

At its last step the argument again reverts to autobiography. Certain philosophers will rightly remain unconvinced, for example "antirealists" of various stripes--pragmatists, Kantians, logical positivists, and so on.

A certain "knee-jerk realism" is an unargued for presupposition of this book. Knee-jerk realism is a vague picture rather than a precise thesis. According to the picture, the point of human inquiry--or a very large chunk of it anyway, a chunk that includes physics--is to conform itself to the world, rather than to make the world. The world is "out there", and our job is to wrap our minds around it. This picture is perhaps my deepest philosophical conviction. I've never questioned it; giving it up would require a reboot too extreme to contemplate; and I have no idea how I'd try to convince somebody who didn't share it. (Sider (2011), 18; emphases in original.)

I bet such a Martian would note that if you have never tried to question your own fundamental convictions,  you most feel very anxious about the status of your convictions.  Moreover, she would add that one way to convince another is to engage their arguments and positions; maybe rational persuasion is too much to be wished for among Terrestrials, but the other may feel 'heard' and, thus, secure enough to re-evaluate their own stance. Finally, she would note the religious language here (e.g., convictions, conforming, unquestioning, etc.).

Historians of Philosophy serve the undergraduates

'The history of philosophy as practiced by professional philosophers [hereafter HOPPP] is a service to the rest of the profession; HOPPP's scholarly output is primarily geared to facilitate (undergraduate) teaching.' This suspicion [hereafter HOPPPS2P] had lodged in my mind when a few years ago I started to reflect on (a) the extremely low citation rates for journal articles in HOPPP, which suggests that there are no genuine controversies nor classic papers that ground future research; (b) the lack of concern about the proliferation of Handbooks and Companions that are effectively slowing down research in HOPPP; (c) the extreme difficulty of getting a position in HOPPP if one is not working on a canonical figure. (There are, of course, extreme regional differences on (c); in some places there are no positions for HOPPPers; in other places so-called 'systematic' and 'practical' philosophers do not even regard HOPPP as philosophy, but let it exist out of institutional inertia, benign neglect, etc.) But I wondered if I could ground ground HOPPPS2P in hard data.

Luckily, Michael Beaney, the thoughtful editor of British Journal for the History of Philosophy (BJHP), wrote a review of the last 20 years of the BJHP, with some recommendations for the future. Now BJHP is a young journal, but it has become one of the top venues in the sub-field. (In Europe it certainly also helps that it is listed in Thompson's Web of Knowledge/Science index so that publication can count in the right metrics.) Beaney and his team compiled data on the contents of the first twenty years.

"What this shows is that almost half the journal has been devoted to the work of just seven philosophers – the ‘big seven’ of early modern philosophy – and that around two-thirds of the journal has been devoted to the work of just sixteen philosophers, with three more early modern philosophers included as well as Plato and Aristotle from the ancient period and four [Hegel, Mill, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche--ES] nineteenth-century philosophers.

On Difficult to read Analytical Philosophers...

As regular readers of this blog know I hold that the claim that 'analytical philosophy is clear' is at best a useful regulative ideal by which we delude ourselves in order to promote group cohesion and at worst a barrier to self-understanding. Of course, most of the time it is neither; we use it to kick down at continentals and litcritters in order to justify our ongoing ignorance of alternative points of view. Now consider the opening lines of this book review:

In the decades following the publication of Intention, readers saw Anscombe's philosophy of action largely through a Davidsonian lens. Davidson's selective reconstruction was more accessible and less Wittgensteinian than the original. It also encouraged the hope of absorbing Anscombe's insights within a comfortable causalism about the mental. This hope could be sustained as long as relatively few philosophers made a serious study of Anscombe's book.

As the present volume shows, those days are over. We now have a critical mass of authors with the scholarly skill and the philosophical acumen to put us in direct contact with Intention.

Anscombe is, of course, a paradigmatic analytical philosopher.  The very idea that one needs "scholarly skill" to read an analytical philosopher simply does not fit our self-conception. Unlike say, Whitehead, who is also notoriously difficult and who has been written out of our tradition and has become assimilated by post-postmodern Continentals to theirs (recal this), Anscombe has not been dismissed (yet). If you want to see how such dismissal works in practice, one can do worse than to start with Davidson's assertion that in Whitehead's class, "Truth, or even serious argument, was irrelevant." (p 14; I thank Stefan Koller for calling my attention to the passage.)

First, we need to note the rhetorical ploy played in this review. There is a contrast between "accessible" and "comfortable" on the one hand, and the "serious study," on the other. It is strongly implied that the Davidsonian reading isn't just mistaken, it just isn't serious (by being selective). Second, without any further evidence it is baldly asserted that in earlier times there was little such "serious study" of Anscombe. Now according to scholar.google Intention has been cited over 2100 times (presumably not all of these subsequent to the volume under review). Anscombe's book has been continuously discused, in fact, by nearly all the leading lights of the tradition. This no serious study before us ploy is as insipid as the Vlastos-move (i.e., until me nobody has understood Plato so we can ignore everybody else). Or the varieties of Spinozism without Spinoza move promoted by French scholars. Such ploys make it impossible to learn from earlier readers.

The Genealogy of Genealogy

We tend to associate the practice of genealogy, especially in its unmasking variety, with Nietzsche (or the emulators of Foucault). But teaching Toland's (1704) Letters to Serena reminded me that genealogy has a genealogy that precedes Nietzsche. One of Toland's genealogies focuses on the idea of the immortality of the soul, (the subject of the second letter). In paragraph 1, of Letter 2, the "immortality of the soul" is treated as a "truth" known to classical sources independent from and preceding Biblical revelation (p. 20; in fact, he insists that the doctrine is unknown to the Hebrew Bible (Letter II, p. 56)). In the very next paragraph (2) on the very next page, Toland speaks in his own voice and offers a concise statement of his methodology:

To persons less knowing and unprejudiced than Serena, it would [be] found strange perhaps to hear me speak of the soul's immortality, as of an opinion, which, like some others in philosophy, had a beginning at a certain time, or from a certain author who was the inventor thereof, and which was favoured or opposed as peoples' persuasion, interest or inclination led them. Letters II.2 (p. 21 [I have modernized spelling to some degree--ES].)

Serena is the official addressee of the Letters; she is a high status, educated interlocutor. The preface to the Letters has, in fact, a resounding defense of intellectual, gender equality. Toland suggests that it is either "inveterate custom" or the "design in the men" that causes female exlusion from the "world of learning." In general, Toland thinks nurture is responsible for much of our (very flawed) "second nature" in women and men. So, while Toland accepts a universal human nature, it is according to him extremely plastic. Echoing Plato and Malebranche, he suggests that belief and character formation starts in the womb and is developed (or degenerated by) our major social institutions (family, church, universities, etc.)--he treats our acculturation as inevitable, but as practiced as a form of social disease (cf. "infection.")

Conceptual genealogy for analytic philosophy

As some readers may recall (but most probably don't), I’ve written a few blog posts on the significance of the history of philosophy for systematic philosophical analysis (here and here, for example). I used the term ‘conceptual archeology’ to refer to the kind of investigation that seeks to unearth the origins and development of philosophical concepts that are central for contemporary philosophers. I also suggested that this exercise is important in that it highlights the contingent and potentially contentious assumptions that led to the establishment of a given philosophical concept, and the dogmas and truisms surrounding it.

Now, NewAPPS’er Jeff Bell is working on a project for a volume on (if I understood it correctly) establishing fruitful dialogues between continental and analytic philosophers. When he invited me to contribute, I figured this could be the occasion I had been waiting for to finally flesh out these ideas of mine in a more systematic way.

Thomas Nagel and the Principle of Sufficient Reason (or, on unprincipled natural teleology)

[Thomas Nagel's Mind & Cosmos has generated a number of very critical reviews, including this blistering one by Leiter/Weisberg, and another, wide-ranging one by Eliott Sober (thanked for his refereeing at OUP by Nagel in the preface to M&C!) as well as gratitude from the creationists (recall Mohan's discussion). Mohan has blogged about some of Nagel's moves before,  but the rather long post -- apologies -- below engages with issues thus far unexplored in these discussions.--ES.]

Analytical philosophy has made great progress over the last century. But its original, necessary biases did some harm, too. In particular, detailed working knowledge of the history of philosophy and metaphysics was banished for several generations. While metaphysics is thriving again, we still lack (despite the brilliance of David Lewis' modular approach) complete systems of thought that can rival in depth and interlocking breadth the past masters (say, Suarez, Leibniz, etc.). The damage has also been more narrow. For example, one of the most obvious so-called ‘Kuhn Losses’ is our relative ignorance of the nature and implications of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR). This is no surprise because analytical philosophy was founded in the act of rejecting PSR. Our forefathers’ attempt to balance between common sense and the truths of science meant -- as science and the PSR parted ways -- the willing submission to brute, ultimate facts (recall this post).  

In Mind & Cosmos, Thomas Nagel happily embraces “a form of the principle of sufficient reason” (17) in support of his "common sense" (5, 7, etc.) and against the recent “orthodox scientific consensus.” (10; 5) Rather than accepting this "ideological consensus," (128) Nagel insists -- regularly using language reminiscent of the great Feyerabend --  that "almost everyone in our secular culture has been browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct." (7) While Nagel insists that the champions of scientific enlightenment are bullies, he treats the "defenders of intelligent design" with "gratitude" (Plantinga returns the gratitude),  even though Nagel clearly recognizes that once one embraces one's inner sensus divinitatis one is also compelled in one's judgments. (12) 

A classic statement of the PSR is Spinoza's "For each thing there must be assigned a cause, or reason, both for its existence and for its nonexistence." (Ethics 1p11d2) That is to say, any PSR worth having imposes significant explanatory demands (especially of non-arbitrariness) on any philosophical system in which it is deployed. Below the fold I critically discuss Nagel's way of combining the PSR and his attempted revisionary science, but here I just register the marvelousness of Nagel's deployment of the PSR as an instrument in the service of common sense! (cf. 91-2) This is certainly an original move in the history of metaphysics--one that, in a single, magical stroke overturns Lovejoy's long narrative.

When in Glass Houses....

This hard-hitting review is getting thumbs up from my fellow analyticals. I agree with a core underlying complaint: "The insulation of French philosophy, often marketed as a thoughtful dismissal of the ideals that underlie Anglo-American philosophy, is in fact rooted in nothing loftier than a systematic disregard for linguistically inaccessible literature."  If the reviewer's description of De Fontenay's approach (which apparently is highly critical of features of analytical moral philosophy) is accurate, she deserves a lot of castigation. Even so, I do not recall that we analyticals are widely noted for our linguistic prowess and careful citation of French (and other non-English) authors! When in glass houses...

Okay, on to a more philosophically outrageous aspect of this review:

But to suggest that such awareness of shared pain can substitute for more principled approaches -- as De Fontenay does -- is to regressively return animal ethics into an extension of sentimental care for animals. It is (arguably) the lasting collective achievement of animal ethics from Singer on to show that the treatment of animals should not be limited to momentary spurts of compassion for cute and furry animals. Animal ethics should, rather, offer a conceptually disciplined framework through which moral restrictions on what may be institutionally done to members of other species can be evaluated and generated.--Tzachi Zamir

I liked continental realism before it became cool

I'm going to move heaven and earth to try to attend these:

1. "Translating Realism" at Notre Dame (featuring: Adrian Johnston (University of New Mexico), Dorothea Olkowski (UCCS/Rotman Institute), Michael Naas (Depaul)),  
2. "The Return of Speculative Philosophy" at the University of Toronto (featuring Rebecca Comay).

There's a particular kind of validation where the stuff you've been digging starts to gain traction, though one must avoid the music fan trope of accusing the now popular thinkers of "selling out" at exactly the moment this happens.

On G.E. Moore, or The Origin of Analytical Philosophy in Classical Philology...

"[G.E. Moore] was in those days beautiful and slim, with a look almost of inspiration, and with an intellect as deeply passionate as Spinoza's. He had a kind of exquisite purity."--Ernest Nagel quoting Russell on Moore.

"But Professor Moore, why do you spend so much time refuting that doctrine; surely [this emphatic use of "surely" he had learned from Moore] no one holds it. To which Moore replied, in a rising crescendo of rhetorical questions: "No one holds it? No one holds it? No one holds it? But Montague holds it-don't you Montague?" Professor Montague rolled his eyes and shook his head affirmatively."--Morton White recalling a seminar with Moore.

By treating Boole's contributions as merely mathematical and requiring a conventional step (the coding of predicates/sentences), Michael Dummett (and here) convinced himself and others that analytical philosophy has its original roots in Frege's more powerful logic and, thus, what we may call the philosophy of mathematics (for an alternative view). By contrast, at the 1959 memorial symposium on G.E. Moore at Columbia University (published in 1960 in JPhil), Ernest Nagel, who I claim (and here; recall Jeff's point) created our shared picture of analytical philosophy, has no doubt that "Moore did help to bring about a revolution, if not in philosophy, at any rate in the philosophical climate, and at the same time a marked heightening in standards of philosophical workmanship." (812; recall Catarina on Moore) Moore and his revolution stand for the "passionate devotion to the pursuit of intellectual clarity." (811)  His clarity was reflected in his writing, of course, and also bequeathed to the discipline through his charismatic teaching style.

Before I turn to Nagel's understanding of the sources and costs associated with Moore's legacy, I should emphasize that Nagel is careful to disassociate Moore from the (then) "current revolts against the traditional conception of philosophy as an inquiry into the most general features of the entire scheme of things." (811) In fact, by quoting from Some Main Problems of Philosophy, Nagel reminds his audience of Moore's vision that one of the tasks of philosophy is to present "a general description of the whole of the Universe. " Even so, Moore's conception of philosophical truth meant, in practice, that he was extremely wary of systematical elaboration. (812) Rather than seeing in Moore an anti-metaphysician (cf. Ayer), he is, thus, better  thought of as re-opening the door to a very deflationary Realism. (See also Alice Ambrose's very interesting contribution to the Memorial Session.) Fair enough.

Why Husserl? Ask Gödel

In a rather unflattering review of Marvin Farber’s 1941 edited collection Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl (Husserl died in 1938), Ernest Nagel takes a few swipes at Husserl, or perhaps more precisely at Husserl’s commentators. Farber himself, as discussed in an earlier post, had studied with Husserl in Germany while a graduate student at Harvard. In 1940 he was the founding editor of the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (which he edited until 1980). With the exception of Dorion Cairns, Farber was probably the person best suited to compile a volume in honor of Husserl.

Despite Farber’s credentials, Nagel finds little that is compelling in the collection and his criticisms often mirror what will often be heard in later decades regarding continental thought. For example, Nagel expresses doubt about whether any of the papers “will be either intelligible or persuasive to any one not previously instructed in Husserl’s ideas or convinced of their importance” (301); and, more damningly, he argues that with few exceptions Husserl’s views are not “expressed in recognizable English,” with “such barbarisms as ‘presuppositionless,’ ‘insightful,’ ‘pre-givenness’ or ‘the itself-giving’” (ibid.) being thrown around in a way that leaves novitiates at a loss to understand their meaning.

Adding to the recent discussions of Eric (here), Catarina (here), and Mohan (here) regarding the use and significance (or lack thereof) of intuition in analytic philosophy, one obvious place to turn to where intuition does appear to loom large is the work of Husserl. Husserl’s work, however, was also an important source of inspiration for Gödel’s understanding of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, and thus it bleeds significantly into a number of problems within the analytic tradition.

On the Origin of Analytic Metaphysics, again...

The lore we are told inspired by, say, Putnam (not a disinterested spectator) and more recently Huw Price, who thinks we delude ourselves, is roughly this: after the founders of analytical philosophy had successfully ridden philosophy of its thirst for metaphysics, Quine, discerning a crack in Carnap's edifice, re-opened the door to our deposed Queen, μεταφυσική, in "On What There Is" (and "Two Dogmas"); with the door ajar and Alvin Goldman and Dan Dennett distracted by 'naturalizing' everything, Hillary Putnam developed a Quine-ean argument from the authority of science for the really real existence of numbers and, more significantly, David  Lewis -- perhaps spurred on by some Antipodes -- drove a truck through the opening by embracing modal realism. 

We love linear stories [Carnap --> Quine --> Lewis], don't we, so even the descriptive metaphysics of Strawson's Individuals (1959) can't quite be squished into, shall we say, our conceptual scheme. Now consider the following paragraph written in 1930:

The pursuit of metaphysics as the study of generic characters of existence has been slowly regaining its professional adherents. Once its central theme, reaction to the unchecked flights of nineteenth century romantic speculation has well nigh banished metaphysics as a legitimate subject matter for philosophy. But the problems which professional philosophers refused to consider became acutely pressing in the special sciences. It was to be expected that ere long comprehensive treatises on the nature of existence would appear, fashioned by philosophers were where sensitive to the advances of recent science as well to the ancient tradition that philosophy is the systematic study of being. To the series of distinguishes essays on metaphysics which contemporary philosophers have contributed, these volumes [by Whitehead--ES] are a notable addition.--Ernest Nagel (1930 "Alfred North Whitehead," republished in Sovereign Reason, p. 154.)

 

Weekly Philo of Economics: Rawls' Silence on Hayek; and Ernest Nagel...

[I thank Kevin Vallier, a blogger over at BHL, for discussion; none of the mistakes below should be attributed to him.--ES],

I got my first taste of the existence of boundary policing within philosophy a year after graduation (Tufts 93): at my graduation a family friend had given me a collection of essays by Isaiah Berlin. Subsequently, I devoured it and his other writings; went on to Vico (of course), and a whole lot of other obscure authors. A year later I went back to Tufts to celebrate some friends' graduation and to beg for a TA job (in political science); as it happened I bumped into a "famous student of Rawls" on campus; he (not Rawls) was a very good teacher and involved in the great questions of the day in Washington. I admired him. He recognized me, we made some small talk, and for whatever reason I revealed my excitement about Berlin (I may have even carried a totemic copy of Four Essays on Liberty around with me). I am not sure what I expected, but was completely taken aback by the disapproving grunts, and was told something to the effect that Berlin isn't "really philosophy." Fair enough.

Much later I decided that Rawls had created (by design/also here) a "school" with broadly shared sensitivities and, thus, gaps in scholarly knowledge. For, Rawls would teach his own work in light of constructed traditions from which he privileged certain thinkers (including, in fact, Berlin when his "famous student" was at Harvard; Rawls studied with Berlin at Oxford on his Fullbright). One consequence of this way of teaching I noted in passing last week: in Theory of Justice (TJ), Rawls calls attention to the significance of the now forgotten Frank Knight (and Knight's debates with Arrow)), but from the evidence available to me it's clear that Rawls did not teach his students to appreciate the significance of Knight to TJ.

This by way of introduction to the topic of the present post: from the vantage point of contemporary political philosophy, Rawls' near-complete silence on his contemporary, Hayek, is striking, and even a bit puzzling. (Here's an exception to the point.) Even Nozick engages less with Hayek in Anarchy than one would expect today.

Philosophy without Discipline

In 1933 Ernest Nagel wrote an extended review (here) for the Journal of Philosophy of the then recently published Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Volume I of the Collected Papers was published in 1931, Volume II in 1932. The Collected Papers would eventually come to a total of eight volumes (the eighth published in 1958). This collection has come to be superseded by the Peirce Edition Project's ongoing Chronological Edition of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce out of Indiana University Press (see here), which is slated to total some 30 volumes when completed.

At the very beginning of his review, Nagel notes that having Peirce’s writings published will allow for “a measure of justice” to be done for the long neglected Peirce. “Unfortunately,” Nagel adds, “the handsome volumes of this edition can not undo the damage which both Peirce and philosophy have suffered when he was not permitted, except for a brief period, to receive the intellectual and literary discipline which regular university teaching would have given him.” (p. 365, emphasis mine). In other words, with the exception of the five years Peirce taught at Johns Hopkins (1879-1884), Peirce’s philosophical work was largely done without the discipline that comes with “regular university teaching,” and this, for Nagel, was to have unfortunate consequences both for Peirce’s philosophy and for philosophy in general.

Remembering Leonard Linsky (1922-2012)

[This is a follow up to this post.]

When I arrived at The University of Chicago (1995), Leonard Linsky's weekly, Friday afternoon reading group on the Investigations was already years old. It was timed not to interfere with departmental colloquia, or the departmental coffee hour. Even though Leonard had officially retired, it attracted the best and brightest graduate students who would talk about it for days after. I had not yet acquired a taste for close reading, and the devotional quality to the reading group put me off. This did not stop me from being fascinating by Leonard--there was a dogged rumor on campus that one of the characters in Erica Jong's Fear of Flying was loosely based on him.

On Stebbing, Gellner, and Eddington

Mohan ridicules Stebbing with a fantastic bit of rhetoric: "Eric admires Susan Stebbing because she was a philosopher who spoke out against the authority of science. I am not so convinced that her stance was all that admirable. I am all for challenging scientists when their philosophy is confused. I am much less keen on setting up common sense as a competitor of science. This is what Stebbing did." Now, first, I had written, appreciatively about "her willingness to challenge the way the authority of science is used in irresponsible, public speech." In fact, Stebbing is not setting up common sense as a competitor to physics, nor is she concerned about defending common sense against displacement from science. Rather, she is attacking muddled metaphysics and muddled theology that mixes common sense and esoteric mathematical physics. (I am willing to grant that in doing so she may have missed what is valuable in Eddington.) On the contrary, she has a healthy respect for physics qua physics. As she writes, "in the present stage of physics, very little can be conveyed to those who lacks the mathematical equipment required to understand the methods by which results are obtained and the language in which these results can alone find adequate expression" (p. 44 in the  1944 edition; p. 50 in the origiginal).

Throughout his piece, Mohan misrepresents  the dialectic between Stebbing and Eddington. For example, in context, Stebbing is not refuting external-world skepticism (as Mohan implies), but an argument that such external world skepticism "can itself be the outcome of the labours of the physicists," (p. 90 in my 1944 edition; p. 112 in the first; note Stebbing's plural) because (of course) such (shared) labors presuppose that the "the world of physics" is about *something* (that is, "the physical world"). That is, in fact, a solid bit of philosophical wisdom.

The Problem with Identity

Coming to a pause in his arguments in Appearance and Reality, Bradley wonders if the reader may question “whether anything of what is understood by a thing is left to us,” given that at this point Bradley believes that what is generally thought of as a thing has been “undermined and ruined.” In particular, Bradley argues that “for a thing to exist it must possess identity; and identity seems a possession with a character at best doubtful.” (AR, p. 72).

Identity is a problem for Bradley with important, although perhaps unsettling consequences. Moreover, the problem of identity has, as Della Rocca (himself a careful reader of Bradley) shows in a recent article (here), important implications for the 3d’ist/4d’ist debate. I would also add that this was already a problem for Hume (as I’ve discussed here and here) and it is a problem that is critical to understanding Gilles Deleuze’s project.

Schwitzgebel's study of CP names in top mainstream journals

Eric Schwitzgebel has a very interesting quantitative study on citations of CP figures in three top mainstream journals (Philosophical Review, Mind, and Journal of Philosophy) from 1900 to the present. Confirming the impression most people have (and that we informally surveyed here), the study shows that CP citations have declined relative to the whole as time goes on.

The trends started rapidly pulling apart in the 1950s through 1970s and have continued to slowly pull farther apart since then.

His conclusion for recent years:

In the 1990s and the portion of the 2000s that has so far been indexed in JStor, the words Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida appeared in 45 articles total among 1209 Big Three journal articles (3.7%). Thus, the Big Three journals have included, on average, about one article per journal per year that even passingly mentions any of these five authors.

Some thoughts below the fold: