|
Philosophy Polemics
*****
This report on the American Psychology Association's tacit
support of torture at Guantanamo, which also touches on the role
played by the U.S. military in the establishment of psychology as a
science, tells me that I am right. The professions cannot be
trusted.
I think that people in the biz ought to think about the profession's public face. I
personally don't think that philosophy should be a specialist topic at
all; I think that it should be the most demanding, inclusive form of
public philosophy.
***********
The trouble with making philosophy into an arcane specialty is that people
still will ask "What have philosophers discovered? What do they do?"
People who can't understand physics still understand that physicists know,
and can do, things other people don't and can't. It's harder to answer
that question with philosophy. Anything of actual scientific value has
been transferred to the relevant actual sciences (mathematics,
psychology, linguistics, AI, etc). The need for an autonomous
meta-science is extremely doubtful -- meta-science is just the
introspective and self-critical aspect of science itself.
Of course, we will always have a public philosophy. But by default it
will just be the crappy New Age / Pentecostal / Ayn Rand / futurology type of public
philosophy.
Was anything important lost when the analytic philosophers gained control of American
philosophy?
I doubt that what I've written has
changed the mind of anyone in the biz, and people who already dislike
analytic philosophy for one reason or another probably aren't really very
interested either. But perhaps I succeeded in corrupting a few youth.
Mary Midgeley on the PhD
I am not saying that the PhD training isn't useful. It provides the
indispensable skills of the lawyer. It shows you how to deal with
difficult arguments, which is necessary in dealing with hard subjects.
But that close work doesn't help you to grasp the big questions that
provide its context - the background issues out of which the small
problems arose. I think there ought to be a corrective course after the
PhD - a course in bypassing details to look at the whole landscape. It's
hard to do this on your own. Today's academic system, which forces
people to write articles without having time to think properly about
them, makes this harder.
Read it all
My writings on Chinese philosophy
Less polemical
writing on philosophy
Sketch of the
philosophical program I'll never get around to
Programmatic statement
of what I think philosophy should be
(Pieces below are posted in reverse chronological order, with the newest
first.)
Anathema: My Gift to
Philosophy
Rather than a right-wing ideology, however, what replaced the
Popular Front was "The End of Ideology" and technocratic
professionalism. This allowed the recruitment of European scientists who
were actually far left by American standards; technocratic professionals
also would not create any interference if and when it became necessary
to switch alliances again (for example, when Nixon made his 1972 trip to Eastasia.) The
rise of analytic philosophy was the philosophical version of a
scenario which took place in some form in many or most departments
of the American university.
Fossil Philosopher
When I attack analytic philosophy, a very
common response is bafflement: why do I dislike it so much,
and just what it is that I would prefer? I have recently
come to understand that this bafflement is sincere and real,
and that no one younger than forty-five or so can remember a
time when analytic philosophy was not dominant. Even by the
time of my own undergraduate years (1964-7) the kind of
thing I wanted to see was being phased out, and by now I am
effectively a fossil. This post is my attempt to clarify my
objections to analytic philosophy, and to sketch what it is
that I would have wanted.
Review of McCumber's "Time in the Ditch"
McCumber mentions that deflationary forces
on the profession over recent decades mean that almost all hiring
comes from about twenty top schools, almost all of which are
analytic, so that the minority tendencies can only place students in
departments they themselves control. (He also mentions a pluralism
revolt led by Wilshire around 1980, but seems to feel, as does
Wilshire, that this revolt was not very successful).
McCumber II: What should philosophy be?
A final consequence of the absence of holistic philosophy is that
the big decisions nowadays are made on the basis of philosophical
gut thinking and hunches by committees comprised of economists,
engineers, marketing and media experts, fundamentalist Christians,
political consultants, military men, and politicians. There won’t be
any philosophers there, and given the state of the biz, there aren’t
many philosophers who would have anything to contribute there, or
even anything to teach the members of the committee.
The peculiar mix of technocracy
and mass entertainment which rules our lives is in part a
consequence of the present devastated state of philosophy.
Brian Leiter and David
Brooks
Supposing that the judges, lawyers, and
jurors I mentioned above were to go to contemporary philosophy for help
in doing their jobs, they would almost certainly end up more confused
than they had been when they started, and they might well end up
incapable of doing their jobs at all. In the present state of the game,
philosophical ethics may well do more harm than good.
Blue covers or red? --
the prejudice against the internet
Just a couple of days ago now I ran into an old academic
acquaintance who I hadn't seen in a few years. We chatted about our
future plans and various friends we had in common, and then she asked me
if I was still publishing. I said that I now self-publish on the
internet. Very quickly, as if I'd invited her to view an autopsy, she
said, "Well, I don't trust the internet" -- and then went on to say that
she herself self-publishes out of a copy center! (This was from
someone who is generally very friendly to me.)
Café Philosophy Today
The internet can be compared to the coffee shops
of XVIIIc France and Britain, or to the free discussions of early
humanism (Erasmus, Montaigne, More, Rabelais, et. al.), or even to the
Athenian agora -- clichéd though that last comparison may be.
Suddenly anyone can participate in the debate -- and more to the point,
anyone can raise a question. To me this is a wonderful thing. Let's hope
it continues, and grows. It should be good for philosophy.
[Update: I think that I was being pretty optimistic here. But it's a
nice idea anyway].
Analysis and
Synthesis / Part and Whole / Specialist and Generalist / Labor and
Management / Deliberation and Decision
Philosophy’s principled decision
to limit itself to specialized subjects and to refuse to try to
understand the whole confines philosophy to the subordinate role and
minimizes the possibility that philosophy might actually make a
difference. If generalism is unphilosophical, then the boss will be
unphilosophical. And in the world we live in, that boss will be someone
like Pat Robertson or George W. Bush. If you leave a vacuum, someone
will fill it.
Russell Jacoby on the
last intellectuals
As a free-lance
intellectual, when I talk to university intellectuals I usually sense
caution, timidity, and conventionality. (Not the conventionality of the
Church Lady, of course, but the conventionality of their discipline.)
“Does anyone hear us?” and “Can you say that?” are in the air, and
behind them is the ever-present “Who do I have to blow”? The
heirarchies which control hiring and promotion are well-known (read the
Leiter Report), and until an academic gets tenure at a first-rank
research university, he or she must always be looking over his or her
shoulder.
Jacoby: "The philosophical self-scrutiny, however,
may well be the weakest, because American philosophy has promoted
a technical expertise that repels critical
thinking...........Philosophy seems the most routinized of the
humanities, the least accessible to change."
Specialization and
Generalism (Easy Version)
It seems reasonable
that generalist thinking should be fostered in the university, and the
departments where generalism would seem most appropriate are history,
literature, and philosophy. But nowadays these departments, too, have
been methodologized, so an eclectic generalist like me really has
nowhere to go. The university has apparently abandoned generalist
thought. This amounts to the abandonment of public philosophy to street
preachers, demagogues, and hack journalists. Every department nowadays
wants to be an expert discipline with specialist methodologies and
paradigms, and the ones that think of themselves as more successful in
this regard sneer at the others (“butterfly collecting and social
work”.)
Specialization and
Generalism (Long Version)
The specialized-expert model of
scholarship, at its best, can lead to impressive discoveries, but it has
its blind spots. At worst, when institutionalized it can force scholars
into narrow and unproductive areas of study, and beyond that, it often
leads to the thoughtless dismissal of work which is generalist or eclectic
or both. The received arguments justifying the sole dominance of
specialized-expert work are flawed. In my rambling way I’m going to point
out some of these flaws below.
Donald Davidson
Imagine the greatest historian in
the world today. (Using hypothetical examples is required in this game).
What would a Davidsonian have to say to him about acts, events, and
reasons? As I have said, the analytic philosopher does not consider it his job
to provide the historian with superior ways of talking about of acts,
events, and reasons. The philosopher’s ploy, I think, would be to
wait for the historian to say something philosophical about one these topics,
and then pause politely for a moment, smile a little analytical-philosophy
smile, and finally say something like “Of course, it is not fair to expect
historians, who have to spend a lot of time dealing with masses of factual detail,
to have a sophisticated understanding of difficult philosophical
concepts.”
The
Philosophy Biz
The classic
expressions of professionalism are "You gotta do what you gotta do"
and "It's only a job." Few really go into liberal arts teaching with the
goal of "doing the job" -- and for a lot of people (and not just adjuncts)
it's not even a very good job.
Why Relativism?
I think that a real
philosophical discussion of ethics would understand ethics in its
political and historical context, with particular attention to the
limitations of the scope of ethics that have been seen over the last
several centuries, and as a result would find relativism as an
unsurprising historical reality rather than as a starting point for
sophisticated philosophical argumentation. A more meaningful ethical
discourse would use real cases instead of fictional ones as heuristic
examples, which would require taking the ethical issues seriously and
actually trying to resolve them. It would also recognize that ethics,
rather than simply being a body of truth-functional ethical statements to
agree to, has to be integrated into the ethical agent’s identity by a
self-transformation in order to be real.
Hello, Friends of Bitch
PhD
I think that professionalization via paradigm-enforcement has had a very
negative effect on the humanities and the social sciences. I would hope for
a broader, opener, more engaged, more generalist, more imaginative,
and more constructive discourse. My role models include Montaigne,
John Dewey, and Nietzsche. I feel that disciplinary narrowing has been
especially harmful in analytic philosophy, as you can read elsewhere, but
postmodernism and "theory" often seem just as bad.
Gunnell on Rawls
“Although John Rawls’ A Theory
of Justice (1971), as well as what many consider to be its ideological
and philosophical counterpart, Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and
Utopia (1974), could be construed as alluding to or reflecting, or in
some way speaking to or about, politics, they were distinctly contextless
works written by professional philosophers which lifted the perennial
debates about liberalism and the ground of values to a new level of
abstraction while apparently allowing academic commentators to believe
that they were actually saying something about politics.” (John
Gunnell, The Descent of Political Theory, Chicago, 1993, pp.
272-3.)
What Happened to
Philosophy?: Rorty's "Consequences of Pragmatism"
A couple decades ago Richard Rorty, along with several
others, proposed a new direction for American philosophy. Nothing came of
this, and the analytic philosophy of the Anglosphere now plays exactly the
same role as the scholastic philosophy pilloried by Rabelais, Montaigne,
More, erasmus, and every other writer of that period whom anyone reads any
more. Post-modernism is almost as bad, and the problem is the same in both
cases: professionalization, methodologizations, and paradigm-enforcement.
It could have been nice.
Analytic Philosophy Sucks
"In earlier eras,
when it was not obvious that the scope of human knowledge far exceeded
what could be encompassed by a single mind, the challenge of explaining
how everything hung together was not transparently unmanageable. Today –
when single minds cannot encompass substantial sub areas of any
established discipline – it is. The solution is not to do badly what
cannot be done, but to do well what can – to construct a series of
limited, but accurate and overlapping, syntheses that together illuminate
reality as we know it. This, I argue, is what we should ask of analytic
philosophy."
According to Soames'
reasoning, there could be no general theory of "physics" or "chemistry"
either, but just scattered and overlapping subfields, and it would be a
foolishly wasted effort to try to bring these subfields under one
umbrella.
"How
History Made the Mind": David Martel Johnson
Johnson's well-intended but rather thin and cartoonish book convinces me
that contemporary philosophy of mind is talking about schematic
quasi-humans who are not very similar to actual humans. I suspect that
philosophers of mind believe that these quasi-humans, who I doubt would be
viable in any actual world, are what humans should really be like.
Debate on Analytic
Philosophy
Links to my debates on Matt Yglesias's
site and elsewhere with a large collection of analytic philosophers.
Whatever fame or notoriety I have came from these debates. In this piece I
respond to various criticisms of my position, which was initially
expressed in an off-hand snarky comment on a discussion thread.
What is Philosophy? (with
special attention to ethics)
My arguments claiming that the
schematic kinds of arguments favored by analytic philosophy, and
especially the kind of sequestered specialist debate favored by analytic
philosophers, is contrary to the nature of ethics, which must be diffused
into the population if it is to be actually capable of being what it is.
(I am aware that hundreds of arguments exist proving that meta-ethics is a
valid enterprise, and a much more philosophical one than actual
discussion of concrete ethical questions, but I think that these proofs
are delusory.
Metaethics does ethics no good at all,
and metaethicists are rather comparable to the naturalist who shot the
last two surviving members of a species he was expert on in order to
complete his researches.
I am emersonj at gmail dot com.
Original materials copyright John J
Emerson
Return to
Idiocentrism
jjmrsnx
|