I've just read you saying, "In philosophy it is very important that we be as civil and charitable as possible. There is no place for polemics in philosophy."
Intriguing. No place, really? Can't a philosophy be wicked or obtuse?
Yes, a philosophy can be wicked or obtuse. But what I said is that there is no place for polemics in philosophy. I distinguish among (a) philosophy as a body of knowledge, (b) philosophy as a type of inquiry, and (c) philosophies as worldviews or belief systems.
My short answer is that a philosophy or worldview can be wicked or obtuse and thus an appropriate target of polemics, but that philosophy as inquiry cannot be wicked or obtuse. Hence it cannot be an appropriate target of polemical attack. It is, on the contrary, a noble and normatively human enterprise that ought to be conducted without personal animus and without the grinding of ideological axes. As I say in Can Philosophy be Debated?
Philosophy is fundamentally inquiry. It is inquiry by those who don't know (and know that they don't know) with the sincere intention of increasing their insight and understanding. Philosophy is motivated by the love of truth, not the love of verbal battle or the need to defeat an opponent or shore up and promote a preconceived opinion about which one has no real doubt.
When philosophy is done with others it takes the form of dialog, not debate. It is conversation between friends, not opponents, who are friends of the truth before they are friends of each other. Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.
There is nothing adversarial in a genuine philosophical conversation. The person I am addressing and responding to is not my adversary but a co-inquirer. In the ideal case there is between us a bond of friendship, a philiatic bond. But this philia subserves the eros of inquiry. The philosopher's love of truth is erotic, the love of one who lacks for that which he lacks. It is not the agapic love of one who knows and bestows his pearls of wisdom.
This of course is an ideal. But it is one that is attained from time to time among certain interlocutors and so can be attained. By contrast, philosophy as a body of knowledge, Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft in Husserl's sense, is an 'ideal' that has never been attained. I suspect that it is an ideal that cannot be attained by us and so is not an ideal, but a mere dream.
The following from a German sociologist (my comments are in blue):
Perhaps you know the old joke: Analytic philosophers think that continental philosophy is not sufficiently clear; continental philosophers think that analytic philosophy is not sufficient.
Having just reread the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, I don't see Kant as an analytic philosopher. Hegel and Nietzsche certainly belong to the continental tradition. And none of the philosophers of the 20th century, who really matter to me, can be called an analytic philosopher. Doesn't "analytic" simply mean after Wittgenstein and in his tradition?
BV: As I see it, there was no analytic-Continental split before the 20th century. So classifying Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche in terms of that split is only marginally meaningful. But it is safe to say that Kant is more congenial to analytic philosophers than Hegel and Nietzsche are.
When did the split come about and what is it about?
If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger's 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap's 1932 response, "On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language." In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics. And in fairness to Heidegger, we should note that he thinks he is doing something more radical than metaphysics. Metaphysics for Heidegger is onto-theology. Metaphysics thinks Being (das Sein) but always in reference to beings (das Seiende); it does not think Being in its difference from beings. The latter is Heidegger's project.
The following are widely regarded as Continental philosophers: Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Ortega y Gasset, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus.
Note that the above are all Europeans. But being European is not what makes them 'Continental.' Otherwise Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap would have to be lumped in with them. And of course there are Continental philosophers who do not hail from Europe. So what makes the above authors 'Continental' as opposed to 'analytic'?
It is not easy to say, which fact supplies a reason to not take too seriously talk of 'Continental' versus 'analytic.'
Note that all of the Continentals I mentioned engage in analysis, some in very close, very careful analysis. (Ever read Husserl's Logical Investigations?) And please don't say that they don't analyze language. Ever read Brentano? Gustav Bergmann accurately describes Brentano as "the first linguistic philosopher." (Realism, 234) Roderick Chisholm's paraphrastic approach was influenced significantly by Brentano. No one would lump Chisholm in with the Continentals.
Will you say that the Continentals mentioned didn't pay close attention to logic? That's spectacularly false. Even for Heidegger! Ever read his dissertation on psychologism in logic?
Perhaps you could say that the Continentals mentioned did not engage significantly with the ground-breaking work of Frege, widely regarded as the greatest logician since Aristotle. I think that would be true. But does this diffeence suffice to distinguish between Continental and analytic? I don't think so: there are plenty of philosophers who write in a decidedly analytic style who do not engage with Frege, and some of them oppose Frege. Take Fred Sommers. You wouldn't call him a Continental philosopher. And while he engages the ideas of Frege, he vigorously opposes them in his very impressive attempt at resurrecting traditional formal logic. And yet he would be classified as analytic.
A Matter of Style or of Substance?
According to Michael Dummett,
What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained.
[. . .]
On my characterisation, therefore [Gareth] Evans was no longer an analytical philosopher. He was, indeed, squarely in the analytical tradition: the three pillars on which his book [The Varieties of Reference, Oxford, 1982] rests are Russell, Moore and Frege. Yet it is only as belonging to the tradition — as adopting a certain philosophical style and as appealing to certain writers rather than to others — that he remains a member of the analytical school. (Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1993)
For Dummett, then, what make a philosopher analytic is not the style in which he writes: clear, precise, careful, explicitly logical with premises and inferences clearly specified, free of literary pretentiousness, name-dropping, rhetorical questions, and generally the sort of bullshitting that one finds in writers like Caputo and Badiou. Nor is it the topics he writes about or the authorities he cites. What makes the analytic philosopher are the twin axioms above mentioned.
The trouble with Dummett's criterion is that it is intolerably stipulative if what we are after is a more or less lexical definition of how 'analytic' and 'Continental' are actually used. An approach that rules out Gareth Evans and Roderick Chisholm and Gustav Bergmann and Reinhardt Grossmann and so many others cuts no ice in my book. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)
A Matter of Politics?
I don't think so. Look again at my list. Sartre was a decided leftist, a Stalinist in his later phase. And Camus was on the Left. But everyone else on my list was either apolitical or on the Right. Heidegger was a National Socialist. Latter-day Continentals, though, definitely slouch Leftward.
A Matter of Academic Politics?
This may be what the Continental versus analytic split comes down to more than anything else. As Blaise Pacal says, with some exaggeration, "All men naturally hate one another." To which I add, with some exaggeration: and are always looking for ways to maintain and increase the enmity. If you are entranced with Heidegger you are going to hate the Carnapian analytic bigot who refuses to read Heidegger but mocks him anyway. Especially when the bigot stands in the way of career success. Although so many Continentals are slopheads, there is no asshole like an analytic asshole.
A Matter of Religion?
No, there are both theists and atheists on my list. And of course there are plenty of analytic philosophers who are theists.
A Matter of Attitude toward Science?
This has something to do with the split. You can be a Continental philosopher and a traditional theist (von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al.) and you can be a Continental philosopher and a conservative (Ortega y Gasset), but is there any case of a Continental philosopher who is a logical positivist or who genuflects before the natural sciences in the scientistic manner? I don't think so.
Interim Conclusion
Talk of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy is not particularly useful. It would be better to speak of good and bad philosophy. But what are the marks of good philosophy? That's a post for another occasion.
Back to my correspondent:
I see philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science. This is not saying that some arguments are not better than others or that one cannot distinguish different degrees of plausibility. But the overall conception (what Heidegger calls "Seinsverständnis) is more – and something essentially different – than the sum of of plausibilities or the logic consistency of the argumentation. There is, or so it appears to me, a 'chanelling' of truth that resembles more the mystical experience than the scientific recognition. Of course I've read Wittgenstein, but why should I spend precious life time reading, say, Gilbert Ryle or Saul Kripke, when I can read Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik?
BV: As I am sure my reader knows, Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) has been dismissed as Begriffsdichtung, conceptual poetry. So I am not surprised that he sees philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science. His attitude is defensible: why read Kripke who is of interest only to specialists in logic and the philosophy of language and who has no influence on anything beyond those narrow precincts when you can read Hegel and come thereby to understand the dialectical thinking which, via Marx and Lenin, transformed the world?
There is also the problem that attempts to bring philosophy onto the "sure path of science" (Kant) have all failed miserably despite the Herculean efforts of thinkers such as Edmund Husserl. He attempted to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft, but he could not get even one of his brilliant students to follow him into his transcendental phenomenology. (I don't consider Eugen Fink to be a counterexample.) There is no reason to think that philosophy will ever enter upon the sure path of science. This is a reason to content oneself with the broader, looser, fuzzier approach of the Continentals.
Only if philosophy could be transformed into strenge Wissenschaft would we perhaps be justified in putting all our efforts into this project and eschewing the satisfaction of our needs for an overarching and spiritually satisfying Weltanschauung; we have no good reason to think philosophy will ever be so transformed; ergo, etc.
When Adorno was in Oxford, he wrote in a letter home: "Here it's always just about arguments." Most of his colleagues there did not even understand what he was missing. And that's the divide!
BV: That is indeed a good part of what the divide is all about.
Well, of course this ignorance of the analytic tradition has in my case also to do with cultural nationalism. The philosophical departments here are more and more forgetting about the great German tradition. Thinkers like Hegel or Schelling, let alone Heidegger, are hardly taught anymore. I'm against this, I'm Deutsch and proud of it. Actually I want – and for me that's another reason to be against illegal immigration – Germany to become again a hotspot of art and philosophy!
BV: I agree! When as a young man I spent a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, I was there to study Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. To my romantic young self Germany was, in the words of Heinrich Heine, das Land von Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and thinkers. You Germans can be justifiably proud of your tradition. Without a doubt, Kant belongs in the philosophical pantheon along with Plato and Aristotle. It is indeed a shame that the analysts are suppressing your great tradition.
As for illegal immigration, if looks from here as if Angela Merkel is a disaster for Germany. Language, borders, and culture are three things every nation has a right to protect and preserve. There is nothing xenophobic or racist about it.
An article by David J. Chalmers. (HT: Dave Lull) I read nine pages into it before I got bored. And this despite my fascination with metaphilosophy. So I went back to reading Klavan's memoir. I am now on p. 173 of this 'page-turner.' I am marking it up something fierce. Damn if it isn't good! Scroll down for a couple of Klavan entries.
I spent the afternoon out back in T-shirt and shorts, drinking chai and enjoying a cheap cigar, on this, the fifth day of January, anno domini 2017. It was nippy during my pre-dawn hike, though, circa 50 on the Fahrenheit scale. I had to don a long-sleeved shirt. Life is tough.
A view from my stoa (click to enlarge, and again to enlarge):
We humans naturally philosophize. But we don't naturally philosophize well. So when science journalists and scientists try their hands at it they often make a mess of it. (See my Scientism category for plenty of examples.) This is why there is need of the discipline of philosophy one of whose chief offices is the exposure and debunking of bad philosophy and pseudo-philosophy of the sort exhibited in so many 'scientific' articles. Although it would be a grave mistake to think that the value of philosophy resides in its social utility, philosophy does earn its social keep in its critical and debunking function.
In the course of our discursive operations we often encounter circularity. Clarity will be served if we distinguish different types of circularity. I count three types. We could label them definitional, argumentative, and explanatory.
A. The life of the mind often includes the framing of definitions. Now one constraint on a good definition is that it not be circular. A circular definition is one in which the term to be defined (the definiendum) or a cognate thereof occurs in the defining term (the definiens). 'A triangle is a plane figure having a triangular shape,' though plainly true, is circular. 'The extension of a term is the set of items to which the term applies' is an example of a non-circular definition.
B. Sometimes we argue. We attempt to support a proposition p by adducing other propositions as reasons for accepting p. Now one constraint on a good argument is that it not be circular. A circular argument in is one in which the conclusion appears among the premises, sometimes nakedly, other times clothed for decency's sake in different verbal dress. Supply your own examples.
C. Sometimes we explain. What is it for an individual x to exist? Suppose you say that for x to exist is for some property to be instantiated. One variation on this theme is to say that for Socrates to exist is for the haecceity property Socrateity to be instantiated. This counts as a metaphysical explanation, and a circular one to boot. For if Socrateity is instantiated, then it is is instantiated by Socrates who must exist to stand in the instantiation relation. The account moves in a circle, an explanatory circle of embarrassingly short diameter.
Suppose someone says that for x to exist is for x to be identical to something or other. They could mean this merely as an equivalence, in which case I have no objection. But if they are shooting for a explanation of existence in terms of identity-with-something-or-other, then they move in an explanatory circle. For if x exists in virtue of its identity with some y, then y must exist, and you have moved in an explanatory circle.
Some philosophers argue that philosophers ought not be in the business of explanation. I beg to differ. But that is a large metaphilosophical topic unto itself.
Philosophy is magnificent in aspiration but miserable in execution.
Part of what makes philosophy a miserable subject is that none of its conclusions is conclusive. Herewith, a little example. But first some background.
A truthmaker maximalist is one who maintains that every truth has a truthmaker. So it doesn't matter whether a truth is necessary or contingent, universal or particular or singular, affirmative or negative, analytic or synthetic, etc.: it has a truth maker. There are no exceptions. The contrary of a truthmaker maximalist is a truthmaker nihilist: one who maintains that no truth has a truthmaker — not because no truth is true, but because no truth needs something in the world to 'make' it true. I incline toward truthmaker optimalism: some but not all truths need truthmakers. But our topic is truthmaker maximalism.
Don't confuse maximalism with the thesis that every truth has its own unique, bespoke, truthmaker. The maximalist is not committed to a 1-1 correspondence between truths and truthmakers. Example. On a factualist approach to truthmakers, they are facts. So on factualism, the truthmaker of 'Al is fat' is the fact of Al's being fat. But this fact also makes true other truths such as 'Someone is fat' and its logical entailments such as 'Someone is fat or Fred is dead.'
Now let's consider a counterexample to truthmaker maximalism. This is from the excellent SEP entry Truthmakers by Fraser MacBride.
2.1.2 Could there be nothing rather than something?
Here's another shot across the bows, this time from [David] Lewis. Take the most encompassing negative existential of all: absolutely nothing exists. Surely this statement is possibly true. But if it were true then something would have to exist to make it true if the principle that every truth has a truth-maker is to be upheld. But then there would have to be something rather than nothing. So combining maximalism with the conviction that there could have been nothing rather than something leads to contradiction (Lewis 1998: 220, 2001: 611). So unless we already have reason to think there must be something rather than nothing—as both Armstrong (1989b: 24–5) and Lewis (1986: 73–4) think they do—maximalism is already in trouble.
Setting up the problem as an inconsistent triad:
A.It is necessarily true that: Every truth has a truthmaker.
B. It is possibly true that: Nothing exists
C. It is not possibly true that: Nothing exists and something exists.
Since (C) is non-negotiable, either (A) or (B) must be rejected. MacBride thinks that (B) is "surely" true, and that therefore (A) is "in trouble." But MacBride's "surely" is surely bluster.
It is impossible that nothing exist. For if that had been the case, then it would have been the case, which is to say that it would have been true that nothing exists, whence it follows that there would have been something after all, namely, the truth that nothing exists.
Or think of it this way. Had nothing at all existed, that would have been the way things are, a most definite way things are that excludes infinitely many other ways things might have been. This way things are, had nothing existed, is something, not nothing. So it is impossible that there might have been nothing at all.
Parmenides vindicatus est.
Is the argument I just gave compelling? No. Philosophy is a miserable subject.
The misery of philosophy is rooted in the misery of man and the infirmity of his reason. But we know our misery. Therein lies an indication of our greatness. The knowledge of our ignorance and of our misery elevates us above every other sentient being.
In April of 2011, 60 Minutes had a segment on the monks of Mt. Athos. It was surprisingly sympathetic for such a left-leaning program. What one expects and usually gets from liberals and leftists and the lamestream media is religion-bashing — unless of course the religion is Islam, the religion of peace – but the segment in question was refreshingly objective. It was actually too sympathetic for my taste and not critical enough. It didn't raise the underlying questions. Which is why you need my blog.
We know that this world is no dream and is to that extent real. For all we know it may be as real as it gets, though philosophers and sages over the centuries, East and West, have assembled plenty of considerations that speak against its plenary reality. We don't know that there is any world other than this one. We also don't know that there isn't. Now here is an existential question for you: Will you sacrifice life in this world, with its manifold pleasures and satisfactions, for the chance of transcendent happiness in a merely believed-in hinter world? The Here is clear; the Hereafter is not. It is not clear that is is, or that it isn't, or what it is if it is. When I say that the world beyond is merely believed-in, I mean that it is merely believed-in from the point of view of the here and now where knowledge is impossible; I am not saying that there is no world beyond.
Let us be clear what the existential option is. It is not between being a dissolute hedonist or an ascetic, a Bukowski or a Simon of Sylites. It is between being one who lives in an upright and productive way but in such a way as to assign plenary reality and importance to this world, this life, VERSUS one who sees this world as a vanishing quantity that cannot be taken with full seriousness but who takes it as preparatory for what comes after death. (Of course, most adherents of a religion live like ordinary worldlings for the most part but hedge their bets by tacking on some religious observances on the weekend. I am not concerned with these wishy-washy types here.)
The monks of Mount Athos spend their lives preparing for death, writing their ticket to the Beyond, engaging in unseen warfare against Satan and his legions. They pray the Jesus Prayer ceaselessly; they do not surf the Web or engage in competitive eating contests or consort with females – there are no distaff elements on the Holy Mountain.
Is theirs the highest life possible for a human being? Or is the quest to determine what is the highest life the highest life? The monks think they have the truth, the final truth, the essential and saving truth. Thinking they possess it, their task is not to seek it but to implement it in their lives, to 'existentially appropriate it' as Kierkegaard might say, to knit it into the fabric of their Existenz. There is a definite logic to their position. If you have the truth, then there is no point in wasting time seeking it, or talking about it, or debating scoffers and doubters. The point is to do what is necessary to achieve the transcendent Good the existence of which one does not question.
This logic is of course common to other 'true believers.' Karl Marx in the 11th of his Theses on Feuerbach wrote that "The philosophers have variously interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." Marx and the commies he spawned thought they had the truth, and so the only thing left was to implement it at whatever cost, the glorious end justifying the bloody means. Millions of eggs were broken, though, and no omelet materialized.
Buddha, too, was famously opposed to speculation. If you have been shot with a poisoned arrow, there is no point in speculating as to the trajectory of the arrow, the social class of the archer, or the chemical composition of the poison; the one thing necessary is to extract the arrow. The logic is the same, though the point is different. The point for Buddha was not theosis (deification) as in Eastern Orthodoxy, or the classless society as in Marxism, but Nirvana, the extinguishing of the ego-illusion and final release from the wheel of Samsara.
If you have the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, then by all means live in accordance with it. Put it into practice. But do you in fact have the truth? For the philosopher this is the question that comes first and cannot be evaded. If the monks of Mt. Athos are right about God and the soul and that the ultimate human goal is theosis, then they are absolutely right to renounce this world of shadows and seemings and ignorance and evil for the sake of true reality and true happiness.
But do they have the truth or does one throw one's life away when one flees to a monastery? Does one toss aside the only reality there is for a bunch of illusions? There is of course a secular analog. I would say that all the earnest and idealistic and highly talented individuals who served the cause of Communism in the 20th century sacrificed their lives on the altar of illusions. They threw their lives away pursuing the impossible. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for example, who went to the electric chair as atomic spies. Such true believers wasted their lives and ended up enablers of great evil. In the end they were played for fools by an evil ideology.
So isn't the philosopher's life the highest possible life for a human being? For only the philosopher pursues the ultimate questions without dogmatism, without blind belief, in freedom, critically, autonomously. I am not saying that the ultimate good for a human being is endless inquiry. The highest goal cannot be endless inquiry into truth, but a resting in it. But that can't come this side of the Great Divide. Here and now is not the place or time to dogmatize. We can rest in dogma on the far side, although there we won't need it, seeing having replaced believing.
My Athenian thesis — that the life of the philosopher is the highest life possible for a human being — won't play very well in Jerusalem. And I myself have serious doubts about it. But all such doubts are themselves part and parcel of the philosophical enterprise. For if nothing is immune from being hauled before the bench of Reason, there to be rudely interrogated, then fair Philosophia herself must also answer to that tribunal.
Philosophy is reason's search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters. But reason is not reason unless it strives mightily beyond itself to sources of truth that transcend it. So the true philosopher must be open to divine revelation. If it is the truth the philosopher seeks, then he cannot confine himself to the truth accessible to discursive reason.
A Czech reader sent me some materials in which he raises the title question. One of them is a YouTube video. I will unpack the question in my own way and then pronounce my verdict.
Suppose what ought to be evident, namely, that we are morally responsible for our actions. Among actions are those that could be labeled 'theoretical.' Among theoretical actions are those we engage in when we do philosophy. (And please note that philosophy is indeed something we do: it is an activity even if it culminates in contemplation.) Philosophical actions include raising questions, expounding them, entering into dialog with others, consulting and comparing authorities, drawing inferences, generalizing, hunting for counterexamples, testing arguments for validity, deciding which issues are salient, and so on.
Given our moral responsibility for our actions, including our philosophical actions, there is the admittedly farfetched possibility that we do wrong when we philosophize. Given this 'possibility' are we not being intolerably dogmatic when we just 'cut loose and philosophize' without a preliminary examination of the question of the moral justifiability of philosophical actions?
Suppose someone were to issue this pronunciamento: It is wrong, always and everywhere, to do anything whatsoever without first having established the moral acceptability of the proposed action!
Or as my correspondent puts it: No action can [may] be performed before its ethical legitimation! He calls this the "methodical rule of the ethical skeptic."
My Verdict
The draconian demand under consideration is obviously self-referential and in consequence self-vitiating. If it is wrong to act until I have shown that my action is morally permissible, then it is wrong to engage in all the 'internal' or theoretical actions necessary to determine whether my proposed action (whether theoretical or practical) is morally permissible until I have shown that the theoretical actions are morally permissible. It follows that the ethical demand cannot be met. (A vicious infinite regress is involved.)
Now an ethical demand that cannot be met is no ethical demand at all. For 'ought' implies 'can.' If I ought to do such-and-such, then it must be possible for me to do it, and not just in a merely logical sense of 'possible.' But it is not possible for me to show the moral permissibility of all of my actions.
I conclude that one is not being censurably dogmatic when one just 'cuts loose and philosophizes,' and that we have been given no good reason to think that philosophizing is morally wrong.
A philosophical paper ought to record the results, not the genesis, of the author's thought about a topic. In this hyperkinetic age it is a good writerly maxim to state one's thesis succinctly at the outset and sketch one's overall argument before plunging into the dialectic.
In chess, the object of the game is clear, the rules are fixed and indisputable, and there is always a definite outcome (win, lose, or draw) about which no controversy can arise. In philosophy, the object and the rules are themselves part of what is in play, and there is never an incontrovertible result.
So I need both of these gifts of the gods. Chess to recuperate from the uncertainty of philosophy, and philosophy to recuperate from the sterility of chess.
Both can be utterly absorbing, and yet both can appear in a ridiculous light. Thus both can appear to be insignificant pursuits far removed from 'reality.' The difference is that only philosophy can tackle the inevitable question, What is reality?
The denigrator of philosophy himself philosophizes, unlike the denigrator of chess who remains outside chess.
But it usually does no good to point out to the denigrator of philosophy that he presupposes an understanding of reality and thus himself philosophizes in an inarticulate and uncritical way. For he is too lazy and unserious to profit from the remark: he does not want truth; he is content to wallow in the shallow opinions he happens to have — and that have him.
A reader demands a list. Here we go. It is very far from complete. To list is not to endorse. Contemporary academic philosophy is hyperprofessionalized and overspecialized. An exposure to some of the following may have a broadening effect. Asterisks indicate a MavPhil category on the right sidebar.
As magnificent a subject as philosophy is, grappling as it does with the ultimate concerns of human existence, and thus surpassing in nobility all other human pursuits, it is also miserable in that nothing goes uncontested, and nothing ever gets established to the satisfaction of all competent practitioners. The magnificence and misery of philosophy reflect the magnificence and misery of its author man, who, neither animal nor angel, is the tension between the two and a question mark to himself.
Magnificent in aspiration, philosophy is yet miserable in execution.
An easy-to-read power point presentation with plenty of pictures.
Haack rightly laments hyperprofessionalization and overspecialization in philosophy as well as the detachment of philosophy from its own history. Compare my Kripke's Misrepresentation of Meinong. Fragmentation leads to hermeticism and ahistoricism. True enough. But then she claims that the cause of fragmentation is academic opportunism. This is not quite right since it ignores a legitimate motive for professionalization and specialization, namely, the realization that a necessary but insufficient condition for progress in philosophy is very careful and rigorous work on well-defined issues, with all the preliminary spadework that that requires.
The main problem with what she proposes is that it is naive. She thinks that interdisciplinary work will lead to progress in philosophy. That won't happen. All that will happen is a proliferation of wild and woolly syntheses and "fusions" at odds with one another.
And we should not forget that Haack's metaphilosophical proposals are themselves just more philosophy, just more fodder for controversy. Her colleagues won't (most of them) say, "You're right Professor Haack, let's get going on some interdisciplinary projects." They will ague with her as I am doing now, and some of them with arguments different from mine.
Serious work in philosophy as in other disciplines must be technical: careful, precise, rigorous, respectful of logical niceties and subtle distinctions. It is not done well in isolation but with the help and criticism of epistemic peers. This is what leads to professionalization and the institutionalization of philosophy which are obviously good up to a point and a necessary but not sufficient condition for philosophical progress.
Unfortunately, the incredible proliferation of journals, conferences, philosophy departments along with the intense efforts of the best and the brightest have failed to place philosophy on the "sure path of science" to borrow Kant's phrase. Intellectual honesty demands that we admit that no real progress has been made in philosophy hitherto and that is an excellent induction that none will be made in the future.
This is the bind we are in. I don't see how an interdisciplinary turn could help.
