I'd been battling with my friend Peter Boghossian about comparing philosophy to a game and about positivism and resisting a scientistic model of philosophy.
I've
been teaching labor history and critical accounts of economic rationalism --
also about sex, culminating in a panel discussion about sex-role stereotypes in
society -- Foucault is a huge influence for me in understanding the Greeks and
bringing a Greek mindset to the present.
I've
been studying Sartre's The Idiot of the Family, Husserl's Cartesian Meditations
and Lacan -- working with my colleagues in Montana.
---
Three
last posts on philpapers -- talking with Derek Allan in Australia and Karen
Elizabeth Zoppa in Winnipeg/Manitoba:
---
Hi
Derek and Karen
If you
don’t mind I will go on with the conversation and try to address some of the
big issues we have been thinking about.
--
I am
surprised to learn that science is uninspired by the highest values especially
on the hundredth anniversary of the general theory of relativity.
As
philosophers I think we must make common cause with everyone who has the
strength of mind to break free of convention and establish truth on the basis
of sound evidence, rather than airy speculation or dogmatic belief. We
need not protect philosophy from the incursions of other fields, especially
from empirical science. New forms of reductionism and logical positivism
and new ways to see big data and big complexity -- new forms of skepticism
about big explanations too -- bring it on -- encourage scientific investigation
and every form and elaboration of natural and human
art-science-technology-skill. We still have to encourage people to learn
and add to the store of understanding. Philosophy is an advocate for the
cause of learning and certainly for scientific discovery. Wake up and
smell the science!
Einstein
once said that the man of science is often a poor philosopher.
Philosophers likewise are often poor scientists -- Aristotle makes huge
mistakes such as rejecting the atomic theory, the theory of evolution,
heliocentrism. Yet Aristotle is a towering philosopher and scientific
spirits such as Frege, disastrous philosophers, make huge advances.
Welcome
to planet earth. We have left and right and lots of problems with
integration. What is the special role that philosophy should play?
--
When I
first started teaching philosophy in the 1980s I was very conscious of the analytic/continental divide in the background. I was interested in
thinkers from both traditions, and also from other traditions -- Chinese
philosophy, Indian philosophy, African philosophy, South American philosophy,
philosophy from Oceania -- but few people I met had the same inspiration for
philosophy as I discovered in myself -- I was also trying to keep up with my
mathematical and scientific education, and my studies of ancient and modern
languages, and studies in economics and social sciences -- trying to study the
large arc of history to see what may be gleaned for the good of society.
All of this seemed relevant and even essential to me, for anyone who wanted to
dig into philosophy in our time, with a world conception of philosophy and a
conception of a truly global (not parochial) process of scrutiny, including an
interrogation of the unremarked assumptions that attach to all our fields of
study, and even to cultures themselves -- if this is possible. I had some
hope but little evidence for any global convergence of philosophical ideas on
big questions, such as the primacy of free inquiry, a foundation in a
humanistic orientation, a final standard in empirico-deductive evidence, and a
clean break with the obscene prejudices of the past. It did not seem
possible to me that philosophy would continue on with its traditions of narrow
interest and specialty -- Kantians vs. Platonists vs. Russell or Popper or
German Idealism.
Some
thirty-odd years later for me, I see that the shape of philosophical
inspiration today is still very much along traditional lines. I do not
meet people often who have a passion for philosophy that resembles mine -- but
I do meet such people on occasion. Some of us try to look across many
traditions and fields, equally at home with history and mathematics. More
often I meet people who focus on one thinker or one strain in a single
tradition -- even young people just starting out in their studies, with
ambitions to become new Hume scholars or Platonists or Feminist
philosophers. Some of us see the analytic/continental divide but mots
people ignore it -- they just go on in their subfield without a grander aspiration.
My
long-term conclusion is that the subjects that occupy people in philosophy may
not be the point -- which would also make the traditions less the focus
too. Maybe the point is to develop a philosophical sensibility, a
sensibility to argument, to tracking down ideas to their root metaphors --
certainly including the important “scientific” value of the decisive import of
empirical evidence -- philosophy as an inspiration both for a welcoming
tolerance and a fearless skepticism.
If there are a
large number of philosophers worldwide who are not attuned to values like
these, then perhaps the platform for discussion should be -- what is
philosophy? -- why should anyone still care about philosophy? -- how can we
translate our personal philosophical researches into paths towards the good
society? How can we attack and help eradicate the very unphilosophical
disease of fanaticism that infects our societies? Philosophers should be
able to get together on the platform of intellectual freedom, tolerance,
empiricism, logic and ethical care. If we do not have this in common,
then ‘philosophy’ is no longer a good in the world, and we don’t need to worry
about it.
--
Derek
you accuse me of both asking and answering my own question -- which if true seems
out of sorts with the aims of philosophy -- philosophy should not perhaps ask
questions that it has already answered.
I
didn’t think I was answering a question -- just raising one. What is
philosophy? Since people go on pursuing projects like analytic philosophy,
continental philosophy, ancient philosophy, comparative philosophy … and since,
as your analyses point out, these projects are not aligned very well, perhaps
there is no common theme … perhaps they merely resemble one another in various
ways.
You
put my presumption to the test. I seem to be identifying ‘philosophy’
with the development of a critical mindset rather than a set of conclusions or
a focus on any particular problem. But suppose this is wrong: as you say,
let us look at the idea that ‘philosophy’ is not bound up with any of these
things -- intellectual freedom, tolerance, empiricism, logic, ethical care, and
the search for the good society.
Let us
try to imagine a kind of philosophy or an understanding of philosophy that does
not respect intellectual freedom. It forbids certain kind of
inquiries. Let us imagine a philosophy that is not committed to
tolerance. It is intolerant of difference across some boundary. Let
us imagine a philosophy that defies logic, ignores evidence, has no animating
moral purpose and no concern for society at all. What is left? I
don’t think we can call it “the fearless examination of arguments” if we have
already eliminated the very bases of argument in logic, empirical evidence, and
moral insight. I don’t think that we have “answered” the question about
philosophy by thinking about it in terms of reasoning, evidence and moral
compass. These are some of its internal components, its inner workings,
and whatever philosophy is will involve these things -- this seems right -- but
this does not specify what philosophy is, how it should be pursued or why there
are philosophies rather than one singular phenomenon that everyone will
see in exactly the same way.
Let us acknowledge
that there is more than one way to pursue this study -- philosophy. Then
perhaps we can get together as philosophers not on a set of conclusions but a
common commitment to values such as respect for basic logic, respect for
evidence, and respect for human beings.
--
Karen you raise the daunting question of
situating ‘science’ in some broader understanding or putting it to the test as
philosophy. You warn us I think that we may be using this word
uncritically and that we should be suspicious of purported “highest truths” --
for example in the case of General Relativity, whose centenary we were
discussing -- perhaps these highest truths are being used to prop up some
merely worldly power.
I started thinking about Heidegger’s critical
engagement and placement of science and technology in his big ‘history of
being’ -- a kind of golden-age theory about the development of philosophy --
this version of Heidegger is an “environmental philosopher” and predecessor for
environmental thinking by Leopold, Naess, Callicott and Hardin -- whose ideas
appear to underlie much recent and ongoing work in environmental ethics.
Heidegger correctly identifies human culture itself as the culprit in the drama
of environmental ethics. Heidegger inspires a number of attempts to
rethink human culture and to develop a new ethic to meet the challenge of the
deadly impact of technology on the environment. These attempts all
contain a ‘primitivist’ strain of thinking aimed at returning human culture to
an earlier and smaller footprint on the earth. Aldo Leopold’s conception
of “the Land Ethic” is an example of this ‘primitivist’ thinking. But
“the Land Ethic” and Heidegger’s earlier, pioneering ideas on this theme
envision a society at odds with free speech, a free press, democracy, the city
and all its problems -- an idyll from a dreamlike past.
In a sense Heidegger was able to articulate a
critique of science and technology because he had established a baseline in an
earlier preindustrial idyll of human quiet and humble dwelling in the house of
being. Heidegger jumps away from the present to this dreamlike past
and achieves a critical perspective on what’s going on right now.
Habermas envisions the ideal speech situation
which is an equal jump from the present to dreamlike future in which human conversation
no longer struggled with deception, coercion, or mere power lust over the
sincere pursuit of rational consensus.
Thus we can achieve critical perspectives on
the present by looking ahead and before -- perhaps we cannot achieve
a critical perspective and remain in the present as actors -- our
criticism, that is, is blunted somewhat by our being situated in the same world
we are surveying.
To the critical engagement with science and
technology and all the problems that seem to be plaguing us at this moment of
history -- especially the plague of violence, and religious
fanaticism, and religious intolerance -- versions of secular fanaticism
and intolerance are also in no short supply. In truth I feel
incredibly small and powerless in the face of these enormous forces of history.
I am so filled with anger about the time I’m living in and the outrages
that the human spirit has to suffer that I can hardly walk and chew gum at the
same time. But I am also living as a philosopher. I’m trying to go
on with these questions. If I’m going to engage with science -- if I
can figure out what that is -- and critically situate it in a broader context
of ideas, then I must do so from a philosophical perspective. So my
question to you Karen is: what is your philosophical perspective?
