{"id":10950,"date":"2011-02-08T15:57:39","date_gmt":"2011-02-08T15:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/02\/08\/philosophy-always-resurrects-its-dead-2\/"},"modified":"2011-02-08T15:57:39","modified_gmt":"2011-02-08T15:57:39","slug":"philosophy-always-resurrects-its-dead-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/02\/08\/philosophy-always-resurrects-its-dead-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>\"Raising_Lazarus007\"<\/a> <\/a>Etienne Gilson famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers."  That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience<\/em>, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat.  It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead.  Let that be my first law.  The history of natural science is littered with corpses, none of which is an actual or potential Lazarus.  Not so in philosophy.<\/span><\/p>\n

None of the classical problems has ever been demonstrated to be a pseudoproblem pace<\/em> Wittgenstein, Carnap and such epigoni<\/em> as Morris Lazerowitz<\/a>; none of the major theories proposed in solution of them has ever been  refuted once and for all; no school of thought has been finally discredited.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thomism, to take an example, was once largely confined to the academic backwaters of Catholic colleges where sleepy Jesuits taught the ancient lore from dusty scholastic manuals to bored jocks.  (I am not being entirely fair, but fair enough for a blog post.)  But in the last twenty years an increasing number of sharp analytic heads have penetrated the scholastic arcana and have been serving up some fairly rigorous forward-looking stuff that engages with contemporary analytic work in a way that was simply beyond the abilities of (most) of the sleepy Jesuits and old-time scholastics.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gilbert Ryle once predicted with absurd confidence, "Gegenstandstheorie<\/em> . . . is dead, buried, and not going to be resurrected."  (Quoted in G. Priest, Towards Non-Being<\/em>, Oxford, 2005, p. vi, n. 1.) Ryle was wrong, dead<\/em> wrong, and shown to be wrong just a few years after his cocky prediction.  Variations on Meinong's Theory of Objects flourish like never before due to the efforts of such brilliant philosophers as Butchvarov, Castaneda, Lambert, Parsons, Priest, Routley\/Sylvan, and Zalta, just to mention those that come first to mind. And the Rylean cockiness has had an ironic upshot: his logical behaviorism is temporarily dead while Meinongianism thrives.  But Ryle too will be raised if my parallel law of philosophical experience — Philosophy always resurrects its dead — holds.<\/span><\/p>\n

It may be worth noting that if philosophy resurrects its dead then it can be expected to raise the anti-philosophical (and therefore philosophical) positions of philosophy's would-be undertakers.  Philosophy, she's a wily bitch: you can't outflank her and she always ends up on top.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Etienne Gilson famously remarked that "Philosophy always buries its undertakers."  That is the first of his "laws of philosophical experience." (The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Scribners, 1937, p. 306) As a metaphilosophical pronunciamento it is hard to beat.  It is equally true that philosophy always resurrects its dead.  Let that be my first law.  The history … Continue reading “Philosophy Always Resurrects Its Dead”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[482,20,362],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meinong-matters","category-metaphilosophy","category-scholasticism-new-and-old"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10950"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10950\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}