something sensible on Thomas Nagel

I find the following to be a good methodological principle. If your view of the world commits you to the proposition that the dominant philosophers between (and including) Kant and Hegel were naive and unsophisticated, then YOUR ARE DOING IT WRONG. 

This to me is the most irritating thing about much academic philosophy, the absolute unwillingness of most of us to spend time trying to, for example, put in the minimal amount of work that it takes to see the world as a Fichte or Shelling (or post-Hegelians such as Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer for that matter) saw it, living in their problem space.* 

I hope that I am not the only one who has come to find contemporary popular naturalists such as Dawkins et. al. and the disputes that arise around them painfully irritating for exactly these reasons. As Lee Braver and Adrian Johnston both have said (and I'm paraphrasing), there is all the difference in the world between having genuinely worked through Hegel and gone beyond him versus just pretending he didn't exist.

And as much as I love Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens in other contexts, I've just gotten sick of new atheist ritualistic denunciations. In this context, the tone and content of much of the recent piling on of Thomas Nagel by people not really fit to tie his shoes should strike us as at the very least distasteful. It's not that Nagel is right, but that contemporary public naturalists such as Dawkins so often seem to suppose that anyone who has any sympathy at all with a teleological view of reality must be obviously stupid (or that a scientific theory such as Darwinistic biology somehow simply competes with a metaphysical system such as Hegel's.**). One gets the feeling that Nagel could have written anything at all defending a teleological view of reality and he would have been attacked with just as much fervor and unearned contempt.  

As a result of this, after the second or so Leiter posting linking to all the usual suspects, I just stopped following the Nagel controversy. But yesterday I found a very sensible post by Michael Chorost at the Chronicle of Higer Education which respectfully examines where Nagel went wrong. Chorost proposes:

1. Failure to engage with prominent natural scientists who disagree with Dawkins et. al. about the teleological nature of reality,
2. Limpid prose characterized by double and triple negatives that make it hard to track what Nagel is really about,
3. Citation and side comments giving cover to very bad people working to destroy the Aufklärung through the "intelligent design" Trojan Horse.

Chorost's final conclusion about changing science departments might be a little bit weird and dangerous in it's own right,*** but it's very nice to see a critique of Nagel by someone not so antecedently hostile to and/or ignorant of the problem space presented by large swaths of the history of philosophy.

Now, to propitiate the gods with respect to my own sins in this regard, I'm going to go reread Mohan's fascinating post on teleology.

[NOTES:

*Our original sin with respect to all of this was the philosophical reset in early stages of the "back to Kant" movement (the Southwest school leading to Heidegger and the Marburg school leading ot Carnap), which ended up being too convenient by half. For all of Carnap and Heidegger's own historical knowledge, the upshot for philosophical education seems to be that we only need to engage with anything between Kant and either Carnap or Heidegger as caricatures and/or as naive moments that no self-respecting post-positivist or phenomenologist would take seriously.

**I'm *not* endorsing the idea that metaphysics and natural science have nothing to do with one another. In fact, Adrian Johnston has convinced me that analytical Hegelianism is not just unsatisfying because it misreads Hegel's relation to Kant so as to mangle Hegel's metaphysics. It's also unsatisfying because Hegel and friends' philosophies of nature are things we should be thinking about.

***I'm not at all sure that this ends up being something that should be thought to affect the practice of natural science at all. It might be a regulative ideal on science not to view things teleologically, even though reality really is teleological. Again though, to paraphrase Johnston, I think that the distinction between the empirical and non-empirical is an empirical matter. So one should take seriously the scientists Chorost quotes qua scientists as well as being open to something like Chorost's conclusion being correct.]