New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

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:

Stebbing Vindicated: on technical expertise as a criterion in being the useful subject of attention

Mohan wrote a useful follow up to my post on the unjustly forgotten Susan Stebbing. Before I get to the core of my response to Mohan's post I want to prevent a potential confusion. Mohan suggests  "it is a pity that historians of analytic philosophy don’t give her more airtime." Well, as some commentators on my post noted, historians of analytic philosophy DO write about Stebbing (and this is how I explained how I came to know of her work). My claim is, rather, that even if we leave aside Stebbing's fascinating treatment of Spinoza, reading Stebbing can be instructive to us (by which I mean professional philosophers today): (i) by reminding us that not all early analytic philosophy was fundamentally anti-Metaphysical; following up the work of Moore and Wisdom (etc), Stebbing is developing and theorizing the tools of analysis in order to offer a distinctly analytic account of metaphysics; (ii) I call it distinctly analytic because it anticipates in rudimentary and non-trivial ways the orientation of the program of David Lewis.  (Of course, I don't want to overstate the claim--modality is not driving Stebbing's approach.) This matters even if there is no line of influence. (iii) Stebbing's understanding of the continuity between Bradley and Russell is a useful corrective to a lot of narratives within the disipline. 

By contrast, Mohan claims that Stebbing's "lack of technical expertise in the key tropes of analytic philosophy (Russell's theory of descriptions, no less) meant that it was not very useful for later generations to read her work." At the end of this post I say something about the criterion that Mohan applies here. Now Mohan offers a bunch of examples of Stebbing's lack of "technical expertise." Dan Kervick has usefully challenged Mohan's examples. Now while I have a healthy admiration for Mohan's technical chops (around NewAPPS I am among the techno-ignoramuses), I want to develop Kervick's points a bit. I do so in reverse order (because all my comments turn, in part, on what Stebbing means by "refer.") Mohan writes:

Susan Stebbing: The History of Metaphysics at the Dawn of Analytic Philosophy

From this point of view metaphysicians are apt to seek for an indubitable datum. Descartes, for example, saw clearly the need for such a datum. Whatever one may think of the success of his efforts, it will probably be admitted that his procedure was correct provided that the aim of metaphysics be to provide reasons for our commonsense beliefs. Curiously enough, it is Descartes, rather than Spinoza who has shown most clearly the futility of a constructed system. Spinoza, so it seems to me, used the form of a deductive system in order to exhibit his vision of the universe. I see no reason why he should be dismayed by the charge of circularity; there is no reason why he should not wrap up in his definitions and axioms all that he desired to bring forth from them. For Descartes, however, such a charge, if it could be substantiated, would be fatal.--Susan Stebbing (69).

One of the great scandals of analytic philosophy is our utter ignorance of our history. Long after my  graduate education I encountered Susan Stebbing´s name for the first time in Mike Beany´s writings on early analytic. (But don't try looking for Stebbing in Soames.) Stebbing (1885 – 1943) was a crucial organizational figure in the movement (she helped found Analysis, brought Carnap to Cambridge for the first time, etc) and important popularizer. (Stebbing is useful to those who wish to tell an alternative to my stories (and here) about Ernest Nagel as Prophet of Analytic Philosophy.) Even so, here I focus on her because she was arguably the first significant theorist of analytic philosophy and the method proper to it. In particular, it is astonishing that Stebbing's (1932) master-piece, "The Method of Analysis in Metaphysics," was (I believe) never properly anthologized in the early readers of analytic philosophy.

Now, Stebbing (and her critic, Max Black) worked hard at explicating what the technique and method of philosophical analysis amounts to. What is crucial is that long before Strawson, Benardete, and Kripke-Lewis, a pre-eminent analytic philosopher had articulated (on the basis of deep reflection on Russell and Moore) how one should think about the marriage of analytic philosophy and metaphysics, which according to Stebbing "is a systematic study concerned to show what is the structure of the facts in the world to which reference is made, with varying degrees of indirectness, whenever a true statement is made." (65) For Stebbing metaphysical analysis had a direction toward the precise understanding of absolutely simple elements (that are taken to exist). Now Stebbing insisted on a distinction between logical analysis and metaphysical analysis. Black denied the distinction and offered a deflationary model for philosophy, which is primarily interested in the "structure of sentences rather than with fact." (258) Black seems to have won the day initially (although I think he misunderstands Stebbings position as uncovering facts rather than the structure of facts), but either way from our post-Lewisian vantage point, Stebbing seems most prescient. (Black ridicules the very idea of an analysist being able to describe basic facts.) We can understand Lewis' natural properties as giving Stebbing her cake (Lewis and Stebbing share a deep respect for common sense and natural science) with little loss of...ahum...simplicity. 

The “Claudine Tiercelin Affair” Part I: Philosophical Nationalism at the rue d’Ulm, an Open Letter from Jacques Bouveresse to Le Nouvel Observateur

[Note: This is the first of four guest posts by Mark Ohm. ]

Here is one of four follow-ups to Jon Cogburn’s link to the translation of Raphaël Millière’s wonderful essay on the recent history of analytic and continental metaphysics. As I will be writing my Master’s thesis on the revival of metaphysics in France, in addition to being committed to and proposing a number of translation projects over the next few years (including translating and editing the ATMOC mirror site), I thought that I’d share with non-Francophone readers a rather disturbing exchange that took place last summer in France, which Millière refers to in notes 154 and 157 of his essay.

For lack of a better term, I will call this the “Claudine Tiercelin Affair.” I do so not in order to project the clichéd image of France as a place that feeds on polemics and scandal, but rather because I believe that the letter, article, blog post, and interview are relevant to the numerous (and sometimes heated) discussions on New APPS and in the philosophical community more broadly over the past few years apropos the divide, sexism in the profession, the pluralist’s guide, the PGR, and, more recently and particularly, Cogburn’s posts on unearned contempt and monolingualism in the profession (or what might translate into what Bouveresse calls “philosophical nationalism”).

Before sharing Bouveresse's letter let me provide some background on Tiercelin and what prompted Bouveresse's letter.

Translation of Raphaël Millière's "La métaphysique aujourd’hui et demain" ("Metaphysics Today and Tomorrow")

Translation (by Mark Ohm, with the assistance of Leah Orth, me, and Emily Beck Cogburn) HERE.

The paper is Millière's inaugural piece for the Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines. Anyone interested in the history of metaphysics and anti-metaphysics in continental philosophy (as well as contemporary accounts of what exactly metaphysics and ontology are) will need to read Millière's canonical discussion.*

It's a very weird sensation when something you helped to translate ends up being much better English language philosophical prose than anything you've ever penned yourself.

[*The whole ATMOC project is a philosophical gem. Millière's piece is the first publication that we've translated as part of our putting up an English language mirror site HERE. This is just the very beginning of an on-going anglo-continental metaphysics collaboration, since ATMOC will start up again next spring when Millière is back from NYU.]

why did "phenomonology" start to be seen as anti-metaphysical? some hypotheses.

The folks at the ATMOC mirror site (shout out to Mark Ohm, Leah Orth, and Emily Beck Cogburn) are almost finished with our translation of Raphaël Millière's inaugural lecture.

It's a fascinating piece that would serve as an excellent first reading in an upper level undergraduate or graduate level survey course in metaphysics. One of the many interesting things in it is the discussion of anti-metaphysics movements and arguments in analytical and continental philosophy.  If one patiently examines the history of these, then many of the standard comicbook views just fall away.

The weirdest thing is that contemporary anti-metaphysical phenomenologists such as Janicaud in some ways have far more in common with early analytic philosophers such as the logical positivists, and perhaps even more so with the first generation of post-positivists such as Quine and Strawson, than they do with early phenomenologists such as Father van Breda, the founder of the Husserl archives at Lueven [the ATMOC mirror site is currently translating parts of a fascinating conference that includes a discussion between van Breda and Strawson; I'll post on that next week].

Metaphysics is alive and well and living in Paris (English language mirror site of the Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines)

[Note: In this rather long-winded post I take way too long to get to the punchline. So let me first just say that my students Mark Ohm and Leah Orth, with help from me and my wife Emily, are putting up an English language mirror site of the Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines (please check out our translation of the Introduction to the Workshop to get an idea of what's going on). As we post translations of each paper or discussion, I'll do a post here at NewApps linking to it and describing the content. Now on to the long-windedness.]

Readers of this blog know of my worry that two factors systematically distort Americans interaction with non-American philosophy: (1) the effective monolingualism of the overwhelming majority of students in American philosophy classrooms, and (2) the fact that it is books that are translated.

On Fashionable Ghosts--what if philosophic trends just are fashions...

A few months ago Matti Eklund published the following: "The research program isn’t abandoned simply on the ground that seemingly compelling arguments against its fundamental assumptions are presented. Rather, it is abandoned when research conducted within its confines is no longer seen as fruitful, and when a new alternative, with some promise of success, is available." It provoked a response by me in which a I suggested that the combination of (i) viewing philosophy as normal science (PANS) and (ii) viewing philosophical "trends" as "inevitable" changes in fashion was toxic. In particular, if (i) and (ii) are true then institutional power plays an out-sized role in philosophy, yet (i) and (ii) don't leave much room to even mention power: for PANS assumes that ruling ideas just are best supported and (ii) assumes that things could not have been otherwise and (given that ought implies can) nobody is required to do anything to change our situation. As I suggested in my response to Eklund, PANS promotes the idea that one can safely ignore even well-founded arguments from sociological outsiders. (Mohan was underwhelmed; recall my response.)

Yesterday, while reading this fascinating review of a book-length defense of ordinary language philosophy, I was haunted by the thought that Eklund got it right. For example, as a graduate student I was very unimpressed by ordinary language philosophy (OLP), which I found not only too driven by pumping of intuitions of upper-class native English speakers -- and their wannabe emulators -- but also completely irrelevant to anything worth thinking about. (It also seemed to me to have been made irrelevant by progress in linguistic science.) But in recent years I have started to wonder if one of its main assumptions, the denial that it is "possible to identify or form ultimate meanings associated with the various words or expressions" isn't...(ahum) true (in a deflationary sense, of course).

Now, I was primed for my renewed concern about the role of fashion in philosophy by a recent read of Huw Price's reflection on the Carnap/Quine debate, "that metaphysics is as dead, or at least deflated, as Carnap left it." As Price (the Bertrand Russell Professor at Cambridge) explains:

Necessarily Grateful! Kvetching about Kripke-mania

This brilliantly written review has been annoying me since it appeared on NDPR. I am not sure why; maybe it shouldn't. The review opens with a cute argument:

If Kripke did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. If it were necessary to invent K, it would be possible to invent K. If K could be invented by J, and K innovated I, then J could have innovated I. For most ideas, I, recounted or reappraised in this first-rate collection of original essays on Kripke's philosophical work: only K could have innovated I. Therefore, in case you weren't sure: Kripke exists. Thank God.

It ends with a quote from Mark Richard (not the reviewer): "thanks to Saul Kripke for providing a model of how philosophy can be rigorous and accessible, genuinely significant and still fun."

Gratitude to our intellectual leaders, who do indeed provide us with models to emulate, is an important, under-appreciated virtue in contemporary philosophy. So it is nice to see it made so central to this review, which is usefully critical in other respects. (But why gratitude to God?) Yet, here is an axiom in the logic of assertion: if you need to keep saying that something is "genuinely significant," it necessarily isn't. (Repeat exercise for "still fun," "rigorous," and "accessible.")

The problematic premise in Burgess's little opening argument is, of course, "only K could have innovated I." Maybe this is true in some distant world where K becomes self-same with God/Substance (etc), but it is not true of mere mortals--unless, of course, I is part of an entirely idiosyncratic if not mad game. We can recognize this brute fact while appreciating Kripke's genuine achievements in modal logic and philosophy of language.

Billy Joel is the patron saint of the analytic/continental divide

I think the worst thing that the analytic/continental split does to philosophical education is propagate unearned contempt among students.

For example I still rememember taking a class around fifteen years ago where the professor apropos nothing brought a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time to class and just read random passages while making faces. The rest of us laughed, wallowing in the joy of a contempt we had done nothing to earn.

But this happens in the other direction too, where kids into continental philosophy feel confident dismissing out of hand some very non-trivial percentage of post World War II English language philosophy. And it's just a s spiritually corrosive.

Now here's the strange thing. In his penetrating essay on Billy Joel,* Slate culture critic Ron Rosenbaum delves into the nature of this corruption..

Repetition

"Say something once, why say it again?" - Talking Heads

At this international Deleuze conference in Kaifeng, China, organized by Paul Patton, I explored the important influence of Hume in Deleuze's own efforts to develop an understanding of repetition. I'll now rework it in preparation for this big event in New Orleans.

Hume's influence is apparent from the very first sentence of the second chapter of Difference and Repetition, “Repetition for Itself,” where Deleuze begins with the Humean problematic, and with what Deleuze calls the “famous thesis” that was the result of Hume’s efforts to address this problem. As Deleuze states the thesis, “Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it…”

As Deleuze sets forth the problem Hume is addressing, we are confronted with a repetitive series, AB, AB, AB, AB, and when we are next presented with A the problem is one of accounting for why we come to expect B when there is nothing in the nature of A itself that would lead us to this expectation. As Hume famously presents the problem in the Treatise (1.3.14), we come after a series of repetitions of AB to have the “idea of a cause and effect, of a necessary connexion of power, of force, of energy, and of efficacy” (T 162). 

The question is why? And this is where Hume's famous thesis enters the picture.

Philosophic Prophecy

“A man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.”—Walden.

"The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world"—Wallace Stevens

I want to try again at characterizing philosophic prophecy (recall here, here). I introduce the concept, first, by explaining how it relates to two other better known concepts -- the so-called “self-fulfilling prophecy” and the “self-refuting prediction” -- to which it bears a close family resemblance. Then I give a list of ten characteristics of philosophic prophecy (with references to texts that instantiate these). I conclude by contrasting philosophic prophecy to so-called “Noble lies” and “Straussian esoteric readings” with which it can be easily mixed up.

According to the famous sociologist of science, Robert K. Merton, “

“The self-fulfilling prophecy” is “in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true. This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning.” Robert Merton.

By contrast, self-refuting predictions start out as a true description of the situation that evokes behavior that makes the originally true conception eventually come out false. Self-fulfilling prophesies and self-refuting predictions take it for granted that publicly expressed ideas can have a meaningful effect on the world. In particular, their impact can change the truth-functional status of descriptions of the world. Of course, not all utterances are like this. Planetary orbits are generally not meaningfully impacted by the claims we make about them (although that could change). Even in the social sciences there is a class of theorems that show that there are successful, non-trivial predictions that need not change the underlying system. Let’s leave aside writings that do not impact the subject-matter of which they speak.

Here I focus on a further class of writings that can impact the world. Philosophic prophecies are structurally akin to self-fulfilling prophecies except that they take a merely possible, even improbable conceptualization of a situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original conception come out true, or nearly enough true. To be sure the outcome is a contingent fact, i.e., the existence of a philosophic prophecy is necessary, but not sufficient for an intended outcome.

The next step in crossing the (Analytic-)Continental Divide?

Richard Rorty used to say that every decade or so someone would grandly announce a position or approach that goes beyond the distinction between realism and idealism. As was his wont, Rorty would excitedly digest the new book for a few weeks. But in the end it always slowly dawned on him that the exciting new position beyond realism and idealism was. . . (wait for it) idealism!

Something similar should be said about the history of pronouncements concerning overcoming or going beyond the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy. While such thoughts typically occur in the wake of genuinely important work that brings together aspects of both traditions (Rorty, Margolis, Dreyfus, Wheeler, Shusterman, etc.), it is slowly dawning on me that this promised exciting new paradigm beyond analytic and continental philosophy somehow always ends up being. . . (wait for it) analytic philosophy!

This is why American philosophers should be conversant in other languages

[Note: The following is speculative and not meant to be part of anybody's culture wars. In particular, nothing pejorative about SPEP is intended. If it reads that way, then please point that out in the comments so I can have a chance to explain myself better. Likewise, if your sociological impressions differ from mine, I'd be interested. In particular, when pointing out similarities between European and Analytic philosophical styles, I don't point out that SPEP-type continental philosophy and European philosophy are similar in that both take the history of philosophy much more seriously. But I don't think this affects my main point about the distorting nature of getting philosophy primarily through book translations, as opposed to articles, discussions, and presentations in the original language.]

The Atelier de métaphysique et d'ontologie contemporaines  at the École Normale Supérieure is one of the most interesting things going on now.

The Spinoza-Clarke dispute in Boole (the origins of analytic philosophy, reconsidered)

A few weeks ago, I quoted this line from Russell: "The ethical work of Spinoza, for example, appears to me of the very highest significance, but what is valuable in such work is not any metaphysical theory as to the nature of the world to which it may give rise, nor indeed anything which can be proved or disproved by argument." (On Scientific Method In Philosophy) In commenting on the full passage, I remarked, "Russell systematically defends the beauty and nobility of Spinoza's ethics, but denies it is philosophical for three reasons: (a) Spinoza's metaphysics of substance has been disproved by science. I call such appeal to the authority of science to settle philosophic argument within philosophy, "Newton's Challenge to Philosophy." Russell here echoes eighteenth century Newtonian criticism of Spinoza. Once Spinoza's metaphysics is discredited, (b) Spinoza's ethics is not really founded on or supported by argument, but by feeling (and this is indeed also Russell's view of Bergson) and "maxims." I actually think this reading of Spinoza has a lot going for it (and the significance of maxims is a way in which Spinoza and Smith are connected), but about that some other time. (c) The feeling that Spinoza's ethics promotes is oriented toward practice, and (c*) Russell denies that philosophy is fundamentally concerned with practice, but rather with understanding." In private I wondered why Russell would have thought (b); had he done an analysis of Spinoza's arguments in the Ethics, which (we learn from Monk's biography) he admired greatly, and found them wanting? I doubt he did.

Rather, I suspect Russell remembered chapter 13 (and 14) of Boole's masterpiece, An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854). Elsewhere, Russell credits Boole with having discovered "pure mathematics," or formal logic. (Oddly, Boole is not mentioned by Monk; this neglect is emblematic for a more general problem in the way "early analytic" is treated, but about that some other time more.) Boole writes, "The analysis of its [Spinoza's Ethics'--ES] main argument is extremely difficult, owing not to the complexity of the separate propositions which it involves, but to the use of vague definitions, and of axioms which, through a like defect of clearness, it is perplexing to determine whether we ought to accept or to reject. While the reasoning of Dr. Samuel Clarke is in part verbal, that of Spinoza is so in a much greater degree; and perhaps this is the reason why, to some minds, it has appeared to possess a formal cogency, to which in reality it possesses no just claim." (p. 145) What are these remarks doing in a book that regardless of its limitations from a more recent point of view, invents "pure mathematics"?