Surely in Need of Much More Argument

Not sure what the problem is, here. The cited paragraph simply suggests that American philosophy is a whore for the Establishment, trying to rationalize ‘the American Way’ into a World Babbitry.

Not very interesting, probably unjustified and discussed endlessly over cubic miles of student beer.

Hooray for Emerson. Perhaps this can be extended to economics and much of academia.

What was the philosophy of 19th century Imperial Britain? Neo-Kantianism? We need a study of the varieties of academic service to Empire.

If you question analyticity, the terrorists will win.

5:Emerson, I have read your stuff on analytic philosophy and neo-classical economists and journanimalists (don’t remember you in the Theory wars) but have yet to see you connect them all under some neat phrase like, oh, “capitalist running dogs.”

Hell, I don’t even remember if the superstructure is important anymore. All I know is that America gets Reagan/Bush economics and kills a million Iraqis, while the French get August off and universal healthcare. Nobody’s fault or credit, of course, and nothing is connected.

Silly puppets.

“Only the dissident rabble is responding.”

I have been reading too much liberal criticism of neo-classical or neo-liberal economics lately. The trade and globalization wars. I get crazed.

Thank, Mr Berube, for keeping your archives open. I am going back to the long series on Raymond Williams to see if it calms me down.

It will at least keep me away from here for while.

The pre- and post- logical positivists were amazingly different. One of them did multi-media pop writing. I strongly recommend Reisch.

Careful, specialized philosophical policy studies aimed at policymakers would fit within my stereotype of analytic philosophy. The absence of a constructive vision and the emphasis on facts and truths, and the refusal of popular engagement, seem to be the sticking points. (As well as the rejection of normativity.)

I second the call to read Reisch and McCumber. For more good historical research on the history of analytical philosophy, pick up two edited volumes: Ronald Giere & Alan Richardson (eds) ORIGINS OF LOGICAL EMPIRICISM and Gary Hardcastle and Alan Richardson, LOGICAL EMPIRICISM IN NORTH AMERICA.

These give a great deal of insight into the politics of the logical empiricists and the political climates in which they worked.

Both volumes are published by the U. of Minnesota Press and the are commonly referred to as “OLE” and “LENA” which is great inside joke for anyone familiar with Minnesota humor.

And, finally, the notion that the positivists were in service to the state and the “contintental” philosophy provides a useful basis to critique the state is hard to square with the historical record. The positivists (Carnap, Neurath, Reichenbach) all fled for their lives from Hitler. Heidegger stayed and found life pretty comfortable under Hitler.

It weren’t me!
But considering how much time Brian spends promulgating the pure reason of academic status-seeking and social-climbing I think he should lay off the diatribes. The defense of intellectual professionalization is conservative on its face. It’s hypertrophied foundationalism; the foundation being not an idea as such but the social structure that underlies that idea. Is anyone going to tell me that discussion of angels and pinheads had no relation to church ideology, or that pure formalism does not hide a politics, or an anti-politics? Derrida began and ended with absurdity, or at least failure, though Americans tried to turn even that into success[!?].

This might be a good time for me to segue into a discussion of Tomasky’s piece in the NYRB. That really is a pathetic piece of work. The democrat’s mistake: they’re too pure for this world.

I’d more or less agree with all of what Harry says, but would add that Reisch is good, McCumber much less so. And also that Emerson, while amusing at times, often talks out of his ass about things he poorly understands and that this is one of the cases. (I guess that’s also part of what Harry was saying but in a nicer way. He’s really much nicer than I am.)

I think Leiter’s probably overstating the case (to say the least), but I would guess that his asserting that analytic philosophy doesn’t exist is in analogy with the retorts for many years that postmodernist philosophy doesn’t exist. Anglo-American philosophers would say (effectively) “Oh, that’s just so much po-mo bullshit”, and the response would be, reasonably enough, that what gets grouped under the umbrella of postmodernism is a whole lot of different ways of thinking and reasoning, or a whole lot of thinkers – Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard etc – which/who disagree on as many points as they agree on.

So perhaps (well I’m sure) all he’s saying is that there’s no monolythic discipline of analyic philosophy. I don’t know that I agree, mind you.
Am I missing something? This seems pretty obvious from reading his other posts.

Does “technical” philosophy exist?
That’s the more important question.
Leiter would say yes.

…while saying that philosophy is not science.

No idea how he manages to do that; smoke and mirrors I guess.

One sense is in which analytic philosophy doesn’t exist is that the styles of inquiry that goes on in departments that style themselves analytic are so disparate that we, quite literally, have trouble talking to one another. Philosophy of science is splintering: as some now do philosophy of physics or biology seriously, you need PhD level knowledge of the relevant science. Naturally, someone who works on moral psychology doesn’t know what you’re on about. Philosophy of mind is splintering, so that as some now do it you need a serious education in cognitive science. Logic went this way long ago. Meanwhile, analytic philosophers continue to do dead Greeks, and rationalism/empiricism; some now do Chinese and Indian philosophy seriously. And some – Brian Leiter is a case in point – do figures that were once the preserve of the continentals. The normative parts of philosophy themselves are splintered: compare say Stephen Stich on morality to John McDowell.

It is very easy to say what all analytic philosophers have in common, as some of the commentators do above (naming no names), especially when you haven’t read any of it seriously that is later than 1970. It’s worth noting that logical positivism has about as much influence on analytic philosophy as does Hegel (arguably less).

I won’t cry if someone names my name, Neil. I even survived being told I’m talking out of my ass.

The diversity you mention proves nothing. As I said, that’s the way you prove there’s no such thing as a species.

The model is proliferation followed by decimation followed by proliferation. Starting about 1940 or so certain tendencies (including logical positivism) became increasingly dominant in American philosophy at the expense (decimation) of all other tendencies. Once these tendencies became dominant they diversified (proliferated). The newly proliferated discipline was diverse, but there were types of philosophy not present because of the earlier decimation. There are certain common traits beneath the diversity traceable to the ancestral schools of 1940 or 1950. (The fact that these schools are also extinct is irrelevant; they left descendents, whereas the decimated schools didn’t).

Implicit in my attacks on analytic philosophy is a belief that it would have been better if some of the decimated schools had survived and had left descendants. Above all I think that the narrowing of range characteristic of analytic philosophy was unfortunate. I agree with Harry B above about normativity. I also think that projective (rather than purely descriptive) philosophy should be pursued, and that philosophy should serve a larger audience than just philosophers.

None of this necessarily means that I have any very strong interest in pomo or continental philosophy.

Neil, Chinese philosophy is my area of greatest interest and expertise (I’ve actually published on it), and while I’ve read analytic work on Chinese philosophy, I find it to be wretchedly bad. Analytic philosophers find seeming matches between some Chinese philosopher and some analytic theme, and write from there. They really don’t seem to have much concern for what the Chinese philosophers were trying to do.

Where are these easy-to-find data? I’m willing to have my mind changed. Someone else tolf me differently.

Demographically, there are not a lot of tenure-track jobs, and there are a lot of PhD-granting institutions. The big schools brag a lot about how good their placement is.

And for the record, I wouldn’t root out and destroy every scrap of rigor I found anywhere. I’d just realize that if I was going to work on an ambitious scale, it couldn’t all be as tightly argued as Quine or whomever.

(“Quine? Quine is tightly argued? Emerson shows once again that he knows **nothing** about philosophy!”)

As I said, that’s the way you prove there’s no such thing as a species.

But you can refute those who claim this by pointing out the important similarities that bind a species together. So what similarities exist that bind analytic philosophers together? My impression is that these similarities are getting less and less significant.

And if you think philosophy should be important to non-philosophers, then po-mo and continental philosophy are definitely out.

Here’s another interesting tangent. What’s the relation of the armed forces to the civilian leadership? If the soldiers are technicians, the suits are the philosophers. And what happens when things get confused?.

Philosophy like politics is comparative. “Expertise” is problematic, if not in fact, dangerous. Brian Leiter is friend and defender of Richard Posner, and both defend experts over amateurs and generalists. Both defend “technical” knowledge and expertise as wisdom. But I would not ask a philosopher of automobile mechanics for his objective opinions on public public transportation policy. He would not have one. So responding to Neil, if philosophy has become atomized, is it not therefore weakened? Posner can’t think of man outside the categories he has created. Tomasky [and man is he not alone in this!] can’t think of politics outside of the categories he has grown up with, which are those of American exceptionalism and the American intellectual’s capacity for “reason.”
What Tomasky describes is the experts’ failure to communicate with and contempt for the masses. That is what Posner and Leiter describe. That’s what the experts of the military say when they overthrow their civilian leadership: “Let the experts take control!”

Experts are the new reactionaries. And amateurs are the only ones left observant enough to notice.
Stewart and Colbert are amateurs too.

Okay John. Nearly every philosophy grad department now lists their placement data on their web page. (there are a few odd exceptions, such as Chicago.) I have looked at all of this. Why? Because I’m interested in such things and since I don’t have a TV I have to find something else to do to waste my time. You could do this too if you wanted but you’d rather just make things up. If you did it you’d see that you’re full of crap here. You also could go to Leiter’s page and look at the last two years of placement data and see that you’re full of crap. But you don’t want to do that. This is what makes me think you’re not actually interested in knowing anything here but rather just is repeating nonsense based on old bad ideas that you’ve had. This sort of thing is common from you, unfortunately. All of the philosophers reading this know you’re full of crap of this subject but others may not which is why I bother to spend time on it. Please, stop just making stuff up.

If this were the first time you’d made stuff up on this topic I’d be more sypathetic, John, but it’s not. See, for example, your claim that ethics isn’t valued at top departments in an earlier thread. It’s quite clear that you don’t know what you’re talking about regarding philosophy as it’s done in philosophy departments today. (Harry seemed to me to say exactly that.)

The flaw that John identifies in Chinese philosophy does seem like a common one amongst today’s analytic philosophers, and it’s noticable to the non-expert. A top tier philosophy journal recently published an article on 14th century Islamic political thought by a well regarded young scholar. Cool. And it is interesting, but it’s frustrating, because he feels it necessary to try to put all this stuff in conversation with Rawls (ie, could it fit with Rawls’ concept of political liberalism). It seems a bit forced, and a distraction from taking those thinkers seriously on their own terms. In my limited experience, this is a trend when analytic philosophers take on non-Western philosophy.

Analytic philosophy contributes to reinforcing existing power structures and modes of thinking by taking for granted the validity and universality of common intuitions and presuppositions, while making no attempt to inquire into their ground, trace them historically, examine their social effects, etc. It is analytical – so it says for example “we generally think of action in terms of agency, the subject, etc, now let’s try to give that some more structure.” But it is only ever “let’s formalize what we already think is true”, with the same basic ontology and terms always at work. Certain broad conceptions of truth, philosophy, inquiry, what language is available, what methods are legitimate, etc are at work in analytic philosophy, but never articulated explicitly, since bringing those horizons to the fore would open the way for alternate possibilities.

I’m pretty sure analytic philosophy does exist too. At least in Turkey.

Analytic philosophers, on the other hand, are mostly just logical constructions out of sense data.

The only time we have reason we have to believe that they exist (as opposed to being merely an empirically adequate explanation of the existence of analytic philosophy) is when they are buying their round at the bar.

On such occasions they tend to be a fairly empirically inadequate. So on those occasions we should take claims about their existence as being expressive of belief not acceptance.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bunch of papers to grade for some aspiring logical constructions out of sense data.

‘Analytic philosophy contributes to reinforcing existing power structures and modes of thinking by taking for granted the validity and universality of common intuitions and presuppositions, while making no attempt to inquire into their ground, trace them historically, examine their social effects, etc.’

Funny. Last time I encountered this line of argument, it was in R.M.Hare’s review of Rawls Theory of Justice.

I guess Hare wasn’t any more of an analytic philosopher than Russell.

By the way: could you explain how the work of, say, Peter Singer ‘contributes to reinforcing existing power structures and modes of thinking by taking for granted the validity and universality of common intuitions and presuppositions’. Or Thomas Pogge, for that matter.

Maybe they aren’t analytic philosophers either.

‘it’s frustrating, because he feels it necessary to try to put all this stuff in conversation with Rawls (ie, could it fit with Rawls’ concept of political liberalism). It seems a bit forced, and a distraction from taking those thinkers seriously on their own terms’

Of course, if he’d done that, he’d have been cited as an example of someone doing ‘dry as dust’ historical scholarship with no relevance to contemporary issues. Or of eschewing popular engagement. Or something.

And incidentally, there is a whole academic discipline (with its own journals) devoted to ‘understanding past thinkers in their own terms’. Its called ‘history of ideas’ and it has a bunch of journals of its own. Such as, for example, ‘The Journal of the History of Ideas’.

And believe it or not, there are even people who know the difference between the two disciplines, and read (and even write) and draw inspiration from both.

Its worth knowing some of these things. Personally, I find it frustrating that Maths journals don’t publish much on things like Hobbes’ proof of the trisectability of the angle.

I don’t know anything about philosophy in America or in China, but it seems obvious that in every society there must be at least a branch of philosophy dedicated to legitimating the ruling regime and its ideology. And obviously it’ll be the most or at least one of the most lucrative branches. That’s just common sense; follow the money, status, etc. – that’s where it’ll be.

Right, it’s getting frustrating to hear claims of the sort “analytic philosophy presupposes X without critically examining it” when I have articles arguing against X on my desk.

One way to make sense of “analytic philosophy doesn’t exist” is to say that it’s a comment about essential definition: there’s no finite set of necessary and sufficient conditions that will pick out AP as opposed to “continental philosophy” (CP). And conversely for CP. Simon Glendinning makes this argument for CP in The Idea of Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh UP, 2006), and so do I (shameless self-promotion ahead) in the Preface to A Dictionary of Continental Philosophy (Yale UP, 2006).

But that’s not the end of the story.

1. You might switch to a prototype category theory and say that there are people everyone agrees do AP and everyone agrees do CP, even though there are borderline cases on which people disagree.

2. You might want to shift gears and say that AP and CP exist as sociological networks, that is, as hiring and citation networks.

Ok then. how about the preference for theory over history. Rawls builds a logic out of dreamed-up beginning (a fantasy). The book begins with what is pretty much the last scene of Louis Feuillade’s Barabbas. I had hard time taking the book too seriously after that.

In Rawls individualism and expertise, are foundational. They precede argument. And if you tell me that there are plenty of books in the analytic tradition that criticise individualism (and I’m curious what they’d be) I’d still respond that I’m not going to spend that much time with a book that claims to argue against its own existence; at least one without a sense of irony.

Expertise and professionalism are not curiosity. They may sharpen it or dull it. Find me a recent academic argument that questions the teleological foundaations of either.
And historians are not “experts”

emerson’s probably right about Singer and PETA. I doubt that the millions his textbook has generated for Oxfam have helped anyone much either.

That is, I really think emerson’s right on the PETA point. The second sentence is supposed to be read ironically.

seth, if Rawls were a historian, his preference for theory over history would, sure, be a defect. He was a philosopher. He was trying to come up with a normatively authoritative set of principles concerning the gvoernance of social institutions. History is not completely irrelevant to that task (in his view). But theory is at the core of it.

Individualism. Sure, the theory is individiualist in one sense. But it is a very specific sense, and one that I find almost incontrovertible, and I doubt its the sense in which you mean it.

Unfortunately, I am offline the rest of the day, and probably for a while longer, but I bet there is an entry in the Stanford Online Encyclpedia of Philosophy on individualism that will sort some of this out for you if you care, or you could read the frist 3 chapters of my book Justice if it is to hand….

“Rawls builds a logic out of dreamed-up beginning (a fantasy)”

Unlike, say, Locke or Hobbes or Rousseau or Plato, or, oh wait, they did that too.

Well, I’ll quit trolling. I still stand by my #3, which hasn’t been addressed much.

-“The Original Position” is a fiction. Is A Theory of Justice taken as a theory of fiction? If not why not?

-Someday soon someone will write a biography of a famous historical figure and it will be praised as “The biography of “X” for the 21st century” What does this statement mean? What does it imply about our sense of historical knowledge?

-What is the place of the “law” of non-contradiction for our observation of ourselves? Does it apply? If we make it apply are we clarifying the issues or only simplifying them to make things easier, so we can build models? And what are the limitations of those models?
Generalizations are vulgarizations. We use courts of law and frankly archaic systems of adversarial ethics to guard against assumptions too quick generalizations. Each act is an isolated and unnamed event until it is “named” at the end of trial.
We categorize every new experience by way of a process of recognition. We “recognize” what we’ve never seen before. If we didn’t there would be no continuity and no communication. What does this, and the rule of law imply again about the limits of our “reason”?

The rule of law is not the rule of science. The rule of law is predicated on the impossibility of pure reason.

There is no reason to trust people. Between Enlightenment and Renaissance humanism I’d choose the latter, hands down. And between Plato and Euripides I’d do the same.
Scientists seek calrity and tend towards optimism. The first is not possible and history argues against the second.

Philosophers, even professors of philosophy, who understand the issues listed above I got no problem with. The vast majority of them don’t. The want to be scientists and worse, they pretend to be. The vast majority are nothing but mental engineers. They may as well by automobile mechanics; in a world where most people don’t own cars.
John Searle is right about AI, and Daniel Dennett is a goddam motherfucking idiot.

seth: “”The Original Position” is a fiction. Is A Theory of Justice taken as a theory of fiction? If not why not?”

Frictionless planes and pure vacuums are fictions in this sense, yet I won’t dismiss classical mechanics as a mere ‘science of fiction’, unworthy of further study. This won’t persuade you, of course, because you see a gaping and unbridgeable divide between the mechanics of matter and the workings of the soul.

I take no sides on the impossibility of pure reason. I’m not even sure what it means for pure reason to be impossible – supposing we think reason can be pure in the sense Kant seems to have meant. Even accepting these divisions, we might believe that the terrain of reason, pure and practical, is more variegated and overlapping than you are hinting at here.

On that point, I have more hope than you that practical reason can be theoretical in useful and insightful ways, and so I don’t assume (as I think you may?) that pure reason and theoretical reasoning are essentially synonymous.

Rawls provides one way (contestable, of course) to buttress my hope with principled argument: practical reason can be usefully theoretical without depending on pure reason. Or, alternatively, constructivism in ethics is possible and fruitful.

Your assertions of radical particularism don’t seem to me to really challenge this hope in any deep way, but perhaps I’m too steeped in the dreams of reason?

But just so I’m clear: are you rejecting the possibility of philosophy outright? Can there be no genuine wisdom in an examined life? Is the latter even possible, in your view?

troll on> The fictions of physics have all been accounted for by now. They were not made a permanent part of the theory. The whole science of thermodynamics had to be worked out in order to bring physics into closer contact with reality and get rid of the fictions. /troll>

I’m puzzled by the analytic philosophy doesn’t exist phrase. Is it a joke? It isn’t like this is one of those supersly categories upon which the experts disagree – it is more like, do Big Macs exist. You might not like Big Macs, but if you want to check out the question of their existence, go and look at a menu at McDonalds. Similarly, scroll through your average faculty page on college websites and look for areas of expertise, and dollars to big macs, you will find analytic philosophy listed somewhere by somebody.

As to what constitutes analytic philosophy, how broad it is, its history and themes, there you can argue. The passages quoted by Holland seem like utter tripe to me – first of all, from the point of view that the state or the scientists are going to analytic philosophy in the first place for legitimation. I must have missed that speech of Eisenhower’s when he pulled out the old Quine and read off exciting passages to legitimate his Cold War strategies.

We’ve long passed the time when philosophy gave out licenses like that.
Also, of cours, as a description of what analytic philosophy does or has done, it is vague and suckish.

Look, the issue isn’t whether philosophers are Republicans or Democrats, it’s whether the intellectual assumptions of analytic philosophy support the modernist mindset of social engineering (which can be authoritarian or supposedly “liberatory”). Quoting from a decidedly non-analytic philosopher,

“The world-city has definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless. Henceforward, we might with some justice replace the word “soul” by the word “brain”. And, since in the Western “brain” the will to power, the tyrannical set towards the Future and purpose to organize everybody and everything, demands practical expression, ethics, as it loses touch more and more with its metaphysical past, steadily assumes a social-ethical and social-economic character.”

John, as a matter of fact, I’ve read both of Mirowski’s books about the foundations and history of neo-classical economics. And unless you are doing associative poetry, the relationship between a socialist like Otto Neurath and the Cowles commission is, uh, obscure to non-existent. Michael Polanyi (a conservative) and his brother Karl (a socialist) were both influenced by some analytic philosophers. Good for them. Every thinker, continental and otherwise, with a job in the academy between 1947 – 2007 has benefited from money directed to the universities by the Pentagon.

If the military was expected big things in the way of legitimation from analytic philosophy, well, I think they got rooked on the deal. Wouldn’t be the first time the pentagon paid too much for tools.

Not to blow this whole thing open, but

[start rant]

Leiter’s denial of the existence of analytic philosophy is really cloaking his desire to deny that there is something called Continental Philosophy. If there is nothing that really is Continental Philosophy then Leiter doesn’t have to use information from Continental Philosophers in the PGR. Thus 20th Century Continental Philosophy, 19th Century Continental Philosophy and Feminist Philosophy (which features a number of Continental programs) are all severely under reported. By that I mean that there is a disproportionate number of programs that get one of the two caveats, either inserted by board, or based on previous rankings. Unless one thinks that there are not enough programs to provide an adequate ranking for CCP than it seems as though there is a definite lack of CPs that are being surveyed. Also, coextensive with this is that if Leiter denies that there is such a thing as CP then he can justify having schools like NYU and Brown ranked for 20th C CCP. Who in there right mind would go to NYU for CP? Obviously there are some good people as U of C (Arnold Davidson, etc), but is nothing compared to Stony Brook, which features 10 Continental philosophers. The PGR also manages to exclude very good CP programs like Memphis and Villanova. And to top it all off Leiter frequently makes derisive comments about the SPEP. It seems to me that anyone who does not take the SPEP seriously is in no position to judge either what CP is, or whether it exists.

[end rant]

seth: “If you want to continue this conversation then begin by answering the questions I laid out in my last comment.”

I thought I did – you mean the ones about Rawls as fiction, right? The original position is indeed fictional if you view it as a situation (“we do not suppose the agreement has ever, or indeed ever could actually be entered into. And even if it could, that would make no difference”). If instead you take it as an argument endorsing an understanding of fairness, tailored for free and equal, rational and reasonable parties who don’t necessarily agree on profound moral, religious and philosophical matters, then I think it seems far less fictional, and far more constructive.

Question: “Someday soon someone will write a biography of a famous historical figure and it will be praised as “The biography of “X” for the 21st century” What does this statement mean? What does it imply about our sense of historical knowledge?”

Question:”What is the place of the “law” of non-contradiction for our observation of ourselves? Does it apply? If we make it apply are we clarifying the issues or only simplifying them to make things easier, so we can build models? And what are the limitations of those models?”
Question: “We categorize every new experience by way of a process of recognition. We “recognize” what we’ve never seen before. If we didn’t there would be no continuity and no communication. What does this, and the rule of law imply again about the limits of our ‘reason’?”

And I’ll rewrite something from above so it’s a question rather than a challenge: “The rule of law is not the rule of science. The rule of law is predicated on the impossibility of pure reason.”
What does it mean to say that the a preference for the rule of law is by definition, conservative, or even pessimistic?

You refer to “the examined life.” Euripides it seems to me led more of one than Plato.

“If instead you take it as an argument endorsing an understanding of fairness, tailored for free and equal, rational and reasonable parties who don’t necessarily agree on profound moral, religious and philosophical matters, then I think it seems far less fictional, and far more constructive.”

…and then we’ll reach the end of history, and we’ll all be eating cake for breakfast. I’d call it a nice plan but it’s not even that. It’s a conceptual home run, but that’s not gonna get us even to first base.
I made a series of observations about the relations of expertise to democracy. No one’s responded. I made a few observations about the tendency of experts to construct a teleology around their expertise to the exclusion of others’ and of objects and events that don’t fit, and again, no response.
In a world where Michael Tomasky can write about the intellectual and moral seriousness of American liberals while 3/4 of the world thinks those liberals are deluded idiots, what am I supposed to think of rationalist discourse? What’s the liberal American discourse concerning the Mideast or health insurance compared to say, Sweden? How did Josh Marshall, reasonable and reasoning American, come to name his son for the man who drew of the map for the annexation of the West Bank? This is American liberalism, which ignores 600,000 Iraqi dead and puts up billboards about Darfur. And if you think I’d being hard on Marshall, well Helena Cobban doesn’t get press at TPM Media, and she’s a goddam quaker.
When has humanity’s conscious and conscientious moral awareness ever not been swamped by desire and fantasies of teleology and easy solutions, or simply by greed? Tell me how the “Philosophical Gourmet Report”[sic!] has anything to do with the life of the mind as promulgated through academic philosophy. Doesn’t rationalist epicureanism kind of miss the point? In fact I think Brian is just being honest. In the end he’s a philosopher of sensibility, but he can’t do more than hint at it, since he says he’s the opposite.

The intellectual life is predicated on criticism, which is a function of language. The logic and craft of language are inseparable, and we are swayed as much by hope and cadence as by reason. The attempt to separate criticism from language and link it by means of analogy [a literary trick!] to science was a betrayal both of language and common sense.

The history of modernism will be written as the history of
wishful thinking.

“Wishful Thinking” is the definition of kitsch.

harry b: I think your father was a colleague of my father’s (or possible even his boss) some time during, or shortly after the John Patten years.

I’ve been reading CT for a while, and had been wondering whether you were related to Tim ‘the nutter who goes round frightening children in Birmingham’ Brighouse for a while until you posted the link to a Guardian story which alluded to the famous Patten libel story.

It strikes me that education is one important area where philosophy – including analytic philosophy – can have(and at times has had) a significant, but not necessarily conspicuously visible effect on the ‘real world’. Obviously, I’m probably preaching to the converted here (or, more exactly, preaching to the parson)in saying this to you – but it seems as though that’s a point that has been under-addressed in this thread.

P.S. Gellner thought of himself as a disciple of Popper, though he had no close relationship to him. Popper is an interesting case, because he was there at the founding, but did not follow the rest of the crew in the renunciation of “big picture” philosophy and a political message. His explicit political message (Cold War administrative liberalism) was about the same as the analytic philosophy tacit position, but his being explicit made him persona non grata and Popperians grumble about his neglect in American (though not British) schools. Neutral liberalism is the ideology that dares not speak its name.

Bill 9:42:

You have a lot of energy, but you’re being obtuse.

Animal rights may be effective, but it strikes me as a ludicrous place to begin your political engagement. The biggest animal-righters are supermodels and the like, and significant contact with these people (when they were trying to disrupt or sabotage the medical research facility where I worked, for example) can be very disturbing.

When you said:

But if so, I think this has more to do with differences between the public role of intellectuals in anglophone culture and non-anglophone (specifically francophone) cultures.

you were basically restating my point in slightly different words in the belief that you were refuting me. When I object to the apolitical nature of American philosophy, I am objecting to “the public role of intellectuals [specifically philosophers] in anglophone culture”.

I no longer have any idea what your point was about “analytic philosophy being hard”. It wasn’t a very good one, I would guess.

Because certainly if philosophers (super-bright people with ample leisure and a public voice) have nothing to say about politics, then the average citizen (“orthodontist” in recent discourse) doesn’t.

Huh? If a person is an expert on, say, philosophy of mind, why does their (reasonable) denial that _their professional expertise_ gives them an expertise in _politics_ amount to a claim that they, _qua citizens_ , have “nothing to say about politics”?

Come off it John, you’re bluff has been called by Josh, Loren, Bill the Turk and lots of others, and all we’re hearing from you now is bullshit, obfuscation, moving of the goalposts.

Chris, who has responded to my #3? Josh tried, and I think his response was lame. You can’t just wave things away by saying “genetic fallacy”.

The expert-specialist definition of philosophy is part of what I object to.

I have even heard Velleman (following Dworkin) say that an ethicist normally has no special insight into actual real-world ethical problems. In a debate elsewhere people seemed to be saying that the philosophical study of ethics cannot and should not intend to produce an ethical teaching, but can only describe and analyze the ethical teachings of others. The professionals seemed horrified at the idea that a philosophical student of ethics would normally produce an ethical teaching.

John,
Harry (and others) have mentioned several people who address just the sort of “problem” you think philosophy now has. You’ve apparently not read any of those people but that doesn’t stop you from making broad and sweeping claims. It’s pretty clear that you’re again making crap up. You’re obviously not stupid, so why do it? Please, stop making crap up. It’s an area you don’t know much about. Your ideas are poorly informed and, at best, out of date. Please, move on.

To refer to a biography or work of history as a book “for our time” is a common trope. No one complains about it. And you should wonder what that means.

What is the place of the “law” of non-contradiction for our observation of ourselves?
In the context of American social and political history, are Jews “white?”

“What does it mean to say that the a preference for the rule of law is by definition, conservative, or even pessimistic?
Why are judicial decisions not made by reasonable people, ad hoc?

I usually go off on Donald Davidson and Mallarme at this point.
No one I know thinks Mallarme can be translated. Do you?

I’ll try another one. What’s the difference between “I love you” spoken with soft confidence and in a plaintive whine?
What’s the difference between the statement “I don’t want to kill my father and sleep with my mother” when it’s howled and when it’s merely stated? What the difference to use Freud’s terms, between repression and a condemning judgement?

Isn’t it odd that people should choose to make things: write them or paint them or build them, solely for the purpose of interpretation and reinterpretation? Isn’t the purpose of art, or the fixation of art specifically on those things or moments or events that are both “A” and “Not-A”?

Logic is not philosophy, it is simply logic. It is a tool.
Tools as not philosophies.

“as I understand people just ignore Putnam because he changes his mind so often.”

Umm, no.

“Not being read by non-philosophers seems to be a positive goal.”

Again, wrong for many, perhaps most, philosophers. But, philosophy is often quite technical. Much of the work is professional. It’s hard for people who are not practiced in it to get in to much of the work. But most philosophers are very happy to be read by non philosophers and many work with them all the time. Your ignorance here is astounding.

“Is this a five minute argument or the full half hour?”

Moral philosophy and real world ethical choices

Dworkin does not go so far as to say that a moral philosopher would be wrong to claim to have a moral teaching, or to try to teach a moral teaching, but I’ve hear others argue that.

Look at my various posts. I made a number of specific statements which could be responded to bey something other than huffing and puffing. But you only huffed and puffed.

“Isn’t the purpose of art, or the fixation of art specifically on those things or moments or events that are both “A” and “Not-A”?

So, back in the ’90s I’m at a Magritte exhibit in London, pondering a painting that is helpfully explained to me in the accompanying blurb as exploring “the problem of rain.” Me, I’m thinking: the problem of rain is that the guy is standing in it.

No one’s amused.

But Matt, people have lots of time for me, especially you.

It’s not worth responding to the comment on Magritte. I’m not much of a fan, but that doesn’t matter; your comment says enough for most people to leave off arguing with you.
I do go back and forth however between annoyance at liberalism at claims for logic as philosophy. They’re related not identical. I disagree with one, I despise the other.

mq at 117: characterizing academics this way is a woeful generalization. All one has to do is to cast one’s eyes across the pond to the work of Gadamer’s skepticism of method, be it aesthetic or scientific, to see that there is plenty of protestation against scientism. On this side of the Atlantic I would think that this post is filled by Rorty. As they both held professorships at major universities I think that it is safe to call them academics.
Now obviously both these philosophers stand outside of mainstream analytic philosophy (which, contra Lieter, does exist) so it could be argued that they do not represent a norm that is based in a scientism. I think that this is true and I have little desire to have philosophy ‘solve’ ‘problems.’

Loren, you just don’t read do you?

Funny Seth, I was about to say the same thing (although at least one of us has actually read Rawls carefully – alas, your monads quip sorta gives it away). I am sorry I seem unable to read you properly. I wonder if, like Mallarme, you are simply untranslatable? Or perhaps you merely await your Debussy? I’d pay a buck for that on itunes.

Josh, in the course of hundreds of pages Mirowski and Reisch make quite detailed arguments which I was not able to duplicate in full here. Both negative attacks specifically on philosophy by McCarthy, and positive foundation and military support for certain schools of philosophy and economics were documented.

As I said in #3, Reisch’s book changed my mind about the role of logical positivism specifically. The logical positivists (proto-analytics) often were politically engaged, and one of the McCarthyists (Sidney Hook) was a pragmatist. After the witchhunts everyone was less engaged, and the winners were analytic philosophers.

I’m playing by blog rules, as is everyone here, and not everything I’ve said has been well-grounded, but actually the argument I’m making has substance and does not deserve the scorn it’s received by people astonished to find that not everyone worships their sacred cow.

Just for fun let me cite a remark on the most prestigious of the engaged analytics. I think that it applies to most of the others:

“Although John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971), as well as what many consider to be its ideological and philosophical counterpart, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), could be construed as alluding to or reflecting, or in some way speaking to or about, politics, they were distinctly contextless works written by professional philosophers which lifted the perennial debates about liberalism and the ground of values to a new level of abstraction while apparently allowing academic commentators to believe that they were actually saying something about politics.” (John Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory, Chicago, 1993, pp. 272-3.)

Ok John, obviously I need to read the book. Still, lumping together logical positivism, Hook’s pragmatism, and analytic philosophy in general — and Hook’s own less-than-fully-admirable position on Communists in academia and McCarthyism, which he opposed — doesn’t make me all that optimistic about being convinced by the argument (although I take it that in the case of Hook, you’re just following the common practice of referring to all attacks on alleged Communist sympathisers in the US as McCarthyism. Which is fair enough, though a bit imprecise.)
Anyway, granting for the moment that there’s strong evidence that analytic philosophy’s advance in American academia was aided by the support of the government, and the purging of non-analytic philosophers: I’m still unclear as to how that supports the argument that analytic philosophy, as such, supports the status quo today. That’s what I meant by invoking the idea of the genetic fallacy, which seems to have caused such offense. And fair enough, I should have been clearer. The point is this: saying that at one point X was used for some purpose — or even that X was designed or pursued with some purpose in mind — doesn’t necessarily mean that X need serve, or always will serve, that purpose. (I mean, think of Marx’s turning of classical economics against capitalism, or Augustine’s use of classical Roman rhetoric and political theory to attack the ideal of the Roman Republic — though granted, that’s an equivocal case).
But — you may well be right. All I’m saying is, pointing to the coincidence of analytic philosophy and some sort of ‘Cold War liberalism’, or even showing that one was encouraged by the other, isn’t a slam-dunk argument.

A lot depends on how you feel about contemporary analytic philosophy. I don’t say that AP is reactionary or conservative. Just tending toward centrism and nullity, and generally ineffectual and irrelevant. The insistence on technical language and strong suppression of what used to be called “world view” philosophy, and tendency to avoid popular outreach even when talking about public topics is a lot of what I’m talking about. (Few or none of the general-interest books Harry B named seem to have made out into the non-philosophical community — Nussbaum is probably a good exception, whereas Singer is a bad exception. (Dennett on Steven Jay Gould is pretty mixed.)

In the course of my polemics I’ve come to realize that almost no Anglophone now alive remembers a time when philosophy wasn’t overwhelmingly analytic. I’m 60, and the stuff I became interested was already being phased out when I was an undergrad.

Even though a few established pros get a little more ambitious in their old age, the philosophy that is taught to grad students and to undergrads planning to stay in the field is very constricting, and people in the field now are the ones who accepted or delighted in the narrow philosophy they were taught.

With the rise of analytic philosophy, a lot of people got squeezed out, and we don’t really believe that what happened was simply a matter of truth defeating error. I’m sort of the last of the Mohicans, and when nmy cohort kicks the bucket, no one will remember that philosophy could have been something other than it is.

“Cartel”: Leiter talks about philosophy as though it were a very successful business, success being defined by hirings and rankings. Sorry, his stuff is unseemly.

My view of philosophy is a very common one among people with an interest in non-analytic philosophy who have encountered American philosophy departments. It’s people who don’t think the way I do stay in philosophy, and by the evidence they’re completely unable to understand what the complaint is. I can understand disagreement, but the bafflement I get is offputting.

“A continuation of past practice with as least as much claim to the label “philosophy” as whatever it is that Emerson would prefer to see in its place.”

“At least as much claim” — hardly a ringing endorsement, especially because I’m not trying to destroy analytic philosophy, but to end its monopoly.

I claim that there was a narrowing of philosophy starting about 1940 or 1950. Is that difficult so understand? Analytic philosophers came into dominance by defeating and excluding other forms of philosophy, and they were happy to do so. I would rather have seen a more plural landscape. Are you unaware of the existence of these other, earlier forms which I would have liked to see continuing to develop? Have my statements of what I would like to see in addition been so totally incoherent that you have no idea what I would prefer?

seems to me that all ya’ll haters in this thread really have some very idosynchratic and mutually inconsistent ideas about what philosohy ought to be, despite the common visceral dislike of what it is today. does everyone agree, for example, with john e. that what’s needed are more discussions of “policy proposals”? how about the guy who said that the problem with rawls is that he cared more about ideas than about people? how about all the scientists who think that philosophers don’t pay enough attention to empirical results? how about all the christians who think that philosophers don’t talk enough about god? (those groups apparently don’t read crooked timber, but i can tell you that there are plenty of them.)

man!, no wonder philosophers don’t attract a wider audience. everybody outside of philosophy has such strong opinions about what philosophers ought to be doing with their time.

hardly a ringing endorsement

Well, it’s hard to make comparative claims when I’m not sure what the alternative is. Regardless of whose fault it is, I’m genuinely unclear on what your preferred “plural landscape” is. What makes this a bit frustrating is that you seem to have a very narrow view of what’s included in contemporary (what-gets-called) AP, and, if that view were right, I would be more sympathetic to the idea that a lot of philosophical value has been left out. But what’s done now under the label “analytic philosophy” isn’t as narrow as, say, the sort of thing done in the Frege-Russell-Wittgenstein corpus that’s often taught under the rubric ‘history of analytic philosophy.’

That isn’t to say that the current tent is maximally inclusive. I’m reminded of Railton’s nice line that while the cure for the ills of 18th c. science was to engage in more inquiry along the same lines, the cure for the ills of 18c. philosophy wasn’t simply more of the same.

Oh my! While I hate to get involved in such a learned debate so late in the game, here’s my piss-poor addition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5s5qGg01nE

“How about all the scientists who think that philosophers don’t pay enough attention to empirical results? how about all the christians who think that philosophers don’t talk enough about god?”
Empiricism and god. That’s a good one!
Chomsky and Posner have a lot in common of course, and none of it good.

“I’m sort of the last of the Mohicans, and when my cohort kicks the bucket, no one will remember that philosophy could have been something other than it is.”

John, that’s too much. You take yourself too seriously and give yourself too much credit.
Scholasticism comes and goes. It has its time and then most of it gets forgotten. If one is interested in philosophy because of an interest in the hows and whys and modes of awareness then you’ll search out things that interest you and that you can learn from. “Serious, professional” journalists are angry about the popularity of John Stewart, just as as “serious fine artists” are still angry about movies and popular culture. But Shakespeare was an entertainer and John Stewart has more respect for his audience than Chris Matthews does; so his audience has more respect for him. And he deserves it.
Serious people who are serious about something other than professionalism get the point. Lieberman’s another example of someone who takes himself more seriously than he takes his responsibilities. But moral seriousness is not moral responsibility. Manners are not actions.
Rationalists rationalize and who can stop them?

If you’re interested in engaging with people who engage the world and others in a questionaing “philosophical” manner, read a novel or go to the movie. Read some history. If you’re interested in professional philosophy the odd are those things won’t interrest you; and the odds you’re pretty god damn dull.
About as dull as a your average democratic politician… or Bob Shrum! But wait! Michael Tomasky can teach you how to be popular with people you have no respect for. You can make the rabble like you!
It’s all so god damn pathetic. A book on philosphy would be a book on the rise of a rigorously intellectual secular Islam, the kissing cousin to the secular jewish intellectual tradition. How about the equally new rise of the intellectual Catholic right? Lotta asians in there. Anti-communist family hisoty. I’ll bet you. How about Lars von Trier, Tarantino and the theater of the confidence man?
We await the return of philosopher as critic.

After asking Loren to describe the “authorial voice” in Rawls I realized how odd the request sounded. And then of course I wondered why it should seem odd. That’s an obvious question for any author, inn’t?

Philosophy historically has to do with the relation of ideas to experience, not of ideas to each other. In the long run the stuff that gets remembered will be historicized. The sciences are looked back on as historicized and not, but science fiction, like all words becomes just another part of history. Don’t mourn the death of philosophy, John, any more than the death of “serious” journalism.
Go get your MTV.
Did you hear that Klezmer clarinet riff in that last Shakira song?
The worlds’ still an interesting place.

link

Or how about Zhang Yimou and the Chinese “Hollywood” epic cinema. He’s sure as shit better than David Lean. But of course in this country philosophers and members of the social-scientific academic community think Peter Jackson and George Lucas are geniuses, without really taking them or “entertainment” seriously. It’s just something you do for fun after reading Rawls or Naming and Necessity.

How about “El Laberinto del Fauno,” “Children of Men” (et al.) and the latinization of the culture of el norte? You don’t have to write criticism any more than Aristotle did, but he paid attention. I’m sure you could pull some interesting abstractions out of all this. I can.
And on the crisis and modernization of Islam, I’m not saying anything others aren’t. But again, they’re paying attention. And yes conservative asian american catholics are rising force in the church and in the defense of intellectual conservatism

The choice kiddo, is between loyalty to your categories or to your curiosity. I would be ashamed to choose the former. Americans, even one’s who you’d think are paid to know better, tend to choose what they know, as if it’s all they need to know.

I went out to browse bookstores today. I thought I might pick up something by Quine or Kripke, but I ended up with Joan Didion. We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. Sounds philosophical, don’t ya’think?
david, to answer your question: a half a bottle of wine.

I’m annoyed by people who would describe themselves as being interested in philosophy as such but whose ideas and behavior manifest more than anything else the assumptions and philosophy of professionalism.
Is professionalism a valid philosophy?
It’s the same problem women had trying to explain sexism to men, and you have the same response. There’s less at stake for me than there was and is for women or blacks (or Palestinians) but the issue itself is the same. Can a technical [sic] philosophy respond to these questions. More importantly is a technical philosophy anything more than an act of avoidance them.
Is autism a philosophy or a symptom?

How about a study of popular culture, Star Trek and the “Borg”? Google, Microsoft, Pseudo-Sociability, and the moral imperitives of geekdom: Individualists are all alike.
Doesn’t interest me much but there’s a book there.

“How does philosophy as practiced today systematically warp your possibilities and life chances, though, or say that your life is worth less than others? It doesn’t, does it?”

Why is it about me? I’m not the issue. But yes, the tendency in the humanities towards pseudo or demi-science and the rule of the reason-able and “fair” in the American press have caused real problems. Academic philosophy, Chicago school economics, and the general professionalization of intellectual life are all BAD SHIT!

Your argument is about as perfect example of anti-intellectualism as I could imagine. Just admit that your interests are technical and not intellectual and we’ll leave it at that. I don’t expect people to be intellectuals, and I don’t picks fights with statisticians.

But yes, the tendency in the humanities towards pseudo or demis – science and the rule of the reasonable and “fair” in the American press have caused real problems. Academic philosophy, Chicago school economics, and the general professionalization of intellectual life are all BAD SHIT!

This guy wrote a couple of books about it (or something similar anyway). Though his criticism is not limited to just the US scene.

Saul seems to enjoy grand generalizations. I make them only under duress. And according to one review I read, Voltaire’s Bastard’s has about a page on Edmund Burke. Not a good sign.
On the other hand, yesterday I bought and this afternoon walked around reading The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature.
So far at least Chomsky comes off as a pedant: every argument predicated on what by his account must be.
Foucault comes off well:

[S]o that it won’t be compromised by history, it is necessary not that the truth constitutes itself in history, but only that it reveals itself in it; hidden to men’s eyes, provisionally inaccessible, sitting in the shadows, it will wait to be unveiled. The history of truth would be essentially its delay, its fall or the disappearance of the obstacles which have impeded it until now from coming to light. The historical dimension of knowledge is always negative in relation to the truth.

“The historical dimension of knowledge is always negative in relation to the truth.” Very nice. And it reminds me, since I’m a half assed reader that it’s not the continentals who annoy me so much as their american fans. Manhattan is full of pseudo-bistros and they annoy me too. It would be interesting to do a study of Chomsky’s reception and popularity in Europe, to see how his straightforward moral individualism is altered by European culturalism. There’s what we would call a Burkean element to all the continentals. But where Americans invent something like Communitarianism to counter the individualism that is the basis of their own logic, the Europeans see culture or community (and therefore history) as foundation itself. For a lot of reasons intellectually and emotionally I’m much more confortable with the latter. I’m also betting that it’s the future and that that future is already here.
That’s enough. I’m having fun but it’s not my blog.

oooh, forgot one, and it’s a beauty …

“But of course in this country philosophers and members of the social-scientific academic community think Peter Jackson and George Lucas are geniuses, without really taking them or “entertainment” seriously. It’s just something you do for fun after reading Rawls or Naming and Necessity.”

“Lauren”?
opps. I just typed without thinking.

I thought considered not responding but since no one reads my blog (or ever did really) I’ll keep going here.
A couple of days ago I was in a bar in my neighborhood with a friend. I live in one of the most diverse and polyglot neighborhoods in the US, and one that is also thought of as one of the most “European” neighborhoods in NY.
My friend and I were in an Irish bar that has begun to attract the newer generations of manhattan transplants. White manhattanites shy away from the other more continental bars and hangouts, Greek and Eastern European, as well as those of other more “ethnic” (darker skinned) groups. The exception is the beer garden, the only beer garden in NY, where NYU students seem to have taken up permanent residency.
They also shy away from places where they might have to dress up a bit. The greek cafes are large and noisy, and on summer nights 30th avenue might be Cyprus or Rio, Alexandria, or somewhere on the Adriatic, populated as it is by people from all of the above and more. My waiter yesterday was Lebanese, and the couple next to me were Ecuadorian well past middle age and on a date. The music was Eurodisco, and loud. The girls all thought they were pretty, to the degree that you believed them, and you got the impression that people knew who they were and why they were there. In a room of about 150, inside and out on the sidewalk under the umbrellas I was probably the only one not born in another country, in Queens or in transit, and I was the only person drinking and eating by myself. I was also almost undoubtedly the only one not fluent in at least two languages.

On sunday in the Irish bar, where the owner is an old friend of Shane MacGowan (who drops by when he’s town to play a gig or get his teeth fixed) my friend and I had to put up with a different crowd. Next to us were 5 rowdy aging NYU types, singing along with whatever came on the jukebox. They annoyed me and they annoyed my companion and others as well; I had them pegged and tried to find a way to describe my response to the woman I was with, an experimental psychologist with as I realized a very sharp eye. When the 5 assholes started singing along with “New York New York” it was better to leave than start a fight.
Outside Z explained it. She said they weren’t enjoying themselves singing as a group, each was singing alone at the same time as the others, in such a way as to try to convince them that he was having fun. And we were not the only ones at the bar annoyed by their behavior.

This is the heart of the issue of individualism and community. The Eurodisco cafes in my neighborhood are full of people for whom community is constitutive and this is brought into stark relief when put alongside the individualism of the americans who move in to their neighborhood. The tension is very similar to that brought out by gentrification in working class neighborhoods, where I’ve witnessed plenty of sing-alongs (of “NY NY”) that were just as rowdy and much less annoying to others in the room.
The difference is that in my neighborhood the immigrants have money, and what is developing is a multiethnic bourgeoisie that exists both as community and a place for individuals, though not in the older american sense. I should also add that the neighborhood has a large and growing Islamic community, from Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco and Palestine and South Asia. I live down the street from a mosque. And although I see women in Abayas and even in niqāb, fully covered, I’ve seen girls in headscarves and spandex and one girl in a headscarf and a t shirt that read “save a horse ride a cowboy.”

Cosmopolitanism sees community as constitutive, even if from the outside. Lberalism sees communty as suspect. And yet liberalism creates artificial communities, with rules and taboos and regulations, that then go unexamined. Reading on in the Foucault Chomsky debate they both begin to sound pretty silly. But Foucault is charming and Chomsky is not.

Interesting to think that the moderate Islamic party in Turkey is considered by many to be more modern than its secular opponents. And from this the logic becomes not one of religion vs secularism but whether a system of order, or language or justice, is seen as a system of questions that one asks of oneself and others, or as system of answers that is handed down by and which one is obliged follow. This is a good essay on community and language and the need of communities to describe themselves on their own terms. That need, requirement, is more important than liberalism itself.
I think this about does it for me this time.
Thanks for the server space.