Science and the “aim of philosophy”

Didn’t philosophers used to do those things, though? Hence ‘natural philosophy’. Is it a bit like religion, where over the years, the sphere of [claimed] relevance has been gradually diminished by advances in science?

Wittgenstein had a similar idea about philosophy: it was the clarification of the fact that there is nothing in philosophy, resolving the confusions of language that philosophy is. (Think Tarski Truth Theorem putting the kibosh on ontology)What BL is tossing out that I think is important is ethics and metaethics, as well as the desiccated remains of metaphysics that we care about. If a philosopher can explain why the amplitude squared is probability, we would all be grateful. But we certainly don’t need yet another generation of ontological arguments for the existence of God.

What is Zen?

What BL is tossing out that I think is important is ethics and metaethics

I think that metaethics is fine on his account, and even required- it’s a part of finding out “the way things really are”, and Leiter has written a fair amount on it. He has, of course, particular views as to what the answers are, and they are controversial, but his reasons for not liking much of first-order moral theory follow (I think he thinks) from what he takes the right meta-ethical views to be. (Those interested might look at his edited volume _Objectivity in Law and Morality_ for some of his views, as well as his book on Nietzsche. )

Anyone interested in Leiter’s take on Cohen might look at “Marxism and the Continuing Irrelevance of Normative Theory.” Review of If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? by G. A. Cohen. 54 Stanford Law Review 1127 (2002). (I think Leiter has changed his position a bit since then, but I’m not sure, and it would be the place to start.)

As for the general issue, I assume Leiter means that he thinks a lot of things philosophers do is a waste of time, and that they’d be better served doing something else. I think that pretty much every philosopher thinks that about some other philosophers, though of course the targets vary. I didn’t read him as saying anything much stronger than that.

I loved that interview a week ago, thanks for linking to it.

(That’s where I read about “reaction formation”)

Do you really want to describe all of philosophy of language and mind as a bit of “methodological underlabouring”? It seems to me that questions about the nature of consciousness, the relation of the mental to the physical, the origin of semantics, and the ways we do things with words are all an important part of finding out the “actual causal structure of the natural and human world”, in ways that aren’t (yet?) able to be delegated to psychologists and linguists, though of course what they say is of great relevance for it.

The questions of ethics and epistemology, about practical, moral, and theoretical normativity seem to be even more clearly just in the domain of philosophy, though I suppose one might question whether they are part of the “natural and human world”. I would say that they are, but I can see that this would depend on one’s substantive views about normativity.

“The way things really are”: people who talk this way often assume that since things are only one way, they can only develop one way. But any actual state has many successor states, some more likely that others. “Realists” tend to marry themselves to the most likely outcomes, whereas political success amounts to realizing a favorable but less likely outcome. The Democratic party is saturated with this kind of thinking.

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

This doesn’t necessarily apply to what Leiter says, but it does apply to a lot of so-called common sense. Democratic defeatist realism is a reasonable but too passive response to four decades of defeat, and it pretty much precludes a turn around.

There should be some discipline investigating the multiple possibilities of present reality and how it is possible to bring about a less likely, more favored, non-entropic, non-equilibrium outcome. Since it would be a way of choosing and making, it would necessarily be ethical in part and include forms of ethical discussion.

Has anyone noticed that Brian Leiter has a very strong resemblance to the comedian Jonah Hill? I say this in all seriousness, by the way…

Preferring realism to moralism isn’t exactly a bold stroke in the American political-intellectual world. It sort of like advocating that shoes be made out of leather and houses of wood.

Perhaps, for a realist, fruitful consideration of How things ought to be can only follow analysis of The way things are, because in the latter we see what possibilities are both raised and frustrated by determinate social practice. For instance, a society of abundance is a possibility immanent to capitalism, and partially realised by it in a distorted fashion.

Abstract moral theory may purport to start from an a priori, “objective” position, but often naturalizes what is historically specific (and, hopefully, transitory.)

Has anyone noticed that Brian Leiter has a very strong resemblance to the comedian Jonah Hill?

My first thought was “he looks just like Griff Rhys Jones“.

Seems a shame not to mention that within days of this the interviewer also reviewed An Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions by Alex Rosenberg, with nods to both Leiter and Williamson (the latter of which is relevant to the question as posed or reposed).

I think Leiter’s remarks lend themselves to what’s likely a misinterpretation: that in opposing realism to moralism he is opposing descriptive to normative aims or forms of philosophy. But I suspect that his use of “moralism” is, like Nietzsche’s, aimed at a narrow form of normative philosophy that focuses on appeals (“moralistic lectures” as Leiter says) to individuals to freely change their behavior. The objection then, is not to prescriptive claims but to free will as a false form of causality, and so the rejection of philosophical moral*ism* needn’t be a rejection of moral philosophy.

Moralism would be distinguished, then, from other still normative philosophers like Marx and Foucault (two of his “realist” examples), who examine the causes and conditions of our moral and political motivations, in order to clarify which normative ends are compatible with reality and how they can be achieved, a realistic form of prescription.

Early in the interview Brian seems to suggest that most people who believe homosexuality is immoral (his phrase is “the typical” such person) do so in reaction to deep homosexual urges they themselves feel. This is a sweeping claim, and I wonder what his evidence for it is. I don’t mean evidence that this “reaction formation” can sometimes happen or that it explains the beliefs of some who condemn homosexuality, but evidence that it explains the beliefs of most of them. I would be surprised if there were any such evidence.

I obviously don’t say this in order to defend the view that homosexuality is immoral, which I reject. But it illustrates my suspicion of the “hermeneutics of suspicion”: that too often it can be an invitation to dismiss beliefs you disagree with on the basis of speculations about their causal origin that are pleasing to you but essentially ungrounded.

And it leads to a question about Nietzsche. How many of his claims about our real motivations or about e.g. the origin of Christian/benevolent morality were based on hard empirical research and how many were the result of armchair speculation that, however striking its conclusions, ought to be condemned as unscientific by any serious philosophical naturalist? I would put a large number in the second category.

And to answer the original question: I think an investigation of “the way things really are” (using various empirical and non-empirical methodologies, and without making arbitrary prior assumptions about the scope of “things” or “facts” is) is in fact a pretty good description of what philosophy should be.

@ Tom Hurka

“And it leads to a question about Nietzsche. How many of his claims about our real motivations or about e.g. the origin of Christian/benevolent morality were based on hard empirical research and how many were the result of armchair speculation that, however striking its conclusions, ought to be condemned as unscientific by any serious philosophical naturalist?”

I’m inclined to think none of Nietzsche’s claims about motivation are based on “hard empirical research,” but it may not be necessary to condemn them on those grounds alone.

First, we can reject Nietzsche’s stronger claims about such motives and instead see them as alternative possible explanations that should be assessed only in their ability to undermine our certainty in the dominant explanations (particularly when the dominant ones are themselves untested prejudices), rather than as establishing the alternatives. (Perhaps this is what Leiter means by “hermeneutics of suspicion”? I’m not sure.)

For example, we needn’t be decisively prove that Christian morality is entirely grounded in the motivation of revenge to reasonably worry that it isn’t entirely grounded in love. And the possible role played by motives such as resentment and revenge helps establish that worry’s reasonableness, even though it certainly does not prove Nietzsche’s alternative explanation.

Second–and this is the more difficult case to make, but worth consideration–we might try to defend Nietzsche’s unscientific movitational claims in the same way Nagel and others have tried (perhaps unsuccessfully) to defend Freud’s: as extensions of commonsense psychological claims rather than failed scientific ones. (Of course there are many problems with this type of defense, but it at least suggests that a dismissal on the *sole* grounds that a motivational claim lacks “hard” empirical evidence is perhaps too quick.)

@ Yan
Which of his mentioned examples do you think are misapplied?

First, I understand this is an interview, not an article, and in an interview one can’t go into all the details and nuances one would discuss in an article. So I don’t want to come across as too harsh and picky on this realism/moralism thing. (And the SSRN site is down for system upgrading at the moment, so I can’t access BL’s linked article on realism and moralism right now even if I had the time and inclination.)

That said, you wrote that BL’s moralism category is “aimed at a narrow form of normative philosophy that focuses on appeals…to individuals to freely change their behavior.” And BL puts Plato, Kant, Rawls, Dworkin, Nussbaum, “among many others,” in this moralism category.

I don’t think Rawls can be characterized that way; he’s interested more in outlining a just “basic structure” of society than in appealing to individuals to change their behavior, ISTM. As for Plato, a good argument probably can be made that he doesn’t fit into the realism/moralism divide, or else straddles it. The theory of Forms is Plato’s idea of “how things really are,” so to that extent he is in the realist category (it’s not based on empirical scientific investigation but, as mentioned upthread, Nietzsche’s ideas weren’t either). I’m also not willing to concede that Dworkin, Nussbaum or Kant are correctly placed here, but I’ll let other people argue about them.

Expediency is not a moral code.
Pre-microscopic worldviews were accurate to the limits of the known.
As are the sub-Planck expeditions.
But the microscopic world was there the whole time, and not down in there at the bottom of the lensed tube, but everywhere. Here. Another world we didn’t know anything about.
That is this. World.
The moral difference between Toxoplasmosis and self-delusion is pretty indistinct; humane insistence on something like the moral compass of the “heart” is caught between rationalist pragmatism and institutional metaphysic. But until very recently it was we all we had to get us through, and abandoning it for the navigation of logic alone seems rash.
Unless of course the human heart is getting in the way of expediency.
Then it makes sense, to abandon its guidance.
From the p.o.v. of a colony of something or other, in the nutrient medium, in the dish.

Regarding Cohen’s first alleged sin against Marx: Brian writes that Cohen offered a “philosophical reconstruction of historical materialism … as functional explanation, rather than in terms of class conflict.” I would dispute “rather than”. Cohen did not dispute Brian’s claim that “class conflict is … the actual causal mechanism of historical change”. He writes, e.g., that “I do not wish to deny that class struggle is always essential for social transformation” (History, Labour, and Freedom, p. 16), and that his interpretation of Marx’s historical materialism is consistent with the claim that “major historical changes are brought about by class struggle.” (ibid., p. 14).

Cohen also maintained, consistently with the above, that, according to Marx’s historical materialism, “if we want to know why class struggle effects this change rather than that, we must turn to the dialectic of forces and relations of production which governs class behaviour and is not explicable in terms of it, and which determines what the long-term outcome of class struggle will be” (ibid.). For this reason, he did not regard functional explanation as an “irrelevant theoretical overlay” in Marx.

Cohen became skeptical of the truth of the claim I’ve just quoted. But he regarded it as issuing from the best interpretation of Marx’s writings on historical materialism. There may be a more interesting, and more truth-tracking, version of historical materialism which jettisons functional explanation and focuses more exclusively on class conflict. But that’s not a criticism of Cohen’s writings on Marx’s historical materialism, the point of which was to interpret Marx rather than to change him.

Mike, that was helpful. I do not agree with the quoted passages but I do not see where it is somehow outside of philosophy. The problem with Rawls is indeed that it is based on this unbreakable individuality which cannot be further analyzed. Personally I don’t think the solution lies in an egalitarian ethos (let alone in a utopian view where state and society do coincide), but an exploration of the reverse of a generalized Homo Economicus certainly is a valid way forward. If only because it seems that we are kind of stuck generalizing this individual need for return and the collective need to restrain those individual needs.

I wonder how one can even begin Leiter’s meta-philosophical project of telling us what philosophy is by beginning with an abstract theme involving those “who think the aim of philosophy should be to get as clear as possible about the way things really are” when, of course, getting clear about the way things really are in philosophy means going to, say, philosophy departments and the history of philosophy and actually looking at what people in institutions said was philosophy, and what they produced. One doesn’t make up the ‘aim of philosophy’ ex nihilo, and then attach it to the search for clarity, bypassing… clarity and the plebian sociological method that has now been around since before Durkheim’s time. And one doesn’t mistake a position within philosophy about philosophy – a normative position – with being clear ‘about the aim of philosophy”, which is an institutional matter beyond the control of the observer. Maybe Leiter doesn’t like deconstruction, or ethics, or aesthetics. Confusing dislike with the statement about what philosophy is about, however, is exactly wrong. It is being very very unclear about what the aim of philosophy is. And if you are unclear about that aim – if you employ a deductive method steming from your personal likes to figure it out – you will probably not be very clarifying in your method or results.

How about this for the “aim of philosophy”. Taking a cue from Heidegger’s essay on “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” the aim of philosophy today must be the critical recovery of the meaning of how the individual soul is educated in relation to the representations of the cave in which the individual soul dwells. This means that philosophy becomes, as Leiter argues, no longer a constructive project aimed at establishing true propositions about the causal structure of nature or culture, but rather a negative or deconstructive project of the soul in relation to its time, in the sense of Hegel’s and Wittgenstein’s takes on the dilemma of modern thought.