[Bups-dis] Fresh topic: Let's have some more cults.

[Pete Wolfendale]

I haven't posted anything on here in a while, but I think this might
be something where I can lend a useful thought or two. Duncan has
brought up a number of really interesting issues, and although it
might be better for me to tackle them individually, I think they're
all quite interconnected and so I'm going to try and answer them
collectively.

Particularly, I find interesting how you've brought up the questions
of 'systematic' philosophy, mentorship, group research (schools, or,
to be a bit Lakatosian, research progams) and the continental analytic
divide at the same time.

Firstly, let me state my 'allegiances': I'm studying at Warwick, where
we have a department divided between continental and analytic
philosophy. My own interests tend toward the intersection of the two,
in fact my proposed PhD is supposed to be on Deleuze and Wittgenstein.
It's important to state here that I'm not just intending to write a
nice little join up the dots account of their similarities and
differences either, but I think I've got new and interesting material
that is relevant to both traditions.

However, I find myself working almost exclusively in the continental
side of the department. Why? Because I find that people working their
are far more open to variant ideas that are completely different to
their own, they're far more used to appraising them and talking about
them too. To say it in a different way, the continental people are
much happier working in large brush strokes, whereas the analytic
people always seem caught up in the small details. I'm generalising a
lot here, but bear with me a little while and see where its going.

One of the major positions I hold, and a cornerstone of my project
(which I'm trying to develop long and interesting arguments for) is
that logic is not a constraint on ontology, or that logic does not
provide the inherent structure of the world. Another way of saying
this would be that the ways in which we pick things out, although it
must be explained by the way things are individuated, does not
necessarily tell us anything about the way things are individuated.

I have arguments for this position, ones I think can be put in
relatively analytic terms. True they take time to engage with, but I
find very few analytic philosophers are willing to give me the time. I
start talking about the possibility that the world is not structured
logically and all I get is blank stares. If I even mention Deleuze
this becomes a lot worse. I may just sound bitter here, and of course
there is a bit of it, but I think there's an interesting socialogical
point to be drawn from it. To draw it out we have to ask the question:
why is it that analytic philosophers aren't interested in issues like
these, and why do they feel justified in ignoring them?

The answer to this question has to do with what you picked out as the
intuition that 'we are all doing the same thing', we're all just
involved in this enterprise called philosophy, and the fact that most
graduate students tend to be working on things directly relevant to
the work of their supervisor.

I read a paper last year which put a lot of this into perspective. I
can only remember the authors last name - Levi - unfortunately. The
central claim of the paper however, was that the distinction between
analytic and continental philosophy could be understood in terms of
their proximity to science. But, unlike the way in which the analogy
between analytic philosophy and scientific approaches that is usually
made, it made it with regard to socialogical structure. The essential
point is that analytic philosophy is much closer to being structured
like a Kuhnian paradigm, or a Lakatosian research program, than
continental philosphy, which doesn't really have any unified structure
other than its distinction from analytic philosophy.

For those who don't know the essential features of a research program,
the basic idea is that they are collective endevours engaged in by
groups of individuals, these individuals being bound together by a
core set of problems which enable them to engage in independent
research which can inform one anothers activity. However, what enables
this core set of problems is a shared metaphysics and ontology,
manifest as shared terminology, which organizes their collective
research and enables communication between individuals. As such, there
can be a neat division of the field into different problems which can
be pursued independently, in the knowledge that they are all
contributing to one anothers research. One of the features of this
kind of organization is that it tends to supress the questioning of
the shared metaphysics, and focus effort into the research which that
metaphysics structures. It also tends to turn an enterprise which
previously might have been structured around big systematic treatments
of issues, mostly written in the form of books, into small treatments
of individual issues within a larger system written in paper form.

I am not claiming that the organization of analytic philosophy is as
strict as something like physics, but rather that it does loosely
share this kind of organization. This means that different individuals
focus on particular areas, which they dedicate their research to in
the knowledge that other things are being taken care of, and that
these individuals are inclined to take on research students within
their own area of speciality, particularly who try to work out the
implications of their own positions. Of course, this does not mean
everyone shares the same positions, but rather that where there is
disagreement it is defined in very specific terms, and importantly is
internal to the tradition itself, rather than challenging the central
concepts which organize the tradition as a whole.

What I am claiming is that analytic philosophy discourages the
questioning of the collective assumptions upon which it, as a loose
research program, is based. The most important of these being that
logic is a constraint upon all philosophical activity, and that as
such the structure of our language mirrors the structure of the world.
This latter consequence is sometimes taken to absurd consequences, but
not always (I'm thinking of doing metaphysics through doing semantics
for instances, semantic externalism being the best example).

I'm going to have to cut this short, as my girlfriend is beckoning me
to have food. But I will post more on this topic, that will hopefully
make more sense. I will finish by clarifying a couple points:-

1) I don't dislike all analytic philosophy, I have immense respect for
Quine, Dennett, Brandom and as you may have gathered most of the
philosophy of science, among others.

2) I understand this is a crude generalisation, as there are those on
the fringe of the analytic tradition who dabble in other things and
hold weird positions: Rorty, Brandom, and McDowell to a lesser extent,
but these people are for the most part really marginal.

3) Continental philosophy is not fundamentally better because it
necessarily has a positive position which is superior, but rather, not
being a single tradition, but rather an interconnected web of
traditions, it tends to encourage rather than discourage the
questioning of fundamental positions.

Later,

Pete