Category: Metaphilosophy

Are Philosophical Problems Soluble?

Edward Buckner writes, 

In my PhD thesis I argued that philosophical problems cannot be resolved. I think you still take the same view. My thinking today is that while the problems exist in some sense, they cannot be coherently stated in logical form. I.e. “The riddle does not exist. If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered.”

I do indeed consider the central problems of philosophy to be insoluble. But I don't agree that the problems cannot be coherently stated in logical form. And I don't agree that a problem to be genuine must be soluble.  Consider the following antilogism:

1. All genuine problems are soluble.

2. No problem of philosophy is soluble.

3. Some problems of philosophy are genuine.

The above inconsistent triad is a clear and coherent presentation in logical form of a philosophical problem, namely, the meta-problem of whether only soluble problems are genuine.  The problem is obviously genuine (as opposed to pseudo), but not obviously soluble.  Hence it is reasonably held to be insoluble. 

If you disagree, tell me which of the three propositions you will reject, and why it must be rejected. For example, you might tell me that (3) is to be rejected and its negation accepted. The negation of (3) is:

    ~3. No problems of philosophy are genuine.

Now prove (~3).  You won't be able to do it.

So What’s up with the Metaphilosophy Book?

I was happy to find the following item in the mailbag the other morning:

Hi Bill,

I recall (however, I can't find exactly where) that you mentioned in an old blog post your intention to publish a work on metaphilosophy at some point in the future. I am curious, is this still a goal of yours? If so, is it in progress? I would be delighted to read it, but I understand if you've chosen not to pursue that project.
 
Your grateful reader,
Chandler
Thank you for your inquiry, Chandler. Yes, the metaphilosophy book is in progress, and has been for longer than I care to reveal.  Why am I taking so long with it?
 
I gave the following dissertation advice a few posts ago:
. . . finish the bloody thing now while you are young and cocky and energetic.  Finish it before your standards become too exacting. Give yourself a year, say, do your absolute best and crank it out. Think of it as a union card. It might not get you a job but then it just might. Don't think of it as a magnum opus or you will never finish. 
My current predicament is the opposite. I am now old and my standards have become as exacting as they ever will be.  I'm under time pressure but it's of a different sort than the young person's. The young philosopher needs to 'make it' and secure a space within which he can pursue his vocation.  He has to solve 'the problem of the belly.' He may also be driven by worldly ambition. I have secured the space, solved the problem of livelihood, and I have renounced all worldly ambition in line with Wittgenstein's 1948 observation, "Ambition is the death of thought." (Ehrgeiz ist der Tod des Denkens, Culture and Value, p. 77)
 
So now I can afford to set high standards. Trouble is, they slow you down.  That's good in one way.  I take to heart the advice of  Wittgenstein and Brentano. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80: Der Gruss der Philosophen unter einander sollte sein: "Lass Dir Zeit!" "This is how philosophers should greet each other: 'Take your time!'"

A similar thought is to be found in Franz Brentano, though I have forgotten where he says this: Wer eilt, bewegt sich nicht auf dem Boden der Wissenschaft. "One who hurries is not proceeding on a scientific basis."

 
On the other hand,  the clock is running, the flag will fall, and the time control is sudden death. There is no secondary or tertiary control; nor can one  take an 'incomplete' when the Grim Reaper comes knocking, his scythe glistening in the rays of the setting sun.

Neither Piety nor Polemic

Neither piety nor polemic belong in philosophy proper.

……………………………..

Commentary:

0) No proper aphorism is an aphorism if it explains itself  or gives reasons for its own truth. And yet a good aphorism is the tip of an iceberg of thought susceptible of commentary.

1) So when I, as a philosopher, speak of God, I never use the pious 'He' but only 'he.' Of course I hold no brief against piety as such. Indeed, our society is in steep decline in part because of a lack of piety, reverence, respect, and cognate virtues.  A sign of decline is the widespread use of 'irreverent' as a term of praise. The hard Left's erasure of collective historical memory via the destruction of monuments and memorials is premised on a dangerous lack of respect for our forebears and what they bequeathed to us and and has stood the test of time. 

2) Philosophy is a conversation among friends who seek the truth together and who love the truth more than they love one another. There is simply no place for the polemic of deeds or the polemic of words among friends. Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas.  The Latin saying is often taken as a gloss on Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1096a10-20, where the Stagirite distances himself from the theory of Forms. But one finds the thought already in Plato's Republic at 595b-c and 607c.

3) That philosophy is a conversation among friends holds for political philosophy as well, since it too is philosophy and is not to be confused with politics. Whether or not Carl Schmitt is right that the essence of the political resides in the opposition Freund (friend) – Feind (enemy),  political action and discourse is almost always, even if only accidentally, polemical. It is a mistake to confuse politics with political philosophy.

4) I tend to alliterate. Is this a stylistic defect? I don't think so, but in matters literary as in matters of the palate, de gustibus non est disputandum. You have a right to your contrary opinion if contrary it is.

5) Philosophy proper is not to be confused with what passes for philosophy among the paid professors of the subject. To know what it is and what it is capable of you must not merely consult but work through the works of the great philosophers appropriating their mindset as you proceed. Ralph Waldo Emerson exaggerates with his "Plato is philosophy and philosophy Plato," but it is an exaggeration in the right direction.

Philosophers in dialogue

A Comparison of the Roles of Doubt in Philosophy and in Religion

This Sunday morning I preach on James 1:5-8. Of all the epistles, this, the most philosophical, is my favorite. There we read that he who is wanting in wisdom should ask it of God. But one must ask in faith without doubt or hesitation. "For he who hesitates/doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and carried about by the wind."  While I do not deny that doubt  can close us off from the help we need, I wonder whether doubt has a positive role to play in religion.

Doubt is the engine of inquiry, as I have said many times, but I think it also plays a salutary role in religion.  

The religious doubt the world and its values. What I mean by 'world' here is the fifth entry in my catalog of the twelve senses of 'world':

5) In the Christian-existential (existenziell) sense, 'world' refers to a certain attitude or mentality. My reader well describes it as follows:

But there is another sense of the term 'world' — Christians  talk of dying to the world and being in the world but not of it. This world they  speak  of could not be reduced to the world of black holes  and dark matter, of collapsing stars and expanding nebulae. This is the social and moral world that they want to die to. It is the world of spiritual distraction and moral fog, the world of status-seeking and reputation.

To which wonderful formulation I add that worldlings or the worldly live for the here and now alone with its fleeting pleasures and precarious perquisites. They worship idolatrously at the shrine of the Mighty Tetrad: money, power, sex, and recognition. They are blind to the Unseen Order and speak of it only to deny it.  They are the Cave dwellers of Plato who take shadow for substance, and the dimly descried for the optimally illuminated. They do not seek, nor do they find. They are not questers. They live as if they will live forever in a world they regard as the ne plus ultra of reality, repeating the same paltry pleasures and believing them to be the summum bonum.

Crucial to being religious is doubting the ultimacy and value of the world in this acceptation of the term.  The religious person is skeptical of secular teachings, secular 'authorities,' and secular suggestions. He is keenly aware of the infernal and ovine suggestibility of  humanity. That's my first point.

Second, the religious man doubts his own goodness and his ability to improve himself. He cultivates a deep skepticism about his own probity and moral worth, not out of a perverse need for self-denigration, but out of honest insight into self.  He follows the Socratic injunction to know oneself and he is not afraid to take a hard and unsparing look into his own (foul) heart, (disordered) soul, and (dark) mind.  He does not avert his eyes from the dreck and dross he inevitably discovers but catalogs it  clinically and objectively as best he can. Reason is weak, but not so weak that it cannot come to know and bemoan its own weakness and its susceptibility to subornation by the lusts of the flesh.

And of course the religious  train their moral skepticism upon their dear fellow mortals as well.  

Fourth, the religionist doubts the philosophers. Well aware that philosophy is magnificent in aspiration, one of the finest flowers in man's quest for the Absolute, the savvy religionist knows that it is miserable in execution. The philosophers contradict one another on all points, always have, and presumably always will.  Their guidance must not be ignored, but cannot be blindly trusted.

Fifth, he doubts the teachings of other religions and the probity of their teachers.

Sixth, he doubts the probity of the teachers of his own religion.  Surely this  is an obvious point, even if it does not extend to the founder of the religion. Doubt here can lead to denial and denunciation, and rightly so.  (Does not Bergoglio the Benighted deserve denunciation?)

Finally, a point about reason in relation to doubt. There is is no critical  reasoning without doubt which is not only the engine of inquiry but also the blade of critique which severs the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, the justified from the unjustified, the plausible from the implausible, the probable from the improbable.  Critical reasoning and thus doubt have a legitimate role to play not only in theology  but also in scriptural exegesis.

Philosophy and religion are opposed  and in fruitful tension as are reason and faith, but each is involved with the other and needs the other for correction and balance, as Athens needs Jerusalem, and Jerusalem Athens.

A Nice Thing about Philosophy

One nice thing about philosophy is that one can often argue in a pleasant and gentlemanly way because little is at stake. It is unlikely that anyone will get up in arms, literally or figuratively, over the East coast versus the West coast interpretation of the noema in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.  I don't expect any blood to be spilt over this.

Among the Riddles of Existence

Among the riddles of existence are the riddles that are artifacts of the attempts of thinkers to unravel the riddle of existence. This is one way into philosophy. It is the way of G. E. Moore. What riddled him was not the world so much as the strange things philosophers such as F. H. Bradley said about it.  

If the Moorean way were the only way, there would be no philosophy. Moore was very sharp but superficial. Yet you cannot ignore him if you are serious about philosophy.  For you cannot ignore surfaces and seemings and the sense that is common. Bradley, perhaps not as sharp, is deep.  I am of the tribe of Bradley. Temperament and sensibility play major roles in our tribal affiliation as our own William James would insist and did insist in Chapter One of his Pragmatism with his distinction between the tender-minded and the tough-minded.

The entry to which I have just linked has it that the tender-minded are dogmatic as opposed to skeptical. Bradley, though tender-minded, is not. He is avis rara, not easily pigeon-holed. He soars above the sublunary in a manner quite his own.  On wings of wax like Icarus?  Like Kant's dove?  Said dove soars through the air  and imagines it could soar higher and with less effort if there were no air to offer resistance.  But the dove is mistaken.  The dove on the wing does not understand the principle of the wing, Bernoulli's principle.  Is the metaphysician  like the dove? The dove needs the air to fly. Can the metaphysician cut loose from the sensible and sublunary and make the ascent to the Absolute?

In the face of temperament and sensibility argument comes too late. 

Bradley and James seem to agree on the latterliness of argument. In the preface to Appearance and Reality, Oxford 1893, Bradley quotes from his notebook:

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct. (p. x)

But why 'bad'? If I could speak to Bradley's shade I would suggest this emendation:  

Metaphysics is the finding of plausible, though not rationally compelling, reasons for what we believe upon instinct . . . .

Nietzsche too can be brought in: "Every philosophy is its author's Selbsterkenntnis, self-knowledge." 

As for Moore, is he the real deal? My young self scorned him. No true philosopher! He gets his problems from books, not from the world! The young man was basically right, but extreme in the manner of the young.   I have come to appreciate Moore's subtlety and workmanship.

Can Rigorous Philosophy be Therapeutic?

Is philosophical analysis relevant to life as she is lived? 

Richard Sorabji:

Stoic cognitive therapy consists of a package which is in part a philosophical analysis of what the emotions are and in part a battery of cognitive devices for attacking those aspects of emotion which the philosophical analysis suggests can be attacked. The devices are often not philosophical and are often shared with other schools. But I believe it is wrong to suppose that they are doing all the work. The work is done by the package and the philosophical analysis is an essential part of the package. Admittedly somebody who just wanted to be treated passively as the patient of a Stoic therapist would not have to understand the philosophical analysis. But anyone who wants to be able to deal with the next emotional crisis that comes along and the next needs to learn how to treat themselves and for this the philosophical analysis of emotion is essential. What is under discussion here is the role of philosophical analysis as relevant to life.

I am indebted to Bernard Williams not only for expressing a diametrically opposite view but for discussing it with me both orally and in print.1 His case demands the most careful consideration. His claim . . . is that rigorous philosophy cannot be therapeutic.

Read more.

The Characteristic Attitude of the Pyrrhonists

Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP, 1996, p. 5: ". . . the characteristic attitude of the Pyrrhonists is one of aporia, of being at a a loss, puzzled, stumped, stymied."  Aporia is not doubt.  Doubt implies understanding, but aporia is a lack of understanding.  The modern skeptic may doubt, but not the ancient skeptic.

Connected with this is a distinction between epoché as the withholding of assent to the meaningfulness of a claim and suspension of judgment as to the truth or falsity of a claim.  (Meaningfulness is a necessary condition of a claims's being either true or false.) One can withhold assent from an assertion without granting that it makes sense; but if one suspends judgment then one has a clear propositional sense before one's mind which one neither affirms nor denies.  See Mates, p. 32.  A good distinction!  Add it to the list.

Trinity diagramConsider, for example, this statement of the doctrine of the Trinity: "There is one God in three divine persons." The epochist, to give him a name, takes no stand on the question whether the doctrinal formulation makes sense.  He neither affirms nor denies that there is a proposition that the formula expresses.  Propositions are the vehicles of  the truth-values; so by practicing epoché our epochist takes no stand on the question whether the doctrinal sentence expresses anything that is either true or false.  The suspender of judgment, by contrast, grants that the sentence expresses a proposition but takes no stand on its truth or falsity.

So, strictly speaking, aporia is not doubt and epoché is not suspension of judgment.  Close but not the same.  One in the psychological state of aporia may or may not go on to practice epoché. Suppose I am stumped by what you say. I might just leave it at that and not take the further step of performing epoché.

The aporia Mates describes is an attitude. But there is another  sense of the term, a non-attitudinal sense, and I use it in this other propositional sense: an aporia is a propositional polyad, a set of two or more propositions that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent. 

I also distinguish broad and narrow sub-senses of aporia in the second, the propositional, sense.  What I just described is a propositional aporia in the broad sense. In the narrow, balls-to-the-wall sense, an aporia is an absolutely insoluble problem set forth as a set of collectively inconsistent propositions each of which makes such a strong claim on our acceptance that it cannot be given up.

Alles klar? No way!

The Sense in which I am Australian

John Heil, From an Ontological Point of View, Oxford 2003, pp. vii-viii:

. . . the paradigmatic Australian trait: ontological seriousness. You are ontologically serious if you are guided by the thought that the ontological implications of philosophical claims are paramount. The attitude most naturally expresses itself in an allegiance to a truth-maker principle: when an assertion about the world is true, something about the world makes it true.

Such an attitude could be contrasted to the idea that, in pursuing philosophical questions, we must start with language and work our way outwards. My belief is that this attitude is responsible for the sterile nature of much contemporary analytical philosophy. If you start with language and try to work your way outwards, you will never get outside language. In that case, descriptions of the world, or 'stories', go proxy for the world. Perhaps there is something about the Australian continent that discourages this kind of 'hands-off' philosophizing. 

The above partially explains why Edward Buckner, my main sparring partner for many years, and I are ever at loggerheads. I am ontologically serious in Heil's sense, and Buckner is not. It regularly seems to me that he is pushing some sort of linguistic idealism. I have never been able to get him to understand the truth-maker principle.  Perhaps there is something about the British Isles . . . . 

And then there is David Brightly, also an Englishman. On Possibility, a discussion with Mr. Brightly,  brings out some of the differences in approach of dwellers in fog and desert dwellers.

Politics and Philosophy

Politics is a practical game. One has to win to be effective. Merely to have the better set of ideas and policies is to fail. Philosophy, however, is not about winning. It is about ultimate understanding, spiritual self-transformation, and wisdom. A politics fully informed by insight and understanding would be ideal if it were not impossible. This 'ideal,' however is not an ideal for us. Nothing can count as an ideal for us if it is unattainable by us.

Ars longa, vita brevis. The same is true of philosophy. The philosopher has time and takes his time. Hear Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 80: Der Gruss der Philosophen unter einander sollte sein: "Lass Dir Zeit!" "This is how philosophers should greet each other: Take your time!"

Athens School of RaphaelThe philosopher can resist the urge for a quick solution. He takes his time because he is a "spectator of all time." (Plato, Republic, Book VI) He's in the game for the long haul, for the 'duration.' After his death he is still in the game if his Nachlass is found worthy. He may concern himself with the questions of the day, but he never loses sight of the issues of the ages. And he has an eye for the presence of the latter within the former.

In politics we have enemies; political discourse is inherently polemical. But there are no enemies in philosophy. For if your interlocutor is not a friend, then you are not philosophizing with him. Ideally, philosophy is the erothetic love of truth pursued either in solitude or  among friends who love each other but love the truth more than they love each other.

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas. (Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1096a15; but the thought is already in Plato at Republic, Book X, 595b-c and 607c. I am tempted to say that everything is already in Plato . . . . . I shall resist the temptation.)