Such is philosophical argumentation. Philosophers arrive at conclusions, but the conclusions they arrive at are inconclusive.
Category: Metaphilosophy
Disagreement in Philosophy: Notes on Jiří Fuchs
That philosophers disagree is a fact about which there is little disagreement, even among philosophers. But what this widespread and deep disagreement signifies is a topic of major disagreement. One issue is whether or not the fact of disagreement supplies a good reason to doubt the possibility of philosophical knowledge.
The contemporary Czech philosopher Jiří Fuchs begins his book Illusions of Sceptics (2016) by considering this question. He grants that the "cognitive potential of philosophy" is called into question by the "embarrassing fact that there is not a single thing that philosophers would agree on." (13) Nevertheless, Fuchs insists that we have no good reason to be skeptical about the possibility of philosophical knowledge. His view is that "Discord among philosophers can . . . be sufficiently explained by the frequent prejudices of philosophers . . . Consequently, the existence of discord among philosophers does not imply that their work is of fundamentally unscientific character." (16)
Besides the prejudices of philosophers, the lack of consensus among philosophers may also be attributed to philosophy's difficulty: "the discord may just be a consequence of the specific challenging character of philosophy."(19)
Fuchs maintains that "consensus has no relation to the core of scientific quality. . . ." (24). The core of scientific quality is constituted by "proof or demonstration." (24) His claim is that interminable and widespread disagreement or lack of consensus has no tendency to show that philosophy is incapable of achieving genuine knowledge, where such knowledge involves apodictic insight into the truth of some philosophical propositions.
There are two main issues we need to discuss. One concerns the relation of consensus and truth; the other the relation of consensus and knowledge. My impression is that Fuchs conflates the two issues. I will argue, contra Fuchs, that while it is obvious that consensus and truth are logically independent, logical independence is not obvious, and is arguably absent, in the case of consensus and knowledge. My view, tentatively held, is that the lack of consensus in philosophy does tend to undermine philosophy's claim to be knowledge.
Consensus and Truth
I maintain, and Fuchs will agree, that the following propositions are true if not platitudinous.
1) Truth does not entail consensus. If a proposition is true, it is true whether or not there is consensus with respect to its truth.
2) Consensus does not entail truth. If most or all experts agree that p, it does not follow that p is true.
3) Consensus and truth are logically independent. This follows from (1) in conjunction with (2). One can have truth without consensus and consensus without truth.
Lack of consensus, therefore, does not demonstrate lack of truth. Even if no philosophical proposition wins the agreement of a majority of competent practitioners, it is possible that some such propositions are true. But it doesn't follow that some philosophical propositions have 'scientific quality.' To have this quality they have to be true, but they also have to be knowable by us. But what is knowability and how does it relate to consensus? To answer this question we must first clarify some other notions.
Truth, Knowledge, Knowability, Cognitivity, Justification, and Certainty
I add to our growing list the following propositions, perhaps not all platitudinous and not all agreeable to Fuchs:
4) Knowledge entails truth. If S knows that p, it follows that p is true. There is no false knowledge. There are false beliefs, and indeed false justified beliefs; but there is no false knowledge. You could think of this as an analytic/conceptual truth, or as a truth about the essence of knowledge.
5) Truth does not entail knowledge. If p is true, it does not follow that someone (some finite mind or ectypal intellect) knows that p.
6) Truth does not entail knowability by us. If, for any proposition p, p is true, it does not follow that there is any finite subject S such that S has the power to know p. There may be truths which, though knowable 'in principle,' or knowable by the archetypal intellect, are not knowable by us.
7) Cognitivity does not entail knowability. Let us say that a proposition is cognitive just in case it has a truth value. Assuming bivalence, a proposition is cognitive if and only if it is either true, or if not true, then false. Clearly, cognitivity is insufficient for knowability. For if a proposition is false, then it is cognitive but cannot be known because it is false. And if a proposition is true, then it is cognitive but may not be knowable because beyond our ken.
8) Knowledge entails justification. If S believes that p, and p is true, it does not follow that S knows that p. For knowledge, justification is also required. This is a bit of epistemological boilerplate that dates back to Plato's Theaetetus.
9) Knowledge entails objective certainty. Knowledge implies the sure possession of the object of knowledge; if the subject is uncertain, then the subject does not have knowledge strictly speaking.
Consensus and Knowledge
Fuchs and I will agree that consensus is not necessary for truth: a true proposition need not be one that enjoys the consensus of experts. But consensus may well be necessary for knowledge. Fuchs, however, seems to conflate truth and certainty, and thus truth with knowledge. A truth can be true without being known by us; indeed, without even being knowable by us. But, necessarily, whatever is known is true. On p. 30 we read:
By denying that the thought processes of philosophers can exhibit a scientific quality simply because of the existence of discord among philosophers, we make consensus a necessary condition for the general validity and potential certainty of scientific knowledge, which is the attribute of science. (Emphasis added.)
On the following page we find the same thought but with a replacement of 'potential certainty' by 'certainty':
. . . the necessary question of whether the consensus of experts is really such an essential and indispensable condition for the certainty and general validity of scientific knowledge. (31, emphasis added.)
When one speaks of the validity of a proposition, one means its truth. ('Valid' as a terminus technicus in formal logic is not in play here.) So it seems clear that Fuchs is maintaining that consensus is necessary neither for the truth of propositions nor for their certainty. He seems to be maintaining that one can have certain knowledge of a proposition even if the consensus of experts goes against one. This is not obvious. Why not?
Knowledge requires justification. Now suppose I accept the proposition that God exists and that my justification takes the form of various arguments for the existence of God. Those arguments will be faulted by an army of competent practitioners, not all of them atheists, on a variety of grounds. What's more, the members of the atheist divisions will marshal their own positive arguments, in first place arguments from evil. Now if just one of my theistic arguments is sound, then God exists. But I do not, by giving a sound argument for God, know that God exists unless I know that the argument I have given is sound. (A sound argument is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true.) But how do I know that even one of my theistic arguments is sound? How can I legitimately claim to know that when a chorus of my epistemic peers rises up against me?
If what I maintain is true, then it is true no matter how many epistemic peers oppose me: they are just wrong! Truth is absolute: it is not sensitive to the vagaries of agreement and disagreement. Justification, however, is sensitive to agreement and disagreement. Or so it seems to me. My justification for considering a certain argument sound is undermined by your disagreement assuming that we are both competent in the subject matter of the argument and we are epistemic peers. You may disagree with what I just wrote, and thus disagree with me about the implications of disagreement, but you ought to grant that I am raising a very serious question here. (If you don't grant that, then you get the boot!)
In a situation in which my justification for believing that p is undermined by the disagreement of competent peers, there is no certainty that p. If knowledge logically requires certainty, and certainty is destroyed by the disagreement of competent peers, then I can no longer legitimately claim to know that p. So, while truth has nothing to fear from lack of agreement, knowledge does. For knowledge requires justification, and justification can be augmented or diminished by agreement or disagreement, respectively.
Interim Conclusion
Fuchs makes things too easy for himself by conflating truth and knowledge. We can agree that consensus is logically irrelevant to truth. Protracted disagreement by the best and the brightest over the truth value of p has no tendency to show either deductively or inductively that p is not either true or false. Truth is absolute and thus insulated from the vagaries of opinion. But truths (true propositions) do not do us any good unless we can know them. It is not enough to know that some truths are known; what we need is to know of a given truth that it is true. But disagreement inserts a skeptical blade between the truth and our knowledge of it.
Disagreement in philosophy undermines her claims to knowledge. As I see it, Fuchs has done nothing to undermine this undermining.
Does Your Disagreement Give Me Good Reason to Question My Position?
In general, no. For you may be foolish or ignorant or otherwise incompetent with respect to the subject matter under discussion. Or you may be morally defective: a bully, a blowhard, a bullshitter, a quibbler, a sophist. But suppose none of these predicates attach to you. Suppose you are my moral and intellectual peer, and what's more, a competent practitioner in the discipline or subdiscipline which is home to the thesis we are disputing. Thus we are both competent, and we are equally competent. And suppose I believe you to be as intellectually honest and as competent as I am.
Suppose further that I have given careful thought to my thesis and have advanced it in respectable, peer-reviewed journals.
If you disagree with me, does this fact supply a good reason for me to question my thesis? Ought I question it? Or would I be justified in ignoring your disagreement?
We note that this is a meta-question that sires a meta-disagreement. This meta-disagreement is between the Conciliationist and the Steadfaster.
I am a Conciliationist. Thus I tend to think that your disagreement with me (given the stipulations above) ought to give me pause. It ought to cause me to re-examine my view and be open to the possibility of either rejecting it or withholding assent from it. It ought to undermine my epistemic self-confidence. I tend to think I would be intellectually amiss, less than intellectually honest, were I simply to dismiss your disagreement. I tend to think I would be unjustifiably privileging my own point of view, preferring it over yours simply because is is mine. This seems wrong to me given that we are trying to arrive at the objective and impersonal truth. Truth cannot be mine or yours.
The Steadfaster stands fast in the face of disagreement. Whereas the Conciliationist allows the fact of disagreement to undermine his epistemic self-confidence, the Steadfaster takes the fact of disagreement to undermine his prior conviction that his interlocutor is as morally and intellectually capable as he initially thought he was. So when you disagree with me, I question whether I am right. But when I disagree with you, you question my competence, rationality, probity, etc.
But now a puzzle arises. If I am a Conciliationist, then my position would seem to require that I question my Conciliationism due to the fact that the Steadfaster disagrees with me. (Assume that the Steadfaster is as morally and intellectually well-endowed as I am and that I believe him to be such.)
It seems that the consistent Conciliationist cannot be steadfast in his Conciliationism given that there are Steadfasters out there who are, and whom he believes to be, his moral and intellectual equals. So what should our Conciliationist do? Should he:
- Suspend judgment and neither affirm nor deny Conciliationism?
- Make an exception for the Conciliationst thesis itself by steadfastly adhering to it ar the meta-level while remaining otherwise a Conciliationist?
- Reject Conciliationism and become a Steadfaster?
- Do something else?
Andrew M. Bailey’s Analytic Philosophy Generator and the ‘Scholasticism Charge’
The AnalPhilGen is a bit of humor from occasional MavPhil commenter Andrew Bailey. I generated the following using Bailey's 'device':
It is a consequence of proper functionalism that polyadic predicates reduce to non-human consciousness.
On the standard Kripkean modal semantics, trope theories supervene on something like Rawls' famous Difference Principle.
Intuitively it seems obvious that both definite descriptions and proper names always lead to zombie arguments.
I came to Bailey's Analytic Philosophy Generator by way of a crappy article that complains about the 'scholasticism' of contemporary philosophy "talking about itself to itself in its own jargon." The article suggests that most of what analytic philosophers write is as meaningless as the above three sentences. The just-quoted phrase suggests that the problems of philosophy discussed by academic philosophers in their narrowly-focused, jargon-laden books and articles are not 'real,' but are merely artifacts of a highly ingrown way of talking.
This is simply not the case.
If you are a philosophy 'insider' you know this; if an 'outsider' then you probably cannot be 'reached.' Or maybe you can. Let someone else try.
Here is the crappy article.
A Quasi-Pyrrhonian Metaphilosophical Puzzle
Some of us are tempted by the metathesis (MT) that every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments for it and the arguments against it are equally plausible and thus 'cancel out.' But the metathesis is itself a philosophical thesis. So if the metathesis is true, then every argument in support of it is cancelled out by an equally plausible argument against it. But then (MT), if true, is such that we cannot have any good reason to accept it.
Is there a genuine problem here for a latter-day quasi-Pyrrhonian who subscribes to the metathesis?
Definitions
D1. An argument A1 for a thesis T cancels out an argument A2 for the negation of T just in case both arguments are equally plausible to the producers(s)/consumers(s) of the arguments, assuming that these individuals are 'competent practitioners.'
Plausibility is relative to an arguer and his audience, if any. Thus plausibility is unlike soundness, which is absolute, like truth herself. Note that there cannot be sound arguments both for a thesis and its negation. For if there is a sound argument for T, then T is true. And if there is a sound argument for ~T, then ~T is true. This is 'fallout' from the definition of 'sound,' see D2 below. But then (T & ~T) is true which violates the Law of Non-Contradiction.
Canceling out is symmetrical: If A1 cancels A2, then A2 cancels A1. It seems to follow that canceling out is also conditionally reflexive, which is to say that if A1 cancels A2, then A1 cancels itself. Right?
A competent practitioner is not the same as an epistemic peer. A number of individuals may be epistemic peers, but all incompetent. I won't try for a crisp definition of 'competent practitioner,' but if Tom is a competent practitioner in the philosophy of religion, say, then he is a a sincere truth seeker, not a quibbler or a sophist; he knows logic and the empirical disciplines that bear upon the arguments he is discussing; he is familiar with the relevant literature; and so on.
D2. An argument is sound just in case it is valid and all of its premises are true.
D3. An argument for a thesis is unopposed just in case there is no argument for its negation plausible to all competent practitioners.
D4. A proposition is rationally acceptable just in case it involves no logical contradiction, and coheres with the rest of what we know or justifiably believe.
Rational acceptability, like plausibility, and unlike truth, is a relative property: That water is an element was rationally acceptable to the ancient Greeks, but not to us.
The Puzzle as an Aporetic Tetrad
1) Every substantive philosophical thesis is such that the arguments pro et contra cancel out. (MT)
2) MT is a philosophical thesis.
3) A philosophical thesis is rationally acceptable only if there is at least one good unopposed argument for it.
4) MT is rationally acceptable.
Solutions
The quartet of propositions is inconsistent. Any three limbs, taken in conjunction, entail the negation of the remaining one. Which should we reject? (2) is not plausibly rejectable: metaphilosophy is a branch of philosophy.
One could hold that the first three propositions are true, but the fourth is false. This implies that a proposition could be true but not rationally acceptable. But if MT is true but not rationally acceptable, what reason could we have for believing it?
A better solution of the tetrad is by rejection of (1). This is the position of the optimist about philosophical knowledge. He holds that some theses are supported by unopposed arguments and that we know what these arguments are.
I accept (1) on the basis of strong inductive evidence which renders it rationally acceptable. Accepting as I do (1), (2), and (4), I must reject (3). Well, why not?
Why can't I say the following?
3*) A philosophical thesis is rationally acceptable just in case there are some good arguments for it accepted by some competent practitioners.
Why Accept the Metathesis?
MT expresses a very bold claim; I imagine most philosophers would just deny it. To deny it is to affirm that there is at least one philosophical thesis that can be conclusively demonstrated. Can anyone give me an example? It has to be a substantive thesis, though, not, for example the thesis that it is contradictory to hold that it is absolutely true that all truths are relative. Here are some examples of substantive philosophical theses:
- There are no nonexistent objects.
- There are uninstantiated properties.
- There are no modes of existence.
- The properties of particulars are tropes, not universals.
- God exists.
- The soul is immortal.
- The human will is libertarianly free.
- Each of us is numerically identical to his living body.
- I am not my living body; I merely have a living body.
- Anima forma corporis.
- Die Welt ist meine Vorstellung.
- Laws of nature are just empirical regularities.
- Truths need truth-makers.
- Only facts could serve as truth-makers.
- There are no facts.
- Relations reduce to their monadic foundations.
- There are no properties, only predicates.
- The predicate 'true' serves only as a device for disquotation.
- Race is a social construct.
- Social and economic inequalities are justified only if they benefit the worst-off.
- And so on.
The Philosophy Paperboy
"This website publishes the latest contents from philosophy journals around the world."
Anecdote. When I taught at Boston College in the '70s I had a nursing student in one of my classes. One day I made mention of a philosophy journal. Sweet Darci said, "You mean they have journals of this stuff?"
David Chalmers and the Purely Theoretical Conception of Philosophy
John Horgan reports in Scientific American on a conversation with David Chalmers. (HT: the ever-helpful Dave Lull)
There is some discussion of the so-called 'hard problem' in the philosophy of mind. The qualia-based objections are supposed to pose a 'hard' problem for defenders of physicalism. The implication is that the problems posed by intentionality are, if not exactly 'easy,' then at least tractable. It seems to me, though, that intentionality is also a damned hard problem for physicalists to solve, so hard in fact as to be insoluble within physicalist constraints and another excellent reason to reject physicalism. I give my reasons here.
But this is not the topic of this entry. What caught my eye was a metaphilosophical item.
Chalmers' is a purely theoretical conception of philosophy:
Does philosophy help him [Chalmers] deal with personal problems? “I’m not sure how deep an integration there is between what I think about philosophically and the way I live,” he replied. “I’d love to be able to say, ‘Here is how the insights I’ve had about consciousness have transformed my life.’… I’ve basically lived my life the way I want to live it without necessarily being all that reflective at the practical level.”
A striking admission. Here we have a philosopher who frankly admits to living his life more or less unreflectively and thus more or less unphilosophically. On such an approach, philosophy has little to do with the life of the "existing individual" to employ a signature phrase from Kierkegaard. This is a widespread attitude among contemporary philosophers for whom philosophy is a purely theoretical discipline aimed at the solution of certain puzzles such as the 'hard problem.'
Well, that is a conception of philosophy one might have. I'll say a few words in its defense. The central problems of philosophy are genuine problems, and the attempts by logical positivists, ordinary language philosophers, and others to show them to be pseudo have failed. Whether or not they are humanly important or socially relevant or such that their solution contributes to human flourishing, they are legitimate objects of inquiry. And a pox upon anyone or any government that thinks otherwise.
But some of us favor a more classical conception of philosophy. For some of us, the signature Socratic saying remains normative: "The unexamined life is not worth living." These are words Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates at Apology 38a:
. . . and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you.
To contrast it with the purely theoretical conception we could call this an 'existential' conception of philosophy as long as we don't confuse it with existentialism narrowly construed. Obviously, one whose approach to philosophy is broadly existential can also have a strong theoretical bent. It might be interesting to attempt a list of some prominent 'existential' philosophers, and then distill the shared attributes that make them such.
Broadly 'existential' philosophers include Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Epicurus, Stoics such as Epictetus, Pyrrhonian Skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus, Christian Platonists such as St. Augustine, all of the medieval thinkers such as St Thomas Aquinas for whom philosophia ancilla theologiae. Add to them all those whose concerns are religious first and foremost Blaise Pascal being a prominent example, and even Kant.
Kant? Well yes. In the preface to the second edition (1787) of his magnum opus, Critique of Pure Reason, he famously declares that his aim is to "deny reason in order to make room for faith." The highest concerns of humanity are God, freedom, and immortality, and Kant's labors are for the purpose of securing these noble objects.
These 'broadly existential' philosophers have in common a concern for ultimate human well-being that trumps the merely theoretical. I'm with them.
When Politics Becomes Like Philosophy
In philosophy everything is up for grabs. Our politics are becoming like this. There is less and less on which we agree. We can't even agree that nations need enforceable and enforced borders!
Widespread and deep-going lack of consensus in philosophy casts serious doubt on the cognitivity of the discipline, but is otherwise not that big of a deal as long as the controversies of the cognoscenti are confined to the ivory towers. Academic controversies rarely spill into the streets. No one literally gets up in arms over the correct analysis of counterfactual conditionals.
But widespread and deep-going lack of consensus among the citizens of a country can lead to civil war. The USA is now in a state of cold civil war; if it heats up it won't be pretty.
The denigrators of philosophy typically dismiss it as so much hot air. What they don't realize is that many if not most of the hot-button issues that exercise them are philosophical at bottom. To see what I mean, consider a few issues that divide Left and Right:
- For the Left, man is basically good; for the Right, he is not. The answer you give presupposes an answer to question number four on Kant's list: What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope for? What is man?
- For the Left, (material) equality trumps liberty; for the Right it is the other way around. This is obviously a central question in political philosophy.
- For the Left, the differences between the sexes are socially constructed and therefore malleable; for the Right, socially constructed gender roles are secondary to biological and perhaps even metaphysical differences between males and females that cannot be socially engineered.
- For the Left, abortion is a woman's reproductive right; for the Right, the human fetus, at least in the later stages of its development, is a biological individual with its own right to life.
- For the Left, the purpose of art is to "challenge the status quo and bourgeois sensibilities"; for the Right, "to produce works of beauty and profundity to elevate the individual and society." (I quote from Dennis Prager.) Questions about the nature and purpose of art belong in aesthetics.
These are very deep philosophical disagreements. Time was, when most of us didn't disagree about them or even raise them as serious questions. But now these philosophical disputes are political disputes. In this sense our politics have become like philosophy.
Interesting times up ahead!
Related articles
The Self-Murder of Academic Philosophy?
Rod Dreher here exposes the latest lunacy in the precincts of mad-dog feminism. I have no objection to the main body of his post, but his opening sentence, written by a philosophy outsider, will give philosophy outsiders the wrong impression. Dreher asks, "Can somebody please tell me why anybody would choose to go into academic philosophy?"
Short answer: philosophy is a magnificent subject and one of the supports of high culture; it cannot be done well, however, without attention to the work of 'academic' philosophers from Plato on down.
Dreher seems to be assuming that the garbage he uncovers is representative of academic philosophy. Not so. Pee-Cee Unsinn is on the rise, and leftist termites have a lot to answer for in the undermining of the universities, but good work is being done in contemporary academic philosophy, not to mention the work done in decades past.
That being said, the short-term trends are not encouraging. But one cannot live without hope. One reason for hope is that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers" as Etienne Gilson famously wrote. That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) The undertakers are winning at the moment, but they will taken under in their turn.
Is There a Place for Polemics in Philosophy?
Our friend Vlastimil writes,
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.
Annoying Habits of Some Philosophers
They still annoy me.
On Continental Philosophy: Response to a German Reader
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.
Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?
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):
Scientism
I am tired of refuting this species of bushwa. Let somebody else do it.
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.
Circular Definitions, Arguments, and Explanations
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.