Comments on: In praise of plodders

By: Roger

Roger — Sat, 26 Jul 2003 19:38:21 +0000

I think Berlin’s remark can’t be true if, indeed, you read the great philosophers. After all, who was Molyneaux? I doubt one person in a hundred—one person who is philosophically educated—could tell you about the man, but his problem engaged Locke, Condillac, Diderot and in a sense defined the way the senses were talked about in the Enlightenment. Who was Fechner? I know very little about him. But I know about William James, and I know that much of William James’ Psychology is a response to Fechner—as well as various second rate French metaphysicians. Who was Samuel Clarke? Yet the letters he wrote to Leibnitz, and the replies, are one of the classic texts of rationalism. Who was Tarski? Has anybody ever read more than one paper of Tarski’s? And yet we all know Tarski’s position on truth, and it shaped the whole analytic discourse on truth. Actually, the second rate in philosophy has a better chance of being remembered than the second rate in, say, painting. Who remembers who won the academy’s painting contest from which Manet was excluded? Who remembers the minor surrealists—or even the major ones, mostly?

By: Harry

Harry — Sat, 26 Jul 2003 18:29:57 +0000

Thank God Kant never read Berlin. Or Russell for that matter. I agree with Chris on the moons of twin earth. But even the greats sometimes learn from the plodders, who can, themselves, contribute to major projects by being realistic about their own capabilities and turning them to problems that the philosophical community needs productive work on. Since I, too, am a confirmed plodder, I can be accused f special pleading too, and have no response. But most of all I envy nameless.

By: mitch

mitch — Sat, 26 Jul 2003 04:10:12 +0000

See The Sociology of Philosophies by Randall Collins for ideas on this subject.

By: micah

micah — Sat, 26 Jul 2003 03:33:01 +0000

No, naturally I did it for the money.

By: Unlearned Hand

Unlearned Hand — Sat, 26 Jul 2003 01:10:57 +0000

Micah, is that why you came to law school?

By: The Philosophical Cowboy

The Philosophical Cowboy — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 21:08:17 +0000

Those of us of an excessively Wittgensteinian bent might argue that some of the Greatest of Philosophers were the ones who’d gone most spectacularly awry. Cf Frege… (Structure of comments: 1) A young plodder’s view 2) Wittgenstein’s little plodders 3) Plodding and Plodderabilia) A young plodder’s view I left the academy, in part, because of the difficulty of making a sensible contribution. Or, at least, what I’d been doing was really heading that way. It certainly seemed that until a DPhil’s out the way, you’re quite constrained in what you’ve “got” to knock out. I think I had two ideas at the time to work through that would take less than half a thesis to work through, but rather more than you can knock out in a hurry. The need for long incremental contributions (or very short, non-contributory pieces) is a bane for a young plodder… Wittgenstein’s little plodders Of course, in my own little area, there’s been some pretty useful work in bringing out anything resembling a sensible account of Wittgenstein’s views, and, given the diversity of the topics his slips of paper cover, plenty of room for a little plodding. But a lot the debates around philosophy of mind (and language) over the last 50 years, say, seem like a step by trip to sillier and sillier view before the paradigm is abandoned (though there have been some great thought experiments along the way). I think of Central State Materialism et seq, in particular (perhaps unfairly, it’s been a while since I did any real mind) Plodding and plodderabilia However, within a broadly Wittgensteinian perspective, there would still seem to be room for plodders taking a J.L.Austin approach of working though individual (or sharply delineated) concepts. Or correspondingly in critique through limited proposals rather than the grand Ghost in the Machine. Apologies for vagary, arrogant dismissal of approaches, and sheer nonsense…. (PS – not my “real” e-mail address BTW - a pseudonymous private joke)

By: dsquared

dsquared — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 15:26:23 +0000

Ross (and Michael C): Gottlob Frege comes to mind as somebody who was very definitely a second-rater before being turned into a Great Philosopher by becoming a predecessor of Russell.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 14:59:46 +0000

Think of all the philosophers, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, who would not have gotten started on Berlin’s premise.

By: Ross

Ross — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 14:50:56 +0000

Following up on Michael C’s point: As I am not a philosopher, I must ask, Are Great Philosophers born, or are they made? Can a second- or third-rate philosopher develop into or rise up to become a Great Philosopher, or are they destined to toil forever on a lower echelon? Can a Great Philosopher arise out of the tutelage of a lower-rate philosopher? It’s my assumption from this passage (not having read much Berlin) that he believes Great Philosophers are, in essence, born fully formed in their greatness.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 13:50:00 +0000

Philosophy is a form of literature, and second rate philosophers fill the same role as second-rate novelists; they all have their own fans, and they fill in the time while we’re waiting for one of the great ones to bring a book out. I don’t really like Iain Banks, but it beats having to wait another three years for the next Michael Frayn.

By: Chris Bertram

Chris Bertram — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 08:32:15 +0000

Berlin’s is a very romantic conception isn’t it? And as such, the obvious point of comparison is with artists. A romantic might well think (or say, anyway) that a second rate painter or composer was worthless, but that neglects the fact that such people provide the sea in which greatness can swim. The legions of hack renaissance church painters and the many who toiled in “workshop of X” or “school of X” weren’t worthless: they made Giotto or Bellini or Titian possible. Ditto, I suggest for nth rate philosophers. Mind you, a lot of nth rate philosophical writing is a waste of time and wouldn’t exist but for institutional pressures. Listening to people working out the 99th epicycle of the moons of twin earth makes me want to impale my head on a spike.

By: Michael C

Michael C — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 04:11:48 +0000

As someone who is, in all likelihood, one of Berlin’s third-rate philosophers, I can confidently say that our role is: (1) to help others (students mostly) understand just how great the great ones are, and (2) to write the reviews, critical commentaries, and derivative articles that effectively anoint the first-rate ones as first-rate. Seriously, though, philosophy has become more like the sciences, with many competent and intelligent practitioners making piecemeal contributions to the field. If you ask most philosophers who the best philosophers today are, I think you’d get wide disagreement, which suggests that there are many excellent philosophers but because of the professionalization of the field, few great ones. In other words, if there are X number of important philosophical advances to be made wthin any particular era, X is now divided more widely than ever before. Also: Berlin assumes we know which philosophers are great when they are alive and actively writing. Rarely so, I’d guess. So how is any of us to be sure we won’t turn out to have been great, albeit posthumously?

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 02:38:10 +0000

I think the problem is with Berlin’s presuppositions. Why should we measure philosophers by how big a rebellion they create? Why not measure them by the incremental progress they make on a variety of areas? This is a little bit of special pleading on my part, since I’ve never had a revolutionary thought in my life, but I think I’m doing a fair job at helping tidy up loose ends at various places where they appear. Maybe there’ll be a revolution tomorrow and it will turn out the whole structure was useless and whether there are loose ends will be irrelevant. But maybe not. The quote from Berlin reminded me, in a roundabout way, of a cute story Geoff Nunberg tells in Notes from Section Z, a 1996 Topic…Comment column from NLLT. bq. I went once to a syntax-semantics workshop organized as part of a summer program at the University of Urbino. There were only a few of us linguists there, interlopers; the hillsides were thick with Lacanians, poststructuralists, and deconstructionists. I was having lunch under the cypresses with a clutch of semioticists. My friend Patrizia told me she wanted to come to hear our session. I said: “Well, really I don’t think you’d find it very interesting. It’s technical, it’s science.”
“Eh, and you don’t think semiotics is a science?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I guess I think it’s only a science if second-rate researchers can make a contribution to it.”
“Umberto says that science is when you number the paragraphs.”
“It comes to the same thing,” said Umberto.

By: nameless

nameless — Fri, 25 Jul 2003 02:29:35 +0000

Dude. In my universe it is still July.