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.

My main criticisms that I remember were that 1.) 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, something you’d hear in an organic food store; it doesn’t seem like something to celebrate; and 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 also apples to Wittgenstein, less so because people do critique Wittgenstein, and to most academic works on Chinese philosophy. (Chuang Tzu did not write the way he did because he had no examples of systematic argumentation to learn from; he did, but was rejecting those examples.)

As for my good will: sometimes people say either 1.) you don’t know what you’re talking about or 2.) you’d fint the stuff you like in present day professional philosophy, but you’re not looking hard enough. So I read stuff they say is great and that I should like. So far, Charles Taylor and Alistair MacIntyre have passed the test, and I wish there were more of them.

I never did promise to abandon my ideas about what philosophy should be, or my conviction that that kind of stuff (socially involved, generalist, pragmatism and process philosophy directed at the general educated reader) was starved out ca. 1940-1980 in philosophy as in many other fields. When I started college in 1964, these people were not extinct, though they weren’t going anywhere, and I didn’t read the tea leaves correctly.

So anyway, my American pantheon is James, Veblen, Moore, Kenneth Burke, Dewey, Whitehead, G. H. Mead, C. Wright Mills, John Kenneth Galbraith, others I’ve forgotten, and a lot of social critics outside philosophy. (Peirce is not on the list because I haven’t read much of him). Someone in 1964 with that pantheon was up shit creek, and what replaced it doesn’t measure up. And the transition was politics and mood shift, not rational.

As I’ve said many times, it’s an opportunity-cost, crowding-out problem. Is the stuff I want there? No. Is the stuff that replaced it better? NO!! Are the same jobs being done differently? No, they quit doing that stuff.

And I could take my lumps, recognize the way of the world, and politely shut up, but there’s no real reason for me to do so. No carrot, no stick.

“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?

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?

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.

I wrote: “Wittgenstein.”

Tom Hurka responded: “Wittgenstein (a horrible influence on philosophy, in my opinion).”

Oddly enough, I would agree with Hurka without being inclined to change my vote. Wittgenstein did have a horrible influence on philosophy. But he was still the most brilliant philosopher. (Explaining how I believe these claims go together would take a bit of explaining, I concede.)

This should read “both of which are books by borderline crackpots who write books for the public because people in their own field have no interest in their ideas”. Hope that helps!

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

ROFL.

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).

…largely because I am unpublished, and that is the major criterion. I mean, if you’re a Socrates, you have to let your Plato do the publishing for you. Sadly, the candidates mentioned already have taken the very unphilosophical step of writing things to convince others that a certain point of view is somehow correct. Oh, dear. I’m sure that the various things they have written are all quite clever, but, you see, the whole point of philosophy is to take the other side, the idea that generating clever theories is the root of all evil.

Which brings us back to my unsustainable claim to this crown of thorns. One could say that I have just advanced a theory. But, in my defence, at least it wasn’t at all a clever theory, and, more importantly, it was stated in such a way as to make it impossible to repose any trust in it. Just as a clever lawyer will have all of his clients pre-probate their wills, so the wise thinker will pre-falsify all of his theories, and those of the people around him. “The unrefuted life is not worth living.”, to quote the founder of this enterprise. That, really, is all a philosopher can do to protect this world from the domination of the rampant theorizing that we do uncontrollably, without even thinking—undermine the credibility of the whole enterprise of speculative thought. If I were really talented, I would exude from my conversation a cloud of incredulity that would keep people from believing, not just my theories, but all theories, in ever-widening circles around me.