New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

On Leo Strauss and the Philosophers

"Strauss' interpretation of Plato is wrong from beginning to end." M.F. Burnyeat.

Although we philosophers are thought of as a cerebral bunch, our loathings can be pretty intense. I need not mention the hundred-year, fraternal civil war, which around here we label a 'divide,' between analytic and continental philosophy; we are not known for our fondness for what passes as 'theory' among literature and cultural studies departments (and I have experienced plenty of uncivil behavior from folk in, say, science studies in return).  But when professional philosophers are not just puzzled by the Straussians they encounter, we reserve a special kind of bile and invective against them, especially as Strauss's students found their ways into advising Goldwater and Reagan (and beyond); once I was halted in my invective against Wolfowitz by (The University of Chicago's) Ralph Lerner's, 'Paul once sat in that chair, and was no less passionate than you.' Undoubtedly a few of us were at least mildly irritated by reading Steven Smith's very respectful review of books on the legacy of Strauss in a recent New York Times Book Review--"doesn't he know that 'Strauss is not a Philosopher!'"?

In his famous essay, Burnyeat (a former teacher) overreached.  Invoking  "ordinary scholarship," Burnyeat treats Plato (surprisingly Popperian) as a "radical utopian," primarily relevant for opening up "a reasoned debate on the nature and practicality of a  just society" (emphasis in Burnyeat). Given that Burnyeat was in no sense an ordinary scholar, who also searchingly pioneered the historiographical construction of the classics, these lines are painful read; Burnyeat reduces the significance of Plato's political philosophy to being a forerunner of Rawls. Those of us living in the shadow of the surveillance state may find Strauss' "anti-Utopian teaching" ("invented" or not) about Plato a useful touch-stone, sometimes. For in Republic and Laws surveillance are ever-present and its limits thematized. The cause of Burnyeat's overreach is that Plato's Laws has always been a blind-spot to him (and until recently ordinary analytic scholarship).

At some level, Burnyeat must have known he overreached, because he allowed the original and reprinted version of the piece to have a clear reference to a famous short story by Oscar Wilde, -- which may be read as an allegory on philosophical madness [Murchison is introduced as a truth-teller] ! -- that ends with that enigmatic "I wonder."

Bradley on Sloth and System (and skepticism)

Neither in form nor extent does it carry out the idea of a system. Its subject indeed is central enough to justify the exhaustive treatment of every problem. But what I have done is incomplete, and what has been left undone has often been omitted arbitrarily.--F.H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, Preface (xi).

There is no established reputation which now does much harm to philosophy. And one is not led to feel in writing that one is face to face with the same dense body of stupid tradition and ancestral prejudice.--Bradley, Preface (xiii). 

Michael Della Rocca has been encouraging me to get interested in Bradley [and this post was prompted by one of his papers--ES]. (See this book for a polemical introduction to Bradley. [I blogged about it here; Mohan responded;  then I; Mohan here.]) The lines in the first epigraph above are the second, third, and fourth sentences of Bradley's book, explaining why Bradley calls it an "essay in metaphysics." While -- if we allow that being exhaustively treated and the idea of system are close in spirit -- the subject is suitable to systematic treatment, Bradley goes out of his way to deny his book is not. At first sight he seems to suggest that it is not systematic because the book is "incomplete." 

Fair enough. The edition I am looking at is over 600 pages long. But Bradley is also insistent that the in-completion is due to his arbitrary omissions. So, the first paragraph of the book introduces an opposition between the idea of system and arbitrary gaps. That is, the idea of system entails deliberateness about internal structure. I emphasize "idea" because Bradley does not deny that his book is an attempt "to deal systematically with first principles" (xiii); evidently such an attempt does not fall under the idea of system.

How can an agent choose to deploy arbitrary gaps? (To be anachronistic: there is nothing arbitrary about letting a random-number generator create the numbers of a sequence, even if any given number is arbitrary.)

On optimal trouser rolling strategies

One of the saddest and scariest things about human beings is how we can work so damned hard for year after year and then derive so little satisfaction when things actually come to fruition. I don't know how ubiquitous this is, but it is somewhat pronounced both in academia and the music world, two fields that typically require a nauseating amount of effort for years on end just to make a bare living.

Consider music. There's an overwhelmingly affecting point in the recent Ramones documentary where the original bassist and songwriter (who later died of a heroin overdose) is reflecting on his bulimia and massive intake of anti-anxiety medication; he says something to the effect of "All my dreams came true. Why can't I be happy?" This isn't just rock music either. There is a small literature suggesting that successful orchestra musicians (with a job market very similar to academia) have pretty low job satisfaction when compared to other fields.

In academia I've noticed in particular two kinds of virulently unhappy successful people. The first is the person who just got tenure and all of the sudden faces an overwhelming existential crises, analogous to when deep sea divers come up too fast and their bodies can't handle the depressurization. That is, at every point prior to tenure, from gradeschool through being an Assistant Professor, there is ususally a ton of outside pressure to do specific tasks to get to the next point. And some people who thrive when being told what to do find it horrifying to be any other way. 

This is a weird thing, because the pressure of going through tenure review is itself so harsh. I know plenty of people who actually went on prescription happy pills for the first time in their life during tenure review, only to get off them after the tenure was resolved and move on unscathed. But two people I cherish did just fine during the tenure review only to completely fall apart afterwards. One was institutionalized and is no longer an academic and the other is dead. 

Making philosophy a multiplicity

One of our categories here is "Analytic-Continental Divide (and its overcoming)." What do I mean by "overcoming"? I don't mean that when the divide is overcome there will be one homogeneous way of doing philosophy. I'm a Deleuzean, and that would not at all be a Deleuzean ideal. Instead I think we should make philosophy into a multiplicity.

JHAP: Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy (Open Access)

Here:

JHAP aims to promote research in and provide a forum for discussion of the history of analytic philosophy. ‘History’ and ‘analytic’ are understood broadly. JHAP takes the history of analytic philosophy to be part of analytic philosophy. Accordingly, it publishes historical research that interacts with the ongoing concerns of analytic philosophy and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions. In addition to research articles, JHAP publishes discussion notes and reviews.

"and with the history of other twentieth century philosophical traditions" is a very important clause! Two [update: now three] notes which concern that clause:

"All I wanted was a Pepsi!" (Ian Hacking on the new DSM)

The London Review of books couldn't have picked a better person for the review (HERE).

It's an excellent piece, but a little weird to me that (given his other work) he only went after the DSM for the ways that mental illnesses as descriptive phenomena are not like Linnaean natural kinds. He basically argues that the massive vagueness of the underlying phenomena forces the DSM writers to:  (1)  overuse "not otherwise specified" (NOS) as a catchall after listing various subtypes of a disorder, basically allowing anyone to be diagnosed with anything (e.g. diagnosed as "schizophrenic: NOS") and (2) the infinite regress of co-morbidity listings, where the disorders overlap so much that it becomes unclear who has what to what degree.

But he writes nothing about how "disorder" is not a statistical but rather a normative notion, and what a bash clinical psychology makes of this fact.

This is very odd because to me the new DSM's defining of mental health as the ability to function in one's society shows how vulgar the whole business is.* There's a strong intellectual pedigree for seeing through this kind of thing that leads right up to Hacking too. In France Canguilhem initially appealed to the normativity of health to critique the Linnaean model of mental health, and later read his own student Simondon to articulate this in Nietzschean terms. This account was picked up and worked on by Foucault, whose own writings in part prompted Hacking's own wonderful thoughts about the metaphysics of mental disorders and much else.

[Notes:

*I was talking about this at a neighbor's crowded pool party last Sunday with a colleage in Clinical Psychology. Weirdly, none of our LSU colleagues engaged with my criticisms until I brought up the example of the Nazis** and the Good German as a paradigm of mental health via the DSM's definition of health. I really did try to use more subtle examples.

[WARNING: F word mentioned (not used) after jump.]

New APA group: "Beyond the AP / CP Divide"

I've created a group on the APA website, open to all members.

Title: "Beyond the Continental / Analytic Divide."

URL: http://www.apaonline.org/group/beyonddivide.

First post: "I thought I would start this group. I would also welcome arguments why we should not try to get beyond the divide, or why "beyond" is a bad metaphor, or why "divide" is a bad metaphor, and so on."

200 YEARS OF ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY

Because I am rarely capable of great subtlety and a friend of historical truth, I love subtle revisionism.  So, I am grateful to Dirk Felleman for calling my attention to the title, "200 YEARS OF ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY" of a 2008  issue of the The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication. The issue was edited by world class scholars-philosophers, SANDRA LAPOINTE, MATTI EKLUND AND AMIE L. THOMASSON. So, where does analytical philosophy start?

Collaborative research project: tracking continental names in top journals

With the recent discussion of citation networks, I thought I'd re-post this piece from 2011.

-------------------

Something about all the recent talk about pluralism (I'd personally prefer something like "aiming to go beyond the a/c divide" though it's more clunky) made me wonder just how often do big continental names appear in top mainstream journals. 

So I searched for "Foucault" in Journal of Philosophy. Unfortunately my library has an electronic subscription enabling me to search their database only up through 2005, so if someone can supplement this search with more recent data, I'd be grateful.

I'll present my results in a bit, but what I'd like to do is ask other people to do similar searches, say for Deleuze in J Phil, or Heidegger in Phil Studies, etc. If you post them here, we'll have a sort of Wiki going. 

Findings: no articles had "Foucault" in the title or as the main topic, although Ian Hacking does a laudatory review of Dreyfus and Rabinow's book: J Phil 82.5 (May 1985): 273-277.

Brian Weatherson rightly takes aim At JPhil; yet I feel embarrassed

In a very interesting, recent post, Brian Weatherson points out that "the tradition of formal philosophy of language" is systematically ignored in Journal of Philosophy, one of the H4 journals.  While I have never been excited about this tradition, I agree with Brian that this is really "unfortunate." For, the tradition is a fundamental aspect of the development of analytical philosophy not in the least in the Low Countries. I offer two observations about Brian's approach, one friendly and one very critical. First, Brian's analysis of the exclusion of the tradition cannot be explained away by the phenomenon of H4-citation-delay (recall here, here, and here).  The classic papers that are not being cited in Jphil were all published more than a decade ago (two of which outside H4). So, we're dealing here with a situation of editorial bias (tacit or explicit, possibly self-reinforcing, etc.) against a certain approach. This means that if you would peruse JPhil monthly (as I used to do religiously in graduate school), you would really miss an important trend in contemporary analytical philosophy.

Second, what annoys me about Brian's analysis is that rather than helping us re-think what's systematically wrong with our discipline that we (i) all collectively claim that H4 are the best/most prestigious journals yet (ii) happily allow that these journals are individually and collectively captured by communities that systematically exclude thriving alternative approaches within even analytical philosophy. Rather, here we have an instance of a high status philosopher,  Weatherson, calling on a top journal to make room for his intellectual friends within days of noticing that he has utterly been blind to other developments in the field (say, in philosophy of scientific practice). Fair enough, what else are friends for? Yet, I find the utter lack of embarrassment among our professional leaders over our collective parochialism (i.e., that our top journals systematically exclude some of  the most important fields in the discipline, ignore very important professional philosophers whose works are also barely discussed in their journals, etc.), well, embarrassing.  

When I am Wrong on Williamson

During the past week I engaged in a polemic with Prof. Williamson (here, here, and here). Along the way I claimed that "in his piece Williamson is scathing of Dummett and the kind of  philosophy promoted by Dummett." In a patient series of letters, Professor Richard Heck has convinced me that I am certainly wrong to claim that "Williamson is scathing of Dummett." In his piece, Williamson makes a clear distinction between Dummett's position and the community of those that followed him: "Dummett’s posing of the issue between realism and anti-realism provides a case study of an occasion when the philosophical community was offered a new way of gaining theoretical control over notoriously elusive issues... The community spurned the opportunity, if that is what it was." (8) So, I apologize to Prof. Williamson and our readers for claiming otherwise.

I had also thought that Williamson held Dummett responsible (in the manner, say, of Socrates's responsibility for some of the vices of his students) for the follies and intellectual vices (stereotypically associated with 'continental' philosophy [about which more below]) of those that followed the "opportunity" Dummett had created (note, for example, the qualifying "if that is what it was.") So, for example, after commenting on Dummett's willingness to give up on the law of excluded middle, Williamson added: "When law and order break down, the result is not freedom or anarchy but the capricious tyranny of petty feuding warlords." (17) I took Williamson to be blaming Dummett for the bad consequences. (This is compatible, of course, with Williamson admiring Dummett in lots of other ways.) After my exchange with Heck, I am less confident about my interpretation, especially because Williamson is -- to quote Heck -- "fully aware of Dummett's efforts at answering the question "which principles of logic are supposed to carry authority.""

Discipline and Authority in Williamson's Sermons

During the last few days I have been rather critical of Timothy Williamson's dismissive-ness toward most of the rest of us and his inability to accept honest disagreement as a potentially intrinsic feature of philosophy (here and here). Now, amidst Williamson's (2006) kvetching about debased standards he does offer a positive proposal worth reflecting on:

But when philosophy is not disciplined by semantics, it must be disciplined by something else: syntax, logic, common sense, imaginary examples, the findings of other disciplines (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology, history, ...) or the aesthetic evaluation of theories (elegance, simplicity, ...). Indeed, philosophy subject to only one of those disciplines is liable to become severely distorted: several are needed simultaneously. To be ‘disciplined’ by X here is not simply to pay lip-service to X; it is to make a systematic conscious effort to conform to the deliverances of X, where such conformity is at least somewhat easier to recognize than is the answer to the original philosophical question. Of course, each form of philosophical discipline is itself contested by some philosophers. But that is no reason to produce work that is not properly disciplined by anything. It may be a reason to welcome methodological diversity in philosophy: if different groups in philosophy give different relative weights to various sources of discipline, we can compare the long-run results of the rival ways of working. (10)

Williamson's Sermonizing

Williamson's final paragraph begins: "In making these comments, it is hard not to feel like the headmaster of a minor public school at speech day, telling everyone to pull their socks up after a particularly bad term". I cannot speak for the participants at the conference, but my own reaction to being compared to a wayward British schoolboy was: So who died and made you headmaster?--Tim Maudlin

Yesterday, David Auerbach reminded us that Timothy Williamson is a serial dismiss-er.  In this piece (it appeared in 2006, but it self-plagiarizes stuff that appeared in the 2004 Leiter volume), Williamson rails against sloppiness in...analytical philosophy: " Much contemporary analytic philosophy − not least on realism and truth -- seems to be written in the tacit hope of discursively muddling through, uncontrolled by any clear methodological constraints...We who classify ourselves as ‘analytic philosophers’ tend to fall into the assumption that our allegiance automatically confers on us methodological virtue." (11; see also p. 4)

I much prefer searching self-criticism than kicking the outsider. So, I was about to start really liking Williamson. But it turns out, Williamson is not above kicking down. For the very same passage continues: "within the analytic tradition many philosophers use arguments only to the extent that most ‘continental’ philosophers do: some kind of inferential movement is observ able, but it lacks the clear articulation into premises and conclusion and the explicitness about the form of the inference that much good philosophy achieves." (11) Okay, so the point is: most analytical philosophers think they are superior in philosophical virtue to continental philosophers, but they are as bad as the legitimately despised continental philosophers.  Yes, in context Williamson says he is deploying "crude stereotypes," but he is not disowning the stereotype about continental philosophy! (Cf. "Much even of analytic philosophy moves too fast in its haste to reach the sexy bits." (15; emphasis added--ES)) The main point of Williamson's piece is to double-down on the stereotypical virtues of analytical philosophy: "precision" and "rigour" (15), and to do so in opposition to the despised 'other.' In fact, the un-argued hostility toward Kant, which I noticed yesterday, is a trope in Williamson: "if we aim to be rigorous, we cannot expect to sound like Heraclitus, or even Kant: we have to sacrifice the stereotype of depth." (15; logically that allows Kant to rigerous, of course, but if you sound like Kant, etc...) [Doubling-down is not the whole story, but about that more tomorrow.]

Against Williamson's anti-grand-narrative

The usual stories about the history of twentieth-century philosophy fail to fit much of the liveliest, exactest, and most creative achievements of the final third of that century: the revival of metaphysical theorizing, realist in spirit, often speculative, often commonsensical, associated with Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Kit Fine, Peter van Inwagen, David Armstrong, and many others: work that has, to cite just one example, made it anachronistic to dismiss essentialism as anachronistic. On the traditional grand narrative schemes in the history of philosophy, this activity must be a throwback to pre-Kantian metaphysics. It ought not to be happening; but it is. Many of those who practice it happily acknowledge its continuity with traditional metaphysics; appeals to the authority of Kant, or history, ring hollow, for they are unbacked by any argument that withstood the test of recent time.--Timothy Williamson (2004).

Philosophy is not easy.

Judging where 'we' are 'in' philosophy's development is also not easy. The twenty-year data-set (1993-2013) deployed by Healy (here and here) cover much of my time in philosophy. My progress through the discipline (Tufts BA, Chicago PhD, Wesleyan, WashU) meant that until I arrived at Syracuse in 2005, I was oblivious about the dominance of David Lewis. Obviously, I had read some Kripke and Lewis along the way; if my memory doesn't deceive me, Van Inwagen had visited Tufts to give a lecture, and, while I found him impressive, I had thought Dennett had gotten the better of the exchange. Ever since 2005 I have been playing catch-up on recent metaphysics (which I adore). I have been taking comfort from the fact that around the same time even Brian Leiter missed how significant Lewis's legacy was radically reshaping philosophy. For Lewis and the "wave of "old-fashioned" metaphysical theorizing," (Leiter: 6) he inspired is, in fact, a very minor presence in Leiter's entertaining volume (2004) The Future For Philosophy, from which I quoted Williamson above (recall my post, and Mohan's).

Spotting self-serving narrative is easier. Here's a formula: when folk that pride themselves on "logical rigour and semantic sophistication," (Williamson: 128) trot out metaphors ("the test of recent time"), you have a good chance of being served disciplinary-boundary-engendering myth. Above Williamson implies that somehow (Kantian) arguments against metaphysics were shown wanting (by argument). Williamson does not even provide a pro forma reference to an authoritative place where metaphysics was made safe from Kantian criticism. Given that it would be surprising if the Wykeham Professor of Logic were merely bluffing, I welcome suggestions from readers that can direct me to the appropriate place where I can find a decisive refutation of transcendental idealism (say, as reformulated by Langton or Allison).

a cursory defense of LEMM as "core analytic" philosophy

Yesterday Roberta Millstein (HERE) raised the question of why the H4 journals  (Nous, Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and Mind) have such a central place in the pantheon of analytic philosophy. While I am convinced by her that it is misleading at best to refer to these as "generalist journals," I am not convinced that this should undermine their centrality.

I think that any journal in analytic philosophy with the H4 level of centrality will of necessity privilege Language, Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Mind. This is because if ones philosophical practice presupposes (independent of whether one takes the presupposition to be true as a philosophical proposition!) a strong distinction between form and content, then following asymmetry holds.

All areas of philosophy will have to make linguistic, epistemic, conceptual, and metaphysical presuppositions relevant to the truth of their claims. But if form is independent of content in certain ways, this dependency is asymmetric. For example, aesthetic presuppositions might render a philosophical paper more or less fun to read, but would not be relevant to the truth of the claims (it's not anti-symmetric, because the paper might be on the metaphysics of beauty).

So LEMM is "core analytic" precisely because all analytic philosophy is asymmetrically dependent upon it.

I should note that at the end of the day I don't think that form and content are seperable in the way I presuppose that they are in the way I conduct my research. However, I think that the false presupposition is a necessary fiction for the proper unfolding of the dialectic (or rather that there need to be institutions in science (Fichtean sense of "science" here) generally where much of the work makes the presupposition).

This is also why I am not looking for some kind of Hegelian synthesis between analytic and continental philosophy (even though there is massive overlap with respect to individual works; see this related post, for what I take to be distinctive of continental philosophy as a practice), but still think that that we must learn from one another. But this is the subject for other posts. Here I just wanted to defend the centrality of LEMM to analytic philosophy.

Bob Newhart on Leiter's "party line continentals" shenaningans

Leiter picking at Graham Harman again HERE (Harman's response HERE). Neither leave comments open.

Leiter links to an earlier post on "party line continentals," which he defines in this manner: 

For sake of clarity and accuracy, we should really call this sociological phenomenon "Party Line Continentalism" since what it actually picks out is a political effort to enforce a certain philosophical orthodoxy, namely, that which arises from a conception of philosophy and its methods that is largely fixed by Heideggerian phenomenology and developments in mostly French philosophy that involve reactions to Heidegger (such as Derrida, but not only him).

Readers of Ferry and Renault's La Pensée 68 (translated into English as French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Anti-Humanism) will recognize this immediately. Ferry and Renault characterize each soixante-huitard as "Heidegger +" someone else (e.g. Foucault is "Heidegger + Nietzsche," Bourdieu is "Heidegger + Marx," and Derrida is "Heidegger + Derrida's style"), and like Leiter describe it in conspiratorial terms.

I have no idea how fair Ferry and Renault were. What's more relevant here is that their book came out during the Reagen administration! And, no matter how you voted back then, basic fairness should lead you to admit that quite a bit has changed.

In particular, since many of the other  Baby Boomer culture wars seem to be winding down with the forces of truth and beauty winning, can we please just do the same with this one?

I'm very serious.

One thing Adrian Johnston and I have in common is that we were both undergraduates at the University of Texas during the enviable time when the Iowa metaphysicians (Herbert Hochberg, Edwin Allaire) and Sellarsians (in particular, Johanna Seibt, who taught a class on Hegel's Phenomenology while I was there) had an excellent rapproachment with continental philosophers such as Douglas Kellner, Kelly Oliver, Kathleen Higgens, Lewis Mackie,  and Robert Solomon. This spirit of rapproachment at least set the tone for the undergraduates and graduate students there at the time. Even though U.T. is still a great department, for those of us that germinated in that enviornment (especially Mackie's grad. students after he died), it was somewhat traumatic as the academic versions of the late eighties culture wars proved to be so destructive to the pluralism that in part made the place such a fertile place to think (Kellner touches on it in this interview). 

With respect to Leiter's fervent efforts to keep alive the Ferry-Renault critique, I should just say that as an analytic philosopher (there are symbols in my papers) who has been to one SPEP and two continental conferences now, I call shenanigans.

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.).