http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOfM7WB1ya4

Next chance I have I’ll do another random journal search. My most recent one confirmed my opinion.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! (Lord knows I’ve been known to indulge.)

I think it’s more of a ‘he who hears but has no ears ought to consider that he is subject to aural hallucinations’ situation, John. That is, I’ll sign off this thread by simply reiterating my opinion – expressed by others upstream: Matt, for example – that concerning all those empirical matters that we can’t profitably debate in a thread: you’re pretty much consistently in the wrong on the facts. This is the problem with calling it a ‘natural historian’s view’. “I haven’t claimed to prove anything or to have done a definitive study.” Not only that, but you haven’t done a study. You have an assemblage of impressions, which I suspect you have not so much gather as embroidered to suit your taste for feeling lonely and embattled.

Out of WWII came administrative, or corporate, or procedural liberalism which was fiercely anti-populist (left or right both) and also favored administrative resolution of issues with minimal popular input. The populists, the pragmatists (Dewey at least), and much of the left had been reluctant to go to war. Minnesota’s governing left-populist party, the Farmer Labor Party, was destroyed.

1957 and Sputnik fever, more likely, and the increasing professionalisation of the American education system as a response to the Soviet threat.

The university is just another factory and as its product it delivers nicely tamed intellectuals not just eager to put their skills in service of capitalism but who think this is all there is to their profession.

Fixed that for you…

It sounds to me like you think philosophy of time should involve more phenomenology.

No. What I think is that philosophy of time should recognize that what is true of ahistorical quantum physics time and relativity time is not at all true of the time of the entities we actually experience. (NOT: of our experience of entities). What I say would be true without human consciousness at all; it’s not subjective. It’s true of any world with life forms, and probably is true of a lifeless geological world: it’s the fact of history and irreversibility. The reversible time of fundamental physics and the irreversible time of entities subject to entropy are two different things, and our lives and world are governed mostly by the latter. This is only even mentioned at all, noncommittally and without emphasis, by a single one of the authors in the Oxford book, which (unbelievably to me) keys on McTaggart’s century old sophistry. Someone reading this book, which seems to be intended as an authoritative survey for intermediate students, would come away understanding time worse than he had before.

A Dsquared almost said, one of the things about philosophy is that all of the right answers are there to be found, mixed in higgledy-piggledy with all the wrong answers. So of course I’m wrong, because the right answers are to be found in there somewhere, as in a Borgesian library, along with every developments of the logical possibly wrong answers, and all the ways of making a case for all the logically possible wrong answers— and he who makes the best arguments wins, as in Phaedrus. The discipline of asking “Does this work?” seems to have been not just neglected, but suppressed. (A philosopher who argues something like this is the mathematical logician Hao Wang, Kurt Goedel’s biographer and literary executor. He calls his philosophy “substantial factualism”)

I don’t really think that I have unique and revolutionary philosophical insights, or that I’m capable of defeating the whole ingenious, diligent, argumentative profession singlehanded. I’m also not really trying to horn in on the biz. I’m just trying to put together aa sort of natural historian’s outside view of philosophy as it functions and communicate it to my fellow non-philosophers (and maybe a few philosophers) and indicate some of the ways it could be better. “He who has ears, let him hear”—I haven’t claimed to prove anything or to have done a definitive study. My Putnam-Sen piece wasn’t intended for journal publication, but I think that it’s basically right.

The game is pretty much over for me, but I’m not dead yet, and being thought of as a crank does me no real harm. For me, as for many others, philosophy is a big unhappy might-have-been, and I am not ashamed to say that.

I think that I have a pretty sensible, intelligent generalist point of view about things in general, which I’ve put together from a lot of sources, and contemporary philosophy has not been a resource for me, when it really should have been. Not only is there too much crap, but the crap seems to be dominant, and as far as I can tell, an undergrad who takes a few philosophy courses runs a better than even chance in getting stuck in an infinite argument loop leaving him wronger and more confused than he had been before. (And in the big human picture, for anyone who is not in the biz, undergrad philosophy is philosophy’s main product, regardless of what philosophers think. And yes, I think that professions should relate to their outside. Perfect professional autonomy is literally insanity.)

Recommended therapy: get a blog: well, I do that, and I also parasitize other people’s blogs.

As far as the future goes: constructive proposals about possible futures cannot be either true or false. If a philosopher is dominated by the standard of truth and true propositions, he cannot make constructive proposals for the future, but only predictive statements about the future. It’s not merely that absolute prediction isn’t possible, it’s that it’s not the goal. (It seems to be the disease of Western philosophy, starting with Plato, to present constructive proposals as statements of fact).

My point about Putnam was not merely that he was right, but that it’s a scandal that he (and Sen) should have to argue that at all, and that it really indicates a fifty to seventy year black hole during which philosophy (and economics) were doing more harm than good. And all Putnam really was doing is proposing the possibility of doing things differently and pointing out a direction—it’s a very preliminary result or proposal. If there are lots of people moving in that direction, good. My sampling of philosophy has not brought me into contact with them, while it has introduced me to many of the others. (By their acts, many of philosophers do seem perversely committed to worse philosophy.)

I am open to suggestions as to the good philosophers. Parfit is on the list. I somewhat like Charles Taylor, but are there others like him? I like Ernest Gellner too, without agreeing with him, but I’ve been assured that he’s not a philosopher, so screw him. And Toulmin, who gave up in disgust. And Michel Meyer, who no one seems ever to have heard of.

I do appreciate your willingness to respond, which surprised me.

It sounds to me like you think philosophy of time should involve more phenomenology.

No. What I think is that philosophy of time should recognize that what is true of ahistorical quantum physics time and relativity time is not at all true of the time of the entities we actually experience (NOT: of our experience of entities). What I say would be true without human consciousness at all; it’s not subjective. It’s true of any world with life forms, and probably is true of a lifeless geological world: it’s the fact of history and irreversibility. The reversible time of fundamental physics and the irreversible time of entities subject to entropy are two different things, and our lives and world are governed mostly by the latter. This is even mentioned at all, noncommittally and without emphasis, only by one of the authors in the book, which as a whole (unbelievably to me) keys on McTaggart’s century old sophistry. Someone reading the Oxford book, which seems to be intended as an authoritative survey for intermediate students, would come away understanding time worse than he had before.

A Dsquared almost said, one of the things about philosophy is that all of the right answers are there to be found, mixed in hodge-podge with all the wrong answers. So of course I’m wrong, because the right answers are to be found in there somewhere, as in a Borgesian library, along with all the developments of the logical possibly wrong answers, and all the ways of making a case for all the logically possible wrong answers— and he who makes the best arguments wins, as in Phaedrus. The discipline of asking “Does this work?” seems to have been not just neglected, but suppressed. (A philosopher who argues something like this is the mathematical logician Hao Wang, Kurt Goedel’s biographer and literary executor. He calls his philosophy “substantial factualism”)

I don’t really think that I have unique and revolutionary philosophical insights, or that I’m capable of defeating the whole ingenious, diligent, argumentative profession singlehanded. I’m also not really trying to horn into the biz. I’m just trying to put together and a sort of natural historian’s outside view of philosophy as it functions and communicate it to my fellow non-philosophers, and maybe a few philosophers, and to indicate some of the ways it could be better. “He who has ears, let him hear”—I haven’t proved anything. My Putnam-Sen piece certainly wasn’t intended for journal publication, but I think that it’s basically right. The game is pretty much over for me, but I’m not dead yet, and being thought of as a crank does me no real harm. For me as for many others, philosophy is a big unhappy might-have-been, and I am not ashamed to say that.

I think that I have a pretty sensible, intelligent generalist point of view about things in general, which I’ve put together from a lot of sources, and contemporary philosophy has not been a resource for me when it really should have been. Not only is there too much crap, but the crap seems to be dominant, and as far as I can tell, an undergrad who takes a few philosophy courses runs a better than even chance in getting stuck in an infinite argument loop leaving him more confused than he had been before. (And in the big human picture, for anyone who is not in the biz, undergrad philosophy is philosophy’s main product, regardless of what philosophers think. And yes, I think that professions should relate to their outside. Perfect professional autonomy is literally insanity.)

Recommended therapy: get a blog: well, I do that, and I also parasitize other people’s blogs.

As far as the future goes: constructive proposals about possible futures cannot be either true or false. If a philosopher is dominated by the standard of truth and true propositions, he cannot make constructive proposals, but only predictive statements about the future. It’s not merely that absolute prediction isn’t possible, it’s that it’s not the goal.

My point about Putnam was not merely that he was right, but that it’s a scandal that he (and Sen) should have to argue that at all, and that it really indicates a fifty to seventy year black hole during which philosophy (and economics) were doing more harm than good in that respect. And all Putnam really was doing is proposing the possibility of doing things differently and pointing out a direction—it’s a very preliminary result. If there are lots of people moving in that direction, good. My sampling of philosophy has not brought me into contact with them, while it has introduced me to many of the others.

By their acts, many of philosophers do seem perversely committed to worse philosophy.

I am open to suggestions as to the good philosophers. Parfit is on the table. I somewhat like Charles Taylor, but are there others like him? I like Ernest Gellner too, without agreeing with him, but I’ve been assured that he’s not a philosopher, so screw him. And Toulmin, who gave up in disgust. And Michel Meyer, who no one seems ever to have heard of.

I do appreciate your willingness to respond, which surprised me.

It depends on whether by ‘philosophy’ you mean the department or the institution. Departmentally, yes he left – for comp. lit. Institutionally, no. He was still publishing and arguing with academic philosophers, in the usual sorts of ways, up to the end.

Moving right along. You say I should know what you are talking about because I’ve read the sort of thing you write, or should have by this point. But that doesn’t cut it. I’ve read the stuff you write. I kinda like your stuff. So here’s the problem: I kinda like your stuff. Except one thing. You keep tediously insisting, against all plausibility, that these sorts of thoughts are shocking, heretical philosophical insights/stances that would get you fired if you dare to develop them as a professional philosopher. In short, your writings look to me like pretty solid counter-examples to your claim that the things you say are shocking heresies that philosophers can scarcely imagine being true; and if they could, they would probably be hounded out of the profession.

Your time piece. It sounds to me like you think philosophy of time should involve more phenomenology. I must regretfully inform you that you will not be shot dead on the spot for saying such things. The proof: Reading Husserl and Heidegger is not a capital offense, even if some people will look down their noses at you. (Not that you have to be a Husserlian or Heideggerian.) But saying the philosophy of time is a matter for phenomenological investigation is not shocking.

Now take your Sen/Putnam piece. It’s a bit polemical and very contemptuous in tone and quite blunt. That will often get you kicked back if you submit it to a journal (don’t I know it!) Other than that you are most likely to be harassed by the following charge, and very justly. ‘The author keeps saying that philosophers are not trying to do x, and need to try. But most philosophers think they are already trying to do x. So the author needs to substantial or clarify his argument and criticism.’

To illustrate: “Philosophy needs to deal with indexicality (so-called “subjectivity”) as something other than a source of error.”

Author needs to acquaint himself with the rich literature on indexicality and subjectivity, very little (if any) of it assuming that these things can only be sources of error.

“It has to recognize that the future is open and indeterminate and that, of necessity, all humans face an unknowable future in the process of being made.”

Vague. Does the author think that other philosophers are unaware that the future cannot be predicted with absolute certainty? Presumably he is not so benighted. Then the author must either be saying nothing or saying that the future is a lot less predictable than we think it is. But he makes no argument to that effect.

“Truth” is only about the past and the eternal and universal, but philosophy also needs to learn to deal with the future and projects.”

As a technical point, this is debatable. As a practical matter, the author needs to explain better why he thinks that philosophy can’t deal with ‘the future’, can’t deal with ‘projects’. Is he just saying, in a generic sort of way, that professional philosophers are all obviously prize idiots? Or is he saying something more specific. If so, what?

“Philosophy has to fully accept not only ethics, but also practical reason governing action. Practical engagement is not a debased form of theory, but a way of making reality, and (as a kind of experimentation) an essential source of knowledge.”

Why does the author think that ethicists do not accept that ethics is a matter of action, rather than theory? Just because they have theories of ethics? But what would the author propose to fill the seminar room with, if not moderately rigorous, semi-systematic talk (about something)? ‘Way of making reality’ and ‘essential source of knowledge’ is just vagueness, to which what follows gives no more definite shape.

Skipping down a bit: “Practical reason works with concrete actualities in real time and has to account for all the details that theory brackets out in order to make the material manageable. Theorists assume that these details are of marginal importance and that the theoretical substrate is what’s really real, but this is only ever more-or-less true, and in some cases it is not true at all.”

This is nonsense. There are volumes of discussion of this very thing. The author may think it is bad discussion. But then he should say so, and explain why he thinks so.

You make the following criticism of Putnam and Sen: “both were giving technical academic authorizations allowing people to think perfectly ordinary, valid things that everyone in the world, except most economists and many philosophers, has always thought.” I actually agree with that, at least with regard to Putnam. And I recently published a paper making exactly that case against Putnam (and so far I have not been drummed out of the academy – that’s one data point against you.) But it seems to me the problem with what you write is that you want to argue for fairly agreeable things (the future substantially unknown, ethics about what people do, not just what is said about what people do) while insisting that no one else already thinks them. A variation on this theme: you want to urge better philosophy. Well, everyone is in favor of that – see also, motherhood and apple pie. So, to distinguish yourself, you have to feign that everyone else is perversely opposed to better philosophy, per se. This is psychologically implausible.

You are determined to set yourself up as an embattled, lone champion of positions that are actually quite generously subscribed. God knows I suffer from the same disease of recreational contemptsmanship myself, in some forms. And it’s not such a terrible thing. Recommended therapy: get a blog. (At least we don’t have the disease as bad as Schopenhauer did. He really needed a blog.) Still, it doesn’t amount to the philosophic breakthrough you seem to think it is. And it muddies up whatever empirical validity there may be to your institutional critique. Again, I’m not going to argue about it here. But if you want to pursue the question of how bad the institutional disease is – what sorts of bad post-positivist path-dependence we suffer from – then you need to distinguish all that from your hobbyhorse of recreational contemptsmanship. Feel free to feel free-floating contempt for academic philosophers. But don’t mistake that for philosophical insight, per se. Is all I’m saying. I mean: no one ever went broke betting that institutions sort of make people stupid. So your free-floating contempt is sure to bump into a lot of truth. But it’s still sorta not tied down enough.

Didn’t Rorty, like Toulmin, end up giving up on philosophy and working in other areas? If he didn’t, I’m wrong.

As far as your claim that I have not adequately expressed myself—as I said, this is a blog, and I am well aware that many here, for example Harry, already begrudge me whatever time I’ve succeeded in extracting from their otherwise happy lives. Some lengthier expositions of my ideas are here (polemics), here (non-polemics), here (Philosophy of Time), here (The Humanities and the University), and here (Putnam and Sen). Most of these things have been available to you for at least a year. From time to time I’ve linked one or another of them.

I spared you these initially because I thought it would be regarded as the imposition of a crank, but you have specifically accused me of not spelling things out in detail.

My beef with Philosophy of Time is that several of the books I read, including one published by Oxford for intermediate students, gives students an erroneous understanding of time by zeroing in on the most abstruse possibilities of quantum physics and relativity and virtually ignoring the functioning of time in the actual (entropic) world of things we can experience.

The Putnam / Sen piece is incomplete as it stands. When I first read Putnam and Sen, I was happy with what I saw, but my second thought was that both were giving technical academic authorizations allowing people to think perfectly ordinary, valid things that everyone in the world, except most economists and many philosophers, has always thought. Thanks, guys. (And they’re both good guys, but they’re trying to extricate themselves from their professional trap).

“a willingness to write more persuasively on more ambitious topics”

You mean: a willingness to do better philosophy? Do you think that the people in the department know how to write more persuasively about more ambitious topics but are consciously – voluntarily – holding back? out of careerist motives? Does that sound psychologically plausible?

“If you choose to be Horatio at the bridge and defend your discipline, you’re going to win, to your own satisfaction at least.”

John, snap out of it. I’m willing to listen to you. I’m not Horatio at the bridge. I’m Horatio on a blog. I am asking you what you think, and what you think is wrong. As responses to a specific request to articulate what you want to say, this seems sort of weak: “I originally started saying these things vaguely hoping that some people in the biz might actually already be somewhat aware of the things I’m saying.”

Yes, but WHAT? No, really, man. I’m asking. I don’t mean the ‘institutions breed mediocrity stuff’. I mean the specifically philosophical stuff. Lay it on me, man.

“I don’t recall that more temperate approaches, e.g. Rorty’s, got very far either.”

Rorty died a famous and successful academic philosopher, admired by many and despised by not a few. What the hell do you want of out academic life if not to be admired by many and despised by not a few? I say nice work if you can get it.

“For me it’s more or less axiomatic that established bodies of thought have systematic blind spots, but to academic professionals today it seems axiomatic that their own specialization, at least, doesn’t.”

Look, it seems to be axiomatic to you that I can’t possible be saying what I am damn sure I appear to be saying. Namely, I am not averse to criticism. I am just a bit skeptical about this particular line of criticism, so I’m inquiring into it a bit more closely. What thing is it that you think philosophers ought to be able to do, which they can’t, on pain of professional death? Approximately.