Marilyn Adams's Dewey Lecture . . . And My Life

There is a lovely set of Dewey Lectures in the latest Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. I am still reflecting on Bernard Boxill's moving and brilliant Central Division address, and haven't gotten around to Harry Frankfurt's Eastern Division one. More on them later, perhaps.

Marilyn McCord Adams's Pacific Division lecture was special, though. It was as revealing to me about my history as it was about hers. And this is what I want to reflect on today.

One of the threads of her story is about her struggle against what she sees as the unreasoning atheism of mid-20th century analytic philosophy, which she connects with its rejection of metaphysics and an unacknowledged but visceral anti-realism. She writes with mixed feelings about the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell, which was in the 1960s the most influential source of Wittgensteinianism in the US. On one hand, they taught her how to write and argue. On the other hand, she says, "Oxbridge was their Mecca and Medina . . . Sprachgefühl, an ear for usage, was what was required." "Semantic put-downs—"that makes no clear sense"—were the "short way" of choice." This, she thinks, was a source of a peculiarly anti-philosophical dogmatism, which she characterizes as a "way of holding beliefs that enforces them on others." In a dramatic reversal, she arrived at the view that "scholastic method was an antidote for dogmatism".

Another thread concerns the History of Philosophy.  She tells how her teacher, Nelson Pike, had a "fine-grained" appreciation of medieval philosophers, but failed to see how the great ones were systematic thinkers. Adams was increasingly absorbed with her thinkers in the round, and not merely in fragments of discussion concerning foreknowledge or ominscience or some other such topic. Her evolution is a microcosm of the emergence (or perhaps re-emergence) of the History of Philosophy as a specialized discipline.

This was where I started to see my own story as a reflection of Marilyn Adams's, though with a very different outcome. I studied at Stanford in the 1970s with Julius Moravcsik and (for a short interlude when she visited) with Gisela Striker. Julius and Gisela got me absolutely hypnotized by Aristotle: I just couldn't get enough of him. I have published fifteen papers on ancient philosophy, some of them really quite decent. But clearly I was treating the ancients in the way that Nelson Pike treated the medievals—as a source of insight into problems that interested me. Adams writes: "When I pointed out how Jaakko Hintikka had misinterpreted Descartes, Malcolm replied, "Who cares? He has such such an interesting idea!" Well, though there are few philosophers more alien to me than Malcolm, that was precisely how I would have felt.

Towards the end of the seventies, though, the practice of the history of philosophy began to change. Slowly, it became a paramount concern to be historically accurate about the views of the great figures of the past. A while later, I came into close contact with one of the more influential figures in this trend, Jonathan Barnes, who made the change himself, having written a decidedly Pikean, or Hintikkian—and addictively interesting—two-volume treatment of the "arguments" of the pre-Socratics. Mid-career, Jonathan decided that this was the wrong approach. It became more interesting to find out what Aristotle actually thought (and then rather cleverly slag him off) than to mine him as a source of inspiration. "If a philosopher is interested in solving philosophical problems or in making philosophical progress, then I urge him strongly not to study Aristotle—or any of the other dead heroes of the subject," he wrote in 1987, in a volume I edited.

Of course, Adams takes a very different view. But just as much as Barnes, she treats History of Philosophy as a highly specialized pursuit, requiring philology and immersion. You can't just read Metaphysics Z: you have to read the whole corpus . . . in Greek—and maybe the entire Thesaurus Linguae Graecae and a good bit of ancient history and literature as well. But where does this leave us amateurs who are "interested in solving philosophical problems"? Can we be like Nelson Pike and dip into great works in search of ideas about this topic or that? Or, lacking the time and (honestly) the interest, must we give up the history of philosophy, treating it as essentially a different discipline in which we must not meddle?

I know which way I went. I gave it up, pretty much cold turkey. In 1997, I began a sabbatical intending to finish my commentary on the De Caelo, and somewhere in the middle gave it up. (My co-author, Jim Hankinson, now intends to finish it on his own.) Still: one thing helped me keep up my amateur love of ancient philosophy. I came to Toronto. Here, I am happy to say, the ancient and medieval philosophers welcome me to their parties, tolerate me cheerfully, and treat with benign amusement not only my views about such matters as Aristotle's ontology and his teleology, but also my lapses of Greek grammar.