According to Benson Mates (1919-2009), all the major problems of philosophy are "insoluble though intelligible." (Skeptical Essays, U. of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 13) If true, this would explain why the problems of philosophy have not been solved. But "the rational minds among us are not inclined to give up the struggle, while the rest become religious mystics or philosophical obscurantists . . . ." (p. x)
But why continue to struggle with the problems of philosophy? To better appreciate the insolubility thesis? Apparently, Mates thinks that while the problems can't be solved or dissolved, one ought to keep trying to solve them anyway. But how rational is this? I should think that a "rational mind" should not attempt to do what he has already convinced himself cannot be done. Is it not more rational to seek a path to truth beyond philosophy?
How rational is it to place one's sole faith in reason when one has, by one's own lights, seen the infirmity of reason?
If a certain weight needs lifting, a weight beyond my ability to lift, and known to be such, does it make sense to struggle with it? Or is it more rational to seek assistance? By rejecting out of hand the assistance of religion and mysticism – which he foolishly conflates — Mates shows that his commitment to reason is irrational, as irrational as my pride-driven conceit that I am master of any difficulty that I should encounter.
"Principles of Non-Philosophy is a treatise on the method, axioms and objectives of non-philosophy and represents François Laruelle's mature philosophy."
That sounds like a joke. Maybe it is. With Continental bullshitters you never know.
Here. Via Andrew Sullivan. HT: Dave Lull. I am surprised that NDPR published a review of this book, and an uncritical one at that.
Hate speech? That's a term leftists use for speech they don't like. No one in his right mind could see Heidegger's magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), published in 1927, as anything close to hate speech. The claim that it is is beneath refutation. Nor can his lectures and publications after 1933, when Hitler came to power, be dismissed in this way.
Heidegger undoubtedly inspires violent passions: he was a National Socialist, and what is worse, he never admitted he was wrong about his political alignment. But according to Michael Dummett, the great logician Gottlob Frege was an anti-Semite. (Dummett says this in either the preface or the introduction to Frege: The Philosophy of Language. ) Now will you ignore Frege's seminal teachings because of his alleged anti-Semitism? That would be senseless. And let's not forget that the later Jean-Paul Sartre was not just a Commie, but a Stalinist. Should Critique of Dialectical Reason be dismissed as hate speech? Should we deny Sartre the title 'philosopher' and re-classify him as a Commie ideologue? Of course not. And please no double standard. Why is being a Nazi worse than being a Stalinist? Why is murdering people because of their ethnic affiliation worse than murdering people because of their class affiliation?
You have two highly influential philosophers. One aligns himself politically with the mass murderer Hitler, the other with the mass murderer Stalin. That is extremely interesting, and no doubt troubling, but in the end it is truth that we philosophers are after, and in pursuit of it we should leave no stone unturned: we should examine all ideas in order to arrive as closely as we can to the truth. All ideas, no matter what they are, whether they come from a Black Forest ski hut or a Parisian coffee house, or the syphilitic brain of a lonely German philologist. Haul them one and all before the tribunal of Reason and question them in the full light of day. To understand the content of the ideas it may be necessary to examine the men and women behind them. But once a philosopher's propositions have been clearly set forth, the question of their truth or falsity is logically independent of their psychological, or sociological, or other, origin. To think otherwise is to commit the Genetic Fallacy.
Sartre claimed that man has no nature, that "existence precedes essence." He got the idea from Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, p. 42: Das 'Wesen' des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz. It is an interesting and influential idea. What exactly does it mean? What does it entail? What does it exclude? What considerations can be adduced in support of it? Questions like these are what a real philosopher pursues. He doesn't waste all his time poking into the all-too-human philosopher's dirty laundry in the manner of Faye and Romano. Are people in this Age of Celebrity incapable of focusing on ideas?
And then there is Nietzsche. If the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger ought to be marked with a skull-and-crossbones, then a fortiori for the Gesammelte Schriften of Nietzsche. There are dangerous ideas in Nietzsche. See my post Nietzsche and National Socialism. Indeed, Nietzsche's ideas are far more dangerous than Heidegger's. Should we burn Nietzsche's books and brand The Antichrist as hate speech? Stupid!
The Nazis burned books and the Roman Catholic Church had an index librorum prohibitorum. Now I don't deny that certain impressionable people need to be protected from certain odious influences. But Heidegger writings are no more 'hate speech' (whatever that is) than Nietzsche's writings are, and they don't belong on any latter-day leftist's index librorum prohibitorum. Are they both philosophers? Of course. Are they on a par with Plato and Kant? Not by a long shot! Are their ideas worth discussing? I should think so: they go wrong in interesting ways. Just like Wittgenstein and many others.
For social and political diary entries from Frege near the end of his life, see here. (HT: Marius Manci) Very interesting.
Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.
What is your goal in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly glass.
Why does the bug need to be shown the way out? Pop the cork and he's gone.
Why did Wittgenstein feel the need to philosophize his way out of philosophy? He should have known that metaphilosophy and anti-philosophy are just more philosophy with all that that entails: inconclusiveness, endlessness . . . . He should have just walked away from philosophy.
If the room is too smoky, there is no necessity that you remain in it. You are free to go, the door is unlocked. This figure's from Epictetus and he had the quitting of life in view. But the same holds for the quitting of philosophy. Just do it, if that's what you want. It can be done. I'm not saying it should be done. On the contrary.
What cannot be done, however, is to justify one's exit. (That would be like copulating your way to chastity.) For any justification proffered, perforce and willy-nilly, will be just more philosophy, and you will remain stuck within the bottle You cannot have it both ways. You either walk away or stay.
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 institutionalized 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. But now on to the topic.
…………..
Is there extraterrestrial life?
To answer this question, one would have to have at least a rough idea of what counts as living and what counts as nonliving. For example, "A working definition lately used by NASA is that 'life is a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution.'"
In a recent Scientific American article, Why Life Does not Really Exist, problems with the NASA definition are pointed out. I won't try to evaluate the putative counterexamples the author adduces, but simply assume that the NASA definition is not adequate. Indeed, I will assume something even stronger, namely, that no adequate definition is available, no razor-sharp definition, no set of properties that all and only living things possess, no set of properties that cleanly demarcates the animate from the inanimate, and is impervious to counterexample.
Supposing that is so, what could explain it? According to the Scientific American article (emphasis added) what explains the difficulty of defining life is that life does not really exist! It can't be defined because it is not there to be defined. You heard right, boys and girls:
Why is defining life so frustratingly difficult? Why have scientists and philosophers failed for centuries to find a specific physical property or set of properties that clearly separates the living from the inanimate? Because such a property does not exist. Life is a concept that we invented. On the most fundamental level, all matter that exists is an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These arrangements fall onto an immense spectrum of complexity, from a single hydrogen atom to something as intricate as a brain. In trying to define life, we have drawn a line at an arbitrary level of complexity and declared that everything above that border is alive and everything below it is not. In truth, this division does not exist outside the mind. There is no threshold at which a collection of atoms suddenly becomes alive, no categorical distinction between the living and inanimate, no Frankensteinian spark. We have failed to define life because there was never anything to define in the first place.
This startling passage provokes a couple of questions.
The first is whether the author's conclusion, which we may take to be the conjunction of the bolded sentences, follows from the difficulty or even the impossibility of finding an adequate definition of life. The answer is: obviously not! One cannot conclude that nothing is living from the fact, if it is a fact, that it is difficult or even impossible to say what exactly all and only living things have in common that makes them living as opposed to nonliving. That would be like arguing that nothing is a game (to invoke Wittgenstein's overworked example) because there is nothing that all and only games have in common that distinguishes them from non-games. There are games and there are non-games and this is so whether or not one can say exactly what distinguishes them.
Not all concepts are such that necessary and sufficient conditions for their correct application can be specified. There are vague concepts, family-resemblance concepts, open-textured concepts. The concept bald, the concept game, the concept art. Their being vague, etc., does not prevent them from having clear instances and clear non-instances. A man with no hair on his head is bald. Your humble and hirsute correspondent is most definitely not bald. The fact that we don't know what to say about Donald 'Comb-Over' Trump does not change the fact that some of us assuredly are and some of assuredly not.
The second question is whether the author's conclusion, namely, that life is a concept that we have invented is even coherent. It isn't. I'll give two arguments. I beg the indulgence of those readers who will feel that I am wasting my time and yours with the dialectical equivalent of rolling a drunk or beating up a cripple. I agree that in general there is something faintly absurd about responding to a position whose preposterousness renders it beneath refutation.
A. If life does not exist, but is a mere concept we have invented, then a fortiori consciousness does not exist and is a mere concept we have invented. For if the difficulties in defining life are a reason for thinking there is no life, then the difficulties in defining consciousness are a reason to deny that there is consciousness. For example, there appears to be something very much like intentionality below the level of conscious mentality in the phenomena of potentiality and dispositionality. (See Intentionality, Potentiality, and Dispositionality: Some Points of Analogy.) This causes trouble for Brentano's claim that intentionality is the mark of the consciously mental. But it would surely be absurd to deny the existence of consciousness on the ground that defining it is not easy. There is a second point. Those of a naturalist bent are highly likely to maintain, with John Searle, that either conscousness is a biological phenomenon or at least cannot exist except in living organisms. So if there is no life, then there is no consciousness either.
But only conscious beings wield concepts. Only conscious beings classify and subsume and judge. So if there is no life, there are no concepts either, and thus no concept of life. Therefore, life cannot be a concept. It is incoherent to suppose that a lifeless material object could classify some other objects in its environment as living and others as nonliving.
Moreover, if consciousness does not exist, but is a mere concept we conscious beings have invented, then obviously consciousness is not a mere concept we have invented but rather the presupposition of there being any concepts at all. The notion that consciousness is a mere concept is self-refuting.
B. The author tell us that "What differentiates molecules of water, rocks, and silverware from cats, people and other living things is not 'life,' but complexity.
Note how the author takes back with his left hand what he has proferred with his right. He appeals to the difference between the nonliving and the living only to imply that there is no difference, the only difference being one of material complexity. But a difference between what and what? Now if he were maintaining that life emerges at a certain level of material complexity he would be maintaining something that, though not unproblematic, would at least not be incoherent. For then he would not be denying that life exists but affirming that it is an emergent phenomenon. But he is plainly not an emergentist, but an eliminativist. He is saying that life simply does not exist.
If the difference between the nonliving and the living is the difference between the less complex and the more complex, then actually infinite sets in mathematics are alive. For they are 'infinitely' complex. If you say that only material systems can be alive,, but no abstracta, what grounds your assertion? If life is a concept we impose, why can't we impose it on anything we like, including actually infinite sets of abstracta? Presumably we cannot do this because of the nature of sets and the nature of life where these natures are logically antecedent to us and our conceptual impositions. Sets by their very nature are nonliving. But then appeal is being made to what lies beyond the reach of conceptual decision, which is to say: life exists and is what it is independently of us, our language, and our conceptualizations. One cannot argue from our poor understanding of what life is to its nonexistence.
The fallacy underlying this very bad Scientific American piece could be called the eliminativist fallacy. An eliminativist is one who, faced with a problem he cannot solve — in this case the problem of crafting an adequate definition of life — simply denies one or more of the data that give rise to the problem. Thus, in this case, the author simply denies that life exists. But then he denies the very datum that got him thinking about this topic in the first place.
Here’s fodder for a follow-up MP post, if you care to pursue it. I do not endorse the following objection, but I wonder how you’d reply.
In “David Lewis on Religion” you say: "To be a good philosopher of X one ought to know both philosophy and X from the inside, by practice." But there is some prima facie tension between this claim and your insistence that arguments don’t have testicles (or skin color).
Objector: “You, Maverick Philosopher, can never know *from the inside* the relevant experiences of women (or racial minorities), so your arguments are not to be taken seriously.” Why not let Lewis’s arguments stand or fall on their merits? And if his arguments *are* defective in some way Lewis cannot see due to his irreligiousity, then mustn't you allow the same charge against your political/cultural arguments mutatis mutandis?
"Arguments don't have testicles" is my preferred response to women (and men) who claim that men have no right to an opinion about the morality of abortion due to their inability to become pregnant. An argument for or against abortion is good or bad regardless of the sex of the person giving the argument. And similarly for race. One doesn't have to be black to have a well-founded opinion about the causes and effects of black-on-black crime. The point holds in general in all objective subject areas. For purposes of logical appraisal, arguments can and must be detached from their producers.
It is also clear that one can be a competent gynecologist without being a woman, and a competent specialist in male urology without being a man. Only a fool would discount the advice of a female urologist on the treatment of erectile dysfunction on the ground that the good doctor is incapable of having an erection. "You don't know what it's like, doc, you don't have a penis!" In objective matters like these, the 'what it's like' is not relevant. One needn't know what it's like to have morning sickness to be able to prescribe an effective palliative. I know what it is like to be a man 'from the inside,' but my literal (spatial) insides can be better known by certain women.
But in other subject areas, the 'what it is like' is relevant indeed. Consider Mary, a character in a rather well known piece of philosophy-of-mind boilerplate.
Mary is a brilliant neuroscientist who has spent her entire life in a visually impoverished state. Pent up in a room from birth and sheltered from colors, her visual experience is restricted to black and white and shades of gray. You are to imagine that she has come to know everything there is to know about the brain and its visual system. Her access to the outer world is via black-and-white TV. The neuroscience texts over which she so assiduously pores have beeen expurgated by the dreaded Color Censor.
Mary knows every third-person, objective fact about the physics of colors and the neurophysiology of color perception. But there is plenty she dos not know: what it is like to see a red rose or a blue sky. That sort of thing. In Chisholm-speak, she does not know what it is like to be appeared-to redly.
So let's say Mary knows everything there is to know about colors from the outside, but nothing about them from the inside. She has no first-person, experiential, knowledge of colors. Do you think she would be in a position to write about the phenomenology of color? Obviously not.
Analogously, a philosopher of religion who has never had a religious experience, and indeed lacks a religious sensibility or disposition such as would incline one to have such experiences, is in no position to write about religion. And this, even if he knows every objective fact about every religion. Thus our imagined philosopher of religion knows the history of religions and their sociology, and can rattle off every doctrine of every religion. He knows all about the Christological heresies and the filioque clause and the anatta doctrine, etc. He is like Mary who knows all about colors from the outside but nothing about them from the inside. He knows the externals and trappings, but not the living essence.
He literally does not know, from the inside, what he is talking about just as Mary literally does not know, from the inside, what she is talking about.
Now no analogy is perfect (else it wouldn't be an analogy) but the foregoing analogy supports the following response to the above objection. The objection is that one cannot consistently maintain both that
(i) some claims and arguments are such that their logical appraisal (their evaluation in terms of truth, validity, soundness, relevance etc.) can and must be conducted independently of inquiries into the natures and capacities and environments of the persons who advance the claims and arguments
and
(ii) some claims and arguments are such that their logical appraisal can legitimately involve inquiry into the nature, capacities, and environments of the persons who advance the claims and arguments.
My response is that one can, with no breach of logical propriety, maintain both (i) and (ii). It depends on whether the subject matter is wholly objective or also necessarily involves elements of subjectivity. If we are talking about the morality of abortion, then the arguments are good or bad independently of who is making them. They are neither male nor female. But if we are talking about the phenomenology of colors, then a person such as Mary is disqualified by her lack of experience should she advance the claim that there are no phenomenal colors or color qualia or that the whole reality of color perception is exhausted by the neurophysiology of such perception.
Can a man know what it is like to be a woman, or more specifically, what it is like to be a woman in philosophy? (There is an entire website devoted to this variation on Nagel's question.) Some women complain bitterly about their experiences as women in the male-dominated field of philosophy. (And some of these women have legitimate grievances.) Can a man know what it is like to be mocked or ridiculed or made to feel stupid? Of course. Who has never been mocked or ridiculed or made to feel stupid? The point here is that men and women have the same types of experiences. I can't feel your pain, only Bill Cinton with his special powers can do that. But I feel pain and so I know what it is like for you to feel pain, whether you are male of female, human or feline. Since I know what it is like to be ridiculed, I know what it is like for a woman to be ridiculed. But an irreligious person does not know what it is like to have a religious experience for the simple reasons that he does not have them.
I know fear and so does my cat. But he has never experienced Heideggerian Angst. So if he were, per impossibile, to say something about it, having read, per impossibile, the relevant sections of Sein und Zeit, we would be justified in ignoring his opinions. Go take a car nap! The irreligious person is like my cat: he lacks a certain range of experiences.
I am not saying that if one has religious experiences, then one will necessarily reject the view that religion is buncombe. For it is possible to have a certain range of experiences and yet decide that they are non-veridical. What I am saying is that religious experiences are a sine qua non for anyone who expects to be taken with full seriousness when he talks or writes about religion. So given that David Lewis did not have a religious bone in his body, as his wife stated, that gives me an excellent reason not to take with full seriousness his asseverations on religion. He literally does not know what he is talking about.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, by contrast, was clearly a religious man. So I take his writings on religion with utmost seriousness, which is not to say that I endorse his philosophy of religion.
I dedicate this, and all subsequent posts on lying and the several senses of 'is,' to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who, by their brazen mendacity, have inadvertently fueled the fires of logico-linguistic inquiry.
………..
Tony Hanson e-mails and I comment in blue:
I hope things are well for you. Sorry for the haste of this message but time is a commodity of which lowly adjuncts have little.
Your posts on lying are interesting. You hint at this in one of your posts but I have not seen anyone raise questions about whether a falsehood is a necessary condition for lying. Further evidence perhaps of the family resemblance approach:
Shady, Bonnie and Clyde rob a bank. They stash the loot under the wood pile at the hideout. A few days later Clyde notices the money is gone. Shady and Bonnie, in a conspiracy to take the loot for themselves, bury it under the oak tree at the cemetery. Clyde drags Shady out of the house and demands to know where the money is. In an attempt to deceive Clyde, he says the money is buried under the bridge by the river. Clyde drags Shady down to the bridge and to Shady's chagrin there is the loot. (Bonnie had moved the loot from the oak tree to the bridge in attempt to have it for herself).
So Shady's statement that the loot was at the bridge was true, though he did attempt to deceive. Did Shady lie or not?
Is a false statement necessary [for a lie] or just the belief that a statement is false?
BV: Counterexamples to the dictionary definition similar to Hanson's were proposed by Monokroussos and Lupu in the discussion threads and are familiar from the literature. Here is the dictionary definition (that I was defending):
D1. To lie =df to make a false statement with the intention to deceive.
Given the Shady example, I think we have three options:
A. Take it as a clear case of lying and reject or revise the dictionary definition. B. Hold fast to (D1) and maintain that Shady did not lie. C. Maintain that there is no one univocal sense of 'lie' in English but rather a family of related senses at the center of which is the paradigmatic sense, a sense captured by (D1).
Here is a revision:
D2. To lie =df to make an untruthful statement with the intention to deceive.
An untruthful statement is one that is believed to be false by the maker of the statement and hence can be either true or false.
Here is a problem with (D2). Jones is under audit by the IRS. The high number of personal exemptions he claimed flagged him for audit. Jones, who has no children, say to an IRS agent, intending to deceive him, "All of my children live at home." Since Jones has no children, he does not believe it to be false or true that they live at home. And yet Jones is presumably lying to the IRS agent. (Example via Chisholm ia SEP article.)
But back to our metaphilosophical quandary. I suspect that each of (A)-(C) leads to trouble, but (C) leads to less trouble. Philosophers have proposed a number of definitions, see the SEP article on lying and deception, but no consensus has been reached. This does not prove that no consensus can be reached or that the quest for a definition must end in failure. But it is pretty good evidence for this conclusion.
As for the (B) approach, I could just insist that (D1) captures the essence of lying. But lacking as I do special access to Plato's topos ouranos, that insistence would smack of arbitrarity.
So what exactly is wrong with the (C) approach? Peter Lupu in conversation suggested that this leads to the abandoning of the ancient Platonic project of seeking the natures of justice, knowledge, virtue, and so on. But maybe not. If some concepts are family-resemblance concepts, it doesn't follow that all are. It could be that there are incorrect and correct (literal) uses of 'lies' and cognates, but that the correct uses are not unified by one univocal sense, but form a resemblance class. Thus there would be no strict One to their Many. But it would not follow that there are no strict ones-in-manys or ones-over-manys.
Consider this list:
lie lie lie.
How many words? One or three? Can't be both. Make a distinction. There are three tokens of the same type. The type is a one-in-many. We could also say that if each token is used in the (D1)-sense, there is exactly one sense common to all three uses.
The term "female philosopher" doesn't even make sense to me. Simone de Beauvoir was a thinker rather than a philosopher. A philosopher for me is someone who is removed from everyday concerns and manipulates terms and concepts like counters on a grid or chessboard. Both Simone de Beauvoir and Ayn Rand, another favourite of mine, have their own highly influential system of thought, and therefore they belong on any list of great philosophers.
This paragraph illustrates a conversational move I find very annoying. Characterizing the ploy in the abstract is not easy, but here goes. One takes a word in use and arbitrarily assigns one's own pejorative meaning to it while opposing it to some other word in the semantic vicinity of the first to which one assigns a non-pejorative meaning. Thus for Paglia 'philosopher' is a pejorative while 'thinker' is not, and no one can be both.
Simone de Beauvoir therefore cannot be a philosopher (bad!) but must be a thinker (good!). And because she cannot be a philosopher, 'female philosopher' makes no sense. Of course, the distinction is bogus, and there is no justification for Paglia's idiosyncratic re-definition of 'philosophy.'
Here is another example of the annoying move in question.
The trendy embrace the term 'spirituality' but shun
its close cousin, ‘religion.’ I had a politically correct Jewish professor in my
kitchen a few years ago whose husband had converted from Roman Catholicism to
Judaism. I asked her why he had changed his religion. She objected to the term
‘religion,’ explaining that his change was a ‘spiritual’ one. How typical. Being a good host, I didn't lay into
her as I probably should have for her 'spiritual' good. The opposing of 'religion' to 'spirituality' is bogus, religion being a form of spirituality, and there is no justification for reading a pejorative meaning into the former.
To make matters worse, Paglia, in the paragraph cited, contradicts herself. Having just gotten through telling us that de Beauvoir is not a philosopher but a thinker, she reverses course and tells us that she belongs on a list of great philosophers.
There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. Mikael Stenmark's Prague paper, "Competing Conceptions of God: The Personal God versus the God beyond Being" got me thinking about it again. What follows, however, is not intended as commentary on Stenmark's paper.
One way into the problem as I conceive it is via the following aporetic triad:
1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence.
2. For any x, y, if x depends for its existence on y, and x exists, then y exists. (This implies that nothing can depend on God for its existence unless God exists.)
3. God is not one of the many things that exist, and so God does not exist.
It is easy to see that the limbs of the triad cannot all be true. And yet each has some plausibility, at least 'in-house,' i.e., among theists.
(1) or something like it must be accepted by both ontic theists and alterity theists. Roughly, an ontic theist is a theist who maintains that God is a being among beings while an alterity theist is one who maintains that God is radically transcendent, radically other, to such an extent that he cannot be identified with any being.
(2) won't be accepted by the alterity theists, but it is to my mind exceedingly plausible!
(3) won't be accepted by the ontic theist, but many find it plausible.
But since the limbs cannot all be true, one of them must be rejected. (I am assuming, of course, that there cannot be true contradictions.) There are therefore three main ways of solving the problem.
A. The quickest solution, call it Blanket Atheism, is by rejecting (1). There is no God in any sense of the term. No being is God, and there is no God 'beyond being.' There is just the natural world (and perhaps abstracta) but nature is not God.
B. The alterity theist rejects (2) while accepting (3).
C. The ontic theist accepts (2) while rejecting (3).
But there are two other C-options, two other options involving the acceptance of (2) and the rejection of (3).
One could take a monistic tack, roughly along the lines of Spinoza. Accordingly, (i) there is a sense in which God exists — God is not natura naturata, but natura naturans — ; (ii) God exists in the primary sense of 'exists'; (iii) God alone exists, hence is not one of many existents, and so does not exist in the sense in which Spinozistic modes exist.
This is what I used to think, back in the '80s. See my "Two Faces of Theism," Idealistic Studies, vol. xx, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 238-257. But I moved away from this position in the '90s and took an onto-theological turn that found expression in my existence book.
That is the other C-option. Accordingly, God is not an existent among existents as the ontic theist maintains. Nor is God somehow real but nonexistent as the alterity theist maintains. Nor is God the one and only existent as the monist maintains. Rather, God is self-existent Existence, yet transcendent, pace monism. This is roughly akin to the position of Aquinas. Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. So God is Being (esse) but God also is. God is Being but also the prime 'case' — not instance! — of Being. But God is in a mode of Being unlike the mode of Being of anything else. So God is not a being among beings, nor does he have properties in the way Socrates has properties.
But this too has its difficulties. So now I am contemplating the final step: Into the Mystic.
Roughly, the above triad is an aporia, an insolubilium. One has to blast through it, as through a koan, into the Transdiscursive. The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Unsayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able — and this is his office – to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it.
Herewith, a partial catalog of some habits that I at least find annoying.
1. Calling an opposing view with an impressive pedigree a 'mistake' as if the opposing view can be simply dismissed as resting on some elementary blunder. Here is an example by a distinguished contemporary:
. . . it is possible to distinguish between the being and the nature of a thing — any thing; anything — and that the thick conception of being is founded on the mistake of transferring what belongs properly to the nature of a chair — or of a human being or of a universal or of God — to the being of the chair. To endorse the thick conception of being is, in fact, to make . . . the very mistake of which Kant accused Descartes: the mistake of treating being as a ‘real predicate.’ (Peter van Inwagen, Ontology, Identity, and Modality, Cambridge 2001, pp. 3-4, emphasis added.)
What van Inwagen is saying here is that the conception of being represented by such luminaries as Thomas Aquinas and all the lesser lights of the Thomist tradition is a mistake because it rests on a mistake. Now it would indeed be a mistake to "transfer what properly belongs to the nature of" an F to the being of the F-item. But that is not what the thick conception does. So if anyone is making a mistake here, it is van Inwagen.
That the thick conception of being does not rest on anything that could be called a mistake is argued by me in "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis," in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45-75.
2. Attempting to refute by fallacy-mongering. This is a perennial favorite of cyberpunks. Having swotted up a list of informal fallacies, they are eager to find 'fallacies' in their opponents' reasoning. Cyberpunks are beneath refutation, so I'll cite as example A. C. Grayling's ham-handed attempt to pin the fallacy of petitio principii on Plantinga. See Sensus Divinitatis: Nagel Defends Plantinga Against Grayling.
3. Dismissing seriously posed questions as 'rhetorical.' Example. Thomists take a hylomorphic approach to the mind. Roughly, they maintain that anima forma corporis: the soul is the form of the body. I am not my soul, as on Platonism: I am a composite of soul and body, substantial form and proximate matter. But they also believe that the soul can exist in a disembodied state post mortem. There is a tension here inasmuch as form and matter are incomplete items, 'principles' uncovered in the analysis of complete items, primary substances. But if souls, as forms, are incomplete items, how can they exist when apart from matter?
Now consider that question. Is it rhetorical? No. It is a genuine question and a reasonable one which may or may not have a good Thomist answer. To dismiss such a sincerely intended and reasonably motivated question as rhetorical is not a legitimate philosophical move. It is a way of disrespecting one's interlocutor by dismissing his concerns.
4. Using 'surely' as a device of bluster. Little is sure in philosophy, hence uses of 'surely' border on bluster. "Don't call me 'Shirley'" is a way of combatting this bad habit, one to which I have been known to succumb. I may have picked up the habit from Plantinga's writing.
"Surely, there is a property expressed by the predicate 'is Socrates,' the property, identity-with-Socrates." (This is not a quotation from Plantinga.) Shirley? Where's Shirley?
Just as one ought to avoid the cheap dismissals illustrated in #s 1-3, one ought to avoid the cheap avowal illustrated in #4.
5. Advertising one's political correctness. I am reading an article on some arcane topic such as counterfactual conditionals, when I encounter a ungrammatical use of 'they' to avoid the supposedly radioactive 'he.' I groan: not another PC-whipped leftist! I am distracted from the content of the article by the political correctness of the author. As I have said more than once, PC comes from the CP, and what commies, and leftists generally, attempt to do is to inject politics into every aspect of life. It is in keeping with their totalitarian agenda.
If you complain that I am injecting politics into this post, I will say that I am merely combatting and undoing the mischief of leftists. It is analogous to nonviolent people using violence to defend themselves and their way of life against the violent. We conservatives who want the political kept in its place and who are temperamentally disinclined to be political activists must be become somewhat politically active to undo the the damage caused by leftist totalitarians. By the way, there is nothing sexist about standard English; the view that it is is itself a leftist doctrine that one is free to reject.
6. Responding by repeating. If I raise a question as to the intelligibility of, say, the Chalcedonian definition, then it is no decent response merely to repeat the definition. Otherwise I become annoyed. And we don't want that.
7. Excessive use of 'of course.' I am guilty of this. It is like 'surely': more often than not a device of bluster in philosophy.
8. Feigning incomprehension. Saying, 'I don't know what you are talking about,' when you have a tolerably clear idea of what I am talking about. This may be the same as Petering Out.
What is offensive here is the dismissal of an idea or an entire philosophy because it is not totally clear, when it ought to be one purpose of philosophical dialog to clarify what is not totally clear. You say you have no idea what Emmanuel Levinas is driving at in Totality and Infinity? Then I say you must be one stupid fellow or uneducated or both. Same with Heidegger and Hegel, et al. You say you don't know what Hegel is talking about what he says, at the beginning of his Science of Logic, that Being passes over into Nothing? No idea at all? Then you are dumb or inattentive or lazy or a philistine or something else it would not be good to be.
Don't feign incomprehension. If you find what I maintain unclear, explain why you think it unclear, and then ask for clarification. In that way, we may make a bit of progress.
9. Taking the names of great philosophers in vain. If you are historically ignorant, don't attach the names of great philosophers to your pet theses. Don't use 'Leibniz's Law' for something that cannot be found in Leibniz. See 'Leibniz's Law': A Useless Expression. Don't call 'Aristotelian' the view that there are immanent universals. If you have never read Brentano or Meinong, why are you dropping their names in your labels for theses that are not theirs?
10. Confusing philosophy with the history of philosophy. Kant says it best in the second paragraph of the Introduction to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (LLA ed. p. 3):
There are scholarly men, to whom the history of philosophy (both ancient and modern) is philosophy itself; for these the present Prolegomena are not written. They must wait till those who endeavor to draw from the fountain of reason itself have completed their work; it will then be the historian's turn to inform the world of what has been done. Unfortunately, nothing can be said, which in their opinion has not been said before, and truly the same prophecy applies to all future time; for since the human reason has for many centuries speculated upon innumerable objects in various ways, it is hardly to be expected that we should not be able to discover analogies for every new idea among the old sayings of past ages.
11. Criticizing a philosopher for thinking for himself and not discussing one's favorite historical figure.
It must have been in the early '80s. A paper of mine on haecceities had been accepted for reading at a regular colloquium session of the A. P. A., Eastern Division. The paper focused on Alvin Plantinga's theory of haecceity properties. Although I had a good job, I was looking for something better and I had also secured an interview with Penn State at that same APA convention. The late Joseph J. Kockelmans was one of the members of the Penn State philosophy department who interviewed me. When he heard that the paper I was to read dealt with haecceities, he asked whether I would be discussing Duns Scotus. I of course explained that there would be no time for that since I had twenty minutes and my paper dealt with ideas of Plantinga. Kockelman's question displayed the typical bias of the Historical/Continental type of scholar. Such a person cannot understand how one might directly engage a contemporary question without dragging in the opinions of long dead thinkers. They cannot understand how one could think for oneself, or how philosophy could be anything other than its history or the genuflecting before texts or the worshipping at the shrine of Heidegger, say.
And then there was a colleague I once had. He was a Leibniz man. Interested as I am in metaphysics, I once brought up the Identity of Indiscernibles with him. I asked him whether he accepted it. His reply was of the form: in one place Leibniz says this, and in another place he says that, and according to commentator X . . . " But what do YOU think of the principle, Dan?" Well, in the Discourse onMetaphysics Leibniz takes the view that . . . . And so it went. He was a scholar of philosophy, but no philosopher.
Examples are easily multiplied.
12. Compiling lists such as this one. This doesn't annoy me, but it might annoy you.
If you are a philosopher or a student of philosophy, how do you respond when someone asks what you do or study? What sorts of misconceptions about philosophy and other disciplines have you encountered? Combox open!
1. When I was a graduate student I would sometimes deflect the question by saying 'mathematics.' But then one day I received the reply, "Why do we still need mathematicians? We now have computers to do their work." The fellow apparently thought that mathematicians spend their time doing computations sitting under green eyeshades, with paper and pencil . . . .
2. When I told an art historian at Cleveland State what I taught, he naively asked, "What's philosophy?" The man had no idea. Here was an intelligent man in the humanities who had no clue, no clue at all.
3. An R. N. in one of my classes was very surprised to hear that there are philosophy journals. "There are journals of this stuff?"
4. At a rest stop off an interstate, some guy asked me what I do. "I teach philosophy." Whereupon the gent regaled me about the interesting philosophy they have up in Nova Scotia.
5. On a flight to Hawaii, I was reading from a copy of The Journal of Philosophy when the lady next to me expressed astonishment that philosophy is a technical subject and that she couldn't make head nor tail of the article I was reading. But at least she wasn't offended that it is a technical subject as some people are. The latter expect it to be comprehensible without any expenditure of effort, an expectation they do not have of physics, say. A curious double standard.
6. When an engineering professor of mine learned that I was abandoning engineering for philosophy, he said, "Whaddya gonna do when you graduate, philosophize?"
7. A relative asked me what I was working on. "At the moment I am reviewing so-and-so's book." "Are you getting paid for that?" The disgusting but all-too-common assumption is that only what one is paid to do is really worth doing. This assumption is discussed in Work, Money, Living, and Livelihood.
8. And then there's the opposite sort of response, "You actually get paid to teach that stuff?" The assumption this time is that philosophy is not worth being paid to do. Curious. If you are not paid, then you are wasting your time, and if you are paid, then you are still wasting your time — and others' time and money to boot.
9. No one asks the dentist whether he is still cleaning teeth or the carpenter whether he is still pounding nails. But it is not uncommon for a philosopher to be asked, "Are you still teaching philosophy?"
10. When my mother died, a great aunt of mine paid us a visit. She asked what I did. "I teach philosophy." "That must make you very serene." The old lady was not wrong about what philosophy ought to be. She was simply uninformed about what it actually is for most of its practitioners.
11. Philosophy courses, even if well-taught, don't seem to do much to ward of misconceptions. An Art Educator, with a doctorate in the field, thought philosophy a lot of rubbish because of her intro course in which she learned that some dead white guy said that everything is water, another that it is all fire, a third air . . . .
12. I overhead two girls talking about a colleague's logic class. "How do you like Dr. Richards' logic class?" "It's all a bunch of word games."
13. Philosophers are in part to blame for the PR problems of the discipline. Nationally syndicated talk show host Dennis Prager's low opinion of philosophy traces back to his freshman year. He began an intro course but dropped it when the professor opened by saying that they would be discussing whether or not people exist.
Antony Flew, There is a God, pp. 40-41 (quoted from Appeared-to-Blogly):
I came to see, as I would write in An Introduction to Western Philosophy, that there can be progress in philosophy despite the general absence of consensus. The lack of consensus in philosophy is not an independently sufficient demonstration that the subject does not make progress. The attempt to show that there is no philosophical knowledge by simply urging that there is always someone who can be relied on to remain unconvinced is a common fallacy made even by a distinguished philosopher like Bertrand Russell. I called it the But-there-is-always-some-one-who-will-never-agree Diversion. Then there is the charge that in philosophy it is never possible to prove to someone that you are right and he or she is wrong. But the missing piece in this argument is the distinction between producing a proof and persuading a person. A person can be persuaded by an abominable argument and remain unconvinced by one that ought to be accepted.
Progress in philosophy is different from progress in science, but that does not mean it is therefore impossible. In philosophy you spotlight the essential nature of deductive argument; you distinguish between questions about the validity or invalidity of arguments and questions about the truth or falsity of their premises or conclusion; you indicate the strict usage of the term fallacy; and you identify and elucidate such fallacies as the But-there-is-always-someone-who-will-never-agree Diversion. To the extent that these things are accomplished with better reasoning and greater effectiveness, progress will be seen—even as consensus and persuasion remain elusive and incomplete. (from Flew, There is a God, pp. 40-41).
Is Flew right? I don't think so.
That there is no consensus in philosophy among competent practitioners is a widely-accepted fact, one that cannot be reasonably disputed. I challenge anyone to give me a clear example of a philosophical problem that has been solved to the satisfaction of all competent practioners. Of course, I am not talking about intramural or school-immanent solutions, but extramural or school-transcendent ones. I trust you catch my meaning. The Thomists think they have solved the problem of universals. The competent practioners within that school agree on that solution and consider the problem solved. But that intramural consensus means little given the existence of competing schools of thought with different solutions. A solution that is school-relative or relative to a set of background assumptions is not a solution, period. (This requires further discussion in connection with the views of N. Rescher, but not here.)
For a second example, the logical positivists in their heyday thought they had definitively established that metaphysical assertions are cognitively meaningless. They had no trouble persuading their own ilk. But the rest of the philosophical world was flabbergasted at their philistinism, not to mention the self-refuting property of the positivist's verifiability criterion of cognitive significance. Examples are easily multiplied.
So I take it to be a fact beyond reasonable dispute that there has been and is now no consensus in philosophy among competent practitioners. What can be reasonably disputed is whether the fact in question gives us a good reason to think either that (i) there will be no progress in philosophy, or that (ii) there can be no progress in philosophy. Flew blurs these two claims. Let's consider the weaker one, (i).
But first we need to address a logically prior question: what is progress in philosophy? It is clear that we ought not identify progress in philosophy with the achieving of consensus, or with progress towards consensus. Suppose consensus is reached as to the solution of some problem. It might still be that the solution is incorrect. Suppose the Thomists take over the world and enforce consensus by liquidating all dissidents and persuading the rest. Their solution to the problem of universals, say, or the problem of change, might still be incorrect. On the other hand, dissensus does not entail that no solution has been arrived at. Maybe Karl Popper did solve the problem of induction despite his failure to convince all of his competent colleagues.
Consensus does not entail philosophical knowledge; dissensus does not entail the lack thereof. (Note that I am assuming, with Flew, that progress in philosophy is progress in knowledge. This is not obvious, but this too cannot now be discussed. There are several ways in which philosophy has progressed even if no philosophical knowledge has been achieved. If nothing else, there are more philosopy books in the world than ever before.)
Entailment, then, fails. Nevertheless, lack of agreement among competent practitioners is good, albeit defeasible, evidence that a solution has not been attained. Flew seems not to appreciate this point, and he seems to miss it because he erects a straw man:
The attempt to show that there is no philosophical knowledge by simply urging that there is always someone who can be relied on to remain unconvinced is a common fallacy made even by a distinguished philosopher like Bertrand Russell. I called it the But-there-is-always-some-one-who-will-never-agree Diversion.
The fact there will always be people who disagree is not to the point. For it may be that they disagree out of stupidity, or temporary confusion, or ignorance of the nature of the problem, or unfamiliarity with the terminology, or because they are sophists or quibblers or contrarians who have a perverse need to contradict. This is why I used the phrase 'competent practitioners.' These are people who have all of the intellectual and moral virtues, a high degree of intelligence, familiarity with the canons of logic, knowledge of relevant empirical facts, etc.
So if anyone is committing a fallacy here it is Flew: he is committing the straw man fallacy. No one "simply urges" that there is no philosophical knowledge because someone remains unconvinced. The point is rather that even after such pesky varmints as the stupid, the confused, the ignorant, the intellectually dishonest, and their uncles and cousins have been excluded, there will still be diagreement, and that this disagreement cannot simply be discounted or ignored. If you are a competent practitioner and you disagree with my solution to a problem, then that ought to give me pause: it is a good reason for me to doubt whether my solution really is one. Of course, I might still be right. But then how would I know this? And if I don't know that my solution is correct, is it a solution? (This needs further discussion. Compare: if I have a true belief about the way to Tucson, does it follow that I know the way? If Seldom Seen Slim, a local, says you go thataway, when I think I ought to go thisaway, should that not give me pause if I don't have justification for my true belief?)
It is telling that the only examples of philosophical knowledge that Flew provides, in the passage quoted leastways, are elementary points of logic. This is not quite to the point since logic is a tool of philosophy but not philosophy proper. I would like to see him give some examples from substantive branches of philosophy where he thinks we have philosophical knowledge.
On Ockham and supposita: A little perplexity at the end, when you write that “[w]hat is curious here is how very specific theological doctrines are allowed to drive the general ontology.” One man’s modus ponens is another’s modus tollens, I suppose, but if Ockham is trying to maintain theological orthodoxy it doesn’t seem too strange to me. Presumably his Christian faith came first, and wasn’t based on any complicated metaphysical arguments. Isn’t it reasonable for him to hold the faith unless it just can’t be done, no way and no how, rather than revise it for the sake of a more straightforward ontology – especially if he is concerned with the risk to his salvation? Maybe I’m misunderstanding something simple here.
I agree that Ockham's Christian faith came first. But I don't agree that the content of his faith wasn't based on any complicated metaphysical arguments. The theological dogmas had to be hammered out in the councils in the teeth of various competing teachings, later to be branded 'heretical,' and that hammering-out involved metaphysical reasoning using principles and distinctions and logical operations not to be found in the Scripture. To state the obvious, the church fathers made use of Greek philosophical conceptuality.
For example, if the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, what exactly does that mean? That God took on a human body? That is, roughly, the Appolinarian heresy. Does it mean that there are two persons in Christ, the Word and the person of the man Jesus? That, roughly, is the Nestorian heresy. If Jesus died on the cross, did a real man die on the cross, or merely a phantom body as the Docetists maintained? Did God the Father suffer on the cross as the Patripassians held? And so on.
Therefore, if Ockham's faith was, or was in part, faith that certain dogmatic propositions are true, then his faith was based on "complicated metaphysical arguments." Of course, there is much more to a living religious faith than giving one's intellectual assent to theological propositions. And one can and should question just how important doctrine is to a vital religious faith.
The problem I am trying to command a clear view of can be approached via the following aporetic tetrad:
a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)
b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures.)
c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational nature.
d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.
Now let's say you have been schooled in Aristotle's metaphysics and are also an orthodox Christian. So you are inclined to accept all four propositions. But they cannot all be true. So one of them must be rejected. Suppose you reject (d). You are then allowing your theological convictions to influence your ontology, your metaphysica generalis.
Is this kosher? Well, if there are non-theological cases in which a distinction between substance and suppositum is warranted, then clearly yes. But if there aren't, then the rejection of (d) and the attendant distinction between substances and supposita smacks of being ad hoc. You are in a logical bind and you extricate yourself by making a distinction that caters to this very bind.
The distinction is made to accommodate a piece of theology, namely, the orthodox Incarnation doctrine. And so the distinction between primary substance and supposit is open to the charge of being ad hoc. The Latin phrase means 'to this' and suggests that the distinction has no independent support and is a mere invention pulled out of thin air to render coherent an otherwise incoherent, or not obviously coherent, theological doctrine.
Again, I ask: Is this (philosophically) kosher?
If our question as philosophers of religion is whether the Incarnation doctrine is rationally acceptable, then it is hard to see how it can shown to be such by the use of a distinction which has no independent support, a distinction which is crafted for the precise purpose of making the doctrine in question rationally acceptable. To rebut this objection from ad hocness, someone will have to explain to me that and how the primary substance-supposit distinction has independent warrant. Is there some clear non-theological case in which the distinction surfaces?
If I ask whether the Incarnation doctrine is rationally acceptable, and you make an ad hoc distinction that removes a putative contradiction, this simply pushes the question back a step: is your distinction rationally acceptable? Arguably, it is not if it is purely ad hoc.
But I admit that the objection from ad-hocness or ad-hocceity is not decisive. Dennis might say to me, "Look, the theological dogma has the force of divine revelation because it was elaborated by fathers of the church under the guidance of the Holy Ghost. So what more support could you ask for?"
At this point we have a stand-off. If the Incarnation doctrine in its specific Chalcedonian formulation is divinely revealed, then of course it is true, whether or not we mere mortals can understand how it is true. But note also that if the doctrine is divinely revealed, then there is no need to defend it by making fancy distinctions. The main point, however, is that anyone who worries about the rational acceptability of the orthodox Incarnation doctrine will also worry about how any group of men can legitimately claim to be guided by the Holy Ghost. How could anyone know such a thing? Any person or group can claim to be under divine inspiration. But how validate the claim?
This looks to be another version of the Athens versus Jerusalem stand-off. The religionist can say to the philosopher: "We have our truth and it is from God, and we are under no obligation to prove its 'acceptability' to your puny 'reason.' To which the philosopher might respond, "You are asking us to abandon our very way of life, the life of inquiry and rational autonomy, and for what? For acquiescence in sheer dogmatism, dogmatism contradicted by other dogmatisms that you conveniently ignore."
Dennis also brings up the soteriological angle. Is one's salvation at risk if one questions or rejects a particular doctrinal formulation of the Incarnation? Is it reasonable to think that salvation hinges on the acceptance of the Chalcedonian definition? Is it reasonable to think that Nestorius is in hell for having espoused a doctrine that was rejected as heretical? Not by my lights. By my lights to believe such a thing is border-line crazy. How could a good God condemn to hell a man who, sincerely, prayerfully, and by his best intellectual lights, in good faith and in good conscience, arrived at a view that the group that got power labelled heretical or heterodox?
The proprietor of After Aristotleagrees with me that polemics has no place in philosophy. But he has a question for me: "Do his [my] statements about philosophy apply also to political philosophy?"
My answer is that if polemics has no legitimate place in philosophy, then it follows that it has no legitimate place in political philosophy. I am assuming, of course, that political philosophy is a species of philosophy in general, an assumption that strikes me as plainly true.
To appreciate my answer bear in mind my distinction between philosophy-as-inquiry and philosophy-as-worldview. When I write 'philosophy,' without qualification, I almost always intend the former. My thesis, then, is that polemics has no place in philosophy-as-inquiry or in any of its branches, however things may stand with regard to the many philosophical worldviews.
The problems of political philosophy are much more likely to ignite human passions than, say, abstruse questions in metaphysics. The misnamed 'problem of universals,' for example, is not likely to be 'taken to the streets.' But polemics is just as out of place in political philosophy as it is in metaphysics.
Addendum (6 August): It may be that the proprietor of After Aristotle had a different question in mind: "You maintain that polemics has no place in philosophy, but you polemicize regularly in political philosophy. But surely what goes for philosophy goes for political philosophy! Are you not being inconsistent?" If that is the question, then my answer is that politics is not the same as political philosophy; that I do not polemicize in political philosophy; and that polemics is not out of place in politics. I wish it were not true, but politics is war conducted by other means. That is clearly how our opponents on the Left view it, and so that is how we must view it if we are to oppose them effectively.
As a cultural warrior, I do battle with my enemies. As a philosopher, I seek truth with my friends.
Can philosophy be debated? In a loose sense, yes, but not in a strict sense. I say that if debate is occurring in a certain place, then no philosophy is occurring in that place. Philosophy is not a matter of debate. That is a nonnegotiable point with me. So I won't debate it, nor can I consistently with what I have just said. It is after all a (meta)philosophical point: if philosophy cannot be debated then the same goes for this particular philosopheme. But though I won't debate the point, I must in my capacity as philosopher give some reasons for my view. My view is a logical consequence of my view of debate in conjunction with my view of philosophy.
Debate is a game in which the interlocutors attempt to defeat each other, typically before an audience whose approbation they strive to secure. Hence the query 'Who won the debate?' which implies that the transaction is about attacking and defending, winning and losing. I don't deny that debates can be worthwhile in politics and in other areas. And even in philosophy they may have some use. Someone who attends, say, a debate between Willian Lane Craig and Lawrence Krauss will come away with some idea of what sorts of philosophical issues contemporary theists and atheists discuss. What he won't come away with is any understanding of the essence of philosophy.
Why is philosophy — the genuine article — not something that can be debated?
Philosophy is 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 preconceived opinions about which one has no real doubt. When real 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.
There is nothing like this in a debate. The aim in a debate is not to work with the other towards a truth that neither claims to possess. On the contrary, each already 'knows' what the truth is and is merely trying to attack the other's counter-position while defending his own. Thus the whole transaction is ideological, the two sides of which are polemics and apologetics. Debate is verbal warfare. This is why debaters never show doubt or admit they are wrong. To show doubt is to show weakness. To prevail against an enemy you must not appear weak but intimidating.
There is no place for polemics in philosophy. To the extent that polemics creeps in, philosophy becomes ideology. This is not to say that there is no place for polemics or apologetics. It is to say that that place is not philosophy.
Discussions with ideologues, whether religious or anti-religious, tend to be unpleasant and unproductive. They see everything in terms of attack and defense. If you merely question their views they are liable to become angry or flustered. I once questioned a Buddhist on his 'no self' doctrine. He became hostile. His hostility at my questioning of one of the beliefs with which he identifies proved that his 'self' was alive and kicking despite his doctrinal asseverations to the contrary.
