Michèle Lamont on Philosophers

Conversation with a mother with a child in the local high school (fact):

Q. So, are they teaching Philosophy these days in high school?

A. Oh, of course not. That’s a religion.

Harry,
You’ve focused on the relationship between philosophers and humanists. How do you see things with social or life scientists?

My sense is that, very unfortunately, most empiricists think that philosophers are irrelevant, as they have no data (and no grants). They assume that everyone else thinks similarly, and feel something like pity, as if philosophy were a kind of intellectual disability.

Foucault and Derrida most certainly designated themselves as philosophers.

I don’t have anything to say about Derrida here, but I’m not sure this was always right about Foucault. Some of his work is pretty clearly philosophy, especially the early stuff (_The Order of Things_ and the like.) But his later work, while having clear philosophical interest, and having philosophical aspects, and being fertile ground for philosophers to work at, is also not clearly clearly philosophy, I think. And, I think that Foucault also saw this. The title he gave his chair at the College de France, after all, was “Professor of the History of Systems of Thought”, a title that seems to more clearly describe what he was up to in his later work than does “philosopher”. That doesn’t take away from him at all, I think. And he was clearly doing philosophy through much of his career, so it seems fine to me to call him, in general, a philosopher, but he also seemed to have seen himself as doing something else much of the time, and I think he was right to so see.

As to Harry’s point, I’ve not known too many people in, say, English departments say that they are _philosophers_, but have heard a fair number say that they do _philosophy_. (More probably do say “theory”, but “philosophy” isn’t that unusual, either.) Often what they do is philosophy, just poorly done. That philosophers think this is so shouldn’t be a surprise, though, any more than literary critics might reasonably think that the literary criticism done by philosophers is poorly done. What I do see is people w/o training in philosophy calling themselves “ethicists”, usually medical or whatever. This tends to mean “I emote about subjects in a fairly banal way, without realizing that my emoting is banal.”

“I’ve frequently been struck, when reading grant proposals from other humanities disciplines, how they could have been enriched by interaction with philosophers, whose input would have helped people to structure arguments better and perhaps to see problems that they gloss over.”

I admit to being very struck by this, in a variety of contexts. But I also wanted to say: Vice versa. Knowledge of other disciplines may be more useful to philosophers than they know. It is often striking to me how incurious some philosophers are. They are sometimes dismissive of whole swaths of intellectual inquiry. I’m not talking about pseudo-philosophy but of qualitative social science or history, e.g. Sometimes it is because they notice some sloppiness in an argument (that may not go all the way down to the argument’s core) and sometimes it seems knee-jerk and makes me worry some people think that doing philosophy and having an interest in (but not a full competence in) the natural sciences sort of covers all one’s intellectual bases. If one is incurious, I still think a little intellectual humility is in order. Perhaps withholding one’s negative judgment of the methodology and subject matter of disciplines you are not well-versed in is advisable.

There is a huge amount of bad philosophy that is done by non-philosophers and that might be the reason behind the dismissive attitude (justified or not) but every once in a while I think maybe someone they respected (a professor, a fellow grad student) simply told them that everything that anthropologists do is bunk and they remain forever convinced this is true. I heard many claims of this sort in graduate school. It would be nice to change that culture and open up a mutual dialogue between philosophy and some branches of the social science and humanities. I once witnessed a collaboration between a fairly orthodox analytic philosopher and an English professor that led to some extremely fruitful research on both their parts. Obviously, the openness has to go both ways. Some philosophers’ views on other disciplines are not the only reason these dialogues are hard to achieve.

The chance to hear from people working in various disciplines is one of the things I like most about Crooked Timber.

I hope it’s possible for the average Joe (let alone the average English professor) to think about ethics without having first fought their way through a John Rawls book. Whether that makes them an “ethicist” or just an ethical person depends, I guess, on whether anyone is willing to pay them for it. Randy Cohen, for instance, probably makes you guys puke, but there seems little doubt that he is in fact a professional ethicist.

Having once participated in a week-long workshop comprising both philosophers and computer scientists, one difference in disciplinary style quickly became evident: Faced with a description of a new application domain or problem, a typical computer scientist immediately thinks:

How can I simplify this problem or abstract away from some of the details of its description, in order to make progress towards solving it?

while a typical philosopher immediately thinks:

What implicit assumptions have been made or distinctions overlooked in this problem description, which need to be articulated, analyzed and discussed before we start to tackle it?

Needless to say, these different disciplinary styles themselves became the subject of discussion by some of the philosophers present, much to the annoyance of the computer scientists!

John 05.20.09 at 5:15 pm

Retelling that.

Matt,

What I do see is people w/o training in philosophy calling themselves “ethicists”, usually medical or whatever. This tends to mean “I emote about subjects in a fairly banal way, without realizing that my emoting is banal.”

This exactly right, IMO. I will never cease to be amazed at how frequent a view it seems to be in the circles I move in that no actual training, practice, and scholarship in moral philosophy is needed to actually “do” applied ethics. On the other hand, even among those with the requisite background, there are obviously better and worse ways of actually doing applied ethics, and the nature and quality of the connection between what is preferable for professional moral philosophy and what is preferable for professional applied ethics should not be assumed.

As to the subject of the post, there is an even more basic question I think needs to be answered or at least raised to disentangle the relationship between philosophy and the humanities: what exactly are the humanities? If we want to clarify or understand the tensions and relationships between professional philosophy and other disciplines in the humanities, surely it is important to actually understand what we mean by the designation “humanities.”

Sadly, in my and others view, the term is frequently as little more than an administrative designation, i.e., it is not the natural or social sciences, and it involved, “you know,” Plato, Aristotle, and then “some Renaissance guys, too.” I maintain, and will hopefully put in writing at some point, that properly historicizing the humanities itself — the name of the educational program developed in detail by a particular group of persons in particular communities during the Middle Ages/Renaissance — may shed some important light on the values and ethos that (here’s the normative claim) should animate the practices of persons who claim to be “humanists” today.

I also suspect that this approach might illuminate some important points in regard to the subject matter of this post.

I just completed an interdisciplinary PhD in theology and philosophy, and currently the majority of my publications are in philosophy — but I would never claim to be a philosopher, primarily because people who consider themselves to be “real philosophers” are huge dicks about it.

So was this an isolated incident, or should intellectual history be a required course for philosophers?

I don’t know whether it was an isolated incident, but I can say that it would have been surprising among the scholars of ancient philosophy that I know.

Harry, No, it was not directed at you.

I am a philosopher who teaches in interdisciplinary courses fairly regularly (‘Great Books’ sorts of things). I have enjoyed it much, especially getting the chance to learn about other disciplines and the works that are at their centers. (It’s like getting to be an undergraduate again.) Still, it’s an impossible task to talk to students about poetry, literature, art and the like. I grope around without a clue what to do, and can only really offer something when we get to a book of philosophy. However, I’ve been surprised on occasion to hear a lack of humility from some colleagues in other disciplines about philosophy, about my discipline, what is and is not philosophy, what is and is not philosophically important, what is and is not really in some work of philosophy. I admit I have heard philosophers on occasion pontificate on the true ‘great books’ of another discipline, though I am embarrassed to be in the same room. Yet even though I’ve had these experiences, on the whole, most academics, including philosophers, seem to me to be exceedingly humble about what they have expertise is in. Anyone should be squeamish about believing that colleagues outside of one’s discipline can adequately evaluate her work. It’s not as though we’re all born knowing what’s important in disciplines outside our expertise. And I’m surprised to hear that those doling out grant money suppose that they do. Isn’t that what letters of support are supposed to be doing–explaining the significance of a project to bright but uninformed and untrained amateurs?

3 term course in the history of philosophy. Final meeting after getting finals back. My statement “No where in this course have I found 1 single instance of a philosopher drawing a conclusion that is verifiable by other means.” Grade F. Personal philosophical belief: Philosophy is mental masturbation.

A real issue troubling the interaction between Philosophy and other fields is the significant confusion, most of all among those in ‘Philosophy’ departments, about what Philosophy is. Unless we simply define Philosophy as “that which gets done by people in departments labeled ‘Philosophy’ “, there needs to be a real examination of just what Philosophy is and why it is an important and distinct discipline. Despite the general ahistorical tendency of the last three-quarters century, what Philosophy means today cannot be understood absent of an understanding of what it has been and why it arose in the first place. The first place to go looking is the Ancient Greeks.

My general view, assuming we want a relatively clear intellectual taxonomy, is that Philosophy departments as they currently exist should be re-named Conceptual Analysis departments. The conflation of one tool for doing Philosophy [conceptual analysis] with Philosophy itself will need to be remedied before Philosophy, and those in departments labeled as such, can regain importance and coherence.

My general view, assuming we want a relatively clear intellectual taxonomy, is that Philosophy departments as they currently exist should be re-named Conceptual Analysis departments.

The (or a) problem with this is that lots of what happens in philosophy departments today isn’t at all properly or plausibly called “conceptual analysis”. Furthermore, even when that term is used there’s a great deal of dispute about what it means and what it comes down to. (See, for example, a recent review of Timothy Williamson’s book _The Philosophy of Philosophy_ by Peter Hacker in the Philosophical Quarterly where it’s clear that the two have quite different ideas of what counts as conceptual analysis. I’m fairly sure, furthermore, that most of the philosophers on this blog would not describe what they do as conceptual analysis, at least not entirely.

I think one problem is that a great number of professors of philosophy call themselves philosophers simply, when they’re simply professors of philosophy instead. For instance, professors of political science know they’re not politicians themselves, and professors of poetry usually know they’re not poets themselves (if, of course, they haven’t written any poetry). That is, more grandly, that what many academic disciplines teach are topics created by society at large: society needs a role called an engineer or a lawyer, and the professor of engineering creates engineers and the professor of law creates lawyers.

But society doesn’t need philosophy: plenty of functioning societies had no philosophers whatsoever, and it’s dubious whether any society actually “needs” philosophers perse. In fact, where philosophy always was and will be is where poetry now also is: previous societies needed poetry – a poet worth studying was a person who wrote poetry that many people liked, or many people thought valuable, or other poets liked, or inspired the king or a number of other reasons. Since our current society has no need of poetry, there is no poetry public except for professors of poetry. Thus, in the past, it would have been bizarre to argue that professors of poetry are necessarily poets of worth (what was a great poet would be a judgement not primarily made inside the academy or by members of the academy) . Now, it’s reasonably valid to say that poetry is an entirely academic exercise and that the best professor of poetry is also simultaneously the best poet simply.

I.E. the poet once had a relatively clear and widely understood societal function. Now that societies don’t need poetry, that understanding means it’s essentially a matter of trivia whether professors of poetry produce good (or indeed, any) poets. It’s probably irrelevant if the professors of poetry want to designate themselves the great poets of the age. There’s no one outside poetry academe who would dispute this designation.

But this had always been the case with philosophy. The state or society doesn’t care and doesn’t want any philosophers whatsoever.

“there are a number of people working in non-Philosophy departments who are philosophers (degrees in philosophy, teaching and publishing on philosophers and on topics philosophers teach and publish on). ”

All that is completely irrelevant. A philosopher isn’t determined by degrees in philosophy. Teaching or publishing on philosophers is indication of being a scholar of philosophy (which is a great thing, but that is not being a philosopher simply). Teaching about the topics philosophers talk about is also a great thing, but doesn’t even seperate philosophers from theologians from (some) sociologists from (some) economists from (some) pyschologists and so on.

Maybe the problem is that, because the disciplinary focus is on “philosophical interestingness”, the best philosophers work on core, more abstract problems, and the bad philosophers are pushed to the margins to apply philosophy to particular problems of interest to other disciplines.

In my field (history of science), many of us do read and engage with philosophy (and some of us do philosophy and call ourselves philosophers). Science, of course, has been a major site of philosophical interestingness for centuries. But the philosophy I’ve read on another personal area of interest, Wikipedia, ranged from trivial observations couched in jargon to ill-informed polemics that reflect a total lack of engagement with related spheres of discourse.

In re: interdisciplinariness. It seems weirdly often to happen that I am reading some person-who-writes-books-that-get-published-under-the-rubric-“philosophy”, and this person announces that he or she, or some cadre of colleagues or new “movement”, is going to courageously tackle some hitherto underdeveloped field of philosophical inquiry, and I think: “Huh. They really ought to begin by reading Proust.” I don’t know how many of them actually do get round to doing so.

(See, for example, a recent review of Timothy Williamson’s book The Philosophy of Philosophy by Peter Hacker in the Philosophical Quarterly where it’s clear that the two have quite different ideas of what counts as conceptual analysis.

)

A truly great review of a truly awful book.

@ burritoboy / 35:

this topic of the thread is premised on distinguishing the use of “philosopher” as (1) an identifier in the current academic division of labor, but which doesn’t necessarily match up with appointments in philosophy departments and (2) as an honorific, signifying the few people who produce work with historical value. In #8 I was (quite obviously) offering a (partial) list of criteria for justifying usage (1). It’s not clear what you’re up to, but it has something to do with (2) and with the state from what I can gather.

analytic philosophy really just looks like a social science to me,…

Again, that might describe some “analytic philosophy” (whatever that means these days), but it doesn’t describe a lot of what’s done in the majority of philosophy departments, large and small, in the English speaking world.

Right, I agree with Matt. A lot of what is done in philosophy departments is, for instance, trying to establish some sort of reflective equillibrium among widely held intuitions about particular cases and general principles that have some initial plausibility.

I think I’ve had more interaction with the humanities than most of the other philosophers posted here (2 phds, and one is in the humanities). I can confidently report that people in English departments and c *never* say of themselves “I’m a philosopher”. It’s an honorific in their lexicon which ought to be applied only to the greats (which of course they define somewhat differently to us). “Philosopher” = dead white guys plus a handful of living French people not all of whom are guys.

Steven at 30 (and others): I’m sympathetic to the idea of using ‘philosopher’ and ‘poet’ as honorifics, but it leaves me with a problem. I’m paid a salary to do and teach philosophy. What do I call myself? I’m obviously not (yet) a philosopher in the honorific sense that, say, David Hume was. But is there also an aspirational sense in which I can be a philosopher, much as I could be a novelist without being Proust?

How about simply “I’m a philosophy professor”? And then if your interlocutor says: “Gosh, a philosopher!”, you can earn brownie points for modesty by replying: “Well, you know, one aspires to being a philosopher…”

@40:

I believe my argument then was that I don’t think that the son of a radical democrat who had been executed by the Thirty Tyrants would have come up with the same conclusion about democracy; I thought that Plato’s class identity played a role. The professor was basically arguing that we had to only consider the ideas and take the argument at face value, without considering the context of the author’s experience.

Well, your professor was arguably justified so to insist inasmuch as a hypothesis as to why (you think) Person A holds View B is not a refutation of or even an engagement with View B, it is simply an ad hominem sidestepping of it; and engaging with View B itself was presumably the point of the class in question.

The problem, centrally, is that philosophy is NOT an academic discipline. It’s a way of life.

This account is going to make an awful lot of people who are clearly philosophers into non-philosophers- Russell, Kant, Hegel, Carnap, A. Smith, Thomas Reid, Sidgwick, etc. Even for many non-academics who are clearly philosophers, it’s not clear that we’d say that philosophy was a “way of life” for them- Descartes, Hume, Leibniz, Locke, etc. So this account surely won’t work. I guess you can go on insisting on this account if you want, but I think it pretty clearly won’t work. It’s right that working in a philosophy department isn’t necessary for being a philosopher, but what many people who work in philosophy departments do is properly called philosophy (if it’s not, it’s not clear what it is.) I don’t see how they are wrong to say they are philosophers anymore than a chemistry professor is wrong to say she’s a chemist, even though she also teaches chemistry as well as doing it.

\threadjack

Chris,

I can report that the judgement of the patient representatives, parents, medics etc. struck me as being in no respect inferior to those of philosophers on the questions we addressed

Two points: first, as I am guessing you are aware, there is a vigorous and fairly voluminous debate over whether it makes any sense to speak of an ethics expert, and whether there is any value added. A CT comment thread is obviously not the appropriate forum to delve into that literature, but it is obviously relevant.

Second, I respect your perspective, but I have formed at least somewhat different views from my own experiences in clinical and research ethics. However, I do want to say my comments were not generally directed at lay participants in the cultures of medicine and science, but rather at many of the professional participants, who often seem to me to have the (peculiar, if not altogether mistaken) unreflective view that their expertise as a professional healer/investigator is all the experience, training, and savvy they need to render ethical decisions as to sometimes deeply complicated and difficult problems. Moreover, the extensive history of unethical human subjects research during the 20th century, does not inspire confidence in the notion that professional healers and investigators are are well-equipped to make decisions that at least historically will be judged morally plausible. Whether applied ethicists would have made a difference is, of course, another question altogether.

\end threadjacking

hannah and rosa?

Burrito-Boy:
“The only way this dilemma can be resolved is philosophically. History provides comparatively little additional value to this question.” That does sound rather arrogant, displinarily-speaking. Philisophic thought, as well as its thinkers, doesn’t emerge from a vacuum of pure reason. Many things influence philosopher’s thinking – I doubt for example that women philosophers would agree with Plato’s comment in the Symposium that love for a man is higher and purer than love for a woman.

Right, but there’s a more subtle thing going on here. The traditional Athenian regime can refer both to democracy, and pre-democratic Athens. Obviously, Plato’s not simply an aristocrat – he doesn’t endorse rule by blood. But given that he thinks only the sons of the aristocracy should be educated in philosophy, his call for philosopher-kings has a certain self-interested ring.

Bianca:
I don’t know whether to be flattered or not by the idea that I went to Columbia in the 1980s – I was in the class of 2005. And I did switch halfway to a much better section that turned into a rollicking debate over the validity of the Enlightenment. Ended up enjoying myself quite a lot.

BTW, if you want a good left take on Locke’s theory of property, I suggest Michael Perelman’s Invention of Capitalism. Essentially, the argument is that Locke’s theory of property is a giant apologia for the enclosure of the commons, which arguably was a huge theft of property rights from the majority of the people.

steven:
That counts as an ad hominem attack? I wasn’t saying he was wrong because he was an aristocrat, I was saying that his attitudes toward the capacity of ordinary people for self-government were influenced by his background. That’s rather mild for ad hominem.

StevenAttewell: the criterion for calling something ad hominem is not the ferocity or otherwise of the “attack”. Your approach to Plato is ad hominem inasmuch as it is directed at “explaining” (away) the view by reference to prior facts about the man, rather than arguing with the view itself. (Ah, I see that Adam has something about this on his other blog.)

“I think the etymology of “philosopher” explains the tendency to use it as an honorific, with which I am sympathetic.”

” Calling a scholar of philosophy a philosopher is very close to calling a scholar who works on F. Scott Fitzgerald a great novelist equal to F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

Thank you.
As I say often enough I want a little historical research on when every professor of philosophy came to be called a ‘philosopher’ I’m willing to bet we can date it to sometime in the last century. Two Cultures’ etc and the attempt of some humanistic disciplines to escape to something else. It ranks up there with the ‘science’ of history, and of economics.
etc. etc.

The comparison between the literary critic and the philosopher doesn’t work. The literary critic studies novels, and does literary criticism. She/he therefore is not a novelist (good, bad or indifferent), but a literary critic. What most of us in philosophy departments do is philosophy; we are engaged in the same activity as Hume, Kant, etc, and most of us are not scholars of their work, but we read it in order to learn how to do what they were doing better than we otherwise could (just as novelists read novels by great novelists in order to learn how to do it, and comedians study (and steal from) great comedians in order to learn how to engage in the same activity. So, I don’t think that any living philosopher thinks that any living philosopher is as good a philosopher as Kant, Hume, Descartes, etc, just as I doubt any living novelist thinks that any living novelist is as good a novelist as Austen, Proust (was he a novelist?), etc. But we are engaged in something that is recognisably the same activity. Its true that “scholars of philosophy” are not, qua scholars of philosophy, philosophers (Rawls, I guess, was both a scholar of philosophy and a philosopher). But most people in Philosophy departments are not scholars of philosophy (and some who are are also philosophers, eg Rawls).

Jesus Christ I don’t think I’ve ever read so many different No True Scotsman fallacies in a single thread before.

” Calling a scholar of philosophy a philosopher is very close to calling a scholar who works on F. Scott Fitzgerald a great novelist equal to F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

Patently false. You’ll notice the word “great” doesn’t appear in the word “philosopher”? You might also be aware–or inform yourself–that some (indeed, most) philosophers are not historians of philosophy (just as some English professors are novelists), and that some historians of philosophy also do non-historical philosophy? There is the added complication that historians of philosophy are not analogous to literary historians. Historical philosophers analyze, critique, reconstruct, and respond to historical philosophical arguments. Literary history would be analogous if scholars re-wrote, or added chapters, or edited, the works they study.

“Philosopher” is not an honoric, and no one has suggested any clear reason why it should be treated as such. And it’s worth keeping in mind that Socrates’ definition of philosopher as _lover_ of wisdom rather than wise person was specifically intended to insist that the philosopher is one who seeks, not one who has found, which doesn’t fit the honoric view.

It is somewhat mind bogglingly ironic that a blog frequented by academics, many of the English department variety, would have a discussion about the uselessness and pretentiousness of any academic discipline, any field of knowledge, any profession.

it is simply an ad hominem sidestepping of it; and engaging with View B itself was presumably the point of the class in question.

Your approach to Plato is ad hominem inasmuch as it is directed at “explaining” (away) the view by reference to prior facts about the man, rather than arguing with the view itself.

Whatever happened to “Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein” ?

I’m certainly not saying that this is the last word in approaching the works of a philosopher or that such an approach cannot turn into an ad hominem, but to simply dismiss it out of hand and equate it with an ad hominem is a bit rich really.

The literary critic studies novels, and does literary criticism. (…) What most of us in philosophy departments do is philosophy.

I don’t think the distinction is nearly as clear cut as you make it seem and FWIW both Quine (if I’ve understood his arguments for confirmation holism and ontological relativity correctly) and certainly Rorty would back me up on this. You might be correct as far as de facto day to day academic teaching is concerned, but there is no good reason to draw a sharp distinction between the activity of discussing an ethical dilemma as it is presented in a thought experiment and a novel.

I think you’ve missed the point that was being made with the literary criticism/philosophy disanalogy.

No, I got the point but was expanding on one of the axioms necessary to make it, i.e. the distinction between “literature” and “philosophy”. If, as I would hold, there is no such clear cut distinction, then Harry’s argument falls apart.

What the heck …

The pretense of philosophers. and it has to be said contemporary designers, is that the knowledge in their their field is cumulative, like chemistry. Is isn’t. At least not in any way that is useful as philosophy.
Logicians are technicians at best.
Bring back Philology, please.

I wasn’t aware philology had gone anywhere but it is conceivable that it disappeared in an universe where philosophy is non-cumulative (at least not ‘in any way that is useful as philosophy’!). If that’s arrogance, there should be more of it – in a world still plagued by the ‘I said so’ or ‘he says so’-fallacies.

The idea that the thought of a mediocre contemporary philosopher is worse than that of Kant is ridiculous (although perhaps such discussions will forever be dominated by bad philosophers – the type that easily believes they would better at soccer if they had set their minds to it, I guess).

The problem of philosophy’s popularity is that it is an activity on subject matter that is not directly measurable (which does not mean its progress isn’t). One side-effect is that may charlatans can hide in this field and that patience is needed to filter them out (not unlike other human activities such as chemistry and fashion).

Steven – no, I’m the one who should apologise: that opening remark was pointlessly irritable, and weakened the point I was actually trying to make, which is that I’d rather be upfront with the people I talk to about what I do. I think, talk and write about the good life, I don’t just teach other people’s thought and writing about it. I take your point that merely engaging in the that activity isn’t enough, but I was actually claiming to be an athlete, although not yet a world-class one, rather than just a runner-for-buses. If that’s arrogant, I’ll own that.

As part of my job as a manager in a double glazing firm I engage in the same activity that Julius Caesar did – leadership. So when people ask me what I do for a living I say I am a ‘leader of men’.

Apology unnecessary! But re the claim of “engaging in the same activity”, it might be worth pointing out that the truth or otherwise of such a claim will vary with the magnification-level of the comparison. Zoom out, and DH Lawrence and FR Leavis were engaged in exactly the same activity, ie writing books. Zoom in a bit, and it’s not the same activity, because one wrote novels and one wrote criticism. But now swap out Leavis for Evelyn Waugh and compare him with Lawrence. At the current zoom level they were engaged in the same activity, ie writing novels, but zoom in some more, and it becomes apparent that they were doing extremely different things…

So thanks, now, for offering a lower-zoom-level definition of what a philosopher does:

I think, talk and write about the good life

Okay. (But that’s not what Hume-the-philosopher was always engaged in doing, is it?) And further, if one were really intent on being annoying, one might then ask what distinguishes philosophers in this respect from writers of self-help manuals, religious tracts and the like? Are they philosophers too, even if perhaps bad ones?

Strewth, comments are coming thick and fast – hadn’t seen Matt’s comment so couldn’t disagree with it.

80, 83: or equally pertinently, the average science lab employs a lot of people, all of whom are doing science, but there is a very definite social demarcation (which I think can only kindasorta be matched up to any objective difference in activities being carried out) between those who are called “scientists” and those who are called “technicians”.

@HV: For some definitions of “chemistry.”

BL writing in the PGR:A reflective, literate person will still find far more nourishment from the writings of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, than from the attempts of some “analytic” philosophers to become free-lance social critics or purveyors of existential wisdom. Yet as a discipline, in which students are recruited to do doctoral work, it is a bit silly to think that Philosophy Departments can train Nietzsches. Genius, one may hope, will find its way in the world without the benefit of rankings.

Apropos of nothing, I find this statement very odd.

As D-squared says in 74 above, this is an issue in the sociology of knowledge, not philosophy. People within a discipline are often not well placed to take an objective view on the social structure of their own discipline and how its boundaries are maintained.

Two points: first, as I am guessing you are aware, there is a vigorous and fairly voluminous debate over whether it makes any sense to speak of an ethics expert, and whether there is any value added.

requiring philosophical training or expertise to make ethical judgements is like requiring a graduate qualifications in order to be kind or fall in love.

A CT comment thread is obviously not the appropriate forum to delve into that literature, but it is obviously relevant.

no, go ahead, a CT comment thread is the appropriate forum for anything and this sounds like an interesting topic. Surely, as a trained philosopher you don’t think yourself superior to the denizens of CT comment threads?

Every chemist with a mediocre mind can do meaningful research. The best a professor of philosopher with a mediocre mind can do is teach. Philosophy is not an objective field.
Philosophers are architects of values not delineators of objective truth. They describe our response to the world, not the world itself. Professors of literature teach the history of literature; novelists write literature. In the continental tradition philosophers are like novelists and architects, and they’re studied in American comp. lit. departments [philology].
The American academic tradition in philosophy marks this absurd.
Jason Stanley once wrote that the responsibility of a university is to increase its own prestige. [Like the responsibility of a company to increase its share price?] Prestige is a given value, almost an absolute. I would think that the first question a philosopher would ask is the meaning of prestige. Philosophy in this context is a technical skill. The snobbery is the snobbery of intellectual interior designers.
A Ph.D. does not confer genius. It does not confer a fertile imagination. All it says is that you are conversant in the history of a field. To pretend otherwise is to lie, individually or collectively. Scholasticism is a collective lie.

“I wasn’t saying he was wrong because he was an aristocrat, I was saying that his attitudes toward the capacity of ordinary people for self-government were influenced by his background. ”

But the only way we can test this claim is philosophically, not historically. Are Plato’s arguments about the capacity of ordinary people for self-government correct? Are they soundly argued? What flaws are in his argument? What arguments can we assemble against his? (and so on) History doesn’t help greatly with those questions, because the questions are philosophic, not historical (more historical data about Plato’s family or more data about the aristocracy of Athens wouldn’t help us very much in answering those questions).

“And it’s worth keeping in mind that Socrates’ definition of philosopher as lover of wisdom rather than wise person was specifically intended to insist that the philosopher is one who seeks, not one who has found, which doesn’t fit the honoric view.”

Precisely.

“a lover or pursuer of something outside of society”

wow, good luck with that

And I’m pretty sure rationalism began with theology and the mysteries of transubstantiation.

sleepy, and your droppings began as food; they’re both organic just as lots of things are thinking and only a very specific sort of thinking is philosophy — a hallmark of which is that it progresses.

“I’m pretty sure philosophy and mysticism aren’t the same thing, burritoboy.”

Neoplatonists?

a hallmark of which is that it progresses

and regresses.

But the only way we can test this claim is philosophically, not historically. Are Plato’s arguments about the capacity of ordinary people for self-government correct? Are they soundly argued? What flaws are in his argument? What arguments can we assemble against his? (and so on) History doesn’t help greatly with those questions

It certainly looks like you’re saying history doesn’t help to answer the question “are Plato’s arguments about the capacity of ordinary people for self-government correct?”, though if you mean historical knowledge about Plato himself, rather than about attempts of ordinary people to self-govern, doesn’t help, I would find that pretty plausible.

Burritoboy, Some philosopohers were mystics, obviously. But your comments seem to define philosophy as mysticism. Maybe I should draw some Ven diagrams.

further to 116: Or would you say my claim is nonsensical? In which case, on what basis?

I can do better than evidence; I can make a logical argument.

AJ Ayer (and the type of philosophy he represented) were more or less dominant for a period of time in philosophy. TH Green (and the type of philosophy he represented) were more or less dominant for a period of time in philosophy.

Ayer believed that Green represented a waste of mental effort and a massive false move, so it is not possible to believe that Ayer and Green were both right. So either Ayer was right (and philosophy went up a blind alley with British Idealism), or Ayer was wrong and Green was right (and philosophy went up a blind alley with Logical Positivism), or they were both wrong (and philosophy went up two blind alleys).

Thus I prove that philosophy has regressed on at least one occasion, QED.

More generally, since more or less every other field of human knowledge has had blind alleys, false trails and periods of regression, the large claim requiring evidence would be that philosophy alone has improved monotonically since Thales of Miletus. Are you making this assertion?

No, dsquared, I’m not making that assertion ;-)

I’m making the assertion that one can speak with sense about blind alleys & temporary regress in philosophy (as you say, this holds for every field of human knowledge). That therefore one can speak of progress in philosophy. I also assert dualism is abandoned – naïve empiricism is abandoned – that Kant improved on Hume & so on, i.e. that there is not only the possibility of progress but actual progress.

Would you deny that assertion – preferably by referring to non-foornotes in the history of philosophy.

I’m making the assertion that one can speak with sense about blind alleys & temporary regress in philosophy (as you say, this holds for every field of human knowledge).

Philosophy’s a field of knowledge, is it?

Yeah, it’s odd that a field would have blind alleys. On a field one can pretty much walk in any direction.

I’m not sure dualism has been abandoned. (Not by anyone using language, anyway!) It seems always to pop out again, displaced to a new arena by the new philosophy. Instead of “body vs. mind,” we get “matter vs. information,” or whatever the current jargon is about “brains vs. the programs being run on them.”

Henri, LOL

Steven, constructing a straw man there, I see.

Lee, it doesn’t survive in the Cartesian form anymore. The notion of programs running on brains, wasn’t that abandoned? If not, it should be.

“I wasn’t saying he was wrong because he was an aristocrat, I was saying that his attitudes toward the capacity of ordinary people for self-government were influenced by his background. ”

But the only way we can test this claim is philosophically, not historically. Are Plato’s arguments about the capacity of ordinary people for self-government correct?

But you appear to assume that empirical arguments have no part in philosophy, which sounds like hogwash to me. Did Adam Smith come up with his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” by ignoring reality?

I could point out Athens’s highly stratified society and the part which Plato was born in (i.e, at the top), but you think it is irrelevant to philosophy. And I could state that the latest Indian general elections illustrate Plato’s arguments about the capacity of ordinary people for self-government are a load of nonsense. A truly philosophical argument would probably engage with the actual arguments, but at least we know they contain flaws, because the conclusion is wrong.

The notion of programs running on brains, wasn’t that abandoned?

The only thing worse is when you encounter someone who earnestly tries to explain their deep insight that the whole universe is, like, a computer, man, and we’re all just programs. But wait, Wolfram is the other thread.

Several people in this thread have asked for a definition of philosophy — or at least some explication of what it is that contemporary philosophers typically do. I think many philosophers would be tempted to claim that philosophy is characterized by its a priori methodology, but this does not seem to me to adequately distinguish it from several other academic fields; and besides, I see no reason why philosophy should necessarily have to exclusively rely on a priori methodology.

So, I think that if you want to understand what philosophy is about, you really just have to look at examples of what actual philosophers do. For instance, the greatest contemporary philosopher is, in my opinion, Jerry Fodor. One of Fodor’s main projects through the years has been to critique the sciences, and he has recently argued against the reliance of the theory of evolution on adaptation, marshaling both conceptual and empirical arguments. To get a gist, I recommend the following link (Fodor is also a great writer, so it’s well worth the read): http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/fodo01_.html

#52
“But the problem is that you can only make the case that Plato’s class identity played a role by examining his philosophy. 1. Your discovery of Plato’s class is itself a reflection of
your own philosophy. You are actually using a theory of class to reflect on Plato’s philosophy. I.E. you are actively assuming that your understanding of class is superior to Plato’s.
Now, that understanding may indeed BE superior to Plato’s but that’s nothing we can assume. The only way this dilemma can be resolved is philosophically. History provides
comparatively little additional value to this question. ”

Bizarre. We have the entire history of human argument and action to look over in examining Plato. We know all sorts of things he did not. The critique everything that exists is just that. And we read not just for text but subtext. Plato’s stated ideas and the ideas in the text are not identical. “Original intent” is not the be all and end all of philosophical analysis. Philology again.
What’s the form?
Along with the history of the use of ‘Philosopher’ maybe someone should do a little research on the history of skillfully articulate intellectually lazy British bloody-mindedness of the sort still practiced today by DD/BB, Snitchens and others. It’s a wonderful counterweight to academic pedantry, and we in the colonies’ are heirs to this, though Norman Mailer is dead and Gore Vidal is old. The only one left is ME!
But what’s the history of this form? What spawned it?

Leiter linked to a joke philosophical dictionary Dennett puts out. A few of the commenters pointed out the references were all to people of Dennett’s generation or older and that this limited its relevance. I asked how this was possible that philosophy could become “dated.”
“We don’t talk about that much anymore”
Why, because it’s SOLVED!!??
No, because they began to talk about something else.
The best we can do is describe our preferences in such a way that future generations may learn about us. What great philosophical problems have we solved? None.
We describe our preoccupations, that’s all. Rawls described his. He said nothing about actual people. Political philosophy now says nothing about politics. It’s the formalism of liberal secular theology. And it will be read and contextualized as the product of an age. And it will be read as interesting or not. It won’t be read as correct or incorrect except as much as some people will have similar beliefs. And beliefs are not facts except as much as it is a fact that people have beliefs.

Philosophers are like architects. There has been no “progress” in architecture in thousands of years. Is a building by Frank LLoyd Wright better than one by Palladio? Or does it just suit us more?

What is the just relation of the individual to the state? There is no one answer. There is only the answer for us. It amazes me when people argue about whether nationalized health plans are ‘un-american.’ Arguing over them is the process by which they are becoming american. Arguments make new truths.
By arguing that people are basically self-interested we’ve actively help encourage greed.
But now even neoliberals are talking about ethos. And so a new ethos is developing that finds greed distasteful. ANOTHER NEW TRUTH!
It’s fun being a determinist.
—
The only thing that predates the dawn of the universe, the one absolute and inviolable truth that’s left, is Budweiser sux.

(Going back a ways) #80 – “I sometimes run (eg for a bus), and Usain Bolt also runs. This does not make me an athlete.”

No, it makes you a “runner.” Like Usain Bolt, perhaps, but you don’t have to have Olympic class talent to (correctly) describe yourself as a runner.

#69 “What most of us in philosophy departments do is philosophy; we are engaged in the same activity as Hume, Kant, etc”

Are graduate students (or undergrads for that matter) puzzling over the same issues also “engaged in the same activity as Hume and Kant?”

Googling the phrase “I’m a philosopher” provides some curious results.
For example, there’s YouTube’s Hardxcore Darkness:
eh, im 16, ima dude x.x i haz long hair…. hazel eyes, and ima philosopher of sortz
luv computerz and friendz, skateboard a lil

Then there’s Charles Calhoun of calhoungolf.com:
” I wear several faces when it comes to the game of golf.

First and foremost, I’m a golfer.

Second, I’m a teacher of the game.

And third, I’m a philosopher.”

What is a priori sociology?
We do the best we can, with the data that’s available.
But you look for data where you can, and if it’s not your field of expertise it’s not the data’s fault, it’s yours.

Oops, here’s the link: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17092-possible-site-of-free-will-found-in-brain.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

132, 133, 139,

The notion of programs running on brains, wasn’t that abandoned? If not, it should be.

It isn’t abandoned. Cognitive science still assumes this naïve conception much as Kant assumed that Newton had said all that could be said in physics.

Nevertheless, it should be abandoned. Both Quine and Davidson destroyed the ideas of Fodor/Chomsky extending the computer-as-brain-analogy coming from days when all of philosophy was merely a technical execution of logic. Science, biology/psychology & the like, are also not very friendly to it.

The neuroscience of ‘finding the God-center’ & al is very much the current fashion for vulgarizing science (as physics was the previous such fashion: Heisenbergian free will!).

That also shows where philosophy is very pertinent: brains-as-computers has all kinds of potential for abuse (‘reprogramming’!).

Enjoy your week-end then!

@142: The neuroscience of ‘finding the God-center’ & al is very much the current fashion for vulgarizing science

Ah, I just knew the word “vulgar” will make an appearance in the response; my neurons fired me a warning. If that’s vulgarizing, what’s the refined version of the same? And I mean in neuroscience, not philosophy.

And no, I don’t think this is similar to “Heisenbergian free will” at all, exactly because in this case it’s a real scientist talking, a guy with a bunch of scalpels and (I’m sure) a whole room full of very sophisticated electronics. “Heisenbergian free will” is not like that.

Henri, if all people with scalpels & electronics had a point … I dunno – read the paper & see the concrete experiment that was done and you know what he proved. Cerainly not the PR-version because it’s kinda hard to design a variable bound to intention/volition.

141/130 (JoB/DD):
On regress – yes, the ‘argument from at least one blind alley’ only works to establish regression if we have reason to think that not everywhere we’ve been was itself a similarly blind alley.

And yep the ‘sociology’ crack is a bit flip. Though the point that a true theory abandoned does not a forward step make is probably fair enough, the conversational implicature of the original comment was surely that said abandoned theories were indeed untrue/wrong/incorrect/bad.

(Unless perhaps some kind of anti-realist understanding of progress was at work – not going back means we are going forward? Maybe Peircean convergence could function to close a subj/obj gap – except that we will never know whether we are actually doing some converging during any given time-period. Compare: how do you know you are oscillating around a moving equilibrium, or what is the margin of error of your margin of error, or why is all-tails evidence of a biased coin?)

But say we have on balance some reason, however weak, to think that new developments are moving in the right direction (and a fortiori, moving in some prevailing direction and not, say, cyclical). Or actually, don’t even say that if you like – the question still arises: how sure would you have to be that an abandoned theory was wrong to conclude that progress has been made?

No surer, surely, than you would have to be about progress in, say, physics? If so, the stuff about Ultimate Reality is a bit strong, I’d say, at least if We are not happy with very extensive skepticism – you can’t be that sure that everything since Newton isn’t a blind alley.

Perhaps (still assuming that rejecting the idea of progress in physics is not acceptable to Us) amassing empirical observations in natural science counts as a kind of progress, even if the project of building theories on them is doomed. But in that case, wouldn’t discovering (and recording) new valid arguments to add to our heap also be progress? Or is logic itself such a hostage to future philosophical advances that even new arguments are fatally undermined sub spec. aet.? I think that would be taking holism a bit far (so to speak!). You can perhaps(?) have progress in one field within the philosophy superfield even if that field might/will come to be undermined wholesale. When Newtonian mechanics was discredited (if it was), does that mean that some part of its development did not amount to progress?

Anyway much more certainly, dsqu’s ‘no further progress possible’ claim goes awry, since knowing one bit of philosophy to be wrong (even from a viewpoint of ‘UR’) doesn’t clearly (clearly doesn’t?) entail knowing everything about philosophy. Bit of an unphilosopherly (or as you might say dopey) point, if I may say so.

Right, so far so meandering. Take it or leave it – or point out which bits are on their way to becoming oxbow lakes (forever?). Or for those who like that sort of thing, read the subtext, deconstruct the discourse, repeatedly point out that we can’t get beyond our own horizons etc.

Oh, btw DD, what’s so great about getting out of bed? As any fule no, the much admired post-Socratic Psynchthloonous of Alamatatheloeia stayed in bed for twenty years and never wrote anything down.

I’d considered philosophy as a discipline, going all the way, and have nothing against it or profs when practiced soundly and ethically. You rightly point out that other fields could benefit by interacting with philosophers who do operate soundly. But the field, particularly logical positivism, structures in processes and practices that renders it unable to grapple substantively or accurately with specific issues. Can logic wrap its head around issues of faith, emotion or ecology? Depends on who’s doing the grappling — and whether their aim is to dominate their interlocutor or arrive at a co-produced truth that uses a reciprocally respectful dialog to uphold both particpants. Too often, the object is to cut down the other guy, under the guise of teaching people to think, rather than actually examine what the speaker is actually putting forth. I encountered this in a philosophy class at the UWMadison, which presumed to teach a ‘philosophy’ of environmental ethics. Yet the prof’s approach was utterly disingenuous — an unethical stance towards every proposition and each student — and he did not approach any argument, student or ecological unit with the intrinsic respect required to examine it accurately or truly.

It became a semantic game of switching definitions to say — ‘oh, a-ha, it couldn’t be that because x really means y’ — exploiting and bankrupting his relationship with his students to win apoint — and violating any prevailing ecological, ethical and linguistic rules that are the norm in any classroom or social situation.

Since I’m more adept at language than he is, I asked the pointed question, exposed the method, and after his outsized response resulted in a faux pas in front of 300 undergrads and he issued a non-apology — I dropped the class.

Why play a game designed to defy the norms and rules of the disciplines that philosophy presumes to be superior to, lord over, or operate as king of some mythical hierarchy?

Well, Henri, I don’t think the computational model is the main hypothesis anymore & I do think philosophers abandoned it. But I grant you: it is the main hypothesis still from a popular point of view and many popular philosophers still adopt it. & I apologize, but I’ll have to abandon it here. Without trying to be convincing: certainly the little that is known on the brain in biology does not support the analogy and neural networks in the computer sciences aren’t running programs in any strict interpretation of the word.

“A good example might be the philosophy of mind: while we still don’t know a lot about how the mind works, we certainly know a lot more than Descartes did.”

The computational model is not dying. The unified computational model is dying.
The only way to oppose the computational model is to defend dualism and transubstantiation. But the defense of unified consciousness and of individualism and rational action are all of a piece, so ‘geeks’ continue the good fight in defense of their belief in themselves.
Only an ideological opposition to empiricism keeps this fight going.
We are machines caught between the twinned and dueling functional imperatives of calculation and conditioned response.

Novakant your description is of progress in science described in language and reflected upon by students of philosophy. You describe this as if philosophers decided there was no god. It makes more sense to say that philosophers came up with ways to describe the new popular sense that we are godless. So intellectuals began to say that god is dead. And this new idea was traumatic to most and still is. The absurdity of life is still traumatic to those interested in ‘truth’ and ‘meaning.’ To village atheists who live to drink and fuck, there’s no news.
All that exists are known and unknown facts. The rest is desire. When you finally get to Mars you need to go somewhere else. The rest is desire including David Chalmers’ desire for a certain kind of order including ‘freedom.’ cf. Donald Davidson’s arguments against the conceptual scheme. The fact that you can not translate Pushkin into french and Mallarme into english means nothing to the faithful who might as well be defending the geocentric model of the universe for all its relation to the facts. The stupidity of Chomskian nativism begins and ends in ideology. Facts be damned, rationalism lives on.
Philosophy models our thoughts no more or less than literature. It’s the claimed superiority of philosophy that’s the problem, like the arrogance of architects.
And HB if all I’m interested in is a priori sociology then why d I keep asking for data on the history of the use of the appellation “philosopher?”

sleepy – it was the fact that your comment about political philosophy revealed that you haven’t read any for several decades that made me suspect you haven’t bothered to do any data gathering yourself. 20 names went through my head of prominent philosophers who write about politics and I thought about listing them, but I’ve got limited time and have no reason to believe you’d turn to them.

(Actually, I’ve got some idea of one thing that might be at issue – namely, that they are inclined and I’m disinclined, to be nominalists about all sorts of things, and in particular about kinds of social activity.)

That’s a built-in quirk in the language already, isn’t it? When someone asks “What do you do?”, the normal way to respond is by answering a different question, viz., “What are you?” (“I’m a philosopher.”)

The comment Adam Kotsko makes at 19 about being shy to identify oneself as a “philosopher” is absolutely right. In fact, the site for which Jason Stanley writes (link in original article) spends a great deal of its time on what it feels is a sort of anti-Sophist patrol, policing and denigrating the work of those folks working in philosophy who aren’t *really* philosophers, by its lofty standards. It’s a far more prudential path to avoid self-identification as a philosopher, if only to avoid Mr. Leiter’s cat-scratching,

sleepy-159,

What the heck, continued …

So intellectuals began to say that god is dead. And this new idea was traumatic to most and still is.

God’s death wasn’t proclaimed by intellectuals but by one historically very identifiable philosopher. If you define ‘most’ to be ‘the people sleepy knows’ you may be spot on, I guess. But other than that and similar groups the proclamation of God’s death has been something of a non-event for most (unfortunately). Anyway, nobody was/is compelled to agree, as is quite apparent from the majority of the world’s population that doesn’t.

Maybe you’re a non-village atheist insomniac ( & I can dig that). But being sleepy is not an excuse for making grand sweeping claims contrary to fact. Somehow you seem a bit stuck in the 70’s, all traumatized & stuff.

“All that exists are known and unknown facts.”

Give us one of the known ones then, and be sure that it’s stated brutely without implied theory or theories.

PS: computationalism is dualism of HW and SW, how can you oppose something that’s of a piece with something that you try to defend? the line from Descartes to computing over rationalism/nativism is rather obvious, isn’t it?

‘The only way to oppose the computational model is to defend dualism and transubstantiation. ‘

That is utter and complete bollocks. Actually it’s worse than that: it’s the opposite of the truth. In reality as philosophers (or ‘philosophers’ depending on your point of view) such as Dreyfus and Descombes and, to give him credit, Searle, have tirelessly pointed out, it’s actually the computational model of the brain which is (covertly) dualist, as it posits a dualism in which the ‘mind’ (conceptualised as software) is different from the brain (conceptualised as hardware).

I use the CTM to refer specifically to cognitivist models: connectionist models don’t have this particular flaw, although they do have others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitivism_(psychology)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-cognitivist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind

I wonder if we don’t need a new verb for sleepy’s contributions: “to delphize.” As in, “man, that sleepy was really delphizing over at CT the other day.”

Many facets of this discussion interest me, but none so much as that begun by StevenAttewell and burritoboy. Their argument is representative of many in this thread in that they are attempting to describe the nature of philosophy in equal and opposing simplistic fashion. For StevenAttewell, philosophy is the discipline where people badly practice other sciences, such as history or poli-sci. For burritoboy, philosophy is an exalted state of rational being.

Would it be too much to ask to just let philosophy be whatever it is? And not assert that it’s what you’d prefer it to be?

Though this will come as news to many, there is not simply one superior “mode” by which one considers the universe. To implicitly assert that all thinking on, say, politics is best done as historical analysis, or as political science, or as sociology, or as fictional narrative, or as political philosophy is like asserting that everything one needs to know can be found in the Bible. It’s grandiose and offensive. My preferred mode of thought is materialist empiricism, but I don’t imagine that the sciences I prefer offer every possible insight 0n everything of interest.

Plato’s political philosophy in Republic need not be vetted by subsequent accounts of history, nor subsequent political theory—especially considering that Plato was offering a political theory as an analogy for a moral theory. A student insisting that Republic could only be understood by comprehending the history of Athens and Plato’s life is not unlike the nerd who complains about the errors in Star Trek physics. There’s some relevance, yes, but it’s not essential—and an insistence upon such a comprehension as the price for admission is to make the painfully common mistake of equating one’s own particular enthusiasms for the Only True Path to Knowledge.

Just so with someone who asserts that philosophy is a combination of a particular lifestyle and an exalted consciousness.

Philosophy is the peculiar intersection of a long, tortured, and extremely diverse intellectual heritage with a mostly verbal emphasis on intellectual analysis. It is not “pure”; and it probably resides within contemporary humanities departments more because it shares a messy organic nature with art and literature and less because it is intrinsically humanist. It is a variety of intellectual temperment; and one with a proven utility. It is not privileged as an intellectual discipline, nor is it subordinate to any other.

Use quotes.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&num=100&q=%22materialist+empiricism%22&btnG=Search

I used to know a guy named Joel Tarr who was one of the founders of the applied history movement. Contrary to what you might expect, he wasn’t suggesting we could learn from the past in any direct way. In fact, the main activity of his applied history group was to try to keep people from thinking they could. Philosophers engage in a similar activity. For all the contempt that physical and social scientists heap on the philosophers, they do a heck of a lot of philosophizing themselves, albeit often under some other name. The point is, they usually do it very badly. The philosophers are just pointing out that if you’re going to promote erroneous metaphysics, it might as well be novel erroneous metaphysics and not the same old crap that Socrates shot down in 399 BC.

Because I do think about “philosophical issues” quite a bit, am reasonably well educated in philosophy, but by temperment most inclined to understanding the world via scientism (which was what I was aiming for from a different direction with “materialist empiricism”).

I describe my affinity for that view in the way that someone else might describe their affinity for history, or art.

While that’s my affinity, I don’t privilege scientism as a “mode” (by this I mean a way of thinking, not a body of knowledge) for thinking about the universe. Philosophy as a “mode” is distinct from history as a “mode”. I was being critical of someone who only seems to believe that comprehension of the subject of Republic can only be achieved historically (or, alternatively or in conjunction, by the body of knowledge and techniques which comprise political science).

I just want to put in a plug for comment #136. I would also like to add:

9. Philosophers (philosophy professors–whatever) may be unable to say what philosophy is and also avoid (a) excluding things that are obviously understood by everyone in philosophy to be philosophy, since Plato and (b) including things that can be done badly by people in many other fields.

And (9) probably doesn’t matter. Philosophers can, in the individual instances where bad philosophy is done, explain why it is bad philosophy. Personally, I think that is often a waste of time, unless something is at stake politically or the answer to the question has some noticeable effect on people’s lives. Life is short. Billions of people live under an almost countless number of harmless misconceptions. There are usually better things to be doing than trying to show them where they’ve gone wrong.

Bianca, I’m having much difficulty in merely beginning to grasp even what point of view from which your comment originates.

My education is in many ways strongest in science, many of my friends are scientists, and my worldview is predominantly scientific. My first impulse when I want to understand something is to take an empirical approach. I added “materialist” to my self-description because “empiricist” does not necessarily exclude it (in terms of worldviews and modes of thought, empiricism and non-materialism could be complementary) and I chose “scientism” because it encapsulates a conjunction of attitudes which cluster around these concepts.

Certainly, some use that word as a sort of insult; probably to imply a way of thinking that is supposedly too narrow and rigid. Indeed, in some people it is. But that accusation, or the possibility of it, doesn’t inspire defensiveness in me and I’m a little surprised that it does in you. The contemporary scientific view of the universe—or, more precisely, the view of the universe that those who most strongly affiliate with the social institution of “science”—is a worldview, a mode of awareness with its own particular strengths and weaknesses.

That it has some weaknesses as well as strengths is clearly apparent to me; just as any other mode of awareness does. The various forms of art are, in my opinion, also modes of awareness with their own strengths and weaknesses. So, too, is historicism.

To put my argument in perspective, I should mention that my educational experience with philosophy, science, literature, and history is atypical by contemporary academic standards and it is my opinion that this unusual experience (which exists alongside prior conventional education in science) provides me with a better-than-average understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of how they’re otherwise conventionally taught. To be sure, many of my classmates arrive at a chauvinistic conclusion which is at odds with my own: they believe our experience is the high road to what they imagine as “truth”. I disagree but believe that our experience has its own particular virtues which compensate for its weaknesses.

A type of ahistoricism is an essential quality of this education and, for the most part, this is almost aggressively the case with regard to philosophy. My tutors were very much the sorts of people who would insist that “the text itself was the only thing of importance”. I disagree—but I also would disagree that an historically informed reading, such as StevenAttewell advocates, is necessary. There is a particular kind of value and insight available in taking a text as its own exclusive authority—historical context can obscure as much as it illuminates, especially in unskilled hands. Indeed, it seems clear to me that there are a number of useful ways in which to approach a text; none of them are exclusively sufficient for the most ambitious of readers; none of them so far superior to all the others that a serious reader can safely habitually utilize one to the exclusion of all the rest.

It seems to me that philosophy is a “mode” in the same sense that art is a mode and science is a mode. People have become so specialized these days that it’s well-nigh impossible for them to appreciate that useful and important things about the world can be developed outside of their disciplines. That is to say, only when they can be safely convinced that a subject of inquiry is entirely outside their discipline will they admit that there’s another way of approaching it. Otherwise, they tend to be certain that another discipline’s approach to a subject is inferior and incomplete, at best, and misleading or confusing, at worst.

By its nature, philosophy gets the worst treatment by other disciplines these days because the subjects of philosophical inquiry are enormously varied and almost without exception they are the subjects of inquiry of other disciplines. To everyone (but particularly scientists), philosophers are badly imitating its betters and producing little or anything of value. These people seem to be incapable of grasping that philosophy has an inquisitive character all its own; a utility all its own.

The flip side of this is that equally chauvinistic philosophers can wield the other edge of this sword and assert or insinuate that philosophy is privileged above all other modes of thought because it can consider almost any topic. So, too, both artists and critical theorists are prone to making such claims.

I took issue with StevenAttewell’s argument because, honestly, his intellectual point-of-view is closest to my own, as a matter of temperment. If I hadn’t learned better, I’d have argued the same historicist argument he makes, I would have looked down upon those who stupidly and ignorantly thought that it made any sense at all to read Republic outside its historical context. Luckily for me, however, I did learn better. There is nothing in this world that cannot be more greatly and usefully comprehended by expanding upon and integrating the perspectives from which it is viewed. I could devote my entire life to the study of Republic without exhausting all possible ways in which it could productively be approached. There’s a reason why critical modalities so quickly come and go: it’s not simply fashion and the thirst for the novel, it’s that there are always additional new and useful perspectives.

Students of the nature of animal intelligence have a typical response they make when someone attempts to compare the intelligence of a human with, say, a dog. They’ll say, “a dog is very smart at being a dog, not so smart at being a human”. To some extent (and being careful to avoid pushing this line of argument too far), asking whether it’s better to understand ethics through philosophy than through, say, political science or theology or even cognitive science is a category error. Ethics as understood via philosophy is the best way in which to understand ethics via philosophy. It’s a very poor way of understanding ethics via theology or political science.

People who tend to denigrate the utility of philosophy—or, for that matter, critical theory—are the sorts of people who have difficulty not feeling certain that there is a single, privileged way of understanding pretty much everything. In this sense, yes, I think the criticisms of those who use the word scientism are often apt—and I say that as someone whose intellectualism could be most accurately described as “scientific”, even though I’m not a scientist. I’m not making the common romantic claim that many subjects are, by nature, completely unsuitable for science; rather, I am making the claim that even when a subject is, by nature, quite well suited to science, it can be and usually is also well suited to disciplines other than science.

“philosophy is more useful to other disciplines than they are to philosophy”

I would rewrite that as “philosophy is only useful in so far as it is useful to other disciplines”. My experience is that philosophy that fails to connect effectively with other disciplines – law, physics, history, anthropology, psychology, or indeed anything with an empirical or pragmatic grounding – is arid and sterile.

In contrast, it is possible to do good physics or history or biology without involving philosophy, at least in a good many areas.

I’m not sure, but fleshbot.com seems like the place to go to find out.

In my experience, for instance, philosophers thinking about quantum mechanics, causality, and related issues are typically either rehashing things that physicists understood 75 years ago

Did physicists really and unanimously “understand” the underlying ontological issues 75 years ago (do they now)? AIUI at least one influential subset of physicists decided not even to try to understand them, given that just doing the maths was so successful. (Feynman: “Shut up and calculate!”)

(This should not be taken to imply that whatever philosophers have to say about such things these days is necessarily useful.)

Quantum physics is the outstanding example of a description of reality going to several decimal places, devised without philosophical input, presenting pictures that are new to metaphysics, and having foundational philosophical implications.

Anyone will note that scientific discovery occurs by very different paths: such as by finding discrepancies, by abstracting a theory to a different situation, by looking for invariants through changes, by trying different equations to fit experimental results (a repeated technique in physics,) by pure philosophical musing, etc. etc. Any of these trails might suggest a repeatable experiment, and off we go.

But in the modern period, pure philosophical musing accounts for only a tiny number of discoveries. The premiere example is the theory of relativity, which originated in epistemological musing by Einstein, who explicitly identified it as such. It included I believe a thoroughgoing review of ideas from Aristotle to Kant — or at least, Einstein was quite familiar with them in his latter years, and continued both to employ, and to advocate for, an epistemological approach to unified theory.

There are of course older examples of a good deal of philosophical study in scientific discovery, I suppose we might conjecture at paradigm shifts. Descartes-Galileo-Newton come to mind as people well-versed in old arguments about the nature of reality — although perhaps that is because all they had to study were the ancient classics, plus the medieval experimenters.

We ought to distinguish “philosophy” as enormous endeavor, from the “philosophy of science,” a subdivision which has been about logical methods until its sociological turn. In most cases philosophy of science has little to teach scientists, much as philosophy of mathematics is of little use to working mathematicians.

But here again: the present mix in the philosophy of science, which is something like a philosophical psychology of science, is somewhat important for forming hypotheses in developmental child psychology.

Indeed I think it’s easy to predict a future circumstance wherein philosophy will again become crucial: when brain imaging becomes precise enough so that we can follow exactly what happens when the subject undergoes conceptual change, PLUS what happens when the subject thinks of the general idea of “concept.”

The connection between these two is philosophical in nature, and so philosophical discourse will provide most of the initial guideposts for drawing the detailed scientific map of how we perform classifications and meta-classifications.

Philosophy is an elaborate method of hiding from the truth.

Tim Wilkinson :

“This may suggest that the layperson in question might have come up with the article themself*, given enough musing….If, so such a line of thought might go, philosophical achievement is not necessarily based on learning or even training, ”

No ways, this doesnt follow . If I say something like following without any footnotes, for example , it doesnt follow that fair amount of learning is not required to make the point I am making :
“…. We cannot assume a priori that naturalized philosophy cannot show that some sort of plausible identification of values and facts about evolution is not made in near future which would make some plausible derivation of value from facts possible. The point is, if philosophical ethics is continuous with science in the sense that philosophy is just a more abstract scientific inquiry –as the naturalists are arguing– then we cannot rule out such a possibility a priori because a priori method in this sort of inquiry is not viable….”

Or, it is possible to characterize say the debate in phil of biology regarding evolution of morality without any footnotes but again it does not follow that fair amount of learning is not required to get it right. So I cannot agree with the point you are making.