Greatest Philosopher of the Twentieth Century

None of the above, its Douglas Adams by acclamation.

The problem is that there are a whole lot of Wittgensteins. Not only early and late, but also this interpreter’s version as opposed to that one’s. (I voted for mine.)

I won’t disclose who the current leader is, at 19%. Bright guy but not my cup of tea, philosophically speaking. No love for Gadamer yet, which is a bit suprising.

Holt’s judgement is somewhat balanced in the article by that of his subject.

My only serious complaint about the book concerns Waugh’s glancing treatment of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical work. He dismisses it as “incomprehensible” and attributes Wittgenstein’s influence to his “striking looks, manner and extraordinarily persuasive personality.”

Leiter omits William James, presumably on the grounds that he more properly belongs in the 19C, but surely his most interesting work was after 1900. Absent James, I guess LW is as good a choice as any, on the grounds of pervasive influence, if nothing else.

Sacre Bleu! It’s Jean-Paul Sartre, not John-Paul Sartre!

This non-philosopher is baffled: who is David K. Lewis (OK, Wikipedia gives me a clue), and why does he get so many votes relative to so many people I’ve heard of?

Slightly surprised at so little love for Karl Popper, who was the only serious competitor to Wittgenstein while both were alive.

Slightly surprised at so little love for Karl Popper, who was the only serious competitor to Wittgenstein while both were alive.

They’re afraid of being beaten with a poker.

“settle the issue once and for all with an internet blog poll”

If Kenneth Arrow won it, would he be automatically disqualified?

Brian Leiter (on his blog): Unfortunately, the poll has now been linked from sites with lots of non-philosophical readers, which is likely to skew the results in predictable directions.

If John Emerson has a Bat Signal, it’s just been activated….

Surely an internet poll of (mostly) “philosophical” readers is itself not “scientific” (I’ll assume Brian had his tongue at least slightly in cheek). And while I think it is interesting how Leiters regular readers answer this poll, I think it’s also interesting how intellectuals in general and the general reading public would answer it (sort of like those “Greatest President” polls that include results both from historians and from the general public).

Finally, a serious question: does Leiter’s readership draw evenly from among professional, academic philosophers, or would a poll confined to that readership itself “skew the results in a predictable fashion” (e.g. David Lewis’s close, second-place position before the unwashed masses were invited in to take part)?

(I’ll assume Brian had his tongue at least slightly in cheek).

Leiter doesn’t even have a tongue.

Greatness is so multidimensional. Lewis for flair and sheer chutzpah, Davidson for the shock and awe value of being completely incapable of understanding anything he says, Russell for, you know, starting the whole 20th century philosophy thing. So I voted for Rawls. Because, well. Rawls.

I was torn between Tarski and Whitehead, but in the end decided the Banach-Tarski paradox weighed heavier. I at least pushed Tarski into double digits.

So exactly how did Leiter come to have this “gatekeeper” function in the field? He strikes me as being to analytic philosophy what non-scientist “science advocates” are — all the attitude and then some (particularly against “continental philosopy,” his supposed discipline), but none of the rigor. He establishes that he’s an “analytic philosopher” by expressing dismay at how many votes Heidegger’s getting and leaving Derrida off entirely, whereas actual analytic philosophers establish that they are such by going to the trouble of solving philosophical problems that, while arguably a bit narrow from certain perspectives, are actually difficult.

The correct answer is Heidegger, of course. But I fault the test on two grounds: one, any poll on this subject matter that doesn’t attract even one vote for Gadamer plainly isn’t reaching enough people who actually know what they’re talking about, and two, any poll on this subject matter that doesn’t even list Charles Taylor as a choice has to be treated as completely blinkered from the start.

Given that Russell’s autobiography would take a while to read, I read his Wikipedia page instead. Based on that, I’m sure you are correct.

Also, the voting is closed.

How can it be a serious poll if it doesn’t have Ayn Rand?

Donald Davidson, Donald Davidson, Donald Davidson …

Because he’s the only one that attempted to bring together the thought of all of the others on a list like this.

Then again, maybe he really is more of a 21st century philosopher who happened to publish a century too early.

I also started out hating him because I didn’t understand any of it but with some dedication it’s pretty much logic (which is quite the reverse of Heidegger in all possible aspects).

Good to see so many votes for Russell!

Wittgenstein had some great insights, but when faced with an enigma he would tend to sit back and revel in it, whereas Russel always had the good sense to roll up his slevees and get to work analyzing it with the most precision and clarity he could muster.

While his primary contributions are obviously to epistimology, he did good work in the philosophy of languge, ethics, and political philosophy; that’s a breadth of serious work with which few others can compare.

And in terms of sheer influence he’s hard to compete with; limiting ourselves to names on the ballot, I count: Carnap, Kripke, Lewis, Popper, Putnam, Quine, Searle, Tarski, Whitehead, and, of course, Wittgenstein.

If figures as minor as Rorty, Dummett, C.I.Lewis, Dewey, Cassirer, and Deleuze get included, then why not Ryle or Austin?

George Carlin. Period. No one else comes close, although honorable mention goes to Douglas Adams.

Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein, Lewis, and Russell? Seriously?

This list shows we clearly need a Most Overrated Philosophers of the 20th Century Poll. I think the results should be the same. Wittgenstein, though, by a landslide. Tractatus is very good, but Philosophical Investigation is a sloppy amalgamation of superb examples unanalyzed–unanalyzed, because there’s no longer a philosopher in the vicinity to do the work.

Possible-worlds-are-real-Lewis? How does any one take this guy seriously? It’d be like including Plantinga.

“See! This man isn’t doing philosophy properly!”

It’s not a matter of “properly” but “at all.” It’s why the Buddha and Jesus and Ayn Rand ain’t philosophers, either. Shewing the fly that there’s a bottle isn’t shewing its way out of crap.

Re: 26:
“He establishes that he’s an “analytic philosopher” by expressing dismay at how many votes Heidegger’s getting ”

Where did he say this? I didn’t see a comments section. I’m dismayed by how low Heidegger’s results are.

Can no one link to the drunken philosopher’s song from Monty Python? O the humanity!

One of the clearest testaments to Wittgenstein’s greatness is surely the obsessiveness of his detractors.

CKD – I won’t convince you if he can’t convince you but it’s difficult to ignore the fact that there are quite a number of examples that were at least enough to inspire others*. More: if you do like philosophy sounding like poetry surely you have to be endebted to the great Witt for giving you Ordinary Language Philosophy!

* that would be, like, 95% of everybody else (not death before the Tractatus) on the initial list

I really find myself wanting to reformat #53 as a series of numbered aphorisms:

114:A better route might be for those who agree with the assessment to say something specific about why they think he’s a particularly great philosophy.

116. But perhaps a clear testiment to a Wittgenstein fan is a tendency for high-minded Silent-Remaining. At least on matters of why.

#55: you forgot to declare your interest….

And also, I am nobody’s idea of a Wittgenstein expert, but if you think that the point of the games example was that “game” is an unanalyzable concept, you’re pretty badly traducing him.

“I really find myself wanting to reformat #53 as a series of numbered aphorisms:”

dsquared, the correct format is: 114, 114.1, 114.2…

” game, as ‘the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’ ”

That’s the best definition of a game I’ve ever heard. Case in point: poetry _and_ philosophy. Exhibit B: Pogo. Though my vote’s for Harpo: that’s philosophically remaining silent.

Re: 52
“it’s difficult to ignore the fact that there are quite a number of examples that were at least enough to inspire others”

I wonder if this is true? Is Wittgenstein’s popularity principally among those who’ve read him, or rather those who’ve read his bio or heard him referenced on The Simpsons? Maybe he’s the P.B. Shelley of 20th century philosophy. Or maybe he’s so inspirational because he leaves us to do all of the work for him? ( I should clarify that I do think he’s a “great” philosopher, which doesn’t disqualify him for “most overrated.”)

“if you do like philosophy sounding like poetry surely you have to be endebted to the great Witt for giving you Ordinary Language Philosophy!”

Oh god, no. Good poetry only — most poetic philosophy is rubbish. Plato was the only consistently good philosophical poet. Maybe Freud is a candidate for second place.

CKD,

JoB made a thoughtful contribution on this score, even if I disagreed.

But you didn’t (disagree), now did you? Unless tacit disagreement counts as disagreement, or the mention of disagreement suffices to count as disagreement — neither option seems to be a very attractive one ;-)

PS: my man is Davidson, Donald Davidson to be precise!

PPS: I think he (the great not-so-witty Witt) did a good job of analyzing ‘games’ – a tremendous job in fact and it was clearly stated as well – maybe even a poetic classic on the words necessary & sufficient

What a strange list. No surprise that Wittgenstein and Russell get the highest scores, but…no Marxists? At all? And why such a high score for Heidegger when Husserl isn’t even mentioned? You might like or hate either of those philosophers but the simple fact is: no Husserl … no Heidegger.

Likewise to reiterate Chris Bertram’s point, why Wittgenstein and no Ryle or Austin?

I might also be politically correct and note that it is simply taken for granted that ‘philosopher’ is automatically assumed to mean ‘male philosopher who wrote in English, German or French’.

That’s the best definition of a game I’ve ever heard.

It’s not that great as a definition. It’s a very good description of a central aspect of game-playing, but it doesn’t really define, does it?

taking sides: question-begging versus rent-seeking

#69 There’s quite a few sort-of Marxists for a bit in there: Adorno, Sartre, Foucault, Putnam.

Hidari-64, why not Grice? Because they are not on the A-list. Why not? Ask Mickey Rourke.

ejh-66 – there are many games that are non-voluntary and that require you to overcome some very necessary obstacles

CKD,

Peace! (I think you missed my apology for cross-posting)

I think we pretty much agree on everything but employ different yardsticks. By my measure it is incredible to have 2 really good discussions (Davidson only barely mustered 3, and he is my favourite!). Obviously many have done it better, many have lived after him to profit from what he did and what Carnap did and what Quine did and what … that’s the way of philosophy: it’s not fair for those not coming last ;-)

(all my thanks goes to Carnap for this very beautiful point)

Ah yes, your parallel to The Simpsons is not on: the references I count are not by you and me – but by the ‘A-list’ of philosophers presented in the original topic.

JoB (#34) likes Davidson “[b]ecause he’s the only one that attempted to bring together the thought of all of the others on a list like this” – or, that is, that “he stands in the line from Frege to Quine, AND he managed to say something sensible about people like Gadamer”.

Davidson would have been my #2 choice, and this is indeed a good reason why. But it’s an even better reason for my #1 choice. On my reading (note my caveat at #4), Wittgenstein incorporates Davidson (et al) even better than Davidson incorporates Wittgenstein (and perhaps we can forgive him for not mentioning the man by name).

What I mean by that is this, and this will have to serve for those demanding an explanation from fans. Put the later Wittgenstein to one side for now. Follow the line of thought from Frege to Quine (which of course has some later W. in it already). Davidson’s extension of Quinean thought cuts to the heart of the empiricist project. Once we see the scheme/content dualism as yet another version of what Quine has rightly rejected, and see how Davidson’s picture works (esp. the later Davidson, from the late 80’s through the 90’s), then you find yourself asking ever thornier questions about how philosophy works once we learn – or in order to learn – how finally to leave Cartesianism and platonism behind. (Of course not everyone wants to do that.)

And here’s where Wittgenstein will turn out to have been three steps ahead of you the whole time. People (here as elsewhere) knock Wittgenstein for pointing at things and asking questions rather than giving rigo(u)rous arguments for the truth of P (or even, bizarrely, trying and failing). This is indeed a risky procedure. If you don’t see what he’s doing, then it will look pointless and weird. But I have found time after time that what looks like an offhand remark in the Investigations makes just the connection that helps one to, well, find one’s way around.

But as they say, your mileage may vary. If you aren’t convinced, I can only point you to Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective and Truth, Language, and History. (Both are essential, but those new to Davidson will have to start with Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation to see how the later picture grows out of the earlier – though Davidson himself thought he was saying the same thing throughout).

It is kind of grim that someone can vote in this poll without even knowing who David Lewis is (#35). Brian oughta have included a pop quiz before you get to answer the poll.

44: “Philosophical Investigations is a sloppy amalgamation of superb examples unanalyzed—unanalyzed, because there’s no longer a philosopher in the vicinity to do the work.”

What counts as analysis?

55: “But he didn’t exactly try hard, did he? A brilliant analysis of the concept of a game, as ‘the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles’ is in Bernard Suits’s book The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia. It kicks Wittgenstein’s ass.”

Sigh.

An important sense of ‘greatest’ is ‘most influential.’ Wittgenstein has a claim to that title in the 20th-Century. The logical positivists (Carnap, in particular) are heavily indebted to the Tractatus and to Wittgenstein’s work in the early 30s. Indeed, the characteristic features of logical positivism are simply taken over from Wittgenstein. And no one exerted a greater influence on so-called ‘ordinary language philosophy’ than Wittgenstein.

Isn’t it interesting that we all get terribly het up about ‘who was the greatest philosopher’ and yet no one gives a toss about ‘who was the greatest dentist’ or ‘who was the greatest welder’ of any century? And yet welders and dentists (especially the latter) have a much more concrete impact on our lives than philosophy.

Perhaps a better list might be the greatest ‘welders who were also philosophers’ of the 20th century or ‘dentists who also happened to be conceptual sound poets’.

In the latter, my vote goes for Bill the dentist*. He’s great.

*Also known as Bill the conceptual sound poet (and dentist).

I don’t see what’s so wrong about an educated public consisting of philosophers and non-philosophers voting in such a thing. Let’s say that there was a vote to see who the greatest Christian theologian of all time was. I assume that a generally educated public would come out strongly in favor of Augustine and Luther. A group of theologians would probably be in the same ballpark. It’s different in the 20th century because fewer people, even educated people, have heard of many of the candidates — but the same holds for philosophy. I wouldn’t really object to people voting for Hans Kung or Rowan Williams by default. They’re not my favorites, but presumably there’s a reason they are better-known than my favorites, such as being a major protest figure in the RCC or being Archbishop of Canterbury.

Similarly, Freud, Dewey, or Sartre are probably better known than David Lewis — presumably because they’ve all had impact in fields other than philosophy and also actually “done stuff” (founded a whole new discipline, worked in educational reform, and been a polymath/activist). Same with Foucault, arguably, and Foucault’s the one you see in the bookstores. It seems perverse that such things are regarded as extrinsic or even as prima facie evidence against someone’s greatness as a philosopher. (I would argue that this is more prevelant in the analytic camp than in the continental camp — but Heidegger’s “life achievements” outside of philosophy are actually negative overall, and he’s still “the greatest.”)

Dave,

“Of course. I doubt we agree on what W was trying to show though.”

True enough, and I think that would be a fine basis for a case that the doubters don’t “get” Wittgenstein. But I still object to those who suggest that to disagree that Wittgenstein succeeded proves one has failed to understand him.

“This does mean, I agree, that W isn’t for everyone, and so maybe not deserving of victory here given the state of contemporary philosophy. And I think he of all people was insistent on that.”

A good point, taken. If I am right to understand Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy as, in some sense, the bottle he’s trying to guide us out of, the “greatest philosopher” designation amounts to something like: the most insightful bottle-dweller?

Plato, footnotes

_What is striking to me about the list is that no-one on it can compete with the greatest philosophers of the 19th century, the 18th century, or the 17th century_

I might say that it’s too soon to say this for sure, but I mostly agree. I think two main, connected, points are mostly responsible. First, specialization is much more common now, making it hard to make very important contributions to lots of areas. I also suspect that, with more social resources devoted to philosophy, there is a very high level of work done in small bits by lots of people, and that this makes it hard for individuals to stand out as much. (I have in mind something like Stephen J. Gould’s writings on genius and sports stars and the like.) This in turn feeds the specialization. That said, I think that only Aristotle and Kant have really first-rate claims to being the greatest philosophers, as no others seem to me to have made as many important contributions to so many fields.

Matt, what about Plato? Hume? (I suppose I can’t get anyone else to buy Mill.)

Bill Watterson.

And not just because he was able to answer Wittgenstein’s question about how do you speak to large canine animals.

Paul- I’m biased against Plato because I find him so boring, but I also think that a couple of things keep him from ranking quite with Aristotle or Kant’s as a contender for the very top spot- he didn’t make what seem to me to be very important contributions to _quite_ as many areas (nothing good on science, say, like we see in Kant or Aristotle, and his contributions to logic and the philosophy of mathematics seem much more dubious to me than either Kant or Aristotle’s), and I think too many of his arguments are bad- the argument from equivocation is one of his favorites. Others will disagree, of course, and I don’t think there’s really an answer here. Hume is closer, and if we were considering “greatest thinker” rather than “greatest philosopher” I’d be more inclined to put him in because of the importance and influence of his _History of England_. There’s philosophical importance in that, too, but indirectly. Mill I’d put a step down from Hume because so much of his work outside of moral and political philosophy now seems not only wrong but not to be or have been extremely fruitful, though of course there’s debate on that and some aspects of it (“Millianism” in the philosophy of language, insofar as it can actually be traced to Mill, for example) have had a stronger influence.

#93: gosh, how jolly grown-up philosophers are these days. I am indeed aware of those two paragraphs, and of this IIHL document where I suspect you googled them. I don’t agree with you on their interpretation; I would be prepared to discuss this, but you’ll appreciate that the nature of the blog medium is such that I can’t possible afford to set the precedent that the way to attract my attention is to make a rude intervention on an unrelated thread. So basically, I’ll just note what kind of a humourless boor is capable of holding down a job as a professional philosopher these days and move on.

First, specialization is much more common now, making it hard to make very important contributions to lots of areas

hmmmm … although this is also true of the natural sciences, and there you’d have to say that ten randomly-selected winners of the Nobel prize this century would almost certainly be able to hold their own with anyone from previous centuries except Newton, Darwin and Galileo.

So mentioning a book I’ve praised before counts as having an ‘interest’

If you praise a book and it so happens you wrote the Foreword, it’s just good practice to mention it. I’m sure you know this. It’s probably less good practice to get huffy if somebody points out your inadvertent omission. I’m sure you ought to know this too.

1.41.1: You pass me in a quadrangle, and a man shouts at us “2.7.2! 5.22.1!”. I say “Don’t worry, this fellow isn’t mad. We’re just trying to score points off each other from an argument we had three months ago.”

1.41.2: Although we are trying to score points, and he is putting up unnecessary obstacles, this isn’t a game.

1.42: If someone thinks I’m ignorant of paragraph 2.7.2, why would he start asking me questions about it?

1.42.1: Perhaps he wishes to show that he himself is absolutely familiar with it. But surely if that was the case, he’d have mentioned it three months ago? Surely nobody would act so high and mighty if he’d only found out himself last week?

1.42.2: In philosophy, we do not always behave as we do in ordinary conversation.

who is David K. Lewis

Lewis is the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, in some universe or other. Though probably not in this one.

Discussing who is or has the greatest is harmless until the point you take it seriously – it is not something one can measure or should measure

Ah, but tell that to someone writing his syllabus for “20th Century Philosophy Survey.”

(Also, dsquared, do you really deny you’re playing a game? Really?)

“despite the fact that enormously more social resources were devoted to studying and doing philosophy in the 20th than in those other centuries”

These resources weren’t provided to make philosophers individually better, but to push philosophy forward as a decipline, although the 20th century may come up short in that regard as well.

“ten randomly-selected winners of the Nobel prize this century would almost certainly be able to hold their own with anyone from previous centuries except Newton, Darwin and Galileo.”

The 20th century was a very productive time for natural science, but I think you over state things. In part this is probably because a lot of the earlier contributions to natural science were from people we mostly think of as mathematicians (e.g. Gauss, Euler, Lagrange). Also, the 19th century had its fair share of greats: Hamilton, Boltzmann, Faraday, Maxwell, Tesla, etc.

counterfactuals matter

Man, tell it to Wikipedia.

… if Lewis actually has anything that bears on this, I’m interested. I don’t see how one can say that Midway was an important battle if one can’t discuss “what if Japan had won the battle,” which requires contemplating things that aren’t true and are by definition unknowable.

The same would seem to apply to “most important 20th century philosopher” for that matter.

“No, Davidson has to come before Wittgenstein because of the Carnapian argument: the science of philosophy progresses so anybody working out a previous idea well must be the better thinker.”

But there is no science of philosophy. I suppose you could say there is a science of formal logic, but philosophy isn’t only formal logic.
That’s the absurdity of Leiter. And he doesn’t claim that philosophy is science so that the relation of his philosophy to science is of the earthy superman to the absent god: sympathetic vibration=analogy. Philosophy as reductive literature
Never mind Witt’s aphorism’s Leiter comes off as one of Socrates’ cardboard opponents.
L – “I am a professional philosopher”
S -“And how did you come to have this profession?”
L- “I went to school. I have a Ph.D. But what right do you have to ask me such questions. Do you have a Ph.D. as well?”
S – “No. But do I have no right to ask a question?”

And on and on.
The foundational truths of philosophy are in the academy, just as they used to be in the church. Onwards to the 13th century!

Harry and Chris: why, or why, do you permit comments on threads pertaining to matters philosophical? “The less they know, the less they know it” barely does justice to half of the preceding. On the other hand, there is the pleasure of watching someone who actually knows something, Tom Hurka, do battle with the ignorant. And kudos, as always, to Matt and Paul for trying to introduce a little reason and knowledge in the midst of this mess.

Harry, I agree with you that none of the 20th-century figures compare favorably with the historical greats. But I have to take issue with Matt regarding his elevation of just two, Kant and Aristotle, above the others. No one doubts that Kant was an important philosopher, but since he was wrong about everything–everything, as far as I can see–it’s hard to see him deserving such special status, certainly not when compared to Hume–or dare I mention Nietzsche?–who were right about so much.

Chris, I suppose there’s a case for Austin, harder to see the case for Ryle, given my original listing of 30. Voters seem to have concurred with you on Dummett. Anscombe is the other I somewhat regret not adding in the first round of this game, even though she surely would not have garnered more than a handful of votes. I, myself, was disappointed not to see more votes for Sartre. And the strong showing by Lewis (not to mention Rawls) is clearly myopia brought on by so many students (and students of students) voting.

E-mail me any further thoughts, since I’m done here. And promise not to link to the run-off!!!

I commend Dowd’s Postulate:

Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, “In this world, Elwood, you must be,” – she always called me Elwood – “In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.” Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.

Ha! Hadn’t seen that site, Kieran. Hilarious.

But I think I had something in mind a bit more narrow than “counterfactuals,” though admittedly a little broader than “counterfactuals re: Battle of Midway.”

Anyway, if Lewis’s work *does* interestingly address such issues, I will have to take a look …

No one doubts that Kant was an important philosopher, but since he was wrong about everything—everything, as far as I can see

I confess to having thought as much, back when I was taking a graduate seminar on Kant.

The value of “philosophers who were (and are) wrong” would comprise an interesting comment thread in itself. As, I now understand, it apparently does, somewhere.

Is the word for “philosophy that is wrong but studied anyway” … “Continental”? Or is it just “philosophy”?

someone who actually knows something, Tom Hurka

I’m sure he does, but it’s apparently not good manners (a lacuna he apparently shares with Prof. Leiter), it’s not international law, and it’s not what he wrote in the introduction to a book about games twenty years ago, so if he’d hurry up and bring it on, all the “professional” philosophers could slap each other on the back, continue to congratulate each other on how much smarter they are than the ignorant multitude, and then wonder why another five philosophy departments closed down this month.

Most people would not be able to vote usefully on the top biochemists of the 20th century, but biochemistry seems to be doing OK.

tom s.
But philosophy is not a science. If it were DD’s point would be irrelevant.
Here’s a link
to a philosopher arguing that a scientist may be right on the science but is nonetheless wrong on the philosophy. As if that made a difference. To top it off the philosopher claims to be a militant atheist. Bizarre.
It might as well be a retelling of Galilleo and the church.

But, dsquared, we also have a strange situation in the anglophone academy where there are plenty of people doing what amounts to philosophy in departments of literature, rhetoric, women’s/gender/area studies, theory, history, etc., etc. Often these practitioners also have other research interests more inline with their putative field. How does that influence this argument? I’m genuinely curious what people think.

All because it seems to me, when some commenters above noted that it’s easier to find Capital-G, Capital-P Great Philosophers in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, that this fragmentation of the field is one of the developments we need to take into account. It’s harder to be Hegel these days — not that it was easy then — because Capital-P philosophy is harder to locate.

I can’t wait to hear how brilliantly subtle the inclusion of Foucault was in context.

Also, can there please be a purge of the 15 people who voted for Bernard Williams?

It seems that the general public don’t care about this kind of philosophy at all

Practical men, one might say, are in general quite exempt from intellectual influences.

I have very kindly not trolled this thread, because I have my own blog to troll at now: Trollblog.

If I get a few links here and there, or a front-page announcement, I’ll be a happy troll and will no longer be driven by insensate troll rage to lay waste to completely innocent CT threads.

This is not a threat at all, not in the slightest,….. but when leprechauns get their bowl of milk, they’re nice leprechauns.

I didn’t mess with Leiter’s little poll at all. I no longer need to lower myself to that level. It was hell, I tell you.

That said, James, Dewey, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Stephen Toulmin, Ernest Gellner, and Michel Meyer were the greatest philosophers of the past century. Analytic philosophers mostly all suck, but I’ll add Charles Taylor so that they have one representative on the list.

So exactly how did Leiter come to have this “gatekeeper” function in the field?

He digitized the method by which the cartel hires, fires, and promotes. He’s a crap philosopher, but he’s like the janitor in my high school who had all the keys and knew where all the fuseboxes were, and where all the bones are buried, and who got caught with their pants down when and with whom.

If there were a category called “Best philosopher of the twentieth century (writing in English) who was also a gifted novelist,” the winner, hands down, would be:
Iris Murdoch.

Re John Emerson @138: Ernest Gellner did write a critique of Oxford philosophy in the ’50s (Words and Things, I believe it was called, created a stir in its day — I haven’t read it), but it’s his historical-sociological works, as far as I’m aware, that are mostly being read, and written about, now. (I’m not taking sides in your (apparently rather personal) quarrel with the (apparently rather arrogant) Prof. Leiter, just noting that Gellner is not generally considered a philosopher.)

All I meant was that Deleuze is the one of those guys who still believes in the philosophical project — although he’s less read than, say, Baudrillard. Why I couldn’t just write that the first time, who knows.

I mean, seriously. Do you need someone to loan you a tape measure, or can you compare penis lengths by eyeball estimation?

Emerson, I think you should just let Eliza take over. “Tell me more about wrong with some of you people. Does that question interest you? Oh, I need someone to loan I a tape measure. Please go on.”

Actually, expanding on the last point above, if there’s one thing you can’t fault modern economists for, it’s explaining the relevance of their subject to the educated laymen. Even before the current crisis, there were Bates Clark medal winners and Nobel prizewinners writing for a mass audience, and specifically doing so specifically because they thought it was important that people understand economics as it’s done in the academy. If instead the economists had just said “well, you don’t understand this because you’re too dumb, so don’t talk about economics, it’s just for us”, then they’d be in … well, they’d be roughly in the state in which rational expectations macro actually is, and that’s a dying research program.

Actually that’s also an interesting question – when was the last time that philosophers, en bloc, abandoned a previous line of inquiry as being wrong? Was it Wittgenstein, or are there other examples I’m missing?

ahhh good spot. Wow, that’s coming up to its 50th anniversary though!

#98

So, dsquared, you’d be prepared to discuss the shield issue now? In the other thread you weren’t prepared to discuss it — it was settled in the 1970s, the other side lost, the topic’s closed, etc. Your response to an attempt to discuss it was ‘up yours’ (speaking of good manners).

#103

You Wittgenwankers are all the same. My article didn’t say that reading a novel is playing a game. It said at best that writing a novel instantiates the same more abstract values as playing a game — a BIG difference. That the values that make x good also make y good doesn’t imply that x = y.

And the point of the Investigations section about games *is* that the concept of a game can’t be analyzed. It’s a mistake to say ‘there must be something in common or we wouldn’t call them ‘games”; there’s only a multitude of family resemblances. I haven’t a clue what else dsquared thinks the section is about.

Non-philosopher here, with zero philosophy training, although I’ve read a lot of Daniel Dennett.

Now it seems to me that virtually no one knows anything about anything, and so I can see why professional philosophers may be impatient with the ignorant unwashed masses carelessly pontificating about things that professors spend their entire lifetimes studying.

But unlike biochemists, philosophers have nothing in the world to point to about which they can say, “Look, without us experts working hard on this, we wouldn’t have that.” Basically every human being on the planet does philosophy, although probably not very well. What exactly do professional philosophers bring to the table? This question does not have an obvious answer. Leiter’s attitude in this thread suggests that he thinks they create a rigorous status hierarchy within the American university system, which is really a worst-case answer.

I find the complete disinterest in explaining the point of serious philosophy, or even explaining to a lay audience what kind of traits make a great philosopher great, somewhat fascinating actually.

157: yeah, there are pop philosophy books, and as I mentioned I’ve read a lot of Daniel Dennett myself. And yeah, there are plenty of people, academics and not, who see no reason to justify what they are doing professionally for a larger audience.

Maybe my point was simply that Brian Leiter seems to be a bit of a jackass.

#154: So, dsquared, you’d be prepared to discuss the shield issue now?

No, not with you. And a quick glance at the tape reveals that “up yours” was in fact a response to you accusing me of “smug moral certainty” – you were rude then too.

You Wittgenwankers are all the same

as I was saying …

#155: Chris, John can speak for himself but I’d reply that a) “analytic philosopher” is more like the name of a trade union than a way of doing philosophy, but as a sociological description it’s got a reasonably constant referent, b) it’s certainly interesting that not all of the names on Leiter’s list are members of that trade union, because all of the people taking the high-handed approach to outsiders were, and they’re seemingly doing it in the name of this trade union, and this is a danger sign.

I just used Amazon “Search inside”, and Nagel, Warburton and Blackburn’s “introduction to philosophy” books come up with a grand total of zero uses of the string “Davidson”, between them, plus zero for “Kripke”. I’ve read Blackburn’s book on a train and it really doesn’t contain much modern research at all – are any of the other “introductory” works different? As it happens, I do understand, a bit, why several people in this thread were prepared to say that Davidson was the single greatest philosopher of the twentieth century – I would even guess that it would be possible to explain to a lay audience why this was the case, but the fact is that in the absence of serious effort at making the case, nobody is going to care, and this matters.

the fact that there’s no popular primer on the work of Robert Brandom or Tim Williamson shouldn’t be a cause for concern about the health of the discipline.

Compare “Freakonomics”; say what you like about that book, and I certainly have, but it’s definitely publicising work that’s at at the leading edge of the literature. Freakonomics isn’t an “introduction” to economics – it’s an explanation of the results of some quite advanced economics, combined with a general exhortation to care about the project that Levitt et al are embarked upon.

I actually like the philosophy that’s done in British universities and would like it to continue to exist, but the market very much appears to be moving in the direction of Media Studies (as I say, philosophy programs are closing down and Media Studies programs are opening up – that’s the reason to worry about the health of the discipline). In answer to Matt’s 135, I think that this is quite different from how things were in the past – Karl Marx, for example, was a law student and Friedrich Engels a clerk and soldier, but both of them joined the Young Hegelians. Sidgwick corresponded with JS Mill (MP and clerk at the East India Company) and Leibniz with Newton and half the crowned heads of Europe. McTaggart and Bradley, you have more of a point, but who remembers them now?

Whereas these days, basically the only time you see philosophers talking to the educated non-professional-philosopher public is when they pop up to have a go at Thought for the Day.

You might be right – I’m working on the basis of anecdote about the proverbial “job market for philosophers”, and specifically the apparent axiom of Brian Leiter’s site that (effectively) nobody who doesn’t go to one of the top twenty world universities can possibly expect a job anywhere. That might not actually be true. (I also assumed Charles Clarke wasn’t blowing smoke when talking about priorites a few years ago, which also might not be safe). Looking at the student population data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency I’d say that it’s flat to slightly up – about 10% higher than 5 years ago, which I think is in line with the demographics, but media studies is up 43% over the same period. So not the terminal decline I’d thought, but still not what I’d call rude health (actually, puttering around the data, it looks like the cultural studies, literature, humanities arm of things have been taking the brunt over the last couple of years, so maybe the trade union is working a bit).

_the fact that there’s no popular primer on the work of Robert Brandom _

Even this is now perhaps not true:
http://www.amazon.com/Robert-Brandom-Philosophy-Now-McGill-Queens/dp/0773534865/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236082918&sr=8-1

(I’ve not done anything more than look at the Amazon page for this book so can’t say if it’s properly a “popular primer”, but some of the other books in this series are thought of as that, I’d think.

As Chris says, while philosophy is having a hard time in the current financial crisis, it’s not having a worse time than the rest of higher education system. Sometimes a school closes a philosophy department, but sometimes the re-open a PhD program and sometimes they close down some other departments. The idea that philosophy is significantly worse off than other academic disciplines isn’t very credible and probably shouldn’t be said with much certainty by those who haven’t looked into the situation very much.

Apologies to Gowder for mangling his name.

When was the last time that philosophers, en bloc, abandoned a previous line of inquiry as being wrong?

Not the right question, alas. It probably was when they decided that pragmatism and process philosophy were no good, back around 1940-1950. And after that, when they decided that l. positivism was no good, not too much later. After that they all look alike to me, but for all I know Tweedledum has been displacing Tweedledee incessantly ever since, like Finnegan constantly falling down the stairs.

Freakonomics isn’t an “introduction” to economics – it’s an explanation of the results of some quite advanced economics

No it isn’t, as you are well aware. It’s an explanation of the results of some quite advanced instrumental variable regressions, applied in a variety of settings. I’ll accept “the results of some papers published in some quite prestigious economics journals”.

Considered as academic disciplines, Economics and Philosophy are quite similar in many ways in their intellectual temperament, commitment toward an orthodox body of methods and styles, and attitude to uncredentialed outsiders. (The latter is not inconsistent with a relatively large amount of internal heterogeneity.) The major point of divergence is that whereas Philosophy as a discipline has little or no political leverage within Universities or in the world at large, Economics since 1945 has transformed itself into a global quasi-profession, much to its advantage.

Effing HTML:

The shelves of [remainders] bookshops are groaning with [remaindered] works explaining philosophy to the general public

Whatever you say about the American public, they have some limits.

Considered as academic disciplines, Economics and Philosophy are quite similar in many ways in their intellectual temperament, commitment toward an orthodox body of methods and styles, and attitude to uncredentialed outsiders. (The latter is not inconsistent with a relatively large amount of internal heterogeneity.) The major point of divergence is that whereas Philosophy as a discipline has little or no political leverage within Universities or in the world at large, Economics since 1945 has transformed itself into a global quasi-profession, much to its advantage.

I agree totally. During prosperous times economists could say any dman fool thing they wanted to — and boy, did they. Now that economists infinitely smarter than you and me have succeeded in bringing on the Second Great Depression, during the transition period before we return entirely to barbarism and the turnip-standard currency I expect economists finally to take their lumps, though mass impalement is of course a Utopian pipe dream.

It’s an explanation of the results of some quite advanced instrumental variable regressions, applied in a variety of settings

Hmmm no, I don’t agree with that (although it’s quite a while since I picked up Freakonomics, and I might be getting it mixed up with Tim Harford’s book or one of the other plethora). There’s a decent slug of game theory in there too, for example the discussion of the spectrum auctions. Klemperer, Bulow & Binmore is quite serious stuff and most of it less than ten years old in the literature.

(Ahhhh, I see via Google that it was Harford I was thinking of – substitute accordingly and apologies. But this is kind of the point; there are so many of these books that I’m spoilt for examples. I could take the discussion of option pricing in “When Genius Failed”, or tax theory from “The Truth About Markets”, or one of a dozen things from Krugman’s books.)

Economics since 1945 has transformed itself into a global quasi-profession, much to its advantage

Absolutely. But it’s done this because it’s (not always or universally, but to an important extent) always had people in the profession who were attempting to build a bridge to the real world of affairs and policy. The UK mobile phone spectrum auctions were designed based on the absolute cutting edge of research in auction theory. The UK guidelines on the use of embryonic stem cells were based on – well, a lot of things, but not really the cutting edge of research in philosophy journals.

Actually that is an interesting one Harry – why is Philosophy of Education still such a “practical”, empirical field? One could easily have seen how it might have gone in a different direction and be full of papers about the logical structure of “learning” and where “X taught Y” implies “Y learned from X”; then they would have had to invent a new field to do all the work that’s currently done in philosophy of education (which thinking about it is pretty much what happened with “bioethics”)

_Are Nelson Goodman and A. J. Ayer currently badly thought of enough not to justly even merit being on the list?_

Goodman probably should have been on there in one sense. No one can reasonably argue from today’s perspective that he was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, but he was surely important and as plausible as many of the others. To my mind his attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction is in some ways better than Quine’s, the “new riddle of induction” is, thankfully, not quite so much talked about anymore, but still important, and lots of his other work, on simplicity and the like, is important, too. I’m not sure of how his work on aesthetics is thought of today because I don’t know much the contemporary field, but it was quite influential for a while, at least. Maybe it still is, though there are some pretty counter-intuitive claims in it, about the nature of musical performance and the like.

Ayer is, I think, often given a bum rap and seen as less good and less original of a philosopher than he was, as if he only wrote a popular introduction to logical positivism. A lot of his later work on epistemology, probability, and some of his historical studies are quite interesting, though I think not really in fashion these days. He’s clearly not a probable choice for “greatest philosopher”, as he well knew, but I think he is unfairly under-rated.

“Several others” is hardly a bowl of milk.

I like the one where you push John Emerson onto the trolley tracks.

I’ve decided that the problem with trolley car experiments is that they lack vividness, plausibility, schadenfreude, and redeeming social value. If trolleycar advantages had been about impaling financiers all along, you wouldn’t have heard me whining.

Carefully explained at my link.

Academic disciplines do die out, you know. A hundred years ago, philology was the cornerstone of nearly every major university. Nowadays … well, there are still some philologists left, but well, who cares?’

That’s interesting, given that C.S. Lewis put Ransom, a philologist, a cut or three above Weston, a physicist in the academic pecking order. Yeah, I know, it’s Lewis, but . . .

An important sense of ‘greatest’ is ‘most influential.’ Wittgenstein has a claim to that title in the 20th-Century. The logical positivists (Carnap, in particular) are heavily indebted to the Tractatus and to Wittgenstein’s work in the early 30s. Indeed, the characteristic features of logical positivism are simply taken over from Wittgenstein.

This doesn’t make any sense at all, unless the philosophers were very late to the table on this one. Logical positivism has it’s roots in the 19th century at least; for instance the intuitionists versus the formalists in mathematics (the Frog and Mouse war as Einstein later dubbed it.) This approach also informed both relativity (time is what clocks measure) and QM, which predates the 30’s by quite a bit. I admit I don’t know much about philosophy; is this a case where the same term is being used for two different ideas?

Dennett describes himself (at the back of Consciousness explained) as a Wittgensteinian, or as someone who wanted to move on from being a Wittgensteinian. So there’s one answer: no Wittgenstein, no Dennett.

Good call (I own that and “Freedom Evolves”. Oh, and “The Minds I” if that counts.) Which is why I asked about influences inside philosophy as opposed to outside philosophy. Dennett seems to have ideas that can be at least in theory be empirically tested for their truth or falsity and seems to have a great deal of currency with scientists working in certain. Wittgenstein does not. Any more than Aristotle does, though no one would disagree that Aristotle ‘influenced’ generations of academics after him.

But there is no right answer to a trolley problem, only answers that fit definitions of the normative in a given place and time.
Most novels revolve around the description of events to which our responses, like those of the characters, are conflicted. Novels are well written trolley problem that deal not in absolutes but in descriptions and the record of perceptions. [Trolley problems as such are bad literature.]
Analytic liberalism ignores the complexity of the world we inhabit, which is a world not of multiple truths but of multiple perceivers and perceptions. It’s the dumbing down of description in preference for labeling assumptions as facts. Bureaucracy not as banal necessity but as foundation . With that in mind:

-Science is the study of facts and philosophy the study of values.
-Conflating the two in favor of facts, values become assumed.
-Values assumed all questions are seen as those of expertise.
-Expertise as the goal terms of measurement are assumed.
-Curiosity is defined by the frame, values by the frame moral worth by the frame.
-Democracy is undermined as a value and then as a goal.,
[Give them numbers if you want]

And as I linked above a respected philosopher and professional copain of Leiter, can now accuse a scientist of being in error because his philosophical assumptions are [apodictic “must be!”] in error even though his science is correct.
Talk about putting the “heart before the course.”

Gettier: Would Leiter’s fixation on Nietzsche being “right” fit here?

Hurka: “You Wittgenwankers are all the same….”

189: “Not at all. If you look, what you will see is a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities in detail….”

Well played, sir. I wonder if professor Hurka will return to explain how reading a novel or taking an exam are paradigmatic examples of ‘games.’

how did philosophers manage to lose more or less the entire territory of applied ethics?

Offhand, I would say they traded it away to preserve their status purity. (Contact with the public usually contaminates occupational status.) There was a moment in the late 60s and early 70s for instance, when bioethics emerged as a philosophical mediator between the state and religion in U.S. policy on genetic engineering. What was initially a subfield of philosophy became a self-subsistent field, though, and stuff like bioethics, business ethics, etc, has little or no standing in the discipline, even though there’s a lot of money there.

It’s been very interesting how economics has been able to hit the sweet spot between getting their hands dirty on the hired gun side while also insisting on the high-mindedness and purity of the field as a scientific enterprise. I think it has to do with the applied side of economics being able to retain a connection (even though it’s a often a notional one) between the applied work and the high theory.

How did philosophers manage to lose more or less the entire territory of applied ethics?

They seem to have renounced it.

David Velleman:

I agree with Gerald Dworkin and Jason Stanley that moral philosophers are not “better than the average person in coming to correct answers about first-order moral matters”…..

The point is that expertise in critically examining your deliberations, though useful, is not the same as expertise in carrying out those deliberations, which (as Jerry put it, and Jason seconded) is likely to require “sympathetic feelings, experience with the subject matter, and intuitive insight”.

Two of the links in my citation seem to have gone dead. I suspect a conspiracy.

““fooled a lot of people who really would have been expected to have known better” is a euphemism for “gave the public what they want”.

how did philosophers manage to lose more or less the entire territory of applied ethics?

Well, arguably in the democratic age everybody else was at it too: it ceased to be a specialist field. Economics remained more specialised because of the necessity to know mathematics.

…so if he’d hurry up and bring it on, all the “professional” philosophers could slap each other on the back, continue to congratulate each other on how much smarter they are than the ignorant multitude, and then wonder why another five philosophy departments closed down this month.

Why do you guys tolerate this kind of thing from dsquared when you have an unambiguous history of not tolerating it from commenters who aren’t him? Almost every comment thread I’ve read in which dsquared participates, he has been involved in arguments and employing sarcasm and other forms of intentionally risible rhetoric.

In any case, the adolescent superciliousness of this:

I’m always playing a game, although not always the one you think ;-)

…should be grounds for suspension of blogosphere posting rights all by itself.

But I recognize this is a lost cause. Sigh.

When will they learn? When will they ever learn?

Sarcasm isn’t allowed now?

Philosophers are, at worse, quixotic and mostly harmless. The latter something not true about, say, bloggers.

Hmm. What measure of harm could we look at?

Unless they’re hungry or have been disturbed, lions are completely harmless They won’t just kill you for no good reason, and if a lion could talk, he’d explain his reasons. But you wouldn’t understand him. You’d think “I don’t know what that guy’s trying to say, but he seems to be terribly disturbed”.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I would like to hear the lion try to explain its reasons for tongue-avoidance.”

Because you never know where that tongue has been.

Paul Feyerabend: he recognized the form and scent of the Enemy

That said, James, Dewey, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Stephen Toulmin, Ernest Gellner, and Michel Meyer were the greatest philosophers of the past century. Analytic philosophers mostly all suck, but I’ll add Charles Taylor so that they have one representative on the list.

Typical, choose the only analytic philosopher who would be known to the general public, having popularized his ideas through footwear design and child-soldier mongering.

Sorry, Chris, but your view that Dewey is a “minor” figure shows a pretty enormous ignorance of the history of philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Then again, this ignorance seems to be shared by Leiter’s readers, which is a bit disappointing. (Of course, I am greatly biased.)

It’s certainly true that professional philosophy has its problems: crappy norms, flattening of creativity, talentless careerists, arseholes. In this, it’s like most human institutions. It’s also true that professional philosophers can be touchy, pompous, and impatient. In this, we’re like most human beings. But I don’t see any reason – in this thread, anyway – for thinking that philosophy is in an especially bad state. There’s lots of exciting work going on – some of it mostly of interest to specialists (but not therefore valueless), some of it speaking much more widely. There are plenty of books which talk, without talking down, to the interested layperson*. John Emerson – as usual – is failing to distinguish between his disagreeing with the content of (what he knows of) recent philosophy, and the discipline being in crisis.

* e.g. Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions; Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love; Peter Singer, Practical Ethics; Joel Kupperman, Six Myths about the Good Life. These are just books in my areas of interest, off the top of my head. Plenty more could easily be added to the list.

There are plenty of books which talk, without talking down, to the interested layperson*.

Yes but they’re not really talking about what’s appearing in the top philosophy journals right now, are they? If you compare it to a really healthy discipline, like evolutionary biology or even physics (where in the last two years I’ve read “Faster than the speed of light” by Joao Maguiero and “The Trouble with physics” by Lee Smolin, both of which are books by people at the top of their profession dealing with genuinely live debates), then you do notice a difference. I’ve drawn the comparison to economics in this thread, but as I’ve noted ad nauseam on CT, I think that a lot of economics is in serious crisis as well, also because of the retreat from the practical.

Kieran – it just struck me on the tube into work this morning that philosophers are doubly stuck because they can lose their status by contact with the public and becoming too practical, but also by becoming too abstract and moving into mathematics.

dsquared, you continue to make that annoying point & you seem to have an abundance of time for it. But your assessment of what is practical or not in philosophy or biology shouldn’t be the censor of what physicists and philosophers actually do. Your example of physics does not hold as it has become fashionable post-Hawking for physicists to publish vulgarizing books in which they act out a long refuted philosophical thesis that physics can explain everything (whilst they are at it gathering support for streaming more dollars into physics research).

The better example for your claim would have been Dawkins. But if Dawkins counts, Dennett is somebody that counts as well and Habermas would count and you’d have enough contemporary philosophers to conclusively refute your point that philosophy, because of lacking the practical application that you deem practical, does not have an impact on the world.

By the way much of what has been done in philosophical and mathematical logic, whether or not unnoticed by you, has a direct link to the applied sciences (AI to name one).

btw, with respect to #223, to accuse someone of “trollery” is to accuse them of not arguing in good faith, which is a form of dishonesty. Serious accusations like that should not be made other than on good evidence; they are personal attacks.

220: Usually when people give me lists such as that one, I mark down the names and take a look at them. I’ve already looked at Singer, and like Lewis he strikes me as fully representative of batshit rationality — the meticulous and rigorous argumentation of theses chosen for shock value. (Singer’s scores 10+ because his thesis appeals to the PETA supermodel community, meaning that he’s engaged in society too, not just an alienated rationalist).

Usually I’m disappointed / validated. I’ve liked Rorty and some things by Putnam, but when you look at it they’re mostly saying “let’s get the hell out of here” and proposing to repair the damage done by 70 years of (nonexistent: see Preston above) analytic philosophy — Putnam’s Sen collaboration is key here. Bernard Williams (trollishly cursed above by Gowder) said somewhat the same, and reading Williams is tremendously sad because I think that he could have done much better work if he’d been working in a field where the ruling oligarchy was methodologically a bit more pluralistic and less fascistic.

Inwagen’s philosophically nihilist book on the Problem of Evil cites a total of three authors who wrote before 1900, one of whom (JS Mill) he refuted and one of whom was an irrelevant anecdotalist, and in whose book all of the heavy lifting was done by a C.S. Lewis mashup.

As for Leiter, he seems to think that if you write a book with the word “Nietzsche” in the title that counts as addressing Nietzsche. Enough said.

So you see, I’m trying. really I am. On the other hand, I have other things to do with my life than just this, and at a certain point you have to apply the rotten-egg one-taste principle of criticism.

My claim that professional philosophy should be in crisis should be distinguished from the claim that philosophy is in crisis. Scholasticism lasted a couple of centuries longer than it should have because it was solidly instituitionalized and even had military and police arms (the Habsburg armies and the Inquisition). I’ve been trolling economics during the same period that I’ve been trolling philosophy, and if people recently have been slightly more friendly to my points, it’s because there’s a point at which economic errors make an enormous difference, and that point has arrived. Furthermore, the present civilizational crisis almost certainly would be less intense if the economics profession had been less well-armored.

But this cannot happen with philosophy, because it’s the “wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism”. There are no consequences to bad academic philosophy, and thus there can be no crisis. [NOTE: if Wittgenstein’s wheel really is a flywheel,as I’ve seen suggested, forget I said this. My guess is that Wittgenstein has two wheels. In any case, academic philosophy isn’t any goddamn flywheel.]

People may wonder: “Where did Emerson get the idea that it’s OK to denounce a whole always-already nonexistent yet dominant school of philosophy, root and branch, without the lest trace of nuance?” The answer is that my model is the wonderfully malicious assault Russell and his friends, long before any of us were born, made on British Absolute Idealism. (You might think that Absolute Idealism never recovered, but you would be wrong. Cf. Oxford U. P.’s recent “Philosophy of Time”, ed. Poidevin, which is almost entirely dominated by McTaggart, and which almost completely ignores Eddington’s almost equally ancient contribution to the question, which is much more useful and which is grounded on science.

“Physicists, [biologists] and philosophers” : one of these things is not the same as the others.

Yes, dsquared, but that just covers students _admitted_. Since home undergraduate numbers are capped by Hefce, you’d also have to look at the unmet demand. I don’t have access to the global stats, but I can tell you that many top universities are fighting off demand from would-be philosophers with 3 As (application to place ratios in the region of 20 to 1) , whereas the physicists struggle to recruit to their allotted places.

I’d disagree with Dsquared here. I’d say that for us, for me at least, the collapse of academic philosophy is a desideratum rather than a fact, just as as for Leiter and his operatives the total control of hiring in academic philosophy is more a goal than a fact. Unfortubnately, I think that D^2 and I are the relatively more wishful ones. This is probably a good point to trundle out the old mole, the dialectic, the cunning of history, internal contradictions, etc.

Chief among the contradictions: WTF happens to philosophy PhDs from the third-ten and the fourth-ten schools, when the gulf between the #10 and #11 schools on the cartels’ carefully quantified hierarchy (copyright Leiter) is already enormous? Shouldn’t they be discouraged from trying for the PhD at all, unless they’re independently wealthy? (I have lots of anecdata about “bankrupt” PhDs driving bus, with the qualification that you cannot declare bankruptcy on school loans and will be in debt for the rest of your natural life).

But if the #21–#40 schools close down, where will the #11-#20 graduates work? A house-of-cards collapse like the recent global economic collapse seems very possible, especially as budgets get tighter (given that economically-rationalized mega-schools don’t really give a shit about the liberal arts anyway).

Philosophy PhDs can always go into law, of course, and practice the wisdom of Phaedrus, who knew that there’s more honor in successfully defending a false proposition than there is in successfully defending a true one, since the defender of a truth has an unfair advantage.

I wasn’t meaning for “would-be philosopher” to be taken all that literally, I was responding to your claim that “people at this precise moment care about physics in a way in which they don’t care about philosophy.” Whether they care enough to apply to study at a university would seem to be relevant, if not conclusive.

dsq-225&226,

OK, that helps (but doesn’t explain the sweeping nature of your posts). I still disagree: a. there’s little empirical support for your claim (better: the support you quote is not sufficient to support the sweepingness of your claim) & b. popularity is a trailing indicator (vulgarized physics are on their way down, work on conceptual schemes adopted as dogmatic truth are on the up) & c. well 15 years isn’t an awfully impressive measuring range.

I do agree by the way that towards the end of the last century there were too little philosophers trying to reach out (and the ones you name are not representative at all for where we came – as little as Chomsky/Pinker are representative for current day language learning hypothesis). The hope I have, but it’s hope w/o evidence is that somewhere something is in the making that’s new enough to be academically important and able to capture the attention of the public at large.

(as to my trollery point: John E kind of makes a point to bring up trolls, I’m sure he wouldn’t be offended by an innocent jab. If he construed it as personal attack I apologize – if somebody else
construed it thusly I have it noted that I have no reason whatsoever to believe he’s dishonest.)

I do believe John is attacking a strawman: I think it was Sam that said it above – any institution, any human being have certain less savoury characteristics, he gives no reason to single out this specific body of human beings. More to the point: 20th century philosophy is not at all like the scholastic movement – that specific comparison is better reserved for neo-liberal economists.

If we’re talking about popular books, by the way, one of the most acclaimed children’s books of recent years, worldwide, was a guide to the history of philosophy.

Any institution, any human being have certain less savoury characteristics, he gives no reason to single out this specific body of human beings.

??????????????????

Because it’s the topic on the table, and one in which I have a special interest.

Any institution has unsavory characteristics, THEREFORE any institution is liable to criticism and attack. Including by outsiders.

Modern academic disciplines, notably philosophy and economics, and their oligarchical leaders use academic freedom, the prestige of science, technical language and the pretense to expertise, their control of the disciplinary machinery, and a quantified algorithm for hiring, firing, and promotion (copyright Leiter) to place themselves above all criticism, transcendent and invulnerable, and feel no obligation to attend to ignorant, unaccredited, folkish sorts.

McCumber, Wilshire, Mirowski, and Donoghue are relevant, but Jeff Schmidt’s “Disciplined Minds” is the most penetrating analysis.

The Philosophical Gourmet report has an enormous institutional importance. It’s Leiter’s baby no matter how many other people are playing. I find it utterly toxic. It’s had the predictable and I presume intended effect of fixing the academic hierarchies in an objective, quantified way which is stabilized by multiple feedback loops: people choose schools by it, hire by it, and are hired from it. One effect, which I presume was intended and is in no sense a surprising outcome , has been to narrow the scope of philosophy. Once all of the philosophers of Type X are in second-twenty schools, Type X thinking is gone.

To be honest I think this thread’s kind of drifted – I am planning to do something similar as a front page post on economics (where Paul Krugman has admitted, more or less offhand, that US universities did practice ideological censorship of rival schools) so maybe continue it there?

As the day progresses and Emerson makes a dent in his jug of Bacardi, expect the generalizations to become ever more grand, the bombast to blast greater, and the Bertrand Russell bashing to commence. Russell had issues, but he also had some political spine. Let’s not forget Russell dissed the bolsheviks when most leftist academics (including Dewey) were hoping for VI Lenin and crew to march into western Europe. Russell also had words for the blackshirt fetish of the Brits (including fatboy Churchill, who blessed Il Duce and Hitler until the panzers were rolling). He protested ‘Nam in his 90s, and was not entirely supportive of the founding of Israel.

Leiter’s usual philo- hustle itself a farce: a straw poll conducted among the Richie Cunninghams of midwestern Philosophy departments asking them to fill in the scantron for their Top 10 eggheads! Geez, Potsie, have to go with ol’ Svengali Ludwig. ( LW’s barely a Glaucon to Russell’s Socrates).

Kieran:

“stuff like bioethics… has little or no standing in the discipline, even though there’s a lot of money there.”

ROFL.

And Lee Smolin apparently does economics these days.

Yes but they’re not really talking about what’s appearing in the top philosophy journals right now, are they? If you compare it to a really healthy discipline, like evolutionary biology or even physics (where in the last two years I’ve read “Faster than the speed of light” by Joao Maguiero and “The Trouble with physics” by Lee Smolin, both of which are books by people at the top of their profession dealing with genuinely live debates), then you do notice a difference. I’ve drawn the comparison to economics in this thread, but as I’ve noted ad nauseam on CT, I think that a lot of economics is in serious crisis as well, also because of the retreat from the practical.

I suppose that a barometer for measuring the health of a discipline at any given time would be something like what are considered the Questions of the Day to the lay public. Hard to believe that they were never the equivalent of questions about whether or not Tyra Banks could be replaced as the diva/guru on America’s Next Top Model, but there was a time when the unwashed masses would crowd public halls to listen to popular lectures on the meaning of simultaneity, or whether dinosaurs were really birds.

Well, there are still preoccupations like that – just not with philosophy. Say what you will about the cranks who crawl out of the woodwork declaring that Einstein was Wrong being funny and/or sad, but at least they are preoccupied with something important. Similarly, evolution in it’s various aspects is much in the public’s eye; everything from the origin of life to evolutionary psychology. Economics, well, . . . ’nuff said.

The point is, there is enough popular interest in these subjects to sustain an entire industry devoted to publishing lay expositions of one topic or another. Philosophy as a general subject just doesn’t have this type of appeal. To the extent it does, people like me read Dennett for musings about the notion of free will, or Dawkins on ethics. So this comment make perfect sense:

Part of the problem here is that Nietzsche was, in part, correct when he said that science has superseded philosophy.

It seems to me that if philosophers want to become ‘relevant’ again, they’re going to have to tackle questions like free will and ethics and human behaviour in a way that science can’t, and in a way that has some practical significance. And, no, railing against the deficiencies of science, albeit in a relevant and cogent way, doesn’t count; the contributions have to be positive ones. Though somebody does have to pound the drum somehow to drive this point home:

The reason some of us are so furious is that we defend humanism not against science but the pseudo-science of anti-humanists with science envy. The unity of the humanities and the sciences was a dream and hallmark of the original scholastics. The Renaissance brought the acceptance of their quite logical separation.

I wouldn’t put it quite so strongly, but economics as a ‘science’ definitely fits the bill: as a description of human behaviour, it definitely belongs in the humanities; to the extent that it tries to fit everyday actions into a framework that depends upon people not behaving like human beings, it is a psuedo-science. But I use this to illustrate my point that, while adversarial debunkers and educated critques are necessary to every healthy discipline, it is not enough. People have known for a long time that economics as it has been used as a shaper of public policy is a fraud, known it for decades. But since alternatives weren’t offered, it wasn’t enough to point out that the Emporer wore no clothes. You need to get away from these sorts of declarations:

By the way, I’m more than a little puzzled by the argument which amounts to one concluding that philosophy is useless and dead because it has no practical application. The same argument applies to a great many academic fields, among which there would be one or two I suspect any particular person making this argument would find themselves defending.

Now, that’s simply not true. What did Keynes say? “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” I would add that the defunct economist is probably the slave of some outmoded moral system encoded by a long-dead philosopher. So a lot of people have this notion of some sort of cut-rate utilitarianism as being the last word in proper conduct. If philosophers could do something with that, maybe they’d be considered a modern force to be reckoned with in the public’s eye.

Part of the problem here is that Nietzsche was, in part, correct when he said that science has superseded philosophy.

The reason some of us are so furious is that we defend humanism not against science but the pseudo-science of anti-humanists with science envy. The unity of the humanities and the sciences was a dream and hallmark of the original scholastics. The Renaissance brought the acceptance of their quite logical separation.

John Holbo,

Hurka doesn’t appear to have a very informed opinion of Wittgenstein.

You wrote your dissertation on Wittgenstein, so I would assume that you do have an informed opinion. Can you sketch your reason(s) for believing that “Wittgenstein did have a horrible influence on philosophy.”

By the way, the link on your website to your dissertation is dead. Are you planning on putting it back up?

OK, I’ll respond to Emerson even though lord knows he and I have had words before:

“As for Leiter, he seems to think that if you write a book with the word “Nietzsche” in the title that counts as addressing Nietzsche. Enough said.

So you see, I’m trying. really I am.”

Look, John. You’re a lovely fellow and peppery as could be, no doubt. But the notion that you are trying, but repeatedly failing, to find value in academic philosophy runs contrary to the evidence, to say the least. You are strongly, obviously quite dogmatically committed to finding no value in it. How not?

At any rate, here’s a challenge for you: take a paper by Leiter on Nietzsche – let’s say one of the ones from the volume he edited with Richardson. The title of the book is “Nietzsche”, so it seems a perfect test of your hypothesis. Make a serious argument that the paper is intellectually worthless and shouldn’t even count as an attempt to address Nietzsche. Alternatively you could just take my word for it: you can’t do it. Which, one way or the other, will bring us back to point number one. We can see that you aren’t trying. Really, we can. Which is ok, in the end. But not quite the same thing as you trying, now is it?

Aw c’mon John, admit it: you like things just the way they are. It would make you miserable if you couldn’t rage against the machine. (There’s your carrot. Who needs a stick, then?)

But down to business: “2.) if you write about an author who deliberately chooses to present his ideas in a certain non-standard way, and who ridicules the standard way, it’ s malpractice to pretend that none of that happened, and translate his ideas into standard format abd go from there, without either or acknowledging or crtitiquing his chosen way of writing or his motives for choosing it.”

This seems to me quite feeble, just the fallacy of imitative form. You can’t write well about Nietzsche unless you write like Nietzsche. I know you don’t actually believe that. But, given that you don’t, what’s the point of pretending that Leiter is blind to the obvious fact that Nietzsche is a weird sort of writer? You are just leaping from the fact that Leiter is trying to construct rational arguments of a certain sort to the conclusion that he must be deluded about the possibility that this procedure is problematic in Nietzsche’s case. (I think your sort of criticism is more applicable to Richardson, who seems to be implausibly determined to find a certain sort of system in Nietzsche. But Richardson is obviously aware that, on the surface, this is a bizarre thing to try to do.)

“Nietzsche’s physiological psychology may have been well-intended and perhaps philosophically well grounded, but in actual content it was incredibly crude and about on a par with alchemy or macrobiotics”

Leiter thinks it’s important that Nietzsche was a naturalist and that this has not always been appreciated. I think that’s right. Do you disagree? If so: why? Where does Leiter say that the crude stuff about diet and so forth is secretly not crude?

Alistair Macintyre passed the test? Now I’m really confused.