By Catarina Dutilh Novaes
This is the third installment of my series of posts with different sections of the paper on conceptual genealogy that I am working on. Part I is here; Part II.1 is here; a tentative abstract of 2 years ago, detailing the motivation for the project, is here.
I now turn to Canguilhem as an author exemplifying the kind of approach I have in mind when I speak of 'conceptual genealogy'. The main difference is that Canguilhem focused on scientific concepts (especially from biology and medicine), whereas I am articulating a methodology for the investigation of philosophical concepts (though of course, often the line between the two groups will be rather blurry). The same caveat of the previous installment on Nietzsche applies: this is a very brief and inevitably superficial discussion of Canguilhem's ideas, on which there is obviously much more to say.
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The thesis of the relevance of historical analysis for philosophical theorizing rests crucially on a historicist conception of philosophical concepts, namely that they are not (or do not correspond to) a-historical essences or natural kinds. However, ‘historicism’ can have different meanings (Beiser 2011, Introduction), so let me now spell out in more detail in what sense I defend a historicist conception of philosophical concepts.
To this end, let us go back to the anti-historicism of analytic philosophy discussed in Part I. This largely a-historical conception of philosophy is at least partially related to the close ties between philosophy and the (empirical and formal) sciences defended by key early figures such as Russell and Carnap. Roughly speaking, the thought would be that, just as scientists investigate (presumably) immutable, non-historical physical phenomena such as relativity or cell metabolism, so do philosophers investigate (allegedly) immutable concepts: truth, causation, knowledge, logical validity etc.
However, the irony is that scientific concepts themselves have time and again been shown to be everything but immutable and a-historical (even if the phenomena they seek to describe might be so, in some sense or another). There are vibrant, rich traditions within philosophy of science that operate precisely by means of thorough historical analyses of the emergence and transformation of scientific concepts and theories. For instance, the increasingly influential &HPS (Integrated History and Philosophy of Science) movement defines itself in the following way:
The founding insight of the modern discipline of HPS is that history and philosophy have a special affinity and one can effectively advance both simultaneously. What gives HPS its distinctive character is the conviction that the common goal of understanding of science can be pursued by dual, interdependent means. (&HPS manifesto)
Kuhn is of course one the founding fathers of the historical emphasis within philosophy of science (opposing for example Popper’s a-historical conception of science), but there are other strands contributing to these developments. In particular, the French tradition of ‘historical epistemology’ dating back to Bachelard and Canguilhem, and including Foucault, has influenced the work of authors such as Hacking and Kusch, among others. Now, if a strong case can be made for the need to adopt a historically informed approach to analyze scientific concepts (and the main support for this claim is the visible success of these programs), why should it be any different for philosophical concepts?
To clarify further what a genealogy of concepts might look like in philosophical contexts, let us take a brief look at the work of Canguilhem, who has made extensive use of this general idea in his work on the history of medicine and biology – for example, in La formation du concept de réflexe and the classic The normal and the pathological. As is well known, he was a major influence on Foucault, who credits him with promoting a ‘‘philosophy of the concept’’, as opposed to a ‘‘philosophy of the subject’’ (Méthot 2013, 114).[2] Canguilhem distinguishes concepts from theories, and describes concepts as theoretically polyvalent (i.e. they can appear, often taking on different meanings, in different theories).[3] (This kind of theoretical plasticity is also present in philosophical concepts, as we will see when discussing specific examples shortly.) As described by Méthot (2013, 114):
[A]n historic-philosophical approach à la Canguilhem consists primarily in tracking scientific concepts over space and time, and across disciplinary boundaries, in order to locate significant shifts regarding meaning, reference, and domains of application.
For Canguilhem, a specific instantiation of a scientific concept at a given point in time is closely linked to practices and the available technologies;[4] in turn, scientific concepts allow for the formulation of new theories and hypotheses, which again provokes further changes in practices and technologies, in a feedback loop. However, it would be a mistake to view Canguilhem as a full-blooded ‘social constructivist’, even if he acknowledges the contribution of social contexts and material conditions for the shaping of scientific concepts. As he notes on the concept of ‘normal’:
It is life itself and not medical judgment which makes the biological normal a concept of value and not a concept of statistical reality. (Canguilhem, 1991, 131).
The work of Canguilhem in history and philosophy of medicine and biology provides thus a fruitful point of departure for the method of conceptual genealogy in the context of philosophical theorizing. However, one obstacle to the genealogical analysis of philosophical concepts is the (still) influential author-centered conception of the history of philosophy. Scholarly work on the history of philosophy typically focuses on authors, in particular the key figures of the philosophical canon: Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Abelard, Aquinas, Ockham, Descartes, Leibniz, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche etc. The narrative is thus typically articulated around what each of them borrows from their predecessors, their influence on later authors, and who is the originator of key ideas and theories.
Now, this is not the place for an extensive discussion of the shortcomings of the author-centered approach to the history of philosophy. For the present purposes, it is sufficient to note that an alternative, concept-centered approach is viable, and has in particular been developed in detail in A. de Libera’s recent work on the archeology of the subject (2007, 2008, 2014). In an interview, he describes the enterprise in the following terms:
The point for me was to construct a story whose protagonists would not be people, but concepts, problems, rules or arguments.[5]
And so, there is no reason why the historian of philosophy or the philosopher should necessarily focus on authors rather than on concepts of problems, much as the historian of science inspired by Canguilhem and others does.
[2] Canguilhem vehemently criticized what he described as ‘the virus of the precursor’ (Gutting 1989, 39), that is the preoccupation with establishing who said what first. What matters for the historian and philosopher of science from Canguilhem’s perspective are not so much the people, but the concepts produced and developed.
[3] One rough way in which the distinction between concepts and theories can be cashed out is that concepts describe or interpret phenomena, whereas theories attempt to explain them. See (Gutting 1989, pp. 32-55).
[4] “[T]he determination of the concept of ‘‘normal’’, especially in physiology and clinical medicine, is linked to specific laboratory equipments and sets of practices; in other words, that there is no absolute concept of the ‘‘normal’’ state in medicine or physiology.” (Méthot 2013, 119)
[5] “Il s’agissait donc pour moi de construire une intrigue dont les protagonistes seraient non des personnes, mais des concepts, des problèmes, des règles et des arguments.” The starting point for this movement towards ‘anonymization’ is de Libera’s own work on medieval logical texts, in particular the sophismata literature of the end of the 12th century and the 13th century. As he describes it, 75% of the relevant texts had no clear authorship, and so obviously an author-centered approach would have been eminently unsuitable for the analysis of this material. Notice also that De Libera focuses on the concept of ‘archeology’, not that of ‘genealogy’; we discuss this distinction later on.
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